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jemck at 04:12pm on 07/03/2007
jemck at 04:12pm on 07/03/2007It's been a day of two halves here. Keeping up with the trade news is something every writer should be doing, but of late, it has all been rather dispiriting. Like this article in Publishing News.
For those of you who don't want to click through for the whole thing, Simon and Schuster are now back in profit - good news - thanks to various strategies including reducing their number of titles by 7% and their hardback output by 15%. Not so good news since, I'm making an educated guess here, most of those cuts will have been to the midlist and genre titles. Though they do say backlist sales are up too, so it's not all gloom, but still...
Then, this afternoon, I've been talking to a hall full of primary school kids - 8 and 9 years old -about being a writer. So it was a simplified talk compared to one of my writing seminars, though that certainly doesn't mean dumbed down. We started with assorted pictures of a milking stool, as you would. Well, you would if you're visiting a school in rural England that's next door to a farm museum that does still milk cows by hand. I told them a story needs three legs, the Who, the What and the Where, all held together by the seat, which is the How and Why. And just as all the milking stools were slightly different, made of different materials, with different tools, every book is different and every writer works in a different way - but all books need those three legs and that bit to hold them together.
So I talked for a bit about character development and plot construction and world building and how much fun all that is to do because you can read biography and history books and visit museums and watch telly programmes and find out all kind of fascinating stuff. And I talked about the help you get as a writer from test readers and editors and the like. And how, if proof reading is my least favourite bit of the whole process, discussing the cover art and seeing the roughs and the finished jacket is one of the things I like best.
Then we went on to questions - and none of them asked where I got my ideas or my names from, which must be a first. Mind you, one likely lad did ask what's the worst mistake I'd ever made in a book, which I don't think I've ever had from a convention audience, And no, that isn't a prompt for anyone who's going at P-Con this weekend to do so.
Just about the final question was 'is it fun being a writer?' And hand on heart, I could say, 'Yes, it is. It's great fun being a writer, it really is.'
So, on balance, you know what? It's been a good day.
For those of you who don't want to click through for the whole thing, Simon and Schuster are now back in profit - good news - thanks to various strategies including reducing their number of titles by 7% and their hardback output by 15%. Not so good news since, I'm making an educated guess here, most of those cuts will have been to the midlist and genre titles. Though they do say backlist sales are up too, so it's not all gloom, but still...
Then, this afternoon, I've been talking to a hall full of primary school kids - 8 and 9 years old -about being a writer. So it was a simplified talk compared to one of my writing seminars, though that certainly doesn't mean dumbed down. We started with assorted pictures of a milking stool, as you would. Well, you would if you're visiting a school in rural England that's next door to a farm museum that does still milk cows by hand. I told them a story needs three legs, the Who, the What and the Where, all held together by the seat, which is the How and Why. And just as all the milking stools were slightly different, made of different materials, with different tools, every book is different and every writer works in a different way - but all books need those three legs and that bit to hold them together.
So I talked for a bit about character development and plot construction and world building and how much fun all that is to do because you can read biography and history books and visit museums and watch telly programmes and find out all kind of fascinating stuff. And I talked about the help you get as a writer from test readers and editors and the like. And how, if proof reading is my least favourite bit of the whole process, discussing the cover art and seeing the roughs and the finished jacket is one of the things I like best.
Then we went on to questions - and none of them asked where I got my ideas or my names from, which must be a first. Mind you, one likely lad did ask what's the worst mistake I'd ever made in a book, which I don't think I've ever had from a convention audience, And no, that isn't a prompt for anyone who's going at P-Con this weekend to do so.
Just about the final question was 'is it fun being a writer?' And hand on heart, I could say, 'Yes, it is. It's great fun being a writer, it really is.'
So, on balance, you know what? It's been a good day.