Who knew the extra skills I'd learn after getting my first book deal? By Tamsin Cooke

After getting my first book deal, my life went on a steep learning curve. 

1)    Website Designer

If you had asked me five years ago, that I would create a website, I would have burst out laughing. I was (and still am to some extent) a technophobe. I have to pass my phone over to my children so they can tell me how to work WhatsApp etc…

But when I got my first book deal, my editor suggested I create a website. My whole body went into shut down/panic mode. 

However, I soon realized that it made a lot of sense. People can find out all about you and your books. Children and schools can contact you. Even though it pushed me out of my comfort zone, I knew it was something I had to do.

And so I researched the Internet, got completely baffled, closed my eyes and picked a website creation tool to help me. I chose Wordpress, but I know there are lots of others out there that are equally good. Then I embarked on something which possibly took me longer than writing a book! Luckily my host support was incredibly helpful. I contacted them so many times, I now know all of their children’s names and birthdays! ; )

As difficult as it was, by the end of the process, I had produced something that I’m incredibly proud of. My website gets lots of hits everyday, especially the quizzes, which I also created. ‘What is your Nahualli/Spirit animal?’ generates so much interest. If you have an idea for a quiz, I thoroughly recommend including it. 

Other things you can include are: Pages about yourself, your books, videos, schemes of work, book trailers, games. The list can go on and on. 

Plus if you create the website yourself and something goes wrong, you can fix it. I do this – with the help of host support of course!

2)    Children’s Entertainer

I had a little head-start on this one, as I used to be a primary school teacher. However, going into school as an author is something else entirely. Children think you’re a celebrity. I often get asked:

‘Are you famous?’ 

To which of course, there is only one answer. ‘Of course. I am the most famous person you will ever meet! I had to fight through the paparazzi to get here.’ 

They then tell me that they’ve met David Walliams or the Queen, and I say, ‘Who?’

 If you are worried about going into schools, it does get easier. And I really recommend playing to your strengths. If you can draw, sing, play a musical instrument, then include those in your act. Children love things like that!  Unfortunately, I’m not very good at any of those. However, I love drama. So I turn up at the school or festival dressed like a cat burglar, and I dress up a few children as well. I mime stunts and get the audience to guess what I’m doing. And using drama and a clapper board, the children perform a story that we create together. 

I try to make the event as inspiring, memorable and fun as possible. 

If the thought of going into a school terrifies you, please remember: children are just so happy that someone other than their teacher is working with them! More importantly, nothing is better than having a person read aloud to you, especially the person who wrote the book or drew the illustrations. You are giving the children a magical gift.

What other skills have you learnt since becoming an author? Things that you never thought possible?

Tamsin Cooke

Author of The Scarlet Files Series and Stunt Double Series

Website: tamsincooke.co.uk
Twitter: @TamsinCooke1 

SCHOOL'S OUT! Or is it . . . ? by Anna Wilson

In January I wrote about the joys of giving children notebooks and letting them run riot with their story ideas. Since then I have met many teachers and parents who have done just this. They have told me how wonderful it is to see this space being used. The freedom to write or draw whatever the child wants has fed into stories she or he has often then gone on to polish in class in structured writing time. (This has not, of course, always been a direct result of my post – many teachers and parents were already giving their children the chance to explore their writing in this way.)

I would not be blogging about this again, were it not for something I witnessed on a long train journey last week; something which had me thinking again about how constraining we can be in our approach to our children’s education and the damage that can be done when pleasure is forsaken in favour of ticking boxes and getting things ‘right’. And, perhaps more importantly, when this approach leaks into home life.

A mum got on the train with her two small daughters, whom I guessed to be about five and six, and her son, who, I thought, looked about eight. They settled into their seats and the mother brought out some pens and pencils, paper and notebooks.

The little girls immediately clamoured, ‘I want my notebook!’ ‘I am going to write you a story!’

How lovely! I thought. What a great way to spend a few hours on the train.

‘Yes,’ said the mother. ‘You each have twenty minutes to write a beautiful story, and then I will read it and check it. Now – remember I want to see “wow” words, good punctuation, proper spelling, neat handwriting and lots of interesting verbs and adjectives—’

The boy groaned loudly (or was it me?) and put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t WANT to write a story!’ he complained. ‘I don’t like writing stories and I am no good at them.’

His mother placated him with promises of chocolate biscuits if he would only ‘be good like the girls and write for twenty minutes without making a fuss’. His sisters were indeed already scribbling away and reading aloud what they had written, eager to share it with their mother. She praised them and told them to keep going for the full twenty minutes.

What is it with this twenty minutes thing? I thought. Maybe she is desperate for a bit of peace and quiet. Don’t judge! You were in this situation not so long ago yourself: long train journeys with young children are tiresome and they have to have things to do otherwise you go crazy and so do they.

The boy then handed over his story. His mother, glancing at it, said, ‘Well, that’s not very interesting, is it? You haven’t used good connectives, there are no “wow” words, your handwriting is messy and you just haven’t made an effort.’

Pretty harsh, I thought.

Then came the killer blow.

‘You really have got to start making an effort with your writing, you know,’ the mother went on. ‘Next year you will have to write for twenty minutes and put all these things into your stories. You have been on holiday for a week already and you have done no writing. You must promise you’ll concentrate on this for another twenty minutes, or you will be no good at this next year.’

