Three Ways Authors Can Get the Most Out of their Computers

This post was originally published on Picture Book Den, a blog about picture books by picture book authors and illustrators.

I don't think I'd have made it as a professional author without a computer's help

A question children often ask me on school visits is “do you write with pen and paper or on a computer?”. I know there are some authors who swear by pen and paper, particularly for the first draft, and say that a computer would get between them and the story. For me it’s the other way around. I’m slightly dyslexic and doubt that I’d be able to make a living as a writer without a computer helping me to set down, shape and polish my stories.

I’ve just gone without my computer for a week, while a faulty hard-drive was replaced. This absence reminded me how much I’ve come to depend on my computer and prompted me to write this post.

Here are three ways authors can get the most out of their computers. My own computer is an Apple Mac, and I’ve included some detailed instructions for other Mac users, but these tips also apply to Windows PCs.


First and foremost …

1: Learn to touch-type

If you’re still pecking away at your keyboard with two fingers, you’re getting your ideas down on the page at a fraction of the rate you could be. Having been born in the dark ages, before computers were in every home, I taught myself to touch type on a mechanical typewriter using a Pitman typing book. These days, you can learn far more easily using typing-tutor software (you find can some recent reviews of some here. It’s never too late to learn. Touch-typing is an invaluable skill for anyone that uses a keyboard and I’ve never understood why it’s not routinely taught at an early age in UK schools.

Use ten not two! Touch typing is an invaluable skill for any author and it's never too late too learn.

2: Have your computer read aloud to you

It’s good practice for any writer to read their work aloud, but it’s essential for picture book authors, as picture books are often read aloud to children by adults. Although I still read text aloud, I use my computer to do this most of the time. I'm not sure if this is linked to my dyslexia, but when I read something I've written aloud, my brain often glosses over errors and I read what I'd meant to type instead of what I've actually typed. However when I listen to the computer reading the same passage, the errors are far more conspicuous.

Having your computer read aloud is particularly useful when writing rhyming texts. Reading aloud is the only way to check that a rhyming text scans well, but if you’ve written the text yourself, you will have preconceptions as to the rhythm of a line and which words need emphasis. Someone reading the text for the first time won't share these preconceptions so you want to make sure that a rhyming text will still read well without them. One way around this is to ask someone else to read your text back to you, but their patience may begin to wear thin if you keep asking them to re-read the same lines, with minor variations, again and again. And after a few readings they'll begin to develop preconceptions of their own. A computer has infinite patience and is incapable of forming such preconceptions. It will give consistently impartial readings with even rhythm and emphasis, putting in appropriate pauses for commas and other punctuation. Standard computer speech used to be very flat and American sounding, but has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. Macs now come with a range of English Language voices pre-installed with yet more available as free downloads (go to System Preferences>Dictations and Speech>Text to Speech and click “customise” to find them). You can find instructions on how to use a Mac’s Text to Speech function here.

Macs can speak English in a variety of voices and accents, including Australian, Indian, Irish, Scottish and South African.

It’s worth taking the time to choose a voice you like and to adjust the speed. My favourite is “Serena”, who speaks with an English accent. You can use the player below to hear what she sounds like reading the opening lines of The Silver Serpent Cup. The software makes the occasional mistake, (its pronunciation of 'noisy' in the passage below is slightly out) and it can slip up with homonyms. However it can cope surprisingly well with made-up words and generally does a remarkably good job.

Today the town of Furryville’s a very noisy place,
Crammed with crowds of creatures getting ready for a race.
The air is filled with honking horns and engines revving up,
As racers take their places for THE SILVER SERPENT CUP.

3. Use software that suits the way you work

Most of the publishers I work with expect manuscripts to be sent to them as Microsoft Word files and when I first became a writer, I used to write directly into Word. However as the years have gone by, Word has become increasingly unwieldy to use, with half of it’s functions hidden away in a bewildering array of sub menus. There are now lots of cheaper applications available, some of which are far better suited to writing a book. About 9 years ago I started using Scrivener, an application designed specifically for authors. It provides a far cleaner, simpler interface than Word and allows authors to access and organise the myriad files, documents and web pages relating to their project through a single window instead of cluttering up the screen with half a dozen windows from various applications. And once you’ve finished a project, you can export it as a MS Word file to send to your publisher.

