Authors Electric

One of the ways in which we bring life to characters is through dialogue. Unless you’re writing fantasy or science fiction, you must create a world with believable people in it who do believable things. How they talk and what they say is integral to that world. An author can create characters by giving them specific personality traits such as being rude, boastful, kind, courageous, tender-hearted, etc. This is all well and good, but the reader needs to experience these traits. In other words, show me how a character is boastful or tender-hearted. Effective dialogue is one way to reveal such details. Good dialogue is all about listening to your characters. It’s the process of: writing a line of dialogue, listening, and then writing down the next line, and so on. Characters come to life through what they say and how they say it.   For this reason, I often talk to my characters as if they are real people. I suspect I’m not the only author who does this! I refer to char...

'Now' is where it's at (or rather when it's at). 'Now' is the moving blade that chops our lives, over and over again, into past, future and that infinitesimal but overwhelmingly significant instant we call 'now'. Prague Astronomical Clock OK, so I was lying in bed musing on what to blog about this month, trying to force myself to think about e-books. Nothing wrong with e-books, of course, but my brain sometimes refuses to think about them to order. Now if I was the kind of organised person who posts my blogs up here months in advance (respect, to those of you who do), I might find it easier to 'focus', as my English teacher used to say. But I don't, and instead of being organised, I sense one of Douglas Adams's infamous deadlines about to whoosh up behind me, whirl me round in a storm of panic and then hurl me onto the jagged rocks of midnight on the 25/26th, with no time left to write this month's post (see below for a disc...