A pleasant surprise

Last week I was asked to give an author talk at a local school. I have to admit I was a little nervous. In my career, I have often had to stand in front of rooms full of people and give talks, but never promoting myself and never in front of a group of year 5 and 6 children. I felt more than a little out of my depth. Why would children be interested in anything I had to say? Did children even read books these days? These were the thoughts going round and round in my head as I prepared what I was going to say.

It was World Book Day. When I arrived I discovered that all the children and staff were wearing their pyjamas. To say I felt overdressed in my leggings, tunic and DM’s would be an understatement. Mind you, I don’t possess any pyjamas. I was armed with nothing but a couple of sheets of notes and my iPad, containing some interesting and relevant photos. Sadly, the iPad wasn’t quite as useful as I’d thought, as it proved impossible to get the photos from it to the big screen. I did, however, have an ally, in the form of Mary, the teacher who’d first suggested the talk. She even had a copy of Plagued for me to sign.

Part of the brief was to talk about what skills are needed to become an author. Given the age of the children, it seemed wise to focus on the basics, like a love of reading and a good imagination. In fact, it has always seemed to me that reading is to the imagination what weights are to body builders. The more you read, the stronger your imagination grows. As a child, my head was often stuck in a book, and from an early age, I knew I wanted to write. So, I began by asking how many of the children liked to read. It was a pleasant surprise to see almost every hand rise. Then, I told them how much I had liked to read as a child, and how one of my favourite things had been going to the library every week to choose new books. When I asked how many of the children went to the library, I was surprised by the number of hands raised. Perhaps these children were not so very different to the child I once was.

Of course, there is a lot more to being a writer than a love of reading and a good imagination. Reading certainly builds vocabulary, and gives a feel for the structure of a story, but without grammar, spelling and punctuation, no one would be able to plough through a book, let alone understand its meaning. Judging by some of the things I’ve seen written in recent years, this basic truth might not be very popular any more, but it is as important today as it’s ever been.

The next in my list of writers’ skills, was staying power. Even today, when attention span appears to be waning at an alarming rate, most novels are at least sixty-thousand words. It takes time and perseverance to write a book. Most writers will tell you they suffer with procrastination. We are the ones who watch all those videos of cats on social media when we should be writing. I told the children that an aspiring writer needs to write every day, even if it’s just a diary, or a page that you read back the next day and delete because it’s so bad.

The final piece of the writing puzzle is to find an idea for a story. This is often the hardest part. Ideas come from all kinds of strange places. Sometimes something you’ve read or heard can spark an idea. Other times, an idea can come from something odd you’ve seen, a strange looking tree, a dilapidated old house, a path leading into the woods. Writers need to be curious about the things they see around them and they need to listen to other people’s stories. These are the places where stories begin.

I finished my talk to the children by telling them where the ideas for my books came from; the stories I heard from my grandfather and my mother, the history of the city and the things I saw around me on my walks. I told them a little about my Pappy being wounded in the Great War, all the books I had had to read, the maps I had looked at and the places I’d visited to research my book.

Then I told them about the other books I’d written, the ones not yet published. Four of those books feature the area the school was in. I told them a little of the history of the area and about my mother who’d grown up there and gone to the same school. I mentioned the names of roads they knew, roads some of them even lived in. Then I told them the story of Dolly Hopkins, the inspiration for the book I am writing right now. Dolly went to their school too and when she left school in 1940, she worked with my grandfather on his baker’s round.

It’s a story I have told here before so I won’t repeat it again, but you can find it here if you haven’t heard it. Then I told them how Dolly went on to become Dolly O’Beirne, one of the first women to become a Southampton councillor. I told them how she was named citizen of the year in 1992 and how she was invited to meet the Queen at Buckingham Place. Hopefully, it was a lesson that you can become anything if you work hard enough at it.

When I arrived at the school I’d been nervous and unsure that the children would be interested in what I had to say. They did listen, though, and afterwards, they asked lots of questions that showed they really had been engaged; things like who my favourite authors were, what my favourite books had been as a child, which author I would most like to meet, how many hours a day I spent writing. One of the questions was whether I’d ever thought about writing books for children. I have to admit, I haven’t, but perhaps, when I’ve got the current crop of stories out of my head and down on paper, I might just do that.

If you like what I write, and you’re interested in my novels are available now on Amazon in paperback, on Kindle and via Kindle Unlimited. Check out my Amazon page here and my Goodreads page here. If you would like to help me keep writing, you can now buy me a virtual coffee by clicking on the little orange coffee cup at the bottom right.