Ask the Author: Wendy Orr
Answered Questions (14)
Wendy Orr
You certainly can! There are no age limits on being a writer. The most important thing is that you have a story that you want to share! If you want your stories published there are many children's magazines to try - some of them are listed here: https://authorspublish.com/15-magazin....
But the most important thing right now is to write your stories and have fun with them. Don't worry about publishing till they're as good as they can possibly be - and if you get sick of a story before it is that good, that's okay. You'll have learned something from it and you can go on to enjoy the next story that you write.
Good luck!
Wendy
But the most important thing right now is to write your stories and have fun with them. Don't worry about publishing till they're as good as they can possibly be - and if you get sick of a story before it is that good, that's okay. You'll have learned something from it and you can go on to enjoy the next story that you write.
Good luck!
Wendy
Wendy Orr
I'm not very good at either! And still haven't managed to fix up my broken blog link.. But welcome, hope you enjoy it!
Wendy Orr
Normally I just wouldn't! If I had to, for example if I'd agreed to be on a panel or interview the author, I would try to focus on what I liked. But usually I think life is too short to read a book I'm not enjoying, no matter how great other people think it is. There are lots of great books out there, and there'll never be enough time to read all of them!
Wendy Orr
The CBCA shortlist! I've already read and loved A Most Magical Girl and Words in Deep Blue, but hope to read more before the awards are announced in August. (Of course, since I"m in Australia, this is my winter reading list.)
Wendy Orr
I'm sorry but I'm not a Goodreads librarian. I think you can find them in a Ask the librarian section- am traveling at the moment but will check out the confusion when I return to ensure I'm just listed as an author not librarian! Good luck
Wendy Orr
Rosemary Sutcliff was probably the biggest influence on my love of historical fiction, especially with The Eagle of the Ninth, which I spent a year or so following up with research and writing my own sequel, when I was 12-13. I think Rumer Godden and Elizabeth Goudge both influenced my style - I don't know if that's still true, but I felt it when I first started writing. But to some extent I think every story we love influences our writing in some way!
Wendy Orr
The simple answer is by sitting down with a notebook and writing! Once I have a story idea in my mind, I sit down and ask myself questions about it. Why does this happen? Who else is in the protagonist's family? etc. The answers lead to other questions and the story forms until it is ready to actually be written.
Once I've started that first draft, I want to go on and find out what happens next - I know the outline, and I know the scene I want to write that day, and the inspirational or fun part is discovering exactly how it's going to happen, because sometimes it surprises me.
As the drafts go on, deadlines and contracts become increasingly inspirational! A lot of writing is discipline: actually getting your bottom onto the chair and the words onto the computer.
Once I've started that first draft, I want to go on and find out what happens next - I know the outline, and I know the scene I want to write that day, and the inspirational or fun part is discovering exactly how it's going to happen, because sometimes it surprises me.
As the drafts go on, deadlines and contracts become increasingly inspirational! A lot of writing is discipline: actually getting your bottom onto the chair and the words onto the computer.
Wendy Orr
I'm just starting a new book, set about 200 years earlier than Dragonfly Song, so about 1625 BCE, at the time of a volcanic eruption on Santorini. So right now, I'm going back and forth between my plot questions and research, as they each feed into the other, and the characters are growing steadily in the background. Sometimes I'm overwhelmed with the sadness and horror of the history, so one of my tasks is to see how that can be represented and yet contained. It's a time of bumbling around and sudden discoveries, in which it's important to have faith that the story will work itself out.
Wendy Orr
Try not to get so carried away with the fun facts of research that you stick in fascinating trivia that doesn’t move the story along. Every word and incident in the book needs to do its job of advancing or deepening the story.
When you think your book is approaching the final draft, read it aloud. If you can’t read it to someone, record it as you read it and then play it back to yourself. You’ll pick up all sorts of unintended rhymes, repetitions, confusing sentence structure…
You can also, or also use the text to voice function. This has the advantage of not subconsciously editing out typing errors, though I find that the simple act of reading my own work aloud gives me more insights.
Remember that all writing advice is a guide only, and when you’ve learned how to write one book, you may need to write the next one in a completely different way. I have never completely managed to read a first or second draft with stopping to fiddle with ugly sentences.
When you think your book is approaching the final draft, read it aloud. If you can’t read it to someone, record it as you read it and then play it back to yourself. You’ll pick up all sorts of unintended rhymes, repetitions, confusing sentence structure…
You can also, or also use the text to voice function. This has the advantage of not subconsciously editing out typing errors, though I find that the simple act of reading my own work aloud gives me more insights.
Remember that all writing advice is a guide only, and when you’ve learned how to write one book, you may need to write the next one in a completely different way. I have never completely managed to read a first or second draft with stopping to fiddle with ugly sentences.
Wendy Orr
Living the story as I write: exploring amazing other lives and being people who are very different from me. It's a lot like being absorbed in a book you're reading - just takes a bit longer.
