Advise from authors, to writers

Hello my children, today I am looking back to when I first started writing and I remembered that I was given advice by two writers who helped to set me on the right direction for getting into my own fiction writing.

Meg Rosoff:

While in my High School I was offered the chance to travel to another school to see a talk from Meg Rosoff about her writing career. She threw in some anecdotes about her life in advertising and even an amusing metaphor about a potato, but for the life of me I can't actually remember what it was about.

Now, at the time I was reading her book, "Just In Case" about a boy who has a bit of a young-life crisis and changes his name to 'Justin Case' and he embarks on a strange journey in his life where he becomes someone new, meets new friends and has unusual experiences. I havn't read the book in many years so its better than I can describe.

Meg had some good comments on her character creations and when asked why she left the physical description of Justin quite blank in the story she explained that she felt it better to let her readers create the character themselves. It seemed like a good plan. You can't not be interested in the physical appearance of a character if you have made the image yourself. Seeings as fiction is said to be all about the characters, its obviously crucial to give the characters situations and experiences that the reader will enjoy and understand but I think its quite a nice idea for you to leave the characters' appearances to the reader; creating a character who meets someone and falls in love with them would really work well if the reader is picturing their own perceptions of a perfect couple. Its a good point, I think.

I have done this to some extent with my human characters, but seeings as around half of my characters are of different races and species I feel that the limit of character non-description should be drawn to anything human.



Simon Scarrow:

Simon was a tutor at my college in good ol' Narrrfaaaaaak. He came in to talk about his brilliant historical fiction books which portray new perspectives of ancient events through the eyes of different characters as to what is usually seen.

He gave us a brilliant workshop into trends of the literary market, the idea of audience perception of a story and some insights into how to get noticed and published.

His advice was particularly focused on encouraging people to write and try to break into the publishing world as well as giving those valuable tips as to catch an editors eyes. His suggestions really compliment my post about the troubles of trying to be original with your writing, because, in truth, it is a very difficult task or, arguably, an impossible one. Instead, he suggested, take an easier route to start with and take an old story, nursery rhyme, fable or fairytale and twist it, like many authors and TV show producers have done. Red Riding, Grimm, Once Upon A Time, Angels and Demons, Da Vinci Code come to mind as examples of media that have done this, and pulled it off brilliantly. Catching a particular audiences attention is always difficult for a new author, but this burden will be particularly lightened if you start off with a foundation storyline that people can pick up and say 'ah, I know this. But hang on, its changed!' (Yeah that was really cheesey, but whatevs)



Alan G. Brown:

Alan is one of the people I have worked with, but i think he is a bit more camera shy. (All the best people are ;D). He is a self-published writer with quite a repertoire of published and in-progress works in his writing career. Alan has given me some brilliant advice into getting yourself 'out there' once your work is available for sale. He has helped me understand the value of publicity, reviews, websites and also gave me an insider's view into how self-publishing works and its really made me explore the option more for future works.

 Self-publishing for a writer such as Alan is a really powerful tool. It shows his dedication to his work, because obviously many people would use this option to bypass the long, long process of editing and self-evaluation in that editing process, but not a dedicated author like Alan Brown. He does all the work that many authors can effectively leave to a team of people and he writes, edits, promotes and markets his own work and does a pretty good job of it by the sounds of it.




I found it really promising to hear of his great results in his books, both at home and overseas and I hope to have at least a fraction of his success. Its a lot of work to get a book on the market at the right quality, and although I feel my first book may be lacking in that quality, I am going to follow his example and double my efforts now that I am older and have gone through the sharp learning curve of seeing my finished work in publication.






All of the books featured here are available for purchase on Amazon, kindle or print! I highly recommend them all to you guys :)