Authors Electric

  I am really bored of the sound of my own voice. Not just my writing voice, which I’ve barely exer cised recently, more my actual physical   chatting into a camera voice. The new term is coming up and my face to face course on ‘writing for children’ has been put online.   I’ve been asked to record a series of ten lectures for online delivery: it is so much harder than I’d expected.     I don’t mind imagining an audience – I’m a writer after all and I can imagine most things – a chamber full of orcs, a classroom buzzing with sentient story telling bees, even a diverse group of adults peering into their screens from anywhere in the world (which is actually what is supposed to happen.) In my mind these virtual students, even the orcs, are attentive and impressed. We will see what happens when my fantasies come up against reality in due course.     I hope these imaginary students are less bored by my voice than I am, but then they only have to l...

Another distraction - view from my window as I type When I’m not writing my own books or not-very-successfully trying to promote them, my chief occupation is being an editor, proofreader and appraiser of other people’s work, and I must admit I love these things almost as much as I love doing my own writing. The processes are very different, however, and seem to use entirely different bits of my brain. It would be lovely to be able to do my own work in the mornings, for example, and work on other people’s books in the afternoons. I know some editors who do this, but for me it simply doesn’t work. It was the same with lecturing and research, in the days when I did those things. In UK universities, lecturers are expected to fit their original research into the gaps between all their various teaching commitments and administrative functions. There are exceptions in a few places, I believe, and perhaps for some who’ve achieved the dizzy heights of academic stardom, but on the who...

Most years I supervise students doing MA dissertations in Creative Writing. I read their work in progress, meet with them individually to talk over what is working and what isn’t.  I make suggestions  and am always staggered by how much easier it is to have innovative plot ideas when the plot isn’t yours and you don’t have to write it. Ditto for world building.    Inevitably we often talk about how to work as a writer, by which I mean how to organise  writing time: the other part, the how to 'work' and make money is an altogether different question to which I don’t have a very useful answer. In all honesty I can’t tell students how to organise themselves with any confidence. I try not to be a hypocrite and I couldn’t organise my way out of my office as anyone who has visited it will testify. I do however try to encourage them to find out what works for them and to ignore all writing advice that doesn't. The harder job is to help motivate them through the ble...