Wendy Orr
I think there are many different reasons why we might be unable to write or continue with a story at any particular time. Right now I'm having trouble getting going with the next book because I'm still too focussed on Dragonfly Song. Now that I've realised that, I've worked out some strategies:
• Timetabling. Structure the time that I need to start on the new book and the time for social media, interviews and emails. The new book doesn’t need huge blocks of time right now. It does need concentration and focus.
• Research. Again, the important thing here is corralling this into a specified time. I could spend the next ten years researching – but I’m not an archaeologist, I’m a fiction writer. I need to sort out notes and pictures, and read more of my huge stack of articles, but I actually have pretty well all the research I need to plan and write this book. I’ll find specific things that I need to know as I write, but I don’t have to know everything first. If I’m feeling truly stuck, a couple of hours of reading is likely to bring me at least one thing that will start an idea.
• Synopsis. By the time I finished this, a couple of months before the final proofreading of Dragonfly Song, I was falling in love with my new character and her story. Now that Aissa has jumped to the foreground again, I know that fleshing out the synopsis and asking the questions I need to know, will reignite the new love affair.
EFT Tapping. Always my go-to when I need to sort something out. After a round or two something about the story is usually so clear that I have to stop to get straight to work.
• Timetabling. Structure the time that I need to start on the new book and the time for social media, interviews and emails. The new book doesn’t need huge blocks of time right now. It does need concentration and focus.
• Research. Again, the important thing here is corralling this into a specified time. I could spend the next ten years researching – but I’m not an archaeologist, I’m a fiction writer. I need to sort out notes and pictures, and read more of my huge stack of articles, but I actually have pretty well all the research I need to plan and write this book. I’ll find specific things that I need to know as I write, but I don’t have to know everything first. If I’m feeling truly stuck, a couple of hours of reading is likely to bring me at least one thing that will start an idea.
• Synopsis. By the time I finished this, a couple of months before the final proofreading of Dragonfly Song, I was falling in love with my new character and her story. Now that Aissa has jumped to the foreground again, I know that fleshing out the synopsis and asking the questions I need to know, will reignite the new love affair.
EFT Tapping. Always my go-to when I need to sort something out. After a round or two something about the story is usually so clear that I have to stop to get straight to work.
Wendy Orr
Thanks very much; that's very special to hear. It's true that I dipped back into a younger audience after Peeling the Onion, (and also an older one, with The House at Evelyn's Pond, which is adult). My next one, Dragonfly Song, which will be out in Australia in July, is in some ways a cross between Nim and Onion as far as readers; my publisher is setting the age level at 10-13, but it's longer than Peeling the Onion, and about half is in free verse. It's set in prehistoric Greece, but I feel there's some similarity to Onion because it explores emotions and darkness, albeit in a very different way.
Wendy Orr
Neeta, I'm very sorry for this late reply to a very good question. I wrote an answer when you asked, but I obviously didn't save it properly, so it disappeared – and I've only just realised.
Even though I wrote the books, I didn't have a choice about how the movies would be. For Nim's Island, the book and film were very close, but as you said, the story for Return to Nim's Island was very different from Nim at Sea. The problem is that movies cost a lot more to make than books and to film Nim at Sea the way I wrote it would have cost many, many millions. So the producers took some of the most important feelings of the book – Nim needs a human friend, and Nim would do anything to save her friend Selkie – and told a different story around those feelings. They were also very true to the characters of Nim and Jack, which was the most important thing to me. So it was a very different story, but as I told the writers of the final script - it was a story I could have written about Nim, and I absolutely loved the movie. I'm very glad you did too, and I'm sorry you had to wait so long for an answer.
Even though I wrote the books, I didn't have a choice about how the movies would be. For Nim's Island, the book and film were very close, but as you said, the story for Return to Nim's Island was very different from Nim at Sea. The problem is that movies cost a lot more to make than books and to film Nim at Sea the way I wrote it would have cost many, many millions. So the producers took some of the most important feelings of the book – Nim needs a human friend, and Nim would do anything to save her friend Selkie – and told a different story around those feelings. They were also very true to the characters of Nim and Jack, which was the most important thing to me. So it was a very different story, but as I told the writers of the final script - it was a story I could have written about Nim, and I absolutely loved the movie. I'm very glad you did too, and I'm sorry you had to wait so long for an answer.
Wendy Orr
I’ve been getting letters from kids for years asking for a third Nim book, and of course that interest intensified after the release of the film Return to Nim’s Island last year. I’d always known that the third story would involve caves, and so I decided it was time to let that story seed grow. However there were challenges, because the film was dramatically different to the book it was based on, Nim at Sea. To satisfy the readers who’d come to it through the film instead of the book, this sequel would have to tie both of them in.
