"Things I wish I'd known..." Hilary Hawkes

I was eight years old when I decided I was going to be a ballerina, marry a prince and become an author.

Sadly, in time I had to admit defeat with my first two ambitions. Unrealistic things like that just don’t happen, right? With perseverance though, the last one eventually did, on a smallish scale. I was nineteen when a magazine published my twelve part story serial (well, it turned out to be thirteen because they accidentally published part nine twice). But I was in my thirties before my first children’s books were published by, what was then, Scripture Union Publishing. 

Setting out to achieve something you’d love to happen isn’t necessarily easy. It often involves all sorts you never imagined it would involve when you were there at the starting point.

There are certain things I would love to have known about being an author and so here is a  post for new writers just starting out and for other authors, like me, who are at a crossroads in their writerly lives.

Being at a crossroad phase or the starting point of something new is the perfect time to stop and pause and decide what’s really important and what isn’t. 

This, I find, can save a whole lot of false starts, going in wrong directions, holding of unrealistic expectations and all sorts of other angst.

What better way to pause and ponder all this than to ask a wonderful bunch of  children’s authors (mostly Scattered Author members, but others too) what they wished they’d known when they’d been at a starting point or the beginnings of a new phase in their careers.

So here is the wisdom and insights they discovered along the way - and comments in italics are mine:

Believe in yourself and persevere. Don’t make excuses for not pursuing your dreams.

Being published won’t change your life – you’ll still have the same stresses and you’ll have a new set: sales, reviews, future book deals.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t take criticism too personally. You need to be thick-skinned. A book is only a book and life is what matters.

Being published is not the end of rejection. And rejection is all part of it.

Being an unknown author IS being an author too. And is actually rather nice.

Sign up for PLR and ALCS straight away – very few authors make a living from writing.

Books go out of print really quickly and publishers don’t keep you on for ever. It is so easy to author-publish your out of print books though.

Writing subsequent books doesn’t get any easier.

Not everything you write has to be published.

School or book shop visits get easier and more fun with practice- but you don’t have to do them if they’re not your thing.

Don’t underestimate the amount of public speaking involved.

Don’t do it for the approval of others because depending on other people’s approval is a highway to misery.

Publishers may be genre restrictive and if that happens find a second/another publisher or other options for your work.

It never gets boring seeing your book on the shelves of a bookshop or library. It never gets boring when your friends send you photos of your book in their local Waterstones.

Writing is like snakes and ladders. When you start you think it will be all ladders. Then you meet the snakes. Keep going though because there will eventually be another ladder.

Do not expect to see your books in bookshops for long – if at all. (It’s ok to take photos of them or do a happy dance right there and then when you do see them).

If you stick at it and learn your craft it will happen.

Your creative friends will hold you up when you’re down and carry you higher when you’re up. Make friends with other authors – they are the best kind of friends.

Writing is absolutely the best thing ever when it’s going well.

Don’t take edits personally.

Having a good agent helps. If you don’t have an agent then the Society of Authors will check contracts and offer all kinds of support.

Each book has to be better or at least as good as the last.

Listen to advice but trust your own instincts.

Stay positive or at least pretend you are.

You’ll need to write a lot of drafts before you have the one that will be published and hopefully you’ll be thrilled with the final one.

If you ever stop writing the world will NOT come to an end.

Be prepared for emails and  bizarre requests from readers etc

Join a critique group - for example a SCBWI group.

Have contact with children and your reader age group. There are lots of ways this can happen – school visits, library story times, bookshop signings, volunteering with reading charities etc.

Specific to self-publishing:

                Get your books properly and professionally edited.

                Bookmark anything helpful you find online for future reference.

                Don’t try to illustrate your own books unless you are a talented artist.

                Offer your book in different formats in as wide a selection of different markets as                    possible.

Don’t give up your day job until your advance is three times your salary. This is not likely to happen!

Persevere. Find the way so you don’t give up on your dream.

If you're one of the lovely authors who contributed to the above then thank you! And if you've just read this and have a further snippet of wisdom you can share then please do so.

For those embarking on their writerly journey, or about to discover the next ladder: onwards and upwards.

Picture credits: pixabay.com

Hilary Hawkes

To Drive The Cold Winter Away by Tess Berry-Hart

It's still winter! The bone-shaking chill of a new January with its winds, ice storms, broken healthy resolutions and humourless deadlines (tax payments, school applications, etc) can make even the bravest of us want to curl up in a cave next to a blazing fire and hibernate until spring arrives.

And to some of us who suffer from depression (episodes of persistent sadness or low mood, marked loss of interest and pleasure) either constant or intermittent, winter can be one of the hardest times. Depression being a multi-headed hydra ranging from many states of unipolar to bipolar, I'm not suggesting that there is one single type of depression; for instance not all of us are affected by the winter or weather, while some people who don't even have depression in the clinical sense might be experiencing a mild case of the winter blues, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

Creativity is like a fire that we can stoke to drive away the cold winter (whether physical or psychological, internal or external). So I'm deep in my cave trying to work out ways that I can stoke my creativity without resorting to biscuits!

