Authors Electric

A long-time colleague of mine recently left our team, taking up a new post. He’d been in the team for sixteen years, so a decent send-off was required. I usually get asked to write something when people leave (a short, humorous poem or sketch) – it’s become a bit of a tradition, in fact, and over the years I must have written seven or eight of these little comic vignettes, but this time was a little different – as I’m currently in charge of the department, it fell to me to do the ‘official’ leaving speech as well. I got there in the end – it was just a couple of hundred words, but took a surprising amount of time to write. It went down well, in the end – clean enough not to upset anyone, with some gentle ribbing recalling a few comic moments, and I managed to deliver it (after a few rehearsals behind a locked door) with perfect timing. So, a success. This was last Thursday morning. We’d also arranged to have a few drinks after work the next night, and during the afternoon, I began t...

  No. no, Austin Powers! I don't mean shake your booty, I mean move your butt--as in relocate from coast to coast, state to state, possibly country to country. Lord knows, I've done them all for a grand total of some 30 moves. So you can imagine my consternation, as an expert on the subject, when I found myself hamstrung and befuddled in the middle of  a move: from Seattle to Tucson, Arizona.  With just three months to go before D-Day in August, and with a strong foundation already in place, my head had started spinning from thoughts of the puzzles I couldn't complete:   --How, on a limited budget, could I afford a professional mover and a junk remover?   --How could I adapt to the changes since 2014, when I moved to Seattle with only a steamer trunk and four boxes? Amtrak will no longer handle a trunk--or allow checked luggage for relocation. Plus, in the past eight years, I've acquired a slew of possessions I value--not the least of them being new books. ...

 I've reached that tricky point in the middle of my current book where all the setup is done but it's too early to start writing the conclusion. I want to keep the pacing and further develop the characters whilst pushing the story towards the conclusion, but this is probably my most ambitious book yet in terms of characters and the different strands of storyline I'm trying to weave together. To try and avoid too much overwriting (and keep the various threads straight) I've been experimenting with plotting over the past few weeks.   I've always been a pantser when writing - previous attempts at plotting have resulted in wooden plots and stilted dialogue which I've only been able to resolve by abandoning the detailed plot (which always seemed fine until written) and letting the characters do their thing. I figure, if I don't know exactly how things are going to turn out, then neither will the reader, and they'll (hopefully) remain engaged with the book...

English author Debbie Young Most authors at some point in their writing lives will come across the advice that there are ONLY SEVEN BASIC PLOTS - or maybe nine, or thirty-six, or various other numbers, depending on whom you consult.  If you're the glass-half-empty type, it's easy to think: "Oh no, how can I ever hope to be original? Someone will have got there before me!" Whereas glass-half-full types like me may think: "Well, Shakespeare just took existing stories and upcycled them into his plays - if it's good enough for Shakespeare, who am I to complain?" Those who can't even see the glass are probably best advised to throw down their pen and take up golf instead. The BEST thing to do is, of course, to take your choice of basic plot and wrap around it your choice your characters, themes, setting, etc etc to produce a final story that only you could write .  How Shall I Write It? Let Me Count the Ways  (Photo by MJS on Unspla...

My latest book, ‘Incident on the Line’ is now published in paperback and as an eBook / iBook on Amazon, so what comes next? Incident on the Line by Valerie Bird Starting again, a new novel, and, as before, all the questions and worries crop up. It began with a scene, an image so clear in my head that it transposed into words with relative ease. What has happened and how it will reverberate into a story is clear. I know the reason who did what to whom and why. I have an outline of a plot.       The characters are coming alive, they’re doing what they want, taking me to places, with thoughts and conversations I hadn't originally envisaged. Apart from the old problem of lacking confidence, fear that I cannot do this, and how do I stay focused and calm to keep writing, I am excited.       This is a love story which should not have happened. It will not be a romance though; happy endings seldom convince me. Even in Ja...

