Authors Electric

By Sun Ladder, Wikimedia A friend of mine, another writer who I shall call X, was planning to spend the weekend writing, since her family were away. But she confessed to a sense of unease, even guilt. Why? Because she wasn't working 'normal office hours.' The way she saw it was, the weekend is for relaxing, meeting friends at a pub, having a lie-in with the Sunday papers -- but instead she was going to be working hard  while the rest of the world slumped or partied. This somehow felt wrong, even though she was looking forward to a couple of days where she'd get a lot of writing done. This peculiar guilt about working was intensified by the knowledge that, come Monday, when everyone else went back to work at tills or desks or production belts, she would be meeting another writer friend for a laugh and a chat. Out of step, you see. She would be working when everyone else was free (interesting phrase, that) and she would be free when everyone else was, presumably, n...

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...

So  here’s my first post on  Authors Electric,  and hoping I’ll fit in here… and here’s what I am doing, while  ‘wearing my writing hat’. It’s November, which to many writers means NaNoWriMo, when we’re invited to write a novel in a month. I’m not trying to do that, (though one year I wrote a rather cheerful poem about it...)  But I am, as I join the group, trying to revive - and complete within the coming months - Book Three of a series. The first two novels in the Mullins Family Saga were written and published before the Brexit debate went public in 2016, and Book Three’s timescale takes my readers to 2007. How to complete this book, which was meant to tell the story of my characters encountering a more domestic tragedy, back before ISIS, the financial crash, and Brexit? It was another world. The Importance of Genre In an article on NaNo I read recently, we’re advised that before starting to write, we shoul...

Anne Bronte by her sister Charlotte (1845, public domain) Anne Bronte's poem Night begins: "I love the silent hour of the night, for blissful dreams may then arise..." As a child I, too, used to look forward to the night, tucked up safe and warm in my bed, knowing I would not be disturbed until morning and could invent stories all night long in my head if I so wished - although, in practice, I usually fell asleep quite quickly, and then forgot most of what I'd dreamt up during the night. In those days, my dream life and my story life must have been closely connected. I don't know if this is the case for all children, but it's probably easier to access your dreams when you're young. As adults, we tend to lose this connection. Nights get disturbed by snoring partners, crying babies, worldly worries, noisy neighbours, smartphone alerts, and - as you get older - an inconvenient need for the loo before it gets light. But I do still dream, even if (like...

I have been teaching creative writing in adult education for forty years, and I can attest to the fact that it really does help some people. I have also been teaching the same subject online for the Open College of the Arts, which leads to a degree. When I started, there was a lot of controversy about whether the subject could be taught at all – and so I did an MA to remind myself what it was like being on the other side of the desk. By that point I had had many short stories published, and five radio plays broadcast, so I wasn’t exactly a beginner. However, whereas the newbies chose modules where they hoped they could shine I decided to go for the things I found difficult – namely poetry and non-fiction. And much to my surprise I found I quite enjoyed it, and five years later I won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition.             I think both methods of teaching are effective, as long as the student is willing to le...

I think about motivation a lot, perhaps more than I should do. I would consider myself a fairly motivated person and yet, there are days where my get up and go fancies a wee holiday. The difficulty with giving your get up and go a holiday, is the danger of it shoving off permanently. I firmly believe that Motivation Matters and that we should do everything in our power to keep our motivation going.  One of the ways we can do this is by joining in with NaNoWriMo or national Novel Writing Month, to give it its full name. For those of you who haven't heard of it, you pledge to write 50,000 words in the month of November, which works out at 1,677 words a day. Trust me that is doable. NaNoWriMo works in many different ways. Firstly, it gets you into a daily writing habit. Secondly, it encourages you just to write with no stops and starts. Thirdly, it helps with accountability. The site, itself, rewards you for writing streaks and gives badges at set times. There are also writi...

A year ago I wrote a rather contemplative blog post about a new venture I’d embarked on – editing an anthology of short stories by a dozen authors inspired by the subject of my own two books , namely King Richard III . Demonized particularly by Shakespeare (following St Thomas More and other writers keen to pander to the dynastic requirements of their Tudor overlords), King Richard wasn’t of course much like the grotesque portrait that’s long been painted of him – and many modern writers are keen to provide their own take on his life and character. My blog post can be found at https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2018/11/dotting-is-editors-role-alex-marchant.html and focuses in particular on the process of editing other people’s fiction writing – something that I found very different from the more practical style of copyediting I’ve long practised in my day job. But it was a process I enjoyed – together with collaborating with a number of other authors with similar in...