Authors Electric

Over the past months in lockdown, I’ve had the opportunity to chat with several writers via video. One of them also writes for Authors Electric — the lovely Bill Kirton. We’ve known each other nearly a decade through our stories and have collaborated on numerous flash fiction pieces. He’s responsible for my joining this esteemed group. This past week, we’ve been writing another story together. We boldly write in an unconventional method. It's served us well, given we've created nearly a dozen joint stories!  If you wish to know more about how we write, feel free to hop over to Bill’s website to learn more. This post, however, is not about our writing process, but about how working with Bill has contributed to my use of words. I’ve always felt that the fewer the words I need to say something, the better, that compression makes my stories more powerful for the reader.  Why tell a story in a hundred words, when I can do it in fifty? Economy of words....

One of the ways in which we bring life to characters is through dialogue. Unless you’re writing fantasy or science fiction, you must create a world with believable people in it who do believable things. How they talk and what they say is integral to that world. An author can create characters by giving them specific personality traits such as being rude, boastful, kind, courageous, tender-hearted, etc. This is all well and good, but the reader needs to experience these traits. In other words, show me how a character is boastful or tender-hearted. Effective dialogue is one way to reveal such details. Good dialogue is all about listening to your characters. It’s the process of: writing a line of dialogue, listening, and then writing down the next line, and so on. Characters come to life through what they say and how they say it.   For this reason, I often talk to my characters as if they are real people. I suspect I’m not the only author who does this! I refer to char...

When I started to write professionally I wrote solely for craft magazines. After a year or so I  decided to see if I could get a craft book published. To my amazement I found a publisher willing to give me a chance and my first craft title was published. This book was based on the many hand-outs I'd written for the craft classes I was teaching.  After a few years I'd had several adult craft books published so I decided to try something new. So I changed focus slightly and started to write activity books for children. After this I moved my focus to picture books. Over a 14-year period I had 21books traditionally published. Then along came the revolution of the eBook. This opened up a brand new world and I was able to turn a project I'd been working on for years into an eBook. This book is a collection of short stories featuring the trickster character Anansi ( Anansi The Trickster Spider ). Sales were better than I expected, so I created a second collec...

I've just been tagged in a Blog Hop meme by Susie Kelly via Victoria Corby called The Next Big Thing - French Twist. A Q&A about current work in progress. It looks great  and I want to participate, I will participate. But it's a long time since I wrote about writing. Problem is, it's a long time since I wrote at all despite all recent good intentions. I have 3 WIPs to complete, selecting one to revisit will, I'm sure, help in the mission to get back to writing. It brings it all back, in a good way, as to what it's all about. My happiest writing times were the pre-publishing hoo ha years of creative writing classes, mostly short stories, a bit of poetry. No pressure beyond getting the words right enough to read out loud, listening to others and entering a few competitions. Like many of those who were to become my friends on the courses, I dreamt of one day being able to write what I wanted to write, publish how I wanted to publish - .....oh hang on? So what...