Authors Electric

I’ve just released my second Nail Your Novel book. I’ve been promising it for about four years, but finally buckled down, sorted out my scrappy notes and made a plan.  It started as a general book about the craft, drawn from my experiences writing and critiquing. Soon, though, it was so enormous that I had to split it. And then I split it again. Anyway, the first subject that naturally came to mind was characters, and so I’m proud to present Nail Your Novel’s new brother: Bring Characters to Life .  So today I want to talk about characters, but not necessarily the ones in our books. I want to talk about us: the general character of writers. As with all professions, there are predilections and quirks that mean we suit our jobs. But they can also work against us. Writer instinct #1: Passive characters Hands up if you’ve been told off for writing passive main characters. It’s an occupational hazard. Passive main characters are people who run ...

An earthquake sounds like a jumbo jet landing on the roof. An immense, relentless assault of noise - rattling, rumbling, shivering, cracking, quivering. In the walls, the ceiling, the windows and the ground. It goes on for ever and when it stops the stillness is thick as rock. It was 9 in the morning. We were a group of friends from seismically solid England spending a week in a Palladian villa in Vicenza. Our expectations for the day were nothing more challenging than agreeing which old towns to explore or where to have lunch. But now we were dashing out of our bedrooms and bathrooms, all calling out the same - obvious - question. Was that what I thought it was? Is everyone all right? We had no internet access, no way of pinging the outside world to check. As if it wasn’t clear anyway, for above our heads the heavy iron chandeliers were swinging. All of them, in every room, beat in slow, wide arcs. It took twenty minutes for them to stop. Gradually we got on with our day. In...

I had to be dragged to Twitter by the scruff of my tail. I had a blog - wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t Twitter just a means of wasting time?  I soon saw it was a fantastic move. A couple of days in, my blog visits trebled. If your blog is like your writing salon, until you’re on a network like Twitter you’re talking at a closed door. And blogging aside, Twitter is a terrific tool in its own right. Half your job as a writer is making contacts; on Twitter you can do that without ever going to a meeting, a group or a launch.  So those are the professional platforming reasons to tweet. But Twitter is not a pitching party or a careers fair. It’s not your blog. No one has to follow you, read your tweets or pass on your news. Although you can bumble up uninvited, it’s as easy to buzz people off as it is to make friends.  Here are some things I learned along the way. 1 The 80:20 rule - What do you tweet? Obviously you want to draw attention to your posts or books, ...

My desk is an old dining table. It has been with my husband longer than I have. He didn’t acquire it by choice. Years before I met him his mother found it by a skip. She delivered it to Dave ‘in case he’d find it useful’. He didn’t, because he didn’t need two dining tables. So he put it in the box room. Then I moved in. I was a private scribbler, a manic creative. The box room became my study and the table my playground, with a computer and a litter of notes. Short stories, a tinkered-with novel, naive submissions. Gradually commissions happened. My prose left the house as printouts and disks and returned as proofs and then real books. The table and I had become serious. It was not a lovely beast. Not just because of the haloes from hot mugs, the cigarette burns and the grooves from children’s scribbles. I’ve never seen wood that looked so like Formica. I sanded and painted the top, in a paler tone of the smoky lilac on the walls. The table’s legs were neither substantial nor retro spi...

If t wo writers move house, by far the worst job is transferring the books. When we did we hired two guys who cheerfully manoeuvred unwieldy items while we took the small stuff. Finally it came to our books. Hundreds of boxes of books, 20 years' worth of greedy collecting. It was like one of those biblical epics where slaves build the Great Pyramid, block by block, all day. For the first hour we joked with the cheerful chaps about how boring it was. For the rest of the hours after that, we wore lobotomised stares. Publishers are well aware that moving books takes time and money. That - and hundreds of other factors including the size of book that looks good in a shop - means there are certain book lengths that aren’t profitable. As I found when I wrote Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books an d How to Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence . Why I wrote a writing book For years I've critiqued novels, helping new writers to polish their books to publishable stan...

An acquaintance from my dance classes read My Memories of a Future Life last month and has since been seeing me in a whole new light. I can tell by the thoughtful looks he gives me as we wince through stretches and wobble through pirouettes; an expression that says ‘I never knew you had that weird stuff going on...’ After class the other day he said to me: ‘that freaky scene with the hypnosis in the underground theatre... you must have been to something like that?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘It's research and imagination.’ He looked a little disappointed. I stomp on your dreams Had that taken away a little of the magic? Do readers prefer to think they’ve been led through your rearranged memoirs than the fruits of your persuasive art? Some clearly do. There’s a long tradition that people who’ve had extraordinary lives sit down to dash off a novel. Many of them are not writers, and so the actual words came from people of ordinary amounts of courage and glamour, in charge of some...