Authors Electric

Aargh another new year dawns and goodness knows how it will go. For the first time in my life, when writing Christmas cards, I couldn’t bring myself to wish the recipients a Happy New Year, when the chances were that at least half their families would be isolating and that New Year would be cancelled anyway. All I could do was add fervent hopes that 2022 would prove a better year than 2021. Which, to be fair, covers a lot of possibilities.  So here are my wishes for 2022:  Covid vaccinations for all Photo by  FRANK MERIÑO  from  Pexels 1. Covid vaccinations offered to all, including young children.  2. Anti vaxxers come to their senses.    3. Kindness ceases to be Something People Talk About and becomes Something People Do.     4. Truth resumes its rightful place in the cold, hard world of Facts, away from the warm, fuzzy one of Feelings where it has been corralled of late.  1, 2 and 3 are self-explanatory. 4 plunges me (and yo...

'Embarrassed dragon' (Public domain photograph - courtesy of Pixabay) ‘Truth’ is under discussion a great deal at present, for very obvious and necessary reasons. The truth about the external world is one thing, but what about truth in fiction? Why do certain novels irritate me beyond belief, by portraying a world that I do not recognise? Not one that is outside my own experience – I love to read about such worlds – but one that bears little relation to my own observations about myself and other people by presenting as ‘normal’ and ‘desirable’ some kind of ideal person I know I can never be? I appreciate that fiction meets a wide range of needs, not least of which is to escape from the real world and our own lives, but the kind of books I like to read (and try to write) do more than that – they latch on to something that I think can be called truth, whether or not we want to resort to high-sounding terms like ‘the human condition’. ‘Write what you know’ is regarde...

Last month, Authors Electric’s Bill Kirton wrote this very interesting post. He was talking specifically about the fantasy genre, but he made a point that I think is relevant to all fiction: "We carry all these race memories, dreams, imaginings; we can release people and things from their restricted functions. Maybe fantasy is simply a means of relaxing our grip on experience, a way to deny chronology and inevitability. Maybe it’s just a less uptight reality." It seems to me that whenever we write fiction – whether it’s fantasy or not – we are, in effect, doing much the same. Fiction is a lie, but it’s not untrue; and that seeming paradox may be at the heart of what we do. “Reality is not the same as the truth” is the tagline to my novella Loving Imogen , and reflects the protagonist’s following thoughts: "These are the things that he remembers from that summer, the things that have always stood out. There are things, no doubt, that he has forgotten ab...