Authors Electric

  Image by  Vinzent Weinbeer  from  Pixabay I’m a great fan of audio books. I’ve been a member of Audible since a month long stay in hospital at the end of 2018 and I’ve had a story on the go ever since. Listening to stories on long car journeys goes back even further. When the boys were small, we borrowed story cassettes from the local library for our trips up and down the A1 visiting family. We were particularly fond of the Diamond Brother books by Anthony Horowitz. Then progressed to his Alex Rider stories (at the same time as we made the technological leap from cassettes to CDs) which made the miles fly by. When my son was home from university at Christmas, we watched series 1 and 2 of the new TV adaptation. I only had a vague recollection of the storyline even though the general plot is the same one I heard years ago. “Can’t you remember that bit?” my now grown-up son asks almost indignantly. He has the advantage that he has also read the books. I am dis...

Take me to a café or a restaurant, put me on a bus or a train and I’m the quiet one in the corner, the one with seemingly not much to say. It’s not because I’m shy, or don’t like being with people, it’s because I’m watching and listening to the people around me. For me, this is as vital as reading. It’s the way I get my dialogue right, the ebb and flow of the language, the non-sequiturs, the sentences that trail off into what is assumed is a shared understanding. Of course, all this will be edited. Real speech with its hesitations and repetitions doesn’t work in fiction, but the feeling and the flavour will be there. Dialogue too reflects character and life story. Language too is constantly changing. Words like “cool” and “wicked” are current one year, tired and dated the next.  Which is one of the difficulties when it comes to writing for children or young adults. When I was working in a middle school it felt natural to write for the age group I was teaching....