WriteSmart Blog

Recovering from disaster - it's not over just because the cameras have gone

2011-03-31T14:42:00.021+11:00

“We have good days and bad days. We are now having more good days than we were, but the bad days are still fairly bad.

"We often have chats at 1 am about where is life leading us, and what we are going to do.”

When I interviewed Charlton GP Dr Stephen Webb five weeks after his house and business premises were inundated in Victoria's January floods, it was clear that although the water had long receded, the impact would be felt for years to come.

For much of the first quarter of 2011, the media ran story after story about natural disasters – Victoria’s and Queensland’s floods, Cyclone Yasi, the Christchurch quake and, most recently, Japan’s quake and tsunami and nuclear disaster.

But as the imminent danger passed and the clean-up after each disaster began, the media reports thinned out and the news topics of the day returned to celebrity gossip, politics and interest rates.

But life hasn't returned to normal for the victims of these events - and it won't for weeks, months or years to come.

Take another Victorian GP, Dr Lachlan Fraser, whose house and practice were destroyed in the Black Saturday fires in 2009.

I spoke to him only a few weeks ago as well and he is still waiting for his new surgery to be built. He has come a long way in two years – finding new love, returning to work, making future career plans – but he admits he is still not over it.

“When you have been in the heat of disaster, and you are in danger of losing your life, I don’t think you ever get over that.”

Dr Stephen Webb suspects he, too, has a very long road ahead of him, especially as he and many of his neighbours learned this week that their insurers will not cover them for what they refer to as 'riverine flood'.

As the townsfolk of Charlton met to consider their options last night, Dr Webb admitted he was preparing himself for the possibility of joining a class action.

He told me his story for an article commissioned by Medical Observer earlier this month. Here is an extract from that interview.

My practice was co-located with the hospital and aged care facility in Charlton. We had a very nice refurbished building – and then it went 50cm to 60cm under water.

Our house was flooded too.

We were in Melbourne at the time. We went out on Saturday night to celebrate my 50th birthday, knowing our house was nine inches under water… we just pretended it wasn’t happening.

Friends went to our house to lift things off the floor, but they couldn’t do much as the light fell and the water rose, so after 30 minutes they left.

We lost metres of bookshelves, filing cabinet drawers, ancestral photos, family tree information, chests with photos from the Middle East, university days, celluloid negatives, antique Asian textiles.

It is quicker to say what we have left rather than what was destroyed.

We got back here Monday afternoon to see the devastation and, thereafter, we had friends who came up and tore our house apart, basically.

We are now, weeks down the track, painstakingly trying to reassemble the house after it was brutally disassembled. We are living in a building site with some damaged furniture.

There are no floorcoverings, the walls are cracked and the paint is peeling, the skirting is half gone, the floors are all bare floorboards or marine chipboard, and we have mould growing. We have this coloured, mouldy fungal farm. Not the kind of pets I want.

It impacts on your emotional stability.

The reality is that if you take valued things away from somebody, whether they are possessions or people or functionality, you grieve. Firstly there is denial; you can’t absorb it. Then comes the anger phase.

It all impacts on your emotional stability. You get sleep disturbance, you lose your appetite, you get short-tempered and it just mucks around with your head a bit.

My own GP recommended moving my nine-year-old daughter into our bedroom so she can actually go to sleep. At the moment, she habitually awakes through the night, or doesn’t even get to sleep until midnight.

Whether that is entirely flood-related and stress-derived at the consequence of seeing the house dismantled around you and losing your favourite toys, I don’t know.

We’re averaging four or five hours sleep a night. We are all short-tempered and cranky and that doesn’t improve the mood in the house.

We don't feel like socialising on a bad day.

We don’t feel like going out or talking to anyone on a bad day. We just don’t feel ready for coping with things. I am sure there are lots of people in the same boat as us and they are limping along the same way.

I have been staying away from work because I didn’t think I would be a lot of use to anybody as a GP listening to patients' problems. I am wrapped up in trying to solve my own problems, which I would hope sounds reasonable.

The perception that doctors are immune from the psychological impact of events like this is a terrible misconception and I think we need to recognise ourselves that we are only human and are therefore subject to human frailties.