The Silver Serpent Cup in Scrivener. Scrivener allows you to open multiple text documents, pdfs, web pages
and images within a single application window. One of Ed Eaves' concept sketches is shown on the right.

I hope the tips above have proved useful. If you have any other computer tips for writers (perhaps you can tell Windows users how to get their computer reading aloud), please post them in the comments box below.

Children's Book Week • Notts TV 630 Show appearance

Last week was Children's Book Week and my local TV station Notts TV marked it by having me as a guest on their 630 Show along with Tim Ryan, one of the organisers of Nottingham's wonderful Telling Tales Festival. Notts TV didn't know it when they invited us, but Tim and I are old friends; we both came to Nottingham to study architecture at the University and went on to work side by side in the same Nottingham practice for a couple years.

I'd originally been invited on to the show to talk about my own books, but I offered to recommend a couple of recent favourites by other authors and illustrators. And then I realised that I ought to take the opportunity to promote the Summer Reading Challenge which was launching the following day. So in the end I didn't have time to talk about any of my own books, but there's an image of one of them, The Silver Serpent Cup, on the screen behind me.

The show went out live and the half hour seemed to fly by. Before I knew it we were finishing with a great performance from Rich Howell of Nottingham music collective RJMarks.  Thanks to Notts TV and 630 Show presenter Nicola Beswick (who's a big fan of kids' books) for having us on.

The books I recommended on the show were:

The Silly Book of Side-Splitting Stuff written by Andy Seed illustrated by Scott Garrett

The Sleeper and the Spindle written by Neil Gaiman illustrated by Chris Riddell

The Telling Tales Festival is on 10 October 2015. You can find out more about it at nottinghamtellingtales.org.uk.

And you can find out more about this year's Record Breakers Summer Reading Challenge at summerreadingchallenge.org.uk

WOLVES AND APPLES Children's Writers Event • Leicester, Saturday 3rd October

I'm going to be doing a couple of events at this year's Wolves and Apples Children's Writers Event in Leicester on Saturday 3rd October.

Wolves & Apples is an annual event where established authors, agents and producers from a variety of mediums offer practical advice and guidance on how to write for a younger audience.

I will be talking about writing picture books and taking part in a panel event.

The lineup is still being finalised, but confirmed speakers include novelist and 2015 Carnegie Medal winner Tanya Landman, TV writer and Wolfblood creator Debbie Moon  and theatre director and dramaturg Juliet Forster.

The event is taking place at the College Court Hotel and Conference Centre in Leicester and there is a General Admission price of £25 (yes, that is extremely good value!) for the whole day.

You can find out more about the event at http://www.red-lighthouse.org.uk/wolves-and-apples/

CLICK HERE to book a ticket online

Two heads are better than one: The benefits of early author-illustrator collaboration

This post was originally published on Picture Book Den, a blog about picture books by picture book authors and illustrators.

I mentioned in a post earlier this year that, although people often assume that picture book authors and illustrators work closely together, it’s not unusual for the author and illustrator to have no direct contact, with the book’s creation being co-ordinated via the publisher.

One of my Dutch publishers told me that Dutch authors and illustrators regularly get together with the publisher during a picture book’s production to discuss how the project is progressing. However, if my own experience is anything to go by, regular meetings like this are not the norm in the UK. I’d been writing picture books for ten years before a publisher, Puffin, invited me to get together with illustrator Steve Cox to look at some of Steve’s initial concept sketches for our picture book Pigs Might Fly and discuss how it might be illustrated. Before then, I’d only met two illustrators I’d done a book with and spoken to a couple more on the phone, and this was always after the project was completed.

One reason for this lack of direct contact is that many picture book publishers like to moderate all communication between a book's author and illustrator. In the conventional UK set-up, an author gives any comments or ideas they might have regarding the illustrations to an editor, who then (if they agree with them) passes them on to the illustrator (sometimes via the book's designer). This is obviously a rather slow method of communication and and misinterpretations can occur as the message is passed along the chain. Another disadvantage of the conventional set-up is that while the author has some influence over how the book is illustrated, the illustrator has relatively little influence over how the book is written, the story having been largely hammered out before they are on board.