Bibliotherapy's been around for a while now, and is the literary prescription of books and poems against a range of "modern ailments" - including depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. A form of guided self-help, it's not exactly a new idea - the ancient Greeks spoke of "catharsis" - the process of purification or cleansing, in which the observer of a work of theatre could purge themselves of emotions such as pity and fear through watching and identifying with the characters in a play. All of us in the modern world can attest to the feeling of connection and joy when an author so precisely describes a state that we are ourselves experiencing, and the nail-biting, cliff-hanging state of knowing exactly what our heroine or hero is going through. We root for him or her because s/he represents ourselves battling our own demons in an idealised meta-state.

But how does bibliotherapy work? According to the various proponents, it helps perpetuate a shift in thinking, so that things are not so inflexible (black and white thinking, for all you cognitive-behavioural depressives out there!) which is crucial to tackling depression. Being able to gain distance and perspective by viewing problems through the lens of fictional characters means that in real life our fixed thought-patterns which contribute to our problems can start to become unpicked.

And of course, identification isn't the only joy to be found in books; good old-fashioned escapism is surely the reason why many of us read so avidly. A new world, a new family, a new life, perhaps even new biology or physics, takes us away momentarily from the mundane world so we can return refreshed, hopefully to see our lives with new eyes.

I've obviously been self-medicating for a long time, but I always called it comfort-reading. By comfort-reading I mean a well-known book that you can plunge into at will like a warm bath or a pair of slippers. At school when I was anxious about exams or bullies I would find solace in re-reading the heroic adventures of Biggles or the magical quest of Lord of the Rings; at university it was in the dreamy memories of Brideshead and the vicissitudes of Billy Liar or Lucky Jim. When I started my first office jobs I would read 1984 or Brave New World (odd choices for comfort-reads but I think it was to remind myself that things could actually be worse!) but when I started writing my own books, I ...er ... stopped reading for some years. I think my tiny little brain could only take so much exercise!

I started comfort-reading again when we first had our children; during long and frequently painful breast-feeding sessions my husband would read my childhood favourites Charlotte's Web and Danny the Champion Of The World to me as distraction and encouragement. And these days my prospective comfort list numbers hundreds of books; for me, reading is re-reading.

So what could I take to bolster myself against the winter chill? I've written myself a prescription but I'd be interested in hearing yours!

1) A dose of James Herriot's short animal stories, to be administered when needed (they are nice and short so you're not left hanging after a few pages) or chapters from Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat, or virtually anything by PG Wodehouse;

2) A daily dose of half an hour "joy-writing" - half an hour in the morning when I can sit down and let ideas spill out onto the page. (If it ends up with me writing about what happened last night then so be it. It can often lead to something more ...)

3) A small creative project on the horizon, easily identifiable and manageable, that I can look forward to; in this case getting a small group of actors together to read through a new draft of a play that I've written (there'll be a blog post on this soon so stay tuned!)

4) Connection with others - I'm a member of a local book group, which not only makes me keep on top of what new books are coming out, but also participating in the joy of discussion; there's nothing more frustrating than reading a good book only to realise that nobody you know has read it!)

So I think that's enough to start barricading myself up against the January snows!

But what about you? What kind of comfort-reads do you enjoy to drive the cold winter away?

Wrestling snakes - by Nicola Morgan

That's what it feels like when a novel just won't do what it's told. And that is what I've been grappling with for the last eighteen months. Big time. Anaconda big time. Crying in the night and thinking my career must be over if I'm this rubbish time. A high concept idea which elicited interest whenever my agent or I mentioned it, but which began wriggling from my grasp pretty much from Chapter Three. And they are short chapters...

I finished the first draft. Didn't like it. Good beginning, good ending, tangled boring mess in the middle. And by "middle" I mean all but the first three and last three chapters. Yes, short chapters.

Left it for a few months.

Attacked the snakepit again. The snakes seemed to have multiplied in my absence, revealing a whole load more flaws that I hadn't seen before.

More crying in the night. More wrestling. More wondering why it was so hard. Other writers were finishing novels left right and centre. What was wrong with me?

Eventually finished the second draft. Didn't like it any better. More crying.

Left it for a few months.

Attacked the pit for the third time, in a spirit of "I will do this if it kills me because I will despise myself if I don't." Put other work on hold - including a book that has a contract and a deadline, which this one doesn't.

Tried a storyboard technique. It didn't work.

Tried mind-mapping. It didn't work. But it had pretty colours.

Tried my patent mathematical drama-versus-time graph technique (which I'd invented to solve a previous book's problem, successfully.) It didn't work this time, though it did show me something - that the snake was bigger than I'd thought. And there were more of them.

Tried a new technique which I haven't got a name for but which has the effect of identifying each snake's position, firing a tranquilliser dart at it and, while it's semi-conscious, manoeuvring it into place and then sticking pins in it so it can't move until I say so.

At the same time I was revealing my desperation to anyone who would listen on Twitter. I described it as wrestling an anaconda-sized plot problem.