But portacabins are being arranged as a temporary general practice location, and we are likely to be in them for three years. Do I want to be? No. Am I resigned to the fact that we probably will be? Yes.

The positive side is that I would like to think it will make me a much more empathic doctor, because the truth is until we have been through something like this we don’t know, we just don’t.

There is no doubt that as a consequence of my own experience it will improve my ability as a doctor when I return to work because instead of just sympathising with people, I will be able to truly empathise with them.

That has got to be a good thing at some point in my professional career.

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Finding case studies for your articles

2011-03-04T13:08:00.020+11:00

Photo: © Vladimir Mucibabic Dreamstime.com

“How do you find case studies for your stories?”

If I had a Mars Bar every time I heard that question, my chin rolls would be bigger than Homer's.

The best way to answer this question is to perhaps walk you through a yarn I was working on this week.

It was a feature article on doctors whose practices had all but been destroyed by the recent floods, and Cyclone Yasi, in Queensland and Victoria.

Not only did I have to find individual doctors who had been affected, I had to get expert advice on what all doctors could do in the future to prepare their businesses in the event of a major catastrophe.

Now, here’s the thing, I am based in Sydney - at least 1000 clicks from each of the doctors I wanted to track down.

So, how did I go about finding a bunch of doctors whose businesses, and possibly their homes, had been destroyed and entice them to spend precious time chatting to me about their heartache while the sludge slowly receded around their ankles?

Good planning!

It’s all it takes.

Step 1:

Firstly, I worked out how many doctors I would need to interview to get a balanced and broad viewpoint for the article.

I figured with floods in Victoria and Queensland, and Cyclone Yasi menacing Northern Queensland, I would need three docs – one from each area – to give a recount of their experiences.

But I also felt it would be worthwhile speaking to a doctor who had previously been through a catastrophic event to ask how they had got through it and – more importantly – how they got back on their feet.

I tinkered around on the internet and flicked through the week’s editions of the metropolitan newspapers to find those towns and suburbs hardest hit.

Like a dart to a board, I zeroed in on these regions and then clicked onto the Yellow Pages site to find the one or two doctors working in and around those areas.

I came up with two of my doctors that way.

Step 2:

To find my third doc, I went back to the newspapers again, this time looking for those articles in which local journalists had already spoken to many affected people, including – you guessed it - doctors.

It was in a metropolitan daily that I found an article that mentioned a doctor, and it was he who would become my third interviewee.

It was also from previous articles that I found the name and location of a doctor whose business and home had been destroyed by fire two years ago.

Again, it was then a simple case of going back to the Yellow Pages to find their business numbers.

Step 3:

Before I started phoning though - because, remember, I was still planning here – I thought about who else in the medical community could give me information on how doctors can prepare for, and recover from, a disastrous event.

This is where having a niche in which you write really helps. Because I specialise in writing about health and writing for medical markets, I knew the local health care organisations that had doctors as their members.

If I hadn’t had that inside knowledge though, I could have found the same organisations by going through back issues or online versions of health publications written for doctors; I could have been cheeky and called a doctor's surgery and asked which group represented their doctors; or I could have even conducted a good old-fashioned internet search.

For example, if I were looking for an organisation that represented accountants, I would have searched for ‘accountant’ + ‘association’ + ‘au’. (For the record, CPA Australia and the National Institute of Accountants come up in the number one and two spots when you punch in that search criteria.)

Step 4:

The final step, once you know who you want to interview, is getting them to speak to you.

Chances are you have found their phone number or email address in your search, so my advice is to simply call, or write, and tell them who you are and what you want from them.

But - and this is the critical part - how you conduct yourself on the phone is vital in getting them to agree to speak to you.

Here’s what I do when I get any potential interviewee on the phone:

• I am extremely polite and ask them immediately if this is an okay time to talk.

• I am very succinct when I am telling them why I am calling. You won’t instil confidence or trust in them if you waffle. I tell them which publication I am writing for and give them a quick summary of the sorts of things I will be asking them.

• In every single instance, I let them know that I realise their time is precious and that I am very, very grateful if they are prepared to talk to me. Remember, they are doing you a favour! It is their prerogative if they speak to you or not. Never, ever think of yourself or your job as so important that they should feel privileged to speak to you.

