TOP TWELVE TIPS for NEW WRITERS – Dianne Hofmeyr

In the 80’s when hair was permed and big and shoulders broad, I was a potter working towards my first ceramics exhibition. Then in 1987 my first novel was published. Thirty years later I’m still writing.

Last week, a question asked by a young man from HMS Census Dept: Does being a writer require any qualification? sparked my immediate reaction:  'Anyone can be a writer.' But after he left, I felt I had too easily dismissed the years and years of 'qualification.'

So in no special order, I’ve made a list of things that might smooth the process for a first-time published writer.

1. Celebrate being a debut author. The world loves a debut. It puts possibility in sight for anyone with aspiration. Even if the publisher doesn’t offer, have your own party. There’ll never be another debut book for you. So party on...

Illustration by Piet Grobler from my story Fiddle Dee Dee to be published soon by Otterbarry Books

Illustration by my friend Niki Day, from his book Welcome to Zanzibar Road. 

Illustration by my friend Fiona Moodie from her book Noko's Surprise Party published by Frances Lincoln

2. Plan in advance for how you think your book could be marketed or what events it might fit with. Don’t wait for the day it’s published. Publishers don't necessarily know everything.

Carol Thompson's marvellous tiger from her workshop for our book, My Daddy is a Silly Monkey, Otterbarry Books. 

3. Say thank you… thank you to everyone along the way – your editor, your agent, the bookshop, the librarian, the teacher, your foreign rights person. Grace generates grace.

4. Writing is a lonely business. Get out there. Do things… photography, fabric design, learn a new instrument, do high-wire trapeze… anything that involves other people.

Illustration by Piet Grobler from my book Fiddle Dee Dee to be published soon by Otterbarry Books

5. Join the SOA (Society of Authors). They are your Trade Union and lifeline for helping with Contracts, Questions on Tax, Copyright, Agents etc etc. and they’re a jolly nice crowd. Join Here. IBBY (International Board of Books for Young Children) is also worth joining. Also a jolly nice crowd! Join Here.

6. Don’t compare yourself to others. It's a bad habit. Your voice is unique.

7. If, like me, you are hopeless at paperwork, use an accountant. Look out for tax deductions. Have I said it before...? Join the SOA.

8. Only use social media if you’re comfortable with it. Choose what suits you best. If you write picture books, Instagram might work for you.

9. Write a good bio (high-wire trapeze? be sure to mention it) and insist on being introduced at events. It sends a much more positive message to an audience, than standing there saying… hi, I’m an author.

10. Even though you may already have signed 100 books, make eye contact with the person in front of you. It might be the first book that child or adult, will ever have signed.

Jane Ray signing at The Illustration Cupboard for her book Feather Girl pub by Frances Lincoln

Polly Dunbar signing at Daunts Bookshop, Marylbone High Street.

11. Be generous. Build a book community. Photograph friends’ books in bookshops and fairs. Send the message out there. Books are great!

12. Lastly – writers empower people. Why else have so many writers been imprisoned or banned over the centuries? Ovid was banned from Rome to Constanta in Romania in 8 AD for his writing, Beverley Naidoo’s Journey to Jo’burg, a children’s novel, was banned in the apartheid years of South Africa.

Beverley Naidoo reading When I Coloured in the World by Ahmadreza Ahmedi, illustr by Ehsan Abdollahi, Tiny Owl

So get out there. Empower people with your writing. Break boundaries. Break down barriers. Dream adventures. Explore down the rabbit hole. Open trapdoors to other worlds. Take courage and write! And most of all, have fun doing it. And feel free to add some more tips in your comments.

PS this blog is full of links to publishers and writers if you want to find out more.

www.diannehofmeyr.com
Instagram: diannehofmeyr

Dianne Hofmeyr's next picture book TIGER WALK will be out in October this year and is illustrated by the very talented Jesse Hodgson and published by Otter-barry Books.

INSPIRATIONS – Dianne Hofmeyr

Piet Grobler's exuberant illustration for our new book FIDDLE DEE DEE

Hopefully your celebration of the New Year was similarly robust. 

What’s not to like about the year 2018? Such a splendidly round number – plump and ripe and if you believe Chinese numerology, also very lucky with its 8, and the 2 for double or twice lucky, the 0 for limitless and the 1 for a beginning. New beginnings, limitless energy and twice lucky.  Sounds like a good year for writing.

What motivates or inspires us to write?

For me, so much seems to come from tiny, bright sparks of childhood experiences, a scene embedded way back in the brain, a sentence, a word, a room, a face. Slim, ethereal snippets that are somewhere in the subconscious. My cork-board, is not strewn with yellow ‘post-it’ notes of plots… but with pictures. Visual reminders of something I can’t quite place.

I’m like someone about to embark on building a house. I collect designs and ideas from magazines and photographs and put them in a folder. My end-product – not being as clear-cut as building a house – means I'm swamped. Some pictures go back more than 30 years.

Girl dancing with crocodile by Niki Daly on a note he once sent me more than 20 years ago. 

A metal sculpture, with in tiny print below November 1984

When I’m about to start working on a new picture book, the cork-board becomes my memory palace. The one below of an ice cave... probably stemming from a childhood visit to a cave in Africa not with ice but the same idea of darkness and light... went up for my next book, TIGER WALK.

On the board is a girl dancing with a polar bear juxtaposed with a picture of a watching tiger. 

The pictures are there for me to draw on. But when finally the story (without my pictures) is handed over to the illustrator, she or he will have their own memory palaces of ideas that are different to mine. And so the two meld and if the meld is strong, a wonderful book emerges that belongs neither to the writer or the illustrator but to something that is quite ephemeral.