The line of communication between author and illustrator is often indirect.
(Image taken from my "How a book is Made" school presentations)

When I first started creating picture books I'd intended to both write and illustrate and was in the habit of developing ideas simultaneously in both text and illustration. Although my illustration has largely fallen by the wayside, I still think of stories visually as much as verbally. I'll often get a story idea from looking at an image or conceive a story outline as a series of illustrations. So I've always thought that the conventional set-up, with its lack of direct interaction between author and illustrator, is less than ideal. Fortunately, I've been able to team up with several sympathetic illustrators who have been happy to exchange ideas at an early stage and several of my more recent picture books have been developed in a far more collaborative way.

After Mark Oliver had illustrated my text for Tom’s Clockwork Dragon, he and I were both keen to do another picture book together. So rather than leave it to chance, I asked Mark if there was anything he’d particularly like to illustrate. Mark sent me a list of ideas, one of which – a mechanical monster manual – became Monsters: An Owner’s Guide. We developed the idea between us and when we had a draft of the text and some concept art that we were both happy with, we offered it as a joint project to publishers. Thankfully, Macmillan accepted it and subsequently took Aliens: An Owner’s Guide as a follow-up.

Some of Mark Oliver's early concept art for Monsters: An Owner's Guide

Since then, I’ve worked on several stories where the illustrator has been involved from the initial concept stage and has often provided the initial inspiration. The Treasure of Captain Claw was written in answer to Steve Cox’s wish to illustrate a submarine story and my latest picture book, The Silver Serpent Cup, was written in response to a set of outlandish vehicle models that Ed Eaves had offered as a possible source of inspiration. 

The Silver Serpent Cup and some of the outlandish vehicle models, made by Ed Eaves, that inspired it.

Not all of the author-illustrator collaborations I’ve worked on have made it into print – I wrote two unpublished stories with the late Vanessa Cabban – but I’ve always enjoyed working with the illustrator to create them. And I suspect that, having helped shape the initial concept, the illustrators I’ve created these books with have felt a little more attached to these projects and may have been prepared to lavish a little extra care and attention on them.

Some of Vanessa Cabban's "Clara and Bertie" character sketches from an unpublished project we developed together.

There’s a synergy when text and illustration work well together in a picture book. This happens naturally when the same person is both writing and illustrating, but if the author and illustrator are two different people, such a synergy can be a lot easier to achieve if they get together early on to exchange ideas. I’d certainly recommend it!

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My latest collaborative picture book is The Silver Serpent Cup illustrated by Ed Eaves and published by Oxford University Press.

THE SILVER SERPENT CUP Top Trumps card game and colouring sheets

 

To mark the publication of Fast and Furry Racers: The Silver Serpent Cup, I’ve created a Top Trumps style card game featuring all twenty-four of the vehicles from the book.

You can download the full set of cards along with a rules envelope to store them in HERE.

In the last post I mentioned how impressed I was with Ed Eave’s vehicle design sketches when I first saw them. Ed has kindly agreed to make these available as a set of colouring sheets which you can download HERE.

Find out more about The Silver Serpent Cup on my web site

The Silver Serpent Cup • New Paperback

I have a new paperback picture book coming out today! Fast and Furry Racers: The Silver Serpent Cup is illustrated by Ed Eaves and published by Oxford University Press. It's a high-speed, adrenaline-fuelled rhyming romp of a story that we hope will be the first of a series of Fast and Furry Racers books.

Today the town of Furryville’s a very noisy place,
Crammed with crowds of creatures getting ready for a race.
The air is filled with honking horns and engines revving up,
As racers take their places for THE SILVER SERPENT CUP!

The initial inspiration for book came from illustrator Ed Eaves. Ed and I had previously done a couple of pop-up books together. We’d got on well and were hoping to work together again some time. About a year after we’d finished the second pop-up book, Ed sent me some photos of a set of cardboard models that he’d made for his illustration degree over a decade earlier. The models were of animals driving outrageously souped-up cars and planes, many of which were armed with enormous weapons. Ed had thought about doing a picture book along similar lines, but hadn’t been able to come up with a suitable story, so he’d sent them to me to see if they would “spark an idea.”

Some of the vehicle models that Ed Eaves made for his illustration degree show.

