Authors Electric

Never have we been in more need of fiction writers telling the truth. I'm not going to engage in a philosophical argument about the nature of truth. My truth might not be yours, that sort of thing. It is the bread and butter of fiction - creating characters who have different views of the world and develop a narrative in which those differences collide and are resolved. Maybe not a 'happy every after' but at least an understanding that allows the people to rub along together well enough (and the baddies to get their comeuppance). I mean objective truth. The 'grass is green' sort of truth. Having written that I can see that even grass can be brown. But surely we can all agree on the basic nature of grass: it grows in soil, regrows if it's cut, provides essential nutrients for countless creatures etc. These are truths the fiction writer takes for granted. When my daughters were young one loved the story of a witch who tired of everything being green and rep...

Do writers grow from societies? Or do they shape them? Going right back to Chaucer, writers notice and comment on the lives of those around them. Shakespeare, between the lines, tells us much about social mores in Elizabethan England; Dickens shines a brutal light on Victorian poverty. It is now no secret that politicians tell lies, nor that newspapers nitpick at truths until their stories have only a flimsy relationship with any objective experience. The stories that News Programmes choose to tell succeed in silencing opposing points of view. Clips that float around the internet rarely explore an on-the-one-hand ... on-the-other construct. We write in challenging times. I've never known British society more divided. A friend told me of a sister she can no longer speak to as they disagree so strongly over Brexit. The UN lambastes the levels of poverty; the British Government simply denies the impact of austerity. Some forecasts for the impact of climate change are apocalyptic;...