• Give them plenty of time if they want to chat, empathise with them if they are pouring their heart out to you and never make judgmental comments.

At the end of the day, who you interview is going to depend entirely on the story you are writing and the publication you are writing for.

But here is a quick guide as to some of the main places where you can find potential interviewees:

• Ask your friends and colleagues. They can make good case studies themselves, or put you in touch with someone who could be.

• Contact public relations companies that work in the field which you are writing about. i.e. a PR company that does the media for a well-known cosmetic surgery company may be able to find you a woman who has had 20 facelifts.

• Read online and print articles on similar topics to get ideas and names of individuals, experts and representative groups.

• Do internet searches for associations or representative and advocate groups. i.e. a story on heart disease would no doubt benefit from a call to the Heart Foundation of Australia. These groups can provide you with all the facts and often a case study or two too.

• Go back to people and contacts you have interviewed before.

In my next blog post, read the stories of some of those people who continue to feel the impact of the January floods - and may do for months or even years to come.

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For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Writing a travel memoir: with Katrina Beikoff

2011-01-07T11:48:00.002+11:00

Sitting on an aeroplane en route from Shanghai to Brisbane in 2008, Australian journalist Katrina Beikoff decided she was going to write a travel memoir about the year she had just spent living in China with her partner and two young children.

The sojourn in Shanghai had come about when she and partner, fellow journalist Gary Smart, were offered roles as foreign experts for the Shanghai Daily, the city's only English language newspaper.

Just a few months later the couple crammed some essentials into suitcases - baked beans, Vegemite and Milo - and took themselves and their children, Milly, then aged three, and Nelson, 18 months, off to Shanghai.

On her journey home to the Gold Coast 12 months later, Katrina saw she had an amazing opportunity to pen an account of hers and her family's experiences and the country as they saw it.

Speaking to her this week, I was intrigued to learn how she put together a travel memoir that is funny, personal, insightful and very informative. It's the type of book she wished had been available when she was making the decision to move her family to Shanghai.

In this podcast, Katrina reveals how she captures the sights, sounds and – often disgusting – smells of Shanghai for her readers; the importance of transitioning between anecdotes and reportage; writing with humour; and how she went about researching factual topics.

Download podcast: Interview with Katrina Beikoff
(Duration 17:29. Size 12MB)

Listen to Katrina's full interview, or use the index of my interview questions below to navigate to the sections you are interested in hearing.

1. You have written a travel memoir that offers personal insight as well as an informative look at the culture and way of life in China. So tell us, how did you get the right formula between memoir and factual reportage? 00:00

2. You transition well between anecdotes and factual information. I found it quite seamless when you went from writing about your family’s plight to factual details of China. For example, you write about your day on the Great Wall of China and you use your physical surroundings to segue into China’s profile. You write: 'Rather we were caught like flotsam, swept along in the flow of eager Chinese sightseers, determined to catch every aspect of the experience. China, with one quarter of the world’s population is all about people.' Are good transitions vital to segue from personal storytelling to factual reportage? 00:53

3. Tell me about your writing process. Did you write sections that covered the facts and then segue way into your anecdotes? Or did you still write in the format of a story with an introduction, middle and end? 02:45

4. Your book is funny and intriguing, as evidenced by your opening sentence: 'Vegemite is really hard to remove from the Great Wall of China.' As a reader I was instantly intrigued to know how Vegemite got on the Great Wall and how you got it off. How do you, as a writer, find and deliver humour to readers? 04:30

5. What are the techniques to writing humorous lines? Is it keeping them succinct? Or do you just, as you say, try to write in the spoken word? 05:34

6. I notice you have a real eye for thorough detail. You write, for example, 'I love walking along Wulu-muqi Lu where there were vendors selling all sorts of dumplings, frogs, crabs, chestnuts, fish, vegetables, and huge pots of dried, crackly mystery ingredients that might be from the river or sea. It was messy and it was noisy. There were always people lined up at a few of the dumpling stores while sour-looking cooks at the almost-empty dumpling stores next door looked on.' How important is descriptive detail in this type of book? 06:43

7. Did you try to avoid clichés and just explain things as you saw heard or smelt them? 09:00

8. Did you think about your audience as you were writing in this genre, or was it more of a recollection for yourself and your family? 10:19

