Authors Electric

Here’s a quiz question for you.  Just about every new writer will, at some time or other, be advised to ‘murder your darlings’. By which is meant not bumping off your nearest and dearest to give you AT LAST a bit of peace and quiet to create… but exerting discipline over what you’re creating. If you have written a passage you’re particularly proud of, with elaborate, flowery images, elegant use of words – the best of fine writing, in short – then delete it. The chances are you’ve strayed into a self-conscious writerliness, in which pace and plot have been sacrificed to draw attention to your own beautiful prose, or (in my case) to set up a joke I’m desperate to squeeze into the story.  It doesn’t work. The narrative must come first. Every bit of scene setting or character depiction, every scrap of dialogue and, yes, every joke needs to further the plot. Writing should be like a clear pane of glass. Photo by Magda Ehlers: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/rustic-wooden-window-overl...

'Embarrassed dragon' (Public domain photograph - courtesy of Pixabay) ‘Truth’ is under discussion a great deal at present, for very obvious and necessary reasons. The truth about the external world is one thing, but what about truth in fiction? Why do certain novels irritate me beyond belief, by portraying a world that I do not recognise? Not one that is outside my own experience – I love to read about such worlds – but one that bears little relation to my own observations about myself and other people by presenting as ‘normal’ and ‘desirable’ some kind of ideal person I know I can never be? I appreciate that fiction meets a wide range of needs, not least of which is to escape from the real world and our own lives, but the kind of books I like to read (and try to write) do more than that – they latch on to something that I think can be called truth, whether or not we want to resort to high-sounding terms like ‘the human condition’. ‘Write what you know’ is regarde...