These were the well-meaning responses I received:

• Take a break from it. (I'd done that twice already.)
• Go for a walk. (Works well for worms, but not anacondas. Also, it would be a hell of a long walk.)
• You can do it. (Not necessarily.)
• Eat chocolate. (Good idea.)
• How come you have this sort of problem when you've written so many books? (Good question.)
• You write my book and I'll write yours. (Since that was Joanne Harris, that was a GREAT idea. Actually, I think I'm confusing two conversations, but still.) 
• Awww, poor you. [[[hugs]]] (Thanks.)
• Introduce zombies. (Not helpful.)
• Or penguins. (*glares*)
• Or zombie penguins. (You're not taking this seriously.)

Now, (*whispers*,) thanks to my tranquilliser dart technique, the signs are currently positive but I'm not going to tempt fate with anything approaching hubris. What I want to say is something which most writers know and which non-writers might be interested in knowing:

• It's horrible, lonely and emotionally draining when a book behaves like this.
• No one can really help. Although talking things through with friends can sometimes reveal the key, essentially the answer comes through our own hard work, no one else's.
• Although it's painful at the time, the satisfaction of success is huge - and probably true that the greater the pain, the greater the satisfaction.
• We don't necessarily get better at it. Each book is a new book, a new start and a new challenge. Some books just come out more easily and some are harder. Success is not guaranteed, and practice does not seem to make perfect.
• Determination is necessary.

So, tomorrow it's back to the snakepit and I'm telling you: it's me or that pesky snake.

Life as a writer - why (oh why) do we do it?

Disappointed writer

 I put this question to myself once every three months or so - usually when things aren't going too well. Why, why, why do I do it? Write, I mean - and all the stuff that goes with it.

I guess it has to be for love or something similar. It's certainly not for money. I've no wish to be a millionaire, though something in the way of royalties and PLR is always welcome. I suppose there's habit in there too. I write because it's what I do. To be honest, I think it's a kind of addiction. If I don't write for more than a few days, I feel dissatisfied and grumpy (just ask my family... though they might claim that I'm sometimes like that when I'm writing, too).

What part of writing, then, am I addicted to? I suppose it's those rare 'first draft' moments when everything goes well - when your characters take hold and run away with the plot and you're left struggling to keep up. For me, it's particuklarly those times when I feel fully tuned in to the thoughts and words (especially the words) of my characters, and I'm evaesdopping on their conversation, racing to get down every word they say. I think that's why I need silence when I write - I can't even stand good music in the background - because anything else distracts me from the voices in my head.

And that joy when you wake in a morning and realise that your brain has solved a knotty plot problem while you slept (though I realise this phenomenon isn't confined to writers). It's always a thrill, to be reminded that your conscious mind play a relatively minor part in what you create, and to realise that the brain has its own concerns you never even dreamt of.

Jumping ahead a few months (or years) - another wonderful thing is those times when your readers, especially children and young adults, tell you that they have read and enjoyed your books. And perhaps even better, when they ask you searching questions that make you realise that they have truly engaged with your characters and themes, perhaps in ways you never anticipated.

But there are also times when the whole process is so discouraging that you wonder why you go on. I'm in one now, in some respects. A project for young readers that I'm involved in is... not so much in peril as changing course, and my role in it may end up being rather different from what I expected. It's disappointing and frustrating, especially as I have no idea when the project will come to fruition. And I feel somewhat flattened - maybe I shouldn't, but I do. It's so easy, as writer, to lose confidence in your abilities. A bad review can run over you like a steamroller, in a way that you would never have expected. Being told by an editor: 'No, that's not what I want...' can take you back to being an eight-year-old at school, being sent away to do your homework all over again.

And, of course, in the early stages of a writer's career (and sometimes in the later stages, too), there are the inevitable knockbacks from agents, publishers, etc. There's the agent who gets all excited by your work and leads you to think she's about to take you on, but then changes her mind.  Even once you're published, there are (or can be, unless you're very lucky), those miserable afternoons sitting at a table in a bookshop, while no one stops to buy. There are the publishers who sign you up and then go out of business - or who decide that your books are not selling in Harry Potter quantities so they are going to pull the plug on you. It's all too depressing to think about.

Etc, etc, etc. Yes, I know that life itself can be a depressing business. And I know that there are (there really are) much more important things in life than publishing contracts. I really do know that! But it doesn't always help as much as perhaps it should.

What I will say, though, is that if you can keep writing when all around you is disappointment and despair, then you may just have it in you to be a writer. Whatever the 'it' is - I'm not quite sure. I suspect it's a kind of madness, but I wouldn't be without it. What's more, I'm very thankful to all those writers of wonderful books who have kept going in the face of discouragement and produced work, maybe, that would never have surfaced otherwise.

So let's take heart and struggle on in our communal craziness. Knowing you are not alone always helps - and I must say that reading this blog is one of the main things that assures me I am not alone and helps me to keep going.

I recently wrote a travesty of Rudyard Kipling's 'If' along these lines, if you'd care to take a peep here.

Best wishes - and don't let anything (or anyone) stop you writing.
Ros

Author of Coping with Chloe (age 11+ approx).
My Facebook author page
My website