Authors Electric

Every other writer in the whole world, ever, it seems gets asked the same question at live events. “Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s become a bit of a joke now, a well-worn trope in the industry. I have only ever been asked this once, at a school talk and I was so chuffed that I think I scared the student a little with my enthusiastic response.   However, questions that people do often ask include, “How do you think up your character names?” and, “Are they based on real people?”   When I was writing the Diary of Isabella M Smugge, my search history was peppered with things like, “posh girls’ names from the 1980s” and, “popular Suffolk surnames.” I didn’t introduce many new characters in the Trials of Isabella M Smugge, but by the time I was writing book three, I’d come up with an absolutely spiffing plan. I was out on the road for the first time, invited to both the Brechin Bookfest and the Scottish Association of Writers event in Dundee by the magnificent Wendy H J...

 Whisper it quietly but I don’t really belong here! I think everyone else on the Authors Electric blog team are proper published writers – me? – well I dabble a bit here and there but I’m NOT a proper Writer with a capital double U. I have everything I need to be a writer I’ve heard Joanne Harris, best-selling author of Chocolat and so many other wonderful novels, say “if you write, you are a writer.” But there’s always more than a smidge of doubt that creeps in telling me this is not really my world, my place is on the outside looking in, reading rather than writing. I may never write a best seller – some days I wonder if I’ll ever publish a full book! That does require actually writing it first and the longer I stick at it I realise just what a huge mountain I have to climb. Can I really do this or am I an imposter? My husband told me I didn’t know the “right sort of people” to be a writer. A friend told me when I started a writing class, “the first novel you write wi...

  So, it’s marking time for the Creative Writing courses I teach ie peak chocolate eating time.  In many ways I think the feedback part of any course is the most useful: the moment when students show tutors what they can do and what they have learned, and tutors discover whether our words of wisdom have made any impact. I am not going to try to take credit for the work of those with natural talent who need no help from me, but I have come to realise that there are others whose writing ‘journey’ may be shortened or eased by the right comment at the right time. I just wish it were easier to find that right comment.   It is all too easy to forget the vulnerabilities of other people, to remember that even the most confident, gifted people still need to be treated with careful consideration, that no one takes criticism easily and that making it useful and palatable is a gift that is all too rare. I am not going to lie, I  have often got it wrong.   Like so many ...