Authors Electric

  One way or another, all writers must solve one great challenge: tracking and pacing the flow of their work and timing the release of essential information. Fiction or nonfiction, mystery or history, hack work or high art...All afford plenty of room for writers to bring their singular talents to bear. Tell a tale in reverse or jump cut back and forth from the present to the past. Interweave philosophy with a gripping narrative as in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  The sky's the limit, baby. But know this when starting out:  Timing is still everything. And no matter how many chapters you have, the book's structure must be solid and efficient. The release of clues or key insights must be impeccably timed. And, ultimately, your work should have its own symmetry. I'm in trouble if my book has three distinctive parts, but the opening movement runs for 150 pages, while the middle runs for 90 and the ending stops short at 50. Just as bad, I doomed if I give the book...

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...

  I’ve recently finished a deliberate break from writing. Not just the act of putting words on paper, but editing and tweaking, even thinking about it in any great depth. The Christmas period helped (I managed to get away to Yorkshire for five days, and deliberately didn’t take a laptop or even a pen with me). Never mind Zoom fatigue (or in my case, Teams (which is, shall we say, not the slickest piece of software I’ve ever used), I had screen fatigue. The thought of turning on my laptop after a full day of staring at a screen was demotivating to say the least. Add to that my job involves teaching all levels of clinicians and their admin staff how to use various digital systems, using both Teams and another piece of software (because Teams won’t do everything we need) and my digital energy levels were non-existent by the time I finished. For the past few months, I’ve ploughed on, trying alternatives such as writing by hand (quite satisfying but slow, and still needed ...

Prologues - why not jump right in?  Prologues in fiction are popular with writers, though less so with readers, and I am of that very ilk. There’s nothing more likely to raise my hackles when I pick up a book than a few pages headed Prologue ,  Before, Then , or In the Beginning . And regardless of the fact I have read many good books with prologues, there’s always the suspicion that here comes something not strictly necessary, something holding up the story we’re about to step into. So why take the risk of putting your reader off on page 1? Let’s think about the nature of the conventional prologue. First of all why is it there?   1)      To create atmosphere and suspense – my mystery takes a few chapters to set things up,  let’s flag up what's coming or get a bit of creepiness/excitement in at the start. 2)      Because it’s in a different timeline – if the reader is going to understand the plot t...

So this is the front our house as of February 2017. They put the scaffolding up a few weeks ago, but a combination of bad weather and our roofer needing to buy a new van has prevented anything actually happening yet. The latest date we've been given is Monday for the guys turning up to strip off the entire roof, re-batten, re-felt and replace all the unbroken slates. There's a stack of new slates around the side to replace the many that are cracked and broken. The view from the top is amazing - so I'm told! You'd never get me up there in a million years. I don't do heights (a bad experience playing in derelict houses as a child - 4 storeys up and out on the roof when I put my foot through a rafter...), so I leave it to Andy to climb up these things and take the photographs! That's the Intercity West Coast mainline service you can see across the fields - we're about 10 minutes out of Crewe towards Liverpool. Both storeys and stories need structure. A...

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...

Am I too old for this social media lark? Being slightly the wrong side of 50, I’ve always been transparent and open in who I am. Maybe that’s naïve in the new online world, where things last forever and once said, can never be unsaid this side of the (zombie) apocalypse. I’ve always been me online. My accounts are always as near to my name as I can get, and I don’t hide behind pen-names or aliases. I can understand why people do, but I’ve never felt the need until now. Because this post is really about editing. And I’ve done editing to death on this blog and others, but here’s a different slant on it. Take this book I read last week. Young adult fantasy and the blurb looked good and it was reasonably-priced with an OK cover. But I can’t review it. Why not? I hear you ask. You’re a writer – surely you know the value of reviews? Well, yes, of course I do. But I can’t review this one. And I haven’t. Because it’s YA fantasy and I can’t give it 5 stars and a glowing write-up. An...