9. You do have a lot of factual information in the book. Did you research your topics while you were in Shanghai or did you have to do a lot of research when you returned home to Australia? 12:18

10.
What about your audience, who are the likely readers of this book? 14:11

No Chopsticks Required
My family's unexpected year in Shanghai
By Katrina Beikoff
Published by Finch Publishing
January 2011

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

This is the media; but not as we know it

2010-12-23T09:00:00.009+11:00

When a dust storm swept across Sydney in September last year - causing residents to fear the battle of Armageddon was upon us - the first picture I saw came via a tweet from the microblogging website Twitter. In fact, I had downloaded dozens of photos and had a good understanding of the phenomenon pushing through much of New South Wales before the major news sites put up their first images of the day.

Following the Iran election in June the same year, it was the residents who reported much of the fallout on social media sites when the foreign press had heavy restrictions placed on it.

Of course it was the newspapers that most of us looked to when we wanted the news of the events all wrapped up in concise, well-researched articles with the broader facts, expert commentary and personal accounts. But no-one could deny that the media industry was rapidly changing and that there was certainly a place for citizen journalism.

China's netizens

Curled up on my couch last night with a copy of Katrina Beikoff's travel memoir, No Chopsticks Required, I was again reminded of how much the media industry is evolving.

Katrina, a Walkley award-winning Australian journalist, moved with her family to Shanghai in 2008 to work as a 'foreign expert' for The Shanghai Daily. In her book, she talks in depth about the 'netizen' phenomenon and explains that some of the best news coverage of the deadly Sichuan earthquake in May 2008 (which killed more than 68,000 people) came from netizens.

I wanted to share this extract from Katrina's book which gives an insight into just how valuable this new element of newsgathering can be.

In China, members of the Internet community are known as netizens. I was told by work colleagues that China’s Internet population was 298 million and the country had about 50 million bloggers.

On the newspaper I had handled many stories quoting netizens and initially wondered why often anonymous Internet bloggers were having their comments taken so seriously as to warrant being quoted in the news pages of a metropolitan daily. I began to realise that the comments were not just by the odd Internet user, but a whole tide of netizens.

This army of faceless newsbreaking bloggers and Internet users were making real contributions to the information available to everyday Chinese citizens and it just couldn’t be ignored. In the face of heavily controlled media, netizens were becoming China’s taskforce for transparency of government, providing real opinions and rallying action.

I know it sounds terrible, but it was a disaster of the magnitude of the Sichuan earthquake that allowed the netizen phenomenon to really shine. From the perspective of a media observer in China, I found it exciting.

As the earthquake struck Sichuan, not only did China’s netizens unite to find missing people such as the soldier’s wife, they dominated mainstream reporting of the tragedy. Netizens became pivotal in getting genuine information and pictures of the quake zone out nationally and internationally, well before conventional media. The first stories and pictures of the disaster appeared on Internet websites about 20minutes after the first rumblings of the massive quake.

Within four hours of the earthquake, there were over 30 million searches on the Wenchuan earthquake in China’s main search engines. The vice-president of Xinhua News Agency and president of its online arm Xinhuanet, Zhou Xisheng, said he had never experienced anything like it….

The effect on China’s traditional media was astounding. Many media commentators said official print and television news reporting of the quake was deeper and broader than any event in Chinese history. It had to be. Official media was no longer in control of the story.

At the Shanghai Daily we saw the paper forced to report the human stories, many often translated straight from the netizen reportage. As a newspaper reader accustomed to detail rather than broadbrush statistics and rawness of emotion rather than rhetoric, I found the netizen influence vital in making the paper’s coverage of the earthquake worth bothering with.

In No Chopsticks Required, Katrina not only gives an insight into China's media, she affords readers a personal account of life in China and the trials and tribulations of immersing one's young family into a foreign land.

In January I will talk to Katrina to learn more of the researching and writing techniques she considers vital in creating an informative and engaging, yet humorous and personal, memoir. Look out for this post on 7 January 2011.

No Chopsticks Required
My family's unexpected year in Shanghai
By Katrina Beikoff
Published by Finch Publishing
January 2011

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

How to avoid being sued for defamation

2010-11-26T14:24:00.011+11:00

This story that appeared in The Australian today is the stuff that makes many of us journalists break out into a cold sweat.

