Authors Electric

Some years ago, another writer, whom I respected said to me, “You have a distinct voice.”  She had read a couple of my books, and at the time, I was writing erotic fiction. Her words caught me off guard.  “Oh?” I felt somewhat ambivalent toward her statement. “I guess my writing’s become predictable.”  “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean you have a certain way of telling a story.”  She was offering a compliment, but in that moment, I couldn’t fully appreciate what she was saying. I took it to mean she had read enough of my stories to notice a recurring pattern, a particular style of writing. I filed away her words in my brain, confident I’d eventually understand them more clearly.  To have one’s own style isn’t a bad thing, right?  I’ve been reading erotic fiction for years, so it’s not a stretch to think I’ve adopted stylistic details from authors I’ve admired. At age eleven, I read Pauline Réage’s Story of O . I didn’t understand all of it, but it made...

The new novel I am writing is all about voice. The main character tells her story in the first person and the novel will either succeed or fail depending on whether her voice engages the reader or not. For that reason, I have been thinking about voice in novels often recently. It is something that I think about anyway because my teaching at Oxford is all about voice. But practice is always different to theory. The particular question I have been considering recently is - just how far can you go with voice? Where does the line fall between a voice which makes a novel which is original, interesting, engaging. A voice which really adds to the story and becomes an integral part of what the novel is. And at what point do we move away from all those positive things to the moment when a voice becomes off putting, hard to read, distracting, annoying. Of course, there is no answer. All we can do is look at the books which work (for us) and the books which don't. When I'm te...

by Bill Kirton I feel privileged to be part of Authors Electric. I’ve read and reviewed several books by fellow members and they’ve all confirmed that this is a group of professionals who care about the business and are gifted, hard-working writers. It’s been interesting, too, to read their blogs, especially when they recount the journeys that have brought them to this particular point in their careers. Some time back, a journalist friend was planning to write a piece on me to help plug The Sparrow Conundrum , which was a favourite of hers. She sent me some questions to answer and the subject of the first one set me thinking about my own trajectory. I wrote a blog about it at the time and I’m cheating here by revisiting and updating it. The question asked about my education and other influences and it made we wonder, not for the first time, whether getting an education helps or hinders a writer. Obviously, we need to learn to read and write, to find out about things, other...