Authors Electric

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...

Going bananas in the Canaries I have a confession to make. I'm addicted to Pinterest. It is far and away the best form of displacement activity I've ever found. I can spend hours on there, gazing at other people's pictures and tinkering with my own. It's also a novelist's paradise. As far as my fiction is concerned, I'm what has come to be known as a pantser rather than a plotter. I write by the seat of my pants and hardly ever do anything but the most sketchy of outlines. In fact I've always disliked people asking me for detailed outlines of proposed projects. I could never stick to them. I tend to know the beginning and the end of a novel or play, but write to find out how to get there. If I already know how I (or more precisely the people in the story) get there I become bored and give up. I know, because I've done it a few times, on occasions when the people I was working with - mostly agents - demanded ever more highly refined outlines. By the...