Teenagers aren’t scary – Lari Don

I spend a lot of time in primary schools, chatting to upper primary age children about adventures and monsters, heroines and heroes, myths and legends, and my Fabled Beast Chronicles. As a writer and storyteller I get on well with 10 year olds - we seem to enjoy the same kinds of stories.

The wonderful thing about primary age kids is their open joyful enthusiasm about their own imaginations.

So a roomful of 10 year olds, or 9 year olds, or 8 year olds (or 4 year olds, when I’m reading one of my picture books) is not scary for me. Not even if there are several hundred of them in a large school hall. That’s my natural environment, as an on-the-road author.

However, a room full of teenagers? That’s scary, isn’t it? It’s certainly not my natural environment, or not until recently.

Because I published a teen novel this year, the YA thriller Mind Blind, and this month, I took Mind Blind on tour, chatting to widely varying numbers of teenagers in secondary school libraries, English classrooms and school canteens.

And I thought this would be completely different from talking to readers in primary schools.

I really did expect teenagers in large groups to be scary. More critical perhaps, less open. Taller than me, certainly. Wearing more makeup and fancier shoes than me…

And I’ve certainly discovered that secondary school events are very different from primary events, but not for the reasons I expected.

So long as I make it clear I’m not trying to teach them anything, that I’m just there to share my passion for ‘what happens next’, and once I’ve shown that I’m not concerned about rules or exams, that I’m prepared to admit mistakes and make a bit of an idiot of myself at the front of the room, then the secondary pupils are usually very open and enthusiastic about sharing their own thoughts, ideas and questions. Just like the primary school pupils.

One striking difference from primary events is that as young writers grow, as they read and write more, they begin to develop a good working knowledge of their own writing style and opinions, which makes for fascinating discussions about different and equally valid ways of planning / not planning stories, what makes a satisfying ending, and how to treat characters and readers.

But the main difference I’ve found between primary and secondary events is the timetable! I usually spend an hour or more with primary children. I can usually see them from the start of the school day until playtime or from the end of playtime until lunchtime, or a nice long chat after lunchtime. Primary teachers can be delightfully flexible, and are usually very keen for me to have as long as possible with their pupils.

But in secondary schools the timetable is the boss. I may be told that I can see the pupils for period 3, which is 10.48 to 11.36 exactly, and that the class will have to go to their teacher to register first, so that might really be 10.54 to 11.36, and that they have to be packed and ready to leave when the bell goes, so that’s more likely to be from 10.54 to 11.32…

So I don’t get nearly as long as I’d like. I can’t just blether on, I have to be more organised, more focused, and get to the meat of what I want to do faster. But once I have got my head round the much shorter session time, then it’s fine. Because really, wherever I am, I’m just chatting to people about stories, whatever age those people are.

So now that I’ve accepted my subservience to the tyranny of the timetable, I’ve realised that teenagers aren’t that scary at all. Not even 170 of them in an echoey old school canteen. They are equally as imaginative and enthusiastic and full of adventure as primary pupils. They may just need a little extra encouragement to step out of the confines of the timetable themselves and let their imaginations fly free.

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 22 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. Lari’s website 
Lari’s own blog 
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Lari on Tumblr

Bring Me The Teenagers - Liz Kessler

Last month, I wrote about how overly attached we can get to our phones and to the desire to share everything we experience – instead ofjust experiencing it. (How did you get on, by the way? Did you cut down at all? I…um…well, I tried!)

I guess this blog might be continuing that theme in a way. It’s about social networking. Only, this time, I want to pick your brains.

Next May, I make my YA debut with my novel Read Me Like A Book (which, incidentally, I just received the bound proofs for, and I am completely IN LOVE with this cover, designed and painted by my very talented artist friend Joe Greenaway.

This book is HUGELY important to me and I want to do everything I can to give it a good send off into the world. Because this is a brand new tack for me, I’ll be doing a lot of things differently. I’m already fairly active on Twitter and Facebook – and I do my monthly blog here – but there are all sorts on online hangouts that I know almost nothing about – and I think it’s time to get educated.

Currently, I use my author page on Facebook to write about my books, post lots of photos of sunrises and my dog and the sea, and have lovely chitchat about mermaids and faires and time travel, mainly with my readers, their parents, a few librarians and a bunch of supportive friends. On Twitter, it feels much more about chatting with my writing peers – other writers, bloggers, bookshop people etc. Think publishing party, only without getting drunk on free champagne and making a fool of yourself in front of the MD.

So that’s all well and good, and I enjoy it. But I want to spread my writerly wings. In particular, I want to talk to teenagers – and I don’t know where to find them!

