Authors Electric

I've always had the urge to learn new things, almost to the point where it might be diagnosed as an addiction. It doesn't appear to be going away as I get older. Learning new things does come in useful for a novelist, however.  My usual reaction to wanting to know something is to look it up. In pre-internet times I would go to a book for the answer, but if I didn't have the appropriate book on my own shelves I would have had to go to the library and try to find it there, and perhaps to a larger better-stocked library, which is all right for someone living in a place with more than one library but not so useful for people in smaller towns and villages. I grew up in a village which only had a visit from a library van once a fortnight. My father and I quickly exhausted their supply of murder mysteries, and my father joined a book club and got one new book a month in the post to supplement the library's offerings.     The internet has opened up many and varied possibilities...

I am writing this having just had the delightful experience of teaching creative writing at the British Council/Kingston University Summer School in Athens.     It was a great experience because it was in Athens; because it was in the Summer; and because I got to see the Acropolis for the first time. Need I go on? It was also great because I really like teaching as it obliges me to think about writing in a slightly more analytical way, to formulate different ways of expressing familiar ideas and to challenge some of my lazier habits.   The main reason it was great, however, was because the people I met were all amazing. The majority were native Greek speakers whose grasp of even idiomatic English was phenomenal.This always makes me feel inadequate and humble because all I do is write in my native language and these ‘students’ have jobs which involve specialist knowledge, in engineering, business and God knows what altogether and yet they can also writ...

Why do we tell each other stories? That’s a huge question and many, many reasons have been suggested, including the need to understand where we come from (in a cosmological as well as a personal sense), to explain natural disasters, to comfort, entertain and keep ourselves from boredom, to come to terms with the things life throws at us, to explore the ‘what-ifs’ of our lives, and, of course, for the sheer joy of creation. You can probably think of at least a dozen more. Another fascinating question is when, in an individual child, does storytelling begin? As a besotted grandmother of Daisy, who has just turned two, I can report that she is already telling stories of a kind. Her current favourite involves a small plastic doll, known as ‘Lady’, who gets ‘in’ to her bright pink, daisy-spangled car at least five hundred times a day in order to ‘drive to Aldi’ (other supermarkets are available, though not, apparently, to Lady), to buy apples, pears, bananas, bread and (impressive, this...