The Australian's Chris Mitchell to sue Julie Posetti for defamation

Being sued for defamation is a frightening reality for all of us tasked with taking information to the public.

I have never been sued, nor do I want to be, despite being told when I was a cadet 20 years ago that, ‘pissing people off is a sign of being a good journalist’.

Protecting yourself

Now, I am not going to pass comment on the alleged facts or details of the scenario published in The Australian today, nor am I going to go into the apparent dangers of social media and the fact that this may become a test case. That will all be covered in the follow-up yarns in the mainstream media over the coming days.

My post is simply a timely reminder to all journalists, writers, self-publishers (yes all us bloggers, tweeters, facebookers) and commentators that we must always be mindful of what we are writing, saying and implying before we hit the ‘send’ button.

When I am editing my work I always ask myself: "Could this make someone else look bad? Is it likely to upset the person in question?"

Because I am not a defamation lawyer I am not going to give legal advice. I will, however, offer some great links explaining the Law of Defamation in Australia.

The Arts Law Centre of Australia Online

For a defamation action to succeed, the person complaining of the defamation (the plaintiff) has to prove three things:
i. that the communication has been published to a third person
ii.that the communication identifies (or is about) the plaintiff; and
iii.that the communication is defamatory.

To be defamatory, the material has to be ‘published’ (communicated by any means – written, orally, pictorially) to at least one person other than the plaintiff. The intention of the publisher does not matter – liability for defamation can arise from errors.

The News Manual: A professional resource for journalists and the media

To defame someone, you do not have to make up false things yourself. You might defame a person by repeating or replaying words spoken by someone else, for example an interviewee.

It is no defence to claim that you were only quoting someone else. If you print or broadcast something defamatory, you could be taken to court, along with your producer, your editor or station manager and the person who said the words in the first place.

Before January 2006, defamation varied from state to state across Australia, but now there are Uniform Defamation Laws which are similar across all states and territories. The uniform laws adopted and adapted a number of statutory provisions from old laws but still retain the basic principles of common law.

The Australian Press Council

The sums awarded by juries in defamation actions grew significantly during the 1990s and 2000s in New South Wales. For instance, in 1989 the proprietor of a Sydney seafood restaurant was awarded A$100,000 (US$ 70,000) after a negative review by the food critic of The Sydney Morning Herald.

The new Defamation Acts cap damages awards at $250,000, subject to annual review on the basis of inflation indexes.

University of technology, Sydney

There is a provision under the defamation act for an early resolution procedure by way of an offer to make amends and to facilitate the making of apologies without the risk of liability being admitted.

For disputes that proceed to court, the remedy usually sought by a defamed person is an award of damages. However, exemplary or punitive damages, which are normally designed to punish the defendant and to deter him/her from repeating the conduct, cannot be awarded under the uniform legislation.

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

On board QF32!

2010-11-05T13:21:00.021+11:00

This morning I received an email from an Australian friend based in Singapore whose wife was on Qantas flight QF32 bound for Sydney - when one of its engines exploded.

I can't remember the last time an email got my heart racing quite as much. Here's how he tells the story of his wife's 'interesting' flight.

Wednesday morning, Julie leaves for a quick business flight back to Sydney. Platinum status has her in the front of the economy cabin, over the wing.

The plane takes off at 9.20am. Julie’s at the window seat; babies crying; long weekend; full flight out of Singapore.

She has the big Bose over-the-ears, noise-cancelling headphones on with her iPod pumping (to block out the babies suffering from the altitude pains) when she hears a distant thump in the background.

A passenger nearby just happens to be in the aerospace industry and is all over the situation, pointing out the holes in the wing.

Engine explodes!

Holes in the wing; bits landing on houses in Indonesia; plane circles over the Singapore Straits for a couple of hours.

Mr Aerospace points out the drama playing out on the personal TV screen. (One of the features of the A380 is a camera under the plane that you can watch through your personal screen. It’s pretty useless for most of the flight because it doesn’t add any value unless you are taking off or landing. Otherwise the view is the same as what you can see out the window. Maybe that’s the point… everyone has a view!) Well, it turns out it’s also perfect for watching fuel dump out the bottom of the plane in an emergency situation.