For November my book group chose the theme of war, and for this post I intended to do a kind of war book round-up. But along the way, I realised two of the novels I'd read made me think of the same writing problem - how and when to include back-story, i.e. stuff that has 'already' happened when the story begins.  Book A in this regard is a prize-winning literary novel of WW2 which opens with vignettes of two characters - a blind French girl and a young German soldier – each living in deadly peril a short distant apart in the town of St Malo just before if falls to the invading Allied forces. The solider is all but buried in a cellar and the girl is alone at the top of a neighbouring house. The bulk of the novel follows the individual journeys that brought them here and for me, despite the beautiful writing and fascinating history – particularly of the German, an orphan whose technical wizardry gets him noticed and promoted by the Nazis - the tension was confined to th...

I am in the middle of conference fever at the moment. I am currently at a conference in Derbyshire and I am writing this whilst waiting to man a stall for The Association of Christian Writers. At the weekend I was in Stirling where I was at Bloody Scotland - A Weekend to Die for. Funnily enough this is a crime writing and reading festival. There were many well known authors there including Ian Rankin, Lin Anderson, Alex Gray and Linwood Barclay, amongst many others.  I attended the writers day and one workshop which stood out in my mind was that on Screenwriting Tips for Authors. This was run by Alexandra Sokollof who in a previous life was a screenwriter in Hollywood. She has used the techniques she learned as a screenwriter and now uses these in her writing. The workshop was designed around these. Screenwriting has developed from the original Greek plays. In Ancient Greece one of the major forms of entertainment was going to the theatre. Now these theaters were not t...

I've recently been sent the first cover image of my newest little book with Franklin Watts. ARABELLA'S WEB is the story of a spider trying to build a web in all kinds of unsuitable places, and who finally gets it right. The inspiration for this came, as always, from things observed - late September spiders in my garden starting their webs in places where they'd inevitably be destroyed, and then, suddenly, one morning, I was looking at bushes draped in silver - like frost or a Christmas tree - and there they all were (not much fun for passing flies, though). I'm not sure about the Hollywood eyelashes, but the composition's nice. At present, I've been re-reading Jeanette Winterson's 'WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL?' As with all good writing, there's always more to discover, and what an amazing question posed by Jeanette's extraordinary and terrifying adoptive mother. On the surface, the question's almost a joke - of course we wou...

So many blogs and facebook threads talk about plotting and planning – who does it and who doesn’t, and why…. So here’s my confession: I don’t plot. Ever. Now you’ve recovered yourselves, I can hear you all shouting: What do you mean you don’t plot? All ‘proper’ writers plot. How do you know where you’re going? Erm. I don’t. I have no idea where I am going. Maybe I’m not a proper writer then? Do I look like I care? Look, I know a lot of people who plot their novels – hell, even short stories, I expect – to the n th degree. They outline each chapter, mark the high and low points, describe the story arc and the theme and the characters. I don’t mean to sound disrespectful to these writers – I’m pleased they can work that way and I wish them every success. Sometimes I long for the comfort of a story-plan, of knowing where I am going with a plot-strand and how far this particular tale has to run. But I just can’t work like that. For me, it’s all about the journey, th...

I'm a romance writer (albeit of the futuristic kind) so my hero is the most important character in my story, next to the heroine of course! Usually, I find heroes fairly easy to create. He needs to be charismatic, strong, smart and a perfect foil for my feisty femail protagonist.  The trouble is, heroes (and heroines) tend to take on a life of their own. In my first novel, 'Starquest', the shy, young man who was supposed to be a supporting character, and to quietly bow out two thirds of the way through, turned out to have  hidden qualities. The murder of his parents and sister and the desire for revenge had made him far stronger than his gentle, unassuming demeanour suggested. He basically took command of the plot and allied himself with the heroine to demand (in a gentle, but very insistent way) that I change my carefully crafted ending . 'Resistance was futile' to slightly mis-quote alien villains in a famous TV and film series. Eventually I was obliged to gi...