Articles

• How the Worry Tree came about
• How on earth do you get published?
• To Plume or Nom de Plume: twelve things to think about when taking a pen name

How The Worry Tree Came About

I wanted to be an author ever since I was ten or so. When I was eleven, I finished my first full length novel entitled Super Gibbo. It was a romantic thriller featuring my classmates and my teacher read it out to the whole class. From then on, I had the writing bug, and went on to write an awful lot of poetry in high school when I was supposed to be paying attention during my Year 10 English class (sorry, Mrs Hoschke!).

Years later, when I was 28, a scene popped into my head where a pesky little sister is timing her older, more uptight sister, in the toilet. I had a feeling I was onto something. This became the opening scene to The Worry Tree.

Some time later, I had all these unconnected scenes involving characters who were similar to people I knew, only different. The characters started doing things the original people would never have done. It felt like I had conjured up a real family who lived in an alternate universe.

Still, I had a problem. I didn't know how to tie these unconnected scenes together into a proper story. By chance, I was looking through a magazine and saw a photo of a girl's bedroom. There was a tree painted on the wall with animals in its branches. It occurred to me that as the main character, Juliet, was a real worrywart, what she needed was a way of coping with her worries. I wondered what it would be like to peel away some old wallpaper and discover a tree you could hang your worries on. That's how the idea for The Worry Tree came about. After that, it was a lot of hard work as I shaped these ideas into a book.

How On Earth Do You Get Published?

• Write, write and rewrite till you're sick of your story.
• Put it in a drawer for a couple of months to get some perspective.
• Take it out of the drawer, read it over and do some more rewriting.
• Grit your teeth and show your story to your friends and family. Praise is nice but you need to know what's not working too. Ask very specific questions, eg, which is the worst bit and why? When does the story get boring? What did you like best? What did you like least?
• You might like to enrol in a creative writing course, or
• Think about getting a professional manuscript assessor to take a look at your manuscript. This costs a reasonable amount of money so make sure it's as good as you can get it before you send it in. Listen to the feedback you receive with an open mind.
• Rewrite the whole thing some more then start sending it out to publishers. Do your research so you know which publishers are publishing in your area and how they like their manuscripts set out. This is very important. Publishers get thousands of manuscripts each year. If yours is printed on purple paper with glitter hearts all over it, you will get the editor's attention, but not in a good way.
• Finally, be persistent. If this is what you want to do with your life, then don't give up, especially if you're lucky enough to receive an encouraging rejection letter from a publisher. Such letters are highly sought after (almost as much as acceptance letters!).
• And even if you don't get published, keep writing anyway, just because you love it.

To Plume or Nom de Plume: twelve things to think about when taking a pen name.

There are many reasons you might want to publish under a different name. Don't be surprised, however, if doing so creates a bit of an identity crisis. I've written the odd story under a pseudonym and even though I'm generally not given to angst, I was surprised to find myself completely wound up about the issue. I didn't just take a trip to Angst City, I bought a flat there and started a vegie garden!

Here are some things to consider:

1. Is your name hard to spell? If yes, people will have trouble Googling it and staff in bookshops may not be able to find it on their computers.
2. Many people are too shy to ask for a book at a bookshop if they don't know how to pronounce the author's name.
3. Then again, we do live in a multicultural society and there are plenty of great non-Anglo-Saxon names out there.
4. You could compromise and spell your name phonetically.
5. Where will it be on the book shelf in the shop? I'm told A-H's have the best sales because they're at eye level.
6. Is it memorable?
7. If you do take a nom de plume, can you see yourself answering to that name on, say, a panel at a festival?
8. Practice writing out each signature and see what feels right.
9. It's possible you may become famous. You might appreciate the anonymity of a pen name.
10. Bear in mind, writing is a business as well as a creative, fun thing to do. What does your name say about you?
11. You will feel loss, no matter what you do. If you change it, you will grieve your old name. If you don't change it, you will feel some regret over a lost marketing opportunity.
12. Ask people what they think, but remember, it's your name so only change it if you really want to.

A version of this article appeared in the e-newsletter, Pass it On.