New Zealand Book Month in Taihape

Thanks to New Zealand Book Month for sponsoring my trip to Taihape, and a BIG thanks to Kate in the library who organised my visit and put together some great displays and posters. Thanks also to the people of Taihape who came along to my talk on Sunday afternoon, to Katherine in the local Paper Plus for stocking plenty of copies of my new Anzac Day book and to the Year 7 and 8 children from St Anthony's and Taihape Area School who proved such attentive listeners on Monday morning.Kate had also borrowed a selection of war mementos from the  Taihape Museum. Most of these were put in a display case for people to look at, but the children were fascinated by the World War One One lemon-squeezer hat and World War Two metal hat, which we let them (carefully) pass around.

So what did I learn about Taihape:

• It feels like quite a different place when it's not crammed full of holiday drivers taking up every parking space and every seat in the cafes
   
• It's the sort of place where people say hello as you walk past
   
• The Taihape Motel is a lovely place to stay and super-friendly - thanks very much to the Vasil family who are excellent hosts
   
• When they are-sealing the road through the middle of town and have taken away all the pedestrian crossing markings, it can be an alarming experience to try and cross the road unless you are with a local who will just stride ahead, knowing the traffic will stop.
   
• It's true about the drought. SO hot, SO dry. Wishing you some more rain very soon.

And what about the children from St Anthony's and Taihape Area School - what did you learn? Well, I hope you found out a bit about what it's like being a writer - and if you've got any more questions, please email me through my website and I'll promise to answer them!

Support New Zealand Book Month!

The New Zealand Book Month site is here, full of news of activities all around the country.

Do your bit to support New Zealand Book Month - look up an event near you and go along to it; even better, use your $5 voucher to buy a book by a New Zealand author!

Have you won any awards?

Have you won any writing awards?

This is another question I often get asked. Like the previous two that I've described (how many books have you written? and how long does it take to write a book?) it's not always easy to answer -  but perhaps for a different reason. I'm enjoying pondering on a few responses to these questions so that next time I get asked them, and I'm floundering for a coherent response, at least I'll know that it makes sense on my blog.

The short answer is yes. I can recite a list of awards I've won or been shortlisted for.

But what is a writing award? It can be as grand as the Booker, or it can be a regional short story competition - do they both make you into an "award winning author"?

Another reason I'm ambivalent about this question is that I've been on judging panels myself, and I know how hard it can be to reach a consensus - and that a different panel of judges would probably have come up with a totally different winner, and quite possibly a different shortlist as well.

I think the "award winning author" category is used by teachers to help students pinpoint someone to study - because students are often the ones emailing the question. It can work for that purpose - but I'm sure that somewhere on Google there will be a list of "authors who never won a major award."

 

 

Wellington on a good day

As they say, you can't beat Wellington on a good day - and there have been a string of them lately.



One of the best was on Thursday - the official last day of summer (but it seems to be continuing!) when a pod of dolphins came into the harbour. This video was put together by Ro Tierney who also made the beautiful short film Snow on Cuba St, back in 2011 - seems hard to believe with this weather we're enjoying at the moment.

How many?

How many books have you written?

This is another question I often get asked at writer talks. Like How long does it take to write a book?, it's a deceptively straightforward one, which I struggle to answer coherently.

For one thing, there's the matter of size. War and peace counts as one book, but so does a 32-page picture book. (The much beloved picture book Rosie's walk only has about 32 words, let alone pages - but it's a classic, too.)

Some people churn out books at the rate of dozens a year; others only ever produce one masterpiece. What would be the point of asking Harper Lee How many books have you written? What would be the point of asking James Patterson?

I find myself gabbling information about different formats of books and School Journal pieces, but I can sense that the person asking the question just wants a number. Five? Ten? A hundred?.

Sometimes my reply includes the fact that I've written over 80 pieces for the School Journal as well as other educational publications. It's a number, so it feels like it's anchored to reality. But what is a "piece"? A story in the School Journal could potentially resurface elsewhere as a picture book - as happened to Margaret Mahy's wonderful The lion in the meadow (sadly, none of my Journal stories are anywhere near as good.)

Is asking How many books have you written? different from asking How many books have you had published? That's another aspect of the question that I've only just identified. Many writers have a drawerful of manuscripts that have never seen the light of day, but that they needed to write to be able to produce a manuscript that was of publishable standard.

Like that previous question (How long does it take...) , I wonder if there are other things going on in the mind of the person asking it. Maybe it's an attempt to quantify the business of writing: tick off how long, tick off how many.  Maybe we're just used to counting and measuring things.

I think it's good to know that some things can't be counted and can't be measured.

 

How long?

How long does it take to write a book?

This is one of the questions that I almost always get asked - by adults and children - whenever I do any sort of writer talk.

Recently I read a post on Melinda Szymanik's blog about the same question, and it made me realise how often I gloss over the answer. There might be a classful of children all waiting impatiently to ask their own question. Or maybe I'm feeling a bit worn out with talking by then and I just give the easy answer. It seems like a straightforward question, so it should have an equally straightforward answer. Shouldn't it?

So what do I usually say? I talk about the difference between writing fiction and non fiction  I explain that I need to do a lot more research for a non fiction book. I might give a wild estimate: six months, a year, two years.

But now I'm wondering if that is what the person asking the question is really asking, and what they actually want to know.

Writing a book is such a mysterious process, one that many non-writers or would be writers (or even writers themselves) are fascinated and intrigued by. I wonder if the person asking this question is really trying to quantify and make sense of the process itself. If I know it takes six months to write a book, they might think, then all I have to do is set aside six months of my life and I will have written one.

But of course it's not like that.

Books are such individual things, the process can't be pinned down - and writers are such individual people. It's true that some books get written astonishingly quickly. The Internet tells me that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - now regarded as a classic - in six days. I can't vouch for that, but last year I went to a talk by John Boyne who described how he stayed up for three days existing on little food and less sleep to write The boy in the striped pyjamas. (He said that if he'd had a meeting scheduled on any of those days, his concentration would have been broken and he might never have finished the book.)

On the other hand, some books take years to get set down on the page.

A book for me starts with a germ of an idea that won't go away, and it might take years to develop into something bigger, or to gather other ideas around it. And even then, it' s not a matter of sitting down in front of a sheet of paper or a computer for so many hours, days, weeks and months. As Melinda says, "when you start writing, you don't necessarily write day in, day out until done". For me, it's writing a bit, making notes, going for a walk to try and sort out a problem of plot or characterisation I'm stuck on, stopping to hang out the washing, stopping to cook dinner, having to deal with emails and paperwork, maybe having to meet a deadline for another piece of writing,  checking up on a few facts in the library, writing some more, editing, writing...

At the end of all of that - the writing , the editing, the interruptions, the emails flying to and fro with the publishers - it would be hard to say exactly how long it took to write that particular book.

But it would take a long time to explain all that, so I apologise if sometimes I go for the easier option.

Six months? A year? Two years?

 

 

 

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Book trailer

Anzac Day: the New Zealand story: what it is and why it matters 

Due out March 2013

What is Anzac Day? What does Anzac stand for? Why do we have Anzac Day? Why does it matter? I hope that my new book will answer all these questions and more. You will discover lots of things you didn't know about Anzac Day including what the different parts of the service mean and what happens on Anzac Day, here and around the world.

And you can view the Anzac Day book trailer here.