Authors Electric

I cannot quite believe I am writing this – I have finished a book! Writing one, I mean. It’s been a while – around five years since I wrote ‘The End’ on anything longer than a few pages. I’ve been writing all that time – I never really stopped – but I haven’t been finishing anything much, and my definition of a writer is not so much ‘Someone who writes’ as ‘Someone who finishes writing something’. I’ve mentioned this before and don’t want to bore you with it all again, but five years ago my writing career, if I can call it that, took a huge knock when a publisher commissioned me to write a series of children’s books and then, after I’d done quite a lot of work, pulled the rug. It probably shouldn’t have upset me as much as it did, but it did. It knocked my confidence, such as it was, clean out of me. At around the same time my father died, and although losing him was much, much worse, the whole thing got mixed up in my mind and somehow made it impossible for me to write prop...

I’m afraid I’m not talking turkey gravy here, just another writerly conundrum. Do you ‘flatter your reader’ by letting them work out what’s going on, or just lay it on the line, loud and clear? This balancing act came to mind during the recently concluded TV drama The Missing ,  a gut-wrenching tale about the abduction of a five-year-old child and his father’s insistence on following up new clues eight years later when everyone thinks he should move on.  I’m not questioning the characterisation, the acting or even the labyrinthine plot, only the problem of keeping track of what was going on in a narrative that jumped backwards and forwards in time right up until the final denouement. At first we were told this with useful captions ‘present day’ or ‘eight years earlier’ but after a couple of episodes we were left to work it out.  Well that was fine up to a point, but because the locations and characters were the same in each time frame, some close observation was r...

A couple of years back, I was asked in an interview what made a good novel. Let’s dodge the first, obvious problem the question poses, i.e. what do you mean by ‘good’? For most mainstream – and indeed independent – publishers, the answer would probably be ‘one that sells’, while others might demand the application of literary criteria. In the context of the interview, it seemed legitimate to assume that it simply meant ‘enjoyable to read’ and my first, predictably glib, response was to quote the well-known Somerset Maugham quip, which is (approximately) ‘There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are’. In fact, it’s a hard question and answers will obviously vary depending on the sort of novel you prefer to read. But the scope (and looseness) of the form almost encourages diverse responses. Mine are pretty basic. First, you have to believe what’s happening in the pages, even if it means stepping outside what’s normally called ‘reality’. Th...