So this is a question aimed mainly at teenagers, parents of teenagers, writers of books for teenagers who interact online…

Where are you? Where do you hang out? Which are your favourite online haunts? And what do look for or expect from in the different places you frequent?

I take a LOT of photos, and should probably be on Instagram. (In fact, I kind of am but I don’t really use it.) I have been told I should get onto Tumblr – and would love to go for it, but every time I glance at it, I feel overwhelmed and bewildered. I’m also kind of half-heartedly on Pinterest, but only so I can look for desks for my new office. And I have got a few videos on Youtube.

The thing is, though, when we try to keep up to date with ALL the places, there’s no time left to, well, you know, write the books. Which I kind of need to keep doing. So I don’t want to join them all. But I’d like to pick the best one (or at most, two) new social networking sites and give them a good go.

So, help me out here. What should I pick? What do you use? Where are my potential new teenage audience most likely to look for me? Any and all opinions on these questions will be gratefully received.

Thank you! :)

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Publishing deleted scenes – risky, cringeworthy, helpful? Lari Don

Publishers want lots of ‘stuff’ from authors now. Not just the book, but lots of other stuff. Content, it’s called, for online things.

One of the bits of content I’ve given my publishers recently is a file of deleted scenes, from my new(ish) teen thriller Mind Blind.

It wasn’t hard for me to find half a dozen deleted scenes, because I delete lots from my manuscripts as I rewrite and redraft. It’s not unusual for me to reduce the length of a book by 20,000 words or more between first draft and final publication. Which sounds very inefficient – wouldn’t I be better just writing shorter books in the first place?

But I’m not a planner and plotter. I discover the story as I write, as I follow the characters on their journey, and that means diversions and doubling back. I never deliberately write anything that I know is irrelevant at the time, every word helps me find out about the characters, their reactions to problems and my own feelings about the story. But once I reach the end and get a sense of the main thrust of the story, it’s usually clear that I've regularly wandered off the narrative path, and that some scenes are now unnecessary. They may have been necessary to get me to the end, but they’re not necessary to get the reader to the end. So I'm ruthless in slashing them out. I reckon that if you can slice out a scene without it seriously affecting the rest of the story, it probably wasn’t that important.

And in a thriller like MindBlind, where it’s very important to keep the pace up and the pages turning, I also removed scenes or parts of scenes because they slowed the story down too much. (Here’s an example of one.)

And sometimes I cut a scene, not because it’s slowing the story down or because it’s an unnecessary diversion, but because I come up with a stronger idea once I know the story and characters better. However, the original scene is still part of the way I got to know the character, so it’s part of my history with them. Here’s an example of that – it’s the first scene I ever wrote about Ciaran Bain, the hero (anti-hero) of the book. It’s not in the book, but it’s still the place I first met him!

Of course, it’s misleading to suggest that all this slashing and slicing is my idea. Quite a lot of it is, but some of it is in response to gentle prompts from my wonderful editor.

a mountain of many Mind Blind manuscripts

So, I have no problem removing large chunks of my first draft or even my fourteenth draft, because as I’m writing, I know that I’m just discovering the story, not finding the perfect way of telling it first time around. And I know that it takes a lot of work to make that original mess of scribbled ideas into a book.

But having taken all this stuff out, why on earth would I want to show it to anyone? These deleted scenes have often been removed quite early in the process, so they’re not that polished (why would I polish them, once I’ve deleted them?) So it does feel quite weird and slightly uncomfortable, revealing these unfinished bits of my creative process to the public gaze.

Even if these are scenes that I took out for plot or pace reasons, rather than pieces of writing I don’t like, they are still parts of the story that didn’t make it into the book. So is it a bit of a risk to show less than perfect examples of your writing to the world? And why on earth do it?

The first reason is the pragmatic one of feeding the voracious social media monster. (This is not a particularly good reason.)

But I wonder if a much better reason is that realising how much an author cuts from their early drafts can be useful, especially for young writers. It’s a very practical way to show that published writers don’t get it right all the time, that our first drafts are just the start of the process and that we have to work at them, slash at them, perhaps radically change them, to get them into shape. Deleted scenes are perhaps the online version of showing manuscripts covered in lots of scribbles and scorings out to groups of kids at author visits. ‘Look, I don’t get it right first time, so you don’t have to either. Just write, and see what happens!’

So, while I was wincing and cringing this week as yet another deleted scene appeared on Tumblr, I wondered:
How much do other writers delete?
Are other writers happy to let the world see the bits they sliced out?
And do readers learn anything about the writing process from deleted scenes?

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 21 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

Lari on Twitter

Lari on Facebook

Lari on Tumblr