Inky Super-Conductors! by Ruth Fitzgerald

Today I got a lovely surprise. An e-mail from a reader in New Zealand. I find it so exciting that someone has been reading about Emily Sparkes on the other side of the world! Isn’t that amazing? A character I made up sitting in my bedroom in Suffolk is now making someone laugh over 11,000 miles away! The power of books and writing entirely freaks out my brain!

This has nothing to do with New Zealand but it’s a really cute bear.

 

For me the real fun of writing and also the biggest challenge is the transmission of thoughts. To try to get something from my head into my reader’s head with as little interference as possible, so they get to see the same thing I do. Like an electrical super-conductor, which transmits currents losing very little power on the way, good writing can convey powerful emotions like joy, fear and even laughter (which is not really an emotion, more of an action, but I can’t think of a word which conveys the accompanying feeling). Through the medium of wonderful wordiness my thoughts have travelled across the world and popped up in someone else’s head. It’s completely magic!

I’ve never been to New Zealand but at least Emily has, via an inky super-conductor (also known as ‘a book’). I hope she gets to visit a lot more countries!