A cave spread by Jesse Hodgson for our new book TIGER WALK

And in the making of the book, just as in the pottery studio where an accidental fingerprint on an otherwise perfect pot, adds its own dimension, so stories acquire shaping through the personal touch of both the illustrator and the writer.

In 2018, dream more, look harder, don’t judge yourself or others, do things that make you laugh and hopefully new beginnings, limitless energy and twice lucky will fall into place. 

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Twitter: @dihofmeyr

NOT JUST THE SINGLE STORY – THE BOY ON THE BEACH – Dianne Hofmeyr

Malorie Blackman has asked for more stories of people of colour in YA fiction. And in The Times on July 15th in My Hunt for Stories about Children that look a bit like mine, Nikita Lalwani quotes the Dominican American writer, Junot Diaz who says vampires reputedly have no mirror reflection and in his work he sets out ‘to make mirrors so that kids like me, might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.’ And on TED the writer Chimamanda Adichie speaks on the danger of the single story and warns that ‘if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories.’ 

The exciting news – YA might be lagging in showing people of colour, but picture books aren’t. To kick off as its summer, I’m beginning with one of my favouritea ­– The Boy on the Beach published by Bloomsbury in 1999. Why is this book out of print? Safeguard it if you have a copy. Niki Daly has jumped across borders and shown us a boy on a hot summer’s day. Sheer joy and energy on every page. You can smell the sea, hear the seagulls and feel the sticky ice-cream running down your chin. Of course the boy gets lost as many children do on crowded beaches, and is found by a lifeguard and rewarded with an ice-cream but can’t interrupt licking it for one second to tell his name... which he writes with his toe in the sand.

Diversity needs to be unselfconscious – telling about children of all cultures and all skin colours in all situations. The Tamarind list has picture book stories like The Silence Seeker by Ben Morley, illustrated by Carl Pearce where a boy from a family of asylum seekers moves in next door, and Joe thinks they are ‘silence seekers’ and tries to find a quiet place in the city for the boy. Modern, dynamic, comic style illustrations.

On their list too are: Mum's Late, by Elizabeth Hawkins illustrated by Pamela Venus, where a boy waiting for his mum, worries and imagines everything that might have happened to her, or My Mummy is Magic, by Dawn Richards, illustrated by Jane Massey which depicts a mixed-race family or Siddharth and Rinki by Addy Farmer, illustrated by Karin Littlewood, where Siddharth dreams of India where he used to live. Now in England when his toy elephant gets lost, he feels lonelier than ever.

Frances Lincoln has always forged ahead with picture books that represent children of all colour in a way that doesn't feel forced or pigeonholed, as in Mary Hoffman’s Amazing Grace books, illustrated by Caroline Binch, and Niki Daly’s Jamela stories as well as his The Herd Boy,

or in Piet Grobler's zany illustrations of a mixed race family 'Fussy Freya' by Katerine Quarmby.

Then there are older books like One Round Moon (Bodley Head 1994) written by Ingrid Mennen and also illustrated by Niki Daly. These books depict many overlapping stories of children both rural and of the city – children who have high aspirations, who believe they can do anything they imagine, children who love dressing up, herd boys who dream of being presidents, children who are fussy eaters, children who are jealous of new born brothers. 

The illustrator Karin Littlewood's name pops up continually also on the Frances Lincoln list. Leslie Beake’s Home Now is about a little girl, Sieta, who has lost her mother to AIDS and finds comfort by befriending an orphan elephant. It shows the deep loss any child experiences at the death of a mother.

Other books illustrated by Littlewood, like Chanda by Margaret Bateson Hill, Leah’s Christmas Story by Bateson Hill, Home for Christmas by Sally Grindley, and The Colour of Home by Mary Hoffman all present overlapping stories with abundant energy.

In the early 80’s when South Africa was in the midst of our apartheid years, I started collecting picture books that depicted black children as heroes and looked to the US (simple because I was travelling there more regularly than to the UK) with illustrators like Jack Ezra Keats, Jerry Pinkney and John Steptoe in his very handsome depiction of Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters – a Cinderella story of two sisters who compete for the hand of a king. (though I'm not fond of Steptoe's pastiche approach to the landscape of Africa with Mount Kilamanjaro, a jumping springbok and proteas all depicted on one page... things that occur some 2000 Km apart) 

An all time favourite of mine from those years, is Ben’s Trumpet published in 1979 by Greenwillow Books, written and illustrated by Rachel Isadora, an ex ballet dancer. Set in the Jazz Age it tells of a little boy who hangs about listening to music and longs to play the trumpet but doesn't own one and so plays his imaginary trumpet. It’s as pertinent now as it was in the Jazz Age, or even in 1979 with its message of inspiration for all young musicians.

Picture books seem to encapsulate these overlapping stories in very visual terms. The heroes in them are every shade of brown and reflect all cultures. I'm neither an academic or a librarian. How can I ever hope to make this dip into picture books an entire rich experience of what's available and out there. Please add your titles in the comments below or your personal favourites on Twitter of Facebook, so we are armed with a list that won’t tell a single story but will tell overlapping stories, so that children don't risk 'critical misunderstanding' and will see themselves reflected back in all shades and from all cultures – heroes all of them!

www.diannehofmeyr.com
Dianne Hofmeyr's latest picture book, Zeraffa Giraffa, is illustrated by Jane Ray. On Twitter @dihofmeyr