Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 117

London Buildings, Good & Bad (Part 1)

Cities that don’t get bombed or burned down always look more cogently constructed. Paris and New York are of a piece, the former locked into the 1900s, the latter the 1920s. New York has gone from futuristic to homely, and is all the better for it. Gdansk was bombed flat and rebuilt exactly as it […]

The Working Mother Writers

While I was selecting  the authors who have now vanished from family bookshelves, I couldn’t help noticing how many women writers gave up because the demands of looking after a parent or children prevented them from putting their thoughts on paper. For many, writing was one of the few ‘respectable’ jobs for a young woman, […]

How Technology Is Killing Fiction

I love modern technology. I’m an early adopter so connected that it requires a masters’ degree in electronics to run my life and even Apple geniuses give a low whistle when I have to explain my set-up. But there’s no question that it’s damaging fiction. That’s the thesis for today. First and most obviously, it’s […]

When Characters Annoy

As I embark upon the 17th Bryant & May adventure, I have to ask myself; am I still making the characters interesting? I ask because on the US Amazon website, a reader described Arthur Bryant as annoying. He is of course, but in the UK we treasure annoying characters, from Harry Worth, Charlie Drake and […]

When Authors Hide Secrets Part 2

Many authors were only known by what they wrote and a postage-stamp sized photo on a dust jacket. In that sense, at least, they had more freedom than most, for it was all the public knew about them. Now that social media has provided us with too much information, we can find out pretty much […]

When Authors Hide Secrets Part 1

When I began writing ‘The Book of Forgotten Authors’, I quickly learned to decode newspaper articles about writers. There were men who were ‘intensely private’ and women who ‘never married’. The words ‘sapphic’ and ‘bachelor’ tended to crop up, used knowingly. These writers were devoted to their mothers and never gave personal interviews. They lived […]

Give Yourself A Word Workout

In these post-Christmas weeks, everyone’s going on about weight and healthy eating, but nobody worries about developing language and communication. We only use a fraction of the words available to us. The Oxford English Dictionary currently holds 171,476 words in regular use and 47,156 obsolete words. By comparison, the Chinese dictionary has 370,000 words. We have a regular […]

What’s On In London?

As a writer you have to keep your mind alive and fresh, but living in London creates a unique problem; like museums that only display 5% of their treasures, I find I have little time to experience what’s going on in an average London week. Yesterday I decided to have a virtual flick-through and see […]

Chang-Siu And The Blade Of Grass

Following on from yesterday, here’s a story that was grouped under the banner of ‘horror stories’ when the collection should really have been labelled ‘Stories of the Fantastic’. I wrote it because I like Marguerite Yourcenar’s style of writing, and wanted to catch something of the same tone. See what you think.   Long, long […]

‘Don’t You Write Horror Stories?’

I was once at a literary gathering – this was very early on in my career – and rather nervous about being in the company of so many university Eng. Lit. graduates. Back then it was a much rarer privilege to go to university. This particular group of three with whom I was standing talked […]