One of them wrote about shooting possums by spotlight. One wrote about getting up at 5 o’clock on cold, wet, dark Spring and Autumn mornings to help her parents milk 100 cows. One wrote about riding her horse up rivers, through bush and along ridges on her uncle’s farm.
They were kids from some of the Northland schools I was lucky enough to visit during this year’s Storylines Festival of NZ Children’s Writers and Illustrators.
Storylines Festivals are amazing, exhausting, wonderful things. For a week, illustrators and writers get taken around schools in Auckland, Northland, Wellington, Christchurch and other places, reading and talking and running writing or illustrating workshops. You meet kids who have better stories than you to tell (I love that), and who sometimes write them better than you (I hate that).
For two days, writer Paula Green, illustrator/writer Tracey Duncan, storyteller/ writer Apirana Taylor and I whizzed in and out of schools. I went to places I’ve never been in my life – Tapora, Ruawai, Tangowahine. I met terrific kids with terrific teachers. I even got given a bunch of flowers. I’m a bloke from Taranaki – what do I do with a bunch of flowers???
Then the four of us, plus local writers, took part in the Storylines Festival Family Day at Whangarei Library. People poured through, listening to readings and panel discussions, buying books, getting faces painted, watching stilt-walkers, accidentally bursting balloons. They know how to run a seriously cool day up in Whangarei.
They’re not too bad at doing so in Auckland, either. The Family Day at the Aotea Centre brings over 20,000 people. Ignore those silly newspaper columnists who moan about NZ kids being poor readers. Again, there were writers and illustrators and storytellers doing their things. Small writers made their own books, and I refused to look at any that were better than mine. The final of the Kid’s Lit Quiz featured teams from around New Zealand, and as usual, I couldn’t answer the questions about my books (but the team members could).
I made the alarming discovery that a lot of children’s writers and illustrators are much younger than I am. When I made a joke about “an old guy like me”, nobody laughed. I had the chance to spend time with writing friends, which is wonderful for a job that is usually so solitary. When North and South magazine have their next “New Zealander of the Year” survey, I’d like to nominate the entire Storylines team of workers. They make an occasion that glitters with excitement, discovery and wonder.
One of the things people often want to know about being a writer is “How do you organise your day?”
Well, I start my day by getting out of bed. But I do try to begin work by 8.30am or so. Every day is different, but I like to write fiction such as novels or short stories in the morning, and non-fiction such as book reviews or travel articles or the magazine column I do for The Listener in the afternoon. I try to work five days a week, the same most people do at their jobs. I go till mid-afternoon, when I usually stop and read for a while. (As Karl Stead wrote, “If you’re serious about being a writer, you read.”) Working regularly like this is the only way I’ve ever known since I became a fulltime writer.
I go about nearly all my writing the same way. I make lots of notes in my tiny, cramped-up hand-writing – notes about events, characters, ideas that may come into the story or the article. I try to do most of them in the same notebook (actually, it's a medium-sized diary). That saves me from losing too many things.
For fiction, I then write a first draft. Yes, I write it – with a ballpoint, on paper. I find that moving the pen across the paper makes more ideas come. And I can go to about five places on the page at once. I’m not good enough with a computer to use it that way. Sometimes for non-fiction things, I’ll go straight onto the computer, but I hand-write a lot of them first as well.
I revise the first draft 2....3....4 times, till it’s such a mess that even I have trouble reading it. I have this secret fear that I may die suddenly when I have a novel at this stage, and nobody else will be able to make any sense out of my handwriting, so the book will never get published. Serves me right.
Then I put the work onto the computer. I always find I’m making a lot of changes as I do this – apart from correcting the mistakes that my two-finger keyboarding causes.. Seeing the words properly printed on the computer screen makes them look quite different. It suddenly shows you a lot of things that need to be changed. It also gives you a strong sense of the SHAPE of the story or article on the page, the visual appearance of it. I believe that’s important.
Next, I’ll print off a copy and start revising it over and over. I’m a fanatical reviser. (I was so relieved once when I heard Maurice Gee say how he’s always changing things right up to final proof stage.) I go over my work till I realise I’ve spent half an hour just taking one comma out and then putting it back again. That’s when I know it’s time for me to send the piece of work to a publisher – the scariest part of the job.
A lot of my work is rejected first time round. I’ve heard some writers say they never get rejections, and I’m afraid I think “Yeah, right”. Getting rejected is part of the job. Sometimes the publisher or editor wants you to make changes so they can have another look at it. Sometimes they’ve just accepted someone else’s story on the same topic. But it hurts – of course it hurts when you’ve spent a week on a story and nobody wants it. I never throw my rejected work away now. I keep it on file, and sometimes I can recycle it as part of something else. I’m an assembler.
Do I get tired of writing? Of course I do, especially when the ideas won’t come or I get one of those rejections. But then there are the times when you know you’ve got a great idea, when everything comes together, and although you’re working hard at it, it seems almost to write itself. And an editor says “Great! We’ll take it!” Then you get up and go outside and the sun seems to be shining brighter than it was just five minutes ago, and you know you’ll keep going, even though tomorrow’s mail may bring another rejection.