This excellent class was offered last Saturday by Commonword, Manchester. It was by invite only and I felt privileged to be invited. We
were quite a small group and so there was plenty of opportunity to ask
questions.
Over the years, I’ve attended hundreds of workshops, many of
them facilitated by well-known people in the writing industry. But I still learnt
something last Saturday.
I’m not going to give you all of the detail – much of what I
could say would repeat what is contained in the very detailed blogs kindly posted
by those who were able to attend the SCBWI-BI
Conference in Winchester last week. I’m just going to go through what
for me – an already published but not yet best-selling author – were the highlights.
The most important points for me from author Melvin Burgess were:
·
The difference between an amateur and
professional is about 10,000 hours. Write, write and keep on writing if you
want to be published. (I keep totting up my hours and I keep getting a
different figure- I never was all that good at maths!)
·
Ultimately, you learn to be your own best editor
– but don’t always start at the beginning as one then tends to rush the end. I’ve
put that into practice already this week!
·
Be a little cautious about seeking the opinions
of others until you are satisfied with the work yourself. Maybe the questions
you need to ask are “Where doesn’t it work?” “Where are you bored?” (I’ll add
in here that I also find it useful to get people to tell you what they’ve
understood about your characters – have they come out the way you intended them
to?)
Agent Catherine
Pellegrino assured us that it is all right to submit to more than one agent
at once “otherwise you’ll be waiting forever” though there may come a point
when an agent wants to read exclusively the whole of a manuscript. This is only
fair and other agents would understand this. So, shortly I’ll be sending out a
little more vigorously two novels that are doing the rounds.
She advised to mention if we had worked with such organisations
as Cornerstones and emphasized that this is a good example of that type of
body. They are expensive and writers should
be proactive enough to make sure that they do get their money’s worth.
She emphasized that humour and great voices are important to
her.
We were very fortunate in also having commissioning editor Shannon
Park with us. She works for Puffin, which is, as she says, the number one
children’s publisher. She gave us the usual depressing news about how publishers
are taking on fewer but “bigger” books and how all revolves around sales. She highlighted
some of the trends. “But of course,” she
said, “it changes all the time.” I’m
always a little wary of this – what is trending now won’t be any more by the time
you’ve finished writing. Also, I can only write what I feel confident I can
write well. However, sometimes things can be reshaped a little to fit a trend,
so it is still worth knowing.
Her most useful tip is to imagine what you would say to the concerned
adult wondering whether they should buy the book or not. I’m quite used to the two-line summary I put
at the beginning of the query letter. But what Shannon meant is shorter than an
elevator pitch. Perhaps Twitter is good training. Maybe all those tweets have been
useful after all! And she also mentioned humour.
It was a really enjoyable and useful day. All of the writers
there were to some extent experienced. It was good to be amongst like-minded people.
We had a lovely lunch courtesy of Prêt à Manger and Commonword. It’s the first time for a while that I’ve some
away from such a meeting feeling optimistic.
