Tuesday: 21st October 2008

Just had a fantastic lecture from that man Steve Voake,; it was inspiring to listen to someone who doesn’t necessarily see themselves as a writer first and foremost, but had the endeavour to see an idea through and has now really made it in the industry. The key points of his lecture follow:

• He started writing school plays in his twenties.
• He didn’t properly start writing until after he was thirty.
• He was the head teacher of a primary school and really enjoyed it.
• Every week he would find time, usually early mornings, to continue with his novel.
• Early hours, about 3am, is a nice time to write.
• Do the numbers, if you do 300 words per day then that’s over 10000 words in a year.
• A children’s novel is roughly 75,000 words.
• He used the Writer’s Handbook to find relevant agents.
• He emailed the agents a short letter introducing himself, and containing a synopsis of the story and a short example.
• It took a long time for them to get back to him – about 3 months.
• He then received a short email saying that they were impressed with the quality of the work and the idea.
• He went to meet them.
• In the end the book was auctioned off between four publishing companies.
• There was a big party.
• He was then contracted to write a second book by the end of that year.
• There was a year between delivery and publication.
• The book has now been published all over the world and in different countries it has different covers, and different titles.
• He made £150,000 from his first novel alone.

So often when you talk to writers, they tell you how they practically came out of the womb with a pen in their hand, and it can feel a little disheartening. Although I’ve been writing to one extent or other since I was about five, I never really thought of being a published writer until I was in my twenties. What Steve Voake basically said was that at one point he’d had an idea that he liked so much, he turned it into a book, it doesn’t matter how old you are or even how much experience you have. Children’s authors like Steve Voake and J K Rowling also make the fiction writing industry seem a lot friendlier. Sometimes it feels as though, if you’re not writing sophisticated poems and stories with long words then you’re not part of the writers circle, I don’t want to write fiction for adults and so hearing about how successful Steve has been in the industry was really inspiring.