The writing process was also somewhat different from my usual ‘let’s dream it and write it and see where it ends up,’ as the film producers had already indicated that they hoped to film it, and suggested that we conference the story idea when I was ready to share. I often discuss a story idea with my editor once I’ve got it worked out, but it’s usually rather vague; this time I had to do a thorough plot summary before I started writing. It took a few attempts to work through this process; my initial attempts I think would have foundered during the writing, because of that conscious awareness of being filmic. Luckily for me, my editor and the film producers quickly pointed out, in the nicest way possible, that these plots didn’t sound like me, or like Nim. I had to go back to my usual more organic way of working out my story, playing with the ideas for several months and letting them germinate; finding odd facts – like the 1987 discovery of Eric the Pliosaur, an opalised dinosaur fossil – that lead me where the story wants to go. Once I really knew the story I wanted to tell, the film producers and I had a very lively phone conference, – and then I went off on my own and wrote for the next nine months.
As usual, it was during the writing that Nim really took over. In the previous two books, she’d existed only in my imagination (the writing of Nim at Sea was completed before the film Nim’s Island was cast). I wasn’t sure how I would feel writing about her now I’d seen her personified by two real girls, Abigail Breslin and Bindi Irwin. Would she still belong to me?
Well, what a resounding ‘yes!’ it was. Although I’d tended to picture Nim as Abbie during the years in between, by the time I started writing I’d been on the set of Return to Nim’s Island. Watching Bindi embody Nim in her own, equally convincing, way reminded me that a character belongs to whoever reads and creates it. Abigail Breslin told me recently, ‘There’ll always be a little piece of Nim in my heart,’ and I think that holds true not just for an actor who’s devoted months of her life to a part, but to all readers who become a character while they’re lost in the book.
And for me, watching Nim come to life again was liberating as well as inspiring: my Nim, my lovely, imperfect, hot-headed girl, was just waiting to take me through her adventure. Because even though I know that I did all that planning, once I started writing, it seemed as it always does, that the story was there, and I just needed the right words to find it.
One lovely incident was that a few days after handing in penultimate draft, my family and I went to Malaysia. As we were hiking through a rainforest one evening, the guide warned us to make sure that the vines we were stepping over weren’t snakes. It was nearly exactly what I had just written: Vines dangled down from the trees and across the ground, ghostly and shadowed in the bobbing light of Nim’s headlamp. It was hard to tell if they were vines or snakes.”
And then the next day, we visited a bat cave...
The writing process was also somewhat different from my usual ‘let’s dream it and write it and see where it ends up,’ as the film producers had already indicated that they hoped to film it, and suggested that we conference the story idea when I was ready to share. I often discuss a story idea with my editor once I’ve got it worked out, but it’s usually rather vague; this time I had to do a thorough plot summary before I started writing. It took a few attempts to work through this process; my initial attempts I think would have foundered during the writing, because of that conscious awareness of being filmic. Luckily for me, my editor and the film producers quickly pointed out, in the nicest way possible, that these plots didn’t sound like me, or like Nim. I had to go back to my usual more organic way of working out my story, playing with the ideas for several months and letting them germinate; finding odd facts – like the 1987 discovery of Eric the Pliosaur, an opalised dinosaur fossil – that lead me where the story wants to go. Once I really knew the story I wanted to tell, the film producers and I had a very lively phone conference, – and then I went off on my own and wrote for the next nine months.
As usual, it was during the writing that Nim really took over. In the previous two books, she’d existed only in my imagination (the writing of Nim at Sea was completed before the film Nim’s Island was cast). I wasn’t sure how I would feel writing about her now I’d seen her personified by two real girls, Abigail Breslin and Bindi Irwin. Would she still belong to me?
Well, what a resounding ‘yes!’ it was. Although I’d tended to picture Nim as Abbie during the years in between, by the time I started writing I’d been on the set of Return to Nim’s Island. Watching Bindi embody Nim in her own, equally convincing, way reminded me that a character belongs to whoever reads and creates it. Abigail Breslin told me recently, ‘There’ll always be a little piece of Nim in my heart,’ and I think that holds true not just for an actor who’s devoted months of her life to a part, but to all readers who become a character while they’re lost in the book.
And for me, watching Nim come to life again was liberating as well as inspiring: my Nim, my lovely, imperfect, hot-headed girl, was just waiting to take me through her adventure. Because even though I know that I did all that planning, once I started writing, it seemed as it always does, that the story was there, and I just needed the right words to find it.
One lovely incident was that a few days after handing in penultimate draft, my family and I went to Malaysia. As we were hiking through a rainforest one evening, the guide warned us to make sure that the vines we were stepping over weren’t snakes. It was nearly exactly what I had just written: Vines dangled down from the trees and across the ground, ghostly and shadowed in the bobbing light of Nim’s headlamp. It was hard to tell if they were vines or snakes.”
And then the next day, we visited a bat cave...
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