More than Writers

 So I had this idea for a novel. I thought I knew where it was going - who the villain/murderer was (I write crime novels) and my sleuth has appeared in three books so far. By now, surely I knew the main and a few supporting characters, the locations and the themes, well enough to just get on with it fairly effortlessly. I began on 27th October, just after the publication of the last book in the series. I wrote for an hour every weekday till 23rd December. Total 17,575 words. Not a lot, you may think, but by now (this is my 19th book) I know my process. I write very fast and very short for the first draft, basically getting the story down on paper before I lose the thread or the energy. And I keep a daily tally - word count.  And I print out that day's work and keep it in a folder, the mounting pile of pages a tangible encouragement. But then all that momentum fizzled out. I wrote again on December 29th and 30th. It was a week before the next attempt - a very paltry few words ...

Everything that we write is informed by who we are, what we believe and what we experience. As we often say in our ACW writers’ group, whether faith is implicit or explicit in our writing, we write as Christians. Our faith underpins our work. Even if we write characters that have very different worldviews to our own, the essence of the story, the underpinning moral framework and ‘feel’ of the piece, is going to be Christian. It’s unavoidable. And it’s one way in which real life informs our fiction. Another way is through our experiences, particularly our emotional life. Taking what we have experienced and putting it into our fiction is what makes our writing authentic and powerful. One of the teenage characters in my current work-in-progress has fallen out with her friends. And as I write about that broken relationship, I realise that I’m reflecting on recent events in my family life. The details are different, but the emotional fall-out is the same. It’s a universal theme: navi...

  What Would Jesus Do With  AI? by Sheelagh Aston There has been some discussion within ACW about AI along with a very thoughtful blog recently by Annmarie Miles. Here is another take on the subject. What would Jesus do with AI? Remember the 90s bracelet with WWJD? My version may seem an odd question, but it is a question that keeps niggling me. Without wishing to dumb down a very complex subject (which is far too complex to do justice to in this short blog) putting it very simply, one way AI develops is through being fed material to learn. This material is created by humans. For creatives and writers, our work is often being used without our permission or knowledge – or remuneration - to achieve this. The stark reality of the volume and damage to creatives has led the Society of Authors GB decision to launch a logo for use to state a book has been written by a human and not AI. Businesses are using AI for various tasks to cut costs and some individuals may choose to use i...

  Photo by Guillermo Latorre on Unsplash I wonder how you read the title of this blog? The word ‘bow’ is a heteronym (I think, but please do correct me!). A word that has different meanings depending on how it is pronounced.   I recently had a dilemma. I was due to speak at an event in Wokingham.  It had been booked in for a while. And then I received a health diagnosis, which might have meant I could not make the event. Or maybe it wouldn’t have meant that. I couldn’t say for certain either way. I dithered. Bottom line: I wanted to do the event. But people who had already booked in probably needed to know whether it was happening. Bottom line: I wanted to be honourable to them. I dithered. And Ali, of  Quench stepped in: “Let’s postpone.” It was a good call.   Bookshop staff are amazing, I am in awe of all they do. And I had the privilege of realising that ‘rescuing floundering authors’ is yet another string to their bow. This little blog has one aim: to cele...

  As I pulled out of my driveway early one morning, I heard a crash and a searing metallic scrape. I stopped quickly, jumped out of the car and surveyed the damage. I’d managed to turn slightly too sharply out of my driveway and catch the edge of a low lying wall on my passenger side. Pieces of wall lay scattered over the end of my drive. That was an unpleasant and expensive start to my day! It has got me thinking about walls though. Not the walls of separation and division that we see all over the place and which are often difficult to tear down, but walls of construction. I’m sure most of you have seen a dry-stone wall. They divide fields in patchwork patterns, especially in the north of the country. These walls take skill to build and last for many years. They have good foundations and are made using a variety of stones. Each stone is handled by the wall builder and distributed with care and precision throughout the wall. These walls are not held together by mortar but ea...

  Where would be without words? I don’t know.   Perhaps we’d all be painters, ceramicists or sculptors, channelling our creativity into visual pieces to either display to the world or to hide in the back of the cupboard depending on our personality, outlook, connectedness and opportunities. As it is, for writers, words are our tool of choice and my head is full of them for most of the day. Perhaps that’s why these art works caught my eye on display at a South African winery last year. Their creator, Maurice Mbikayi was born in the Congo in 1974, gained his BA in Kinshasa and his MA in Cape Town.   According to his website he ‘interrogates the proliferation of technological commerce in our geopolitical system.’ Quite. He’s intent on making the point that resources for twenty-first century technology have required the sort of mining in Africa that has benefited multi-national companies and big corporates but done very little for local communities.   By using discarded ...