Authors Electric

As well as being a fan of Monty Python in my youth, I was also an avid reader of horror and ghost stories. Grubby, increasingly battered copies of the Pan series of horror stories passed from hand to hand around the classroom ... and then I discovered Dennis Wheatley and H.P Lovecraft nestling up against Dickens in my Dad's bookcase, and had a few more sleepless nights ... As I got older I became a bit more squeamish and my love of horror lessened - but not so the good old ghost story, which provides all of the chills but without the buckets of blood and gore. The highlight of Christmas TV viewing was the BBC ghost story: a friend introduced me to MR James amongst other authors - and there are some very fine ghost story writers amongst the Authors Electric members too, including Susan Price, Mari Biella and Ann Evan s ... But although I read lots of ghost stories, I don't write them. Well, not normally. I did at one time pen a few, for t...

One of the fiction writer’s jobs is to create characters, and I’m sure we all do it in different ways. Some writers create a biography for their character before they ever put pen to paper to write their story. Some writers may model their characters on people they know, taking a little bit here and another bit there and amalgamating them into a new character. Some writers start the book first and let the character grow out of the narrative. I could go on and on.   However, it was something Cally Phillips said in a recent blog which was ‘walk a mile in their shoes’ in order to understand someone, and this applies to characters as well as people.   Anyway, Cally’s comment got me to thinking, because when I’m creating characters I like to get inside their heads, and I like to walk in their shoes. Oh, I do all the other things as well, but there’s nothing quite like getting inside someone’s head to really get to know them.   Mind you, a lot of my writing can be scar...

In my teens I went through a phase of reading horror stories – remember those collections of short stories published by Pan with gruesome illustrations of bloody eyeballs and worse on the covers? Me and my friends passed copies around ourselves, comparing notes and shuddering over the most grisly. Finally it all got too much: one story eventually gave me such bad dreams that I stopped reading them, and moved on from horror to the much more sophisticated ghost story genre. Being able to create a delicious thrill which makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck is very much harder than horror as it doesn’t rely on the cheap trick of buckets of blood and gore to achieve its aim. It's a more subtle and challenging skill, and one which many writers fail to achieve - but those stories that do succeed you will always remember, even though you may forget the writer’s name. Recently I read a story on my Kindle, ‘Overheard in a Graveyard’ which I’d read many yea...