As you should know, I am the author equivalent of the waiter/actor: the teacher/writer.
One thing I wanted to try with this blog - and I assume I can do this but I'm not sure - is to post some of my writing that is otherwise just gathering dust somewhere (well, intangible bit and byte dust, since it's all new-fangled computer writing. I like my friends to read my stuff, but damned if I don't get sick of e-mailing current versions all over the place. Hopefully this will be easier. If it works.
As an apt starting point, I thought I would try posting my story of failing as a writer that I failed to sell to the School Journal.
One Word at a Time: Behind the Scenes of Writing a Story
Do you want to be a writer? Have you ever had an idea and thought, ‘that would make a great story’? I have. So one day I wrote that idea down in a notebook. Two years later I had a complete story.
Here is my story about the journey of writing a story…
The idea for my story actually came on Christmas Day. I was watching a Christmas movie on television, and it wasn’t very good, to be honest. But it made me think about the hard work Santa has to put in on that one night of the year. ‘How does he do it?’ I wondered. I thought I could do a better job of telling that story. Thinking about that one little idea eventually led to a story called The Santa Problem. It’s about Antarctica, elf fights, secret agents, and all kinds of other crazy stuff!
Part of the fun of writing The Santa Problem was researching all those different things I wanted to put in the book. I researched all about the history of Santa, reindeers and elves. I did a lot of research about Antarctica, how to get there (usually in Air Force planes. Cool!), how people survive there, the weather conditions. Did you know that the sun goes down in Antarctica for about two months over winter? That’s right; imagine spending June and July in total darkness! Or did you know that the temperature gets so cold that the wind could freeze the skin off your face? Or that Antarctica has mounds of earth-covered snow or ice called Pingos, kind of like reverse volcanoes? These are all fascinating facts I found out while researching my story, and they all found their way into the story somewhere too.
From start to finish it took me two years to write The Santa Problem. I wrote in two ways: if I was at home I sat at my desk, with my cat on my lap, and typed straight onto my computer. The most important thing for me when I sat down to write out an idea or a chapter was that I was not interrupted. I listened to music so it wasn’t too quiet, but my friends knew that I wouldn’t answer the phone if I was in the middle of writing. If I was somewhere else, like on holiday, I would write into a little notebook and copy my work onto computer later. There were months at a time where I didn’t add a single word to the story – sometimes I was busy with my real life, or I just didn’t have any idea what was going to happen next – but I thought about my story every day. Sometimes I would hold an idea in my head for weeks, rolling it around and thinking about it from different angles. Writing the story wasn’t easy – there were many times I wanted to give up, when it seemed too hard. But I found that once I had started the story it wouldn’t go away. I had to know what was going to happen, I was so interested in where my story was going! It’s a great feeling.
When the story was finished I gave it to some of my friends to read. Because the story was intended for Intermediate age children I also gave it to some of the children in my Year 7 class to read. They actually went through and corrected quite a few spelling and punctuation mistakes! (See, teachers make them too) One girl even suggested an idea that I worked into my story. It’s definitely a good idea to talk to people you trust about your story, and really listen to their feedback.
Finishing the story doesn’t mean that the hard work is over. If you want to have your story made into a book, you need to find a company willing to publish your work. Publishers get hundreds or even thousands of people sending them stories every year, so they barely have time to read them all. They definitely don’t have time to tell you what they liked or didn’t like about your story. So the first step in this process is to post a copy of your manuscript to a manuscript assessor.
The job of the manuscript assessor is to read your story and give you professional advice on what publishers will like about your story, what you should change, whether there are parts of your story that are unclear, that sort of thing. They write all of this information into a big report that they send back to you. It is kind of like handing in an assignment to a teacher for marking. Like a good teacher, a good manuscript assessor will make you feel good about your work while pointing out honestly what needs to be improved upon. The manuscript assessor also provides you with a letter that you can send to publishers saying that you have had your book checked professionally.
Each publisher has a different set of rules for how you show them your work. Most publishers want a hard copy (printed on paper) and only between one or three chapters. They read those ‘sample’ chapters and decide based on that if they think they can sell your story. So picking those sample chapters is a big decision. Do you send the first few chapters? Usually there is a lot of setting up in those chapters for events that occur later, so they may not be the best choice. For The Santa Problem, I chose three chapters that introduced three of the main characters. I figured if the publisher likes those characters they will like the book as a whole.
One publisher liked my sample chapters enough to request the whole manuscript. That was really exciting.
Let me know what you think. I personally believe that the lesson of not succeeding has great merit for children, especially when they're - let's just admit it - spoiled.
And I'm out.