I found the models very appealing and an idea for a no-holds-barred race story, featuring a motley assortment of creatures and vehicles immediately sprang into my mind. However, I couldn’t get the story to work straight away and was tinkering with it, off and on, for more than a year before I went back to Ed with a draft. Most of Ed’s models were of aeroplanes and having already written a picture book about an air race, Pigs Might Fly, I decided that the race in this story needed to be distinctly different. So I extended the range of vehicles to include cars, boats, submarines, a steam train and a tunnelling machine. I’m always arguing that we need more picture books that can match the appeal of children’s TV, film and video games and one of the biggest inspirations for the story was the Wacky Races cartoon series which was a childhood favourite of mine. Another more contemporary influence was the Mario Kart video games. My kids love playing these and I wanted to see if we could create a similar sense of action-packed, adrenaline-fuelled excitement in a picture book. In Mario Kart, racers fire a variety of bullets, bombs and shells to sabotage other vehicles. I borrowed this idea for a scene towards the end of the book where villainous alligator Al McNasty tries to win the race by firing rockets at the other racers’ vehicles.

Ed and I wanted the book to have a similar appeal to TV show Wacky Races (left) and video game Mario Kart (right).

Luckily Ed liked the draft I sent him, so we sent it out to publishers, along with the photos of Ed’s models. We were delighted when Peter Marley at Oxford University Press accepted it!

Only seven of the racers are directly referred to in the story, but the text makes it clear that a lot more are taking part in the race. Ed decided that there would be twenty four vehicles in all and designed all of them before he began work on the illustrations. I was blown away by these design sketches when I first saw them. Each of the vehicles looks distinctly different, partly because Ed made many of them look like the animals that drove them. You can see that Ed’s given a lot of thought to the design of each and every one of them.

Ed designed many of the vehicles to look like their drivers.

All twenty four vehicles lined up on the starting grid. 

Ed illustrations also draw on Wacky Races and Mario Kart for inspiration and this really comes across in his action-packed, dynamic final artwork. This submarine spread where octopus Ollie Octllini takes the lead among the underwater racers, is one of my favourites.

Here's a trailer I made for the book.

As you can probably tell, this book has been a pleasure to work on. I only hope children will enjoy reading it as much as Ed and I enjoyed making it!

Visit The Silver Serpent Cup's page on my web site

Why I’ll still be voting Green, despite their crazy copyright policy.

I don’t usually use this blog to make political statements, but as a Green Party supporter I’m concerned by the way the party has been criticised and attacked by many other authors and illustrators on blogs and social media in the last few days and wanted to show that not all authors and illustrators regard the Green Party as “morons”.

The furore is over the Green party’s current policies on copyright, as outlined on their policies website. The proposal that’s created the biggest fuss is the reduction of copyright to 14 years. Whether this is 14 years after creation or 14 years after the creator’s death is the subject of some disagreement. The proposal to legalise peer-to-peer sharing has attracted less outrage, but seems every bit as problematic.

As a full-time author whose living is dependent on copyright, I’m not going to attempt to defend these policies. I think they show a lack of understanding of how many people working in the creative industries actually earn a living and appear to be a triumph of ideology over common sense.

I’m not a Green Party member and, although I have voted for them in the past, I’ve only done so intermittently, partly because of impractical policies like these. However, like any political party, the Green Party’s policies are subject to constant revision and over the last few years, as the party has grown bigger, I've noticed that such unrealistic policies are increasingly being supplanted by more pragmatic, properly thought through alternatives. Some Green Party members, including the MP Caroline Lucas, appear to have got the message that their current copyright policy is unsuitable and this morning the party announced that that it will be reviewing the policy at its next conference. However, this will not be until after the general election, which may be too late for some of the authors and illustrators who have said that they were thinking of voting Green but, because of the copyright policy, will now be voting for another party.

I will still be voting Green. Copyright is important to me, but there are far more important issues at stake in this election. And if the election results in a hung parliament and the Greens gain enough seats to have some influence over government policy, I don’t believe that revising copyright will be one of their top priorities.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that one of the Greens’ top priorities will be addressing climate change. This is just as well as, while the Greens may currently be inept on copyright, the last 20 years of government has clearly demonstrated that the other UK parties are inept on tackling climate change. And climate change is THE single most important issue facing our generation. Hundreds of thousands of lives have already been lost as a result of our failure to address it effectively and things will get far worse if our politicians continue to downplay its importance. Here’s how environmental organisation Greenpeace outlines the enormity of the problem.

