Confessions of an Author

Listen With Your Eyes Listening with your eyes When you are an author, you are, in effect, a parasite of life. Every experience, every glimpse of people, is stored up, ready to use in a novel. Sometimes, when there’s time, it’s good to be able to simply notice. To walk through a crowd and store up memories. You don’t consciously decide that a stranger will be a psychopath, or that a young man will be a jilted lover, or the grandmother will be the wise woman in a story. But you notice, you listen with your eyes, and add to the store in your mind. So that when you are writing, perhaps months later, and you need a character, you have a whole bank of them, waiting, ready to be fleshed out with a personality and a backstory. It helps if you are alone, as chatty husbands can be something of a distraction. So when the family decided to build a sandcastle (yes, they are all adults) I didn’t object, and was happy to walk along the beach for a while. Walk along a beach in the A...

Invisible Jane – confessions of an author Okay, I have a confession. I am bit of a literary snob. I enjoy reading the classics, or good quality literary fiction, or well written psychological thrillers. What I don’t read is chick lit. If a book has a pink cover, I do not buy it. However (this is the confession) the first book I ever wrote is – chick lit. I guess perhaps because my life was overloaded stress when I wrote it, and I couldn’t cope with anything too real, too nasty. So I wrote a ‘nice’ book, an “enjoy it on the beach with an ice-cream” sort of a book, something you might find serialised in your mother’s weekly magazine. A girly story, all about love – with some “snort your tea everywhere” funny bits. Deeply embarrassing. I wrote it by hand, on the back of bank statements and Ocado receipts, then laboriously typed it onto my computer; and left it there. It was way too embarrassing to show people. Husband read it (he wanted the bank statements and wondered why...