About the girls event - Jane Godwin

The About the girls series was kicked of in style last night by Jane Godwin at Kew library. Jane works as a publisher and writer and has authorer a range of titles from picture books through to teenage novels.

Jane talked about the process of writing and publishing books and gave us some great tips for writing. Writers use experience, observation and imagination to come up with ideas. We might think we have no experiences worth writing about, but it's surprising what you can come up with if you trawl your memory. Ask yourself questions like: "What is the scarriest thing that ever happened to me?"; "What were the most exciting 30 seconds of my life?".

She said the initial inspiration for When elephants lived in the sea came from seeing a picture of an elephant swimming with it's trunk acting as a snorkel. She then did some research which led to the book. Following this, Jane asked everyone to choose a photograph from a selection she had laid out. We then had exactly 4 minutes to start writing a story inspired by the picture.

Falling from Grace is an example fo a novel inspired by personal experience. The setting in Point Nepean and the struggle of worrying about the safety of a sister are both based on Jane's own experiences.

Jane talked a little about planning. Some authors plan everything, some plan nothing, some are in between. There is no right or wrong way. Find the method that works for you and go with it. She also spent some time showing us some of the different cover options they produced for Falling from Grace before settling on the final version.

We finished by firing a few questions at Jane which she was happy to answer. As far as I could tell, everybody had a great time.