I must confess that, at the time, I wanted to lean across and engage the boy in conversation. I wanted to ask him if he liked reading and, if so, what kind of stories did he like best? What about his favourite films? I wanted to get him chatting about his likes and dislikes and encourage him to scribble them down, to use this precious ‘writing time’ as a chance to let his brain go wild. I wanted to tell him that it was OK to do that, and that afterwards he could go back over his story and concentrate on the connectives and the punctuation and the neat handwriting. I wanted to say that all those things his mother was talking about were indeed important, but that perhaps the reason he hated writing so much was that he was struggling with remembering the rules; that if he could forget the rules to start with, he would then perhaps find he loved writing stories, and that he had piles and piles of them to tell. I might perhaps have added that, as a published writer, I would be paralysed if I had to write a clean first draft from the off which obeyed all the rules of Standard English . . . 

Of course I didn’t. I did not want to upset his mother – after all, it was none of my business. In any case, on reflection, it was not her behaviour with her children that upset me the most, rather the fact that she clearly felt anxious that her son was not up to scratch with his English. Indeed, she was so anxious that he improve that she was insisting he work on it over the summer holidays, and work on it in the exact same way he is required to at school. She was armed to the hilt with educational jargon and was turning this terrifying arsenal on her weary son.

I was an editor before I was fortunate enough to develop my career as a writer. I know as well as anyone the importance of good grammar and correct punctuation. I appreciate clean, clear writing and a well-structured plot. I know good dialogue when I see it. My own children will roll their eyes and tell you that I am the first person to howl at the misuse of the apostrophe on a street sign or restaurant menu. Of course I can see why we have to teach these things and why parents should care about their children’s level of competence in English.

However, it makes me extremely upset that an obsession with such technicalities has the potential to wreck a child’s love of their own language. When you are as young as that little lad, creative writing should be fun, shouldn’t it? Leaving aside the dubious value in making your child work over the summer holidays in such a joyless way, I found it heartbreaking that the mother seemed not to see the potential for fun in giving her son a notebook and letting him run riot with his imagination before giving him guidance and advice on how to hone his ideas. Even more heartbreaking, though, was the thought of how anxious the woman seemed to feel about her son attaining certain targets in the academic year to come. She cannot be alone in feeling this.

I only hope that, come September, her son will find himself fortunate to have one of the many inspirational teachers we have in this country who are still in love enough with their subject to occasionally throw out the rulebook and teach from the heart instead.

www.annawilson.co.uk

Creativity in Education - Heather Dyer

I've been reading Edward do Bono's Thinking Course in order to get some exercises for a class I'm teaching on Developing Creativity. A quote in the introduction floored me. He says, "schools waste two thirds of the talent in society and universities sterilise the other third." 

A little while later I came across another quote by Ken Robinson, in his TED talk Changing Paradigms (www.ted.com). He says, "most people leave education with no idea what their real abilities are."

What a horrifying thought! After eighteen years of education! I asked my students (most of whom are retired or at least middle-aged) whether they felt they knew what their abilities were when they left school. None of them did.  I certainly didn't. It’s only now that I’m beginning to see my strengths - and I'm in my forties. When I left school, I only knew my weaknesses. Is this what education is supposed to do?

All due respect to those hardworking teachers, but I know what my education didn’t do for me: it didn’t prepare me for life, or show me how to be happy. It also didn’t teach me how to fix a dripping tap without flooding my flat, or drive a car, or save a friend from choking. It didn’t teach me how to invest in the stock market (or anything else), grow my own food, or manage my emotions. It makes me wonder what I was doing all that time. No wonder I ended up graduating in the sciences and then spending twenty years trying to carve out a niche in the arts without any training.

Perhaps, as one of my students said, 'it's life that teaches us who we are'. Well…yes. But in that case, should we be spending eighteen years of our most formative years sitting in classrooms rather than experiencing 'life'? Did we really need all those days, weeks, years shut in one room in order to learn to read and write and do some basic arithmetic? I certainly can't remember more than a few random facts of what else I learned.

What about educating ourselves by following our bliss rather than having the information that other people think we need to know pushed into us? What about being encouraged to be creative in order to find out who we really are - which is surely the starting point for anyone?

But never in those eighteen years do I recall anyone ever asking me: Who are you? What makes you tick? What can you contribute?

The first time anyone helped me find myself was when I took a month-long government-run course for out-of-work ‘artists’ when I was living in Canada. I didn’t even consider myself an artist at the time – but the course was free and I was paying my rent with my credit card and didn't have a clue what I was good at. I had just graduated with a degree in the sciences and couldn't even get work as a temp...

The acronym for the course was SEARCH, and I forget what it stood for. But on this course they asked us who we were. They helped us put together our own mission statements. They helped us create resumes composed of our genuine skills, not just our employment histories. They told us that our only hope in life was to be who we really were. I was thirty-three.

For the first time since I was seven years old, I remembered that I was really a writer, and then found out how and where I could apply those skills. Two weeks after leaving that four-week course (and without any qualifications in writing; just certainty) I had a job that paid double what I’d ever earned before. Six weeks after that I had another job which paid double again. Two months later I had my first picture book published.

Do you know who you are? Who helped you to find out?




Heather Dyer - children's author and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

• For enquiries about creative writing workshops for children or adults, or editorial services, go to www.heatherdyer.co.uk
• For enquiries about academic writing workshops, go to:  http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/