2010 Boroondara Literary Awards

Fancy yourself as a bit of a writer? Do you have notebooks full of stories hiding in your bottom drawer? Perhaps you hope to be the next John Marsden or Emily Rodda.

If so, then you'll be glad to know the 2010 Boroondara Literary Awards have a Young Writers category.

Head over here for details, including the downloadable entry form. You can also grab an entry form from any of our libraries.

About the Girls report

Sadly I wasn't able to be at Lili Wilkinson's talk to the girls at Kew Library last week, but here's what Katy had to say:

Lili Wilkinson's advice to aspiring authors is "If someone asks you to write something, say yes!" Lili spoke recently at Kew library, explaining how writing a review in The Age led to being asked to write a book about Joan of Arc. Now the author of five novels, she is an inspiring speaker and a refreshing advocate for trashy literature for teens.

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.

About the boys event - Michael Hyde

Last week saw the first About the boys event for 2009. A good crowd of boys and their dads had the chance to meet Michael Hyde, hear him talk about writing and fire questions at him. Michael is the author of the Change the game series of sporting related choose your own adventure type books. He has also written a bnunch of other titles for older kids & teenagers.

Michael talked about starting his writing career 30 years ago. He was working as a teacher and had been encouraging his students to write their own stories. Then one day one of the students asked him why he didn't write some himself. So he did. He pointed out that many of his early attempts were not very good. The students were also disappointed that most books were about American or English kids, that there were very few Australian stories for them. Michael saw the opportunity to contribute in this area.

He made the point that writing is for everyone, not just the lucky few who get published. There are plenty of people who write beautifully but never get published. He talked about getting ideas from all around him. Things he sees and people he meets.

Michael read from a few of his stories, answered questions, and laughed out loud at the horrible history quiz run on thi night.

So there you have it - writing is for everyone, ideas can come from everywhere, and even a published author started out writing stories that he was too embarrassed to tell us about.