Authors Electric

No more monkey business. You’ve only to spend a little time in the real or virtual company of writers to hear some version of accepted wisdom. We all need editors, kill your darlings, less is more. I used to agree. And there’s a part of me that still does. I’m all for editing as a process, although there’s a difference between proof reading for typos and punctuation – which is generally better done by somebody else – and editing in the sense of somebody telling you that you need to rewrite your manuscript and how you ought to do it, occasionally going so far as to try to do it for you. I’m a compulsive reviser. Just about everything I write, but especially fiction, goes through many drafts, sometimes more than a dozen, sometimes more than two dozen. I revise on paper as well as on screen. Partly it’s because I fall in love with my characters and can’t bear to leave them. Mostly it’s because I love the process of honing and refining. I began my writing life as a poet and paring d...

The bird that almost didn't fly. You can't get editorial help from a committee or, worse, a multitude. Well - you can - but it stands a good chance of turning your work into a camel. (I know, I know, camels are pretty efficient beasts in their way - but only in certain circumstances.) Some years ago, when I was despairing of finding a publisher for my next undoubtedly mid-list and cross-genre novel, I decided that I would blog it, a chapter at a time. If you want to read it, it's called Bird of Passage and you can find the whole novel, properly published on Amazon Kindle, here if you're in the UK and here if you're in the USA. But definitely not on any blog.          Even then, I was an experienced and well published/produced writer with a good track record. And although I'm always very happy indeed to talk about my writing, what inspires it, how I feel about it, how I work, and so on, I made it clear that I didn't want detailed editorial f...