Authors Electric

          Parody is enormous fun, and I teach a class on how to write it each term in my creative writing courses Malden Centre and Surrey Hills Onward Learning   because the students enjoy it so much. It doesn't seem as daunting as starting something from scratch. It’s actually a very good way of finding out about other writers’ styles, although you have to choose someone with a distinctive voice. Hemingway is an excellent subject, with his absence of adverbs, and reasonably easy to do as a consequence. Chandler and Spillane are good targets as well. Probably the most famous parody of all is Cold Comfort Farm , by Stella Gibbons, which took the mickey out of the accounts of rural life by writers such as Mary Webb, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, concentrating on sexual undercurrents, muddy fields and inheritances. This is one of my favourite passages: …He looked up as Judith entered, and gave a short, defiant lau...

Poetry isn’t like fiction, even in the world of snail publishing (if that’s the phrase I’m looking for). It’s a form of writing that in recent times has flourished mainly in small magazines, whose editors dream, usually in vain, of finding a few subscribers who don’t want their own poems published - for poetry is a commodity for which supply massively exceeds demand. New poetry in book form is published mainly by a small number of specialist publishers, such as Bloodaxe, Carcanet and Enitharmon, with one or two general publishers continuing to do their bit, notably Faber.           Few poets can have any realistic hope of being published by any of the big boys. Some years ago when I still had delusions I checked them out, and found that one - it may have been Bloodaxe - had announced that they would definitely not be taking on any new poets for at least three years. The others were little more encouraging. The number of living poets whos...

There are lots of reasons for re-illustrating a previously published book when you’re converting it for the Kindle. The originals, drawn by someone else, may not have been to your liking. It may simply be a matter of style – or the illustrator may have got some things fundamentally wrong, like the age of the protagonists, or whether one of your fantasy creatures has wings/horns/sharp pointy teeth. The best illustrations I have ever been sent were those of Miho Sataki, in the Japanese editions of The Divide , who read everything so carefully that each tiny detail was absolutely accurate. Her sense of design was wonderful, too. If the book was first published some time ago the drawings may be out of date; the shoebox-sized mobile phone of 1995 bears no resemblance to the smart phones in use today. There’s also the question of royalties – this way, you avoid those complexities altogether. The actual mechanics are remarkably easy. Make sure your illustration is a jpeg, and cent...