Glaciers, permafrost and sea ice are disappearing. Sea levels are rising, coral reefs dying, seasons changing and extreme weather events becoming more common. The impacts of climate change are already responsible for killing an estimated 315,000 people every year and damaging ecosystems. And this is just the beginning - the science predicts that anything more than 2°C rise in global temperatures puts us on the road to potentially catastrophic problems. There will be more flooding, more drought, more disease, more famine and more war, creating hundreds of millions of refugees and causing the destruction of entire ecosystems and species.

While issues such as the NHS, the economy, education or the benefits system are important, in 50 years time our failure to tackle any of these effectively will seem trivial in contrast to our failure to tackle the threats posed by climate change. If we don’t get our act together soon, future generations will wonder how our generation could be so astonishingly short-sighted and selfish.

Authors and illustrators tend to be relatively left-wing in their views, so I assume that most of those authors and illustrators who have decided to switch their vote away from the Greens are planning to vote Labour instead. Unfortunately the Green party’s crazy copyright policy is more than matched by some of Labour’s crazy policies on climate change, such as those relating to the aviation industry.

This is what Greenpeace had to say about the last Labour government’s stance on aviation in its Blair and Climate Change – The Rhetoric-Reality Gap report of 2005.

The Government’s denial of the urgent need to tackle climate-changing pollution from aviation is probably the greatest failure of all. According to the Sustainable Development Commission, the growth in emissions from air travel threatens to negate any reductions made on the ground.
Currently aviation emissions account for 11% of the UK total. Aviation emissions will account for 25% of the UK total by 2030 – this will rise to 33% by 2050. The Government’s decision to commit to airport expansion, against Royal Commission advice, demonstrates an utter lack of consistency with its commitments to tackling climate change and an inability to take the real steps needed to address the problem.

The Labour party leadership’s extraordinary naivety regarding the effects of aviation growth were highlighted in a 2007 interview with Tony Blair in which the then Prime Minister admitted that he would be reluctant to give up his frequent holidays abroad to help tackle climate change. Blair went on to say that encouraging people to holiday nearer to home was “impractical” and suggested that we ought to look at making air travel more energy efficient instead. A chorus of engineering and transport experts subsequently made it clear how "impractical" Blair's own suggestion was, explaining that even if energy efficient airliners were to be developed immediately, it would be 20 years before they had any impact on the industry. Only 5% of the world’s population have ever flown on an aeroplane. Effectively Blair was arguing that maintaining the lifestyle of a relatively affluent, privileged minority was more important than saving the planet for future generations.

Labour's policies on aviation are as ill-conceived as the Greens'
policies on copyright, but have far more damaging consequences.

Despite climate scientists' increasingly urgent calls for tougher restrictions on carbon emissions, the Labour party continues to doggedly support airport expansion. The 2010 Labour manifesto supported the construction of a third runway at Heathrow – a move that was opposed by the Greens, the Lib Dems and even the Tories on environmental grounds. The 2015 Labour manifesto refers to a “need for growth” in UK airport capacity and the party’s current leader, Ed Miliband, has dismissed sanctions to curb aviation growth, saying that it would be wrong to impose targets on airlines.

Claiming that you're committed to tackling climate change, but are not prepared to tackle aviation is like saying you're committed to vegetarianism, but are not prepared to give up your weekly hog roast. One person’s transatlantic flight adds as much to their carbon footprint as a typical year's worth of driving. Unfortunately, studies have shown that UK air passengers are unlikely to change their flying habits unless they are made to do so. And, if we have a majority Labour government after the next election, it’s clear that this is not going to happen any time soon.

Despite their deeply misguided stance on aviation and climate change, I don’t think the Labour Party are "morons". I think they have got their aviation and climate change policy badly wrong, just as I think that the Green Party have got their copyright policy badly wrong. However the consequences of Labour’s ineptness on climate change will be far more devastating, which is one of the reasons I will be voting Green rather than Labour next month.

Another reason I’ll be voting Green is that policy comparison websites such as Vote for Polices and Verto have told me that the Green Party’s policies across a wide range of areas are more in keeping with my own views than those of the other parties. I’m a supporter of the Fair Admissions campaign which aims to end religious discrimination of students and staff in UK state-funded schools. While the Greens and the Lib Dems support the campaign, Labour and the Tories do not, so this is another area where I think these other parties have got their policies badly wrong.

So that’s why – despite a crazy copyright policy that’s clearly not in my personal interests – I’ll still be voting Green. I hope that other authors and illustrators who are concerned about climate change will be able to see the bigger picture and consider doing the same.