He is also good for some other useful facts: like how lucky they were that the shrapnel that tore apart the wing didn’t hit the cabin, and that all that fuel spilling from the wing was probably pooling inside… might have been better not to know that one!

During the circles, Julie and some other passengers turn on their phones to take photos and check for mobile coverage. Surprisingly, she manages to get a couple of seconds of coverage each time they come around over Indonesia. She shoots me a text:

“Explosion on plane lost an engine returning to Sing [SIC].”

F**k!

(Fortunately, I didn’t know about the text until I got the call from Julie from the airport later.)

So, Julie sits there watching and waiting for the engine to explode and decides to shoot a couple of photos from the air (pictured). After a couple of hours of fuel dumping and burning, the plane lands and is stopped at the end of a runway.

Fuel is still spilling out everywhere.

No one approaches the plane.

One of the engines won’t shut down.

The captain is good. He is constantly keeping people on the plane informed of the situation. He explains they practice emergency situations every three months and that they know what they are doing.

No-one is panicking. No-one is visibly upset - none of those passengers around Julie anyway.

On the ground, ten minutes passes, fuel is spilling out – still no-one approaches. The captain announces they are going to try and shoot high pressure water into the engine to shut it down. Inside the cabin it is starting to get hot since the air con is now off.

Doesn’t work!

They shoot foam everywhere to cover the spilling fuel.

Eventually they start evacuating people through the back-middle-right of the plane (lots of doors on this thing) - opposite side of the engine that is still zinging along.

One stair case; 20 people at a time; packed A380; 433 people plus 26 crew (according to news reports). Front to back.

Instructions are to take ‘medication, passport and wallet only… but stay in your seat'! As you can imagine, there is a bit of heat when half the cabin stands up to grab their passport out of the overhead luggage.

There is constant instruction not to take anything else… if you do it will be confiscated. Nothing… no carry-on… no handbags… nothing!

As it turns out, when everyone is eventually corralled into the departure lounge, there are a lot of people with their handbags, 10kg carry-on bags, bottles of Baileys… everything!

Julie calls me from the departure lounge. It’s about 1pm. I miss the call, but call back, oblivious to the missed messages, emails, photos, other calls and news. Only after our conversation - my mind still consumed with all my day’s work – do I realise what went on.

F**k!

In the lounge, the captain of the plane is still in there keeping people informed.

Julie and a work colleague take the opportunity for a quick work meeting… seriously!

While in the lounge they are also given food and drink and big yellow or orange stickers, depending on which class they are in.

Julie finally leaves the airport at 5pm. No-one gets to collect their main luggage - that will be on their new flight the next day.

Always something happening!

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Writing travel features: "Do I tell readers about the machine guns?"

2010-10-28T11:24:00.059+11:00

Writing my travel feature on Israel and The Palestinian Territories this week, I had to ask myself a few questions: “Do I tell readers about the Hummers mounted with massive machine guns? Is this the forum to sprout forth my own political views on the wall around the West Bank (pictured)? What about the t-shirts with 'Guns and Moses' written on them; shall I tell potential tourists not to buy them because they’re so lame?"

Working out what to put in a travel feature – and, just as importantly, what to leave out – always puts me in a spin.

Okay, so it’s obvious no-one wants to read about how the kid on the plane next to me farted continuously for 14 hours or that the only place I could scoff food privately in Dubai during Ramadan was in a toilet. But finding the right mix of informative detail and personal experience to make a travel story good can be tricky.

I am not a dedicated travel journalist so I don’t claim to have a magic formula to turn every travel feature into a Walkley winner, but I have been commissioned to write stories on just about every junket, personal holiday (including my honeymoon) and weekend away I have had in the past 20 years.

Let me say at the outset, though, that the key to writing a good travel feature is to entice readers from the start and to avoid anything at all that makes your article sound like a travel brochure.

So, here are my five top tips to writing a good travel yarn:

1. Avoid cliches. Go to your nearest travel agent and pick up a few brochures. What do you see? Phrases like: “frolicking in the crystal-clear waters” and “sun-bronzed beaches, soaring peaks and lush rainforests”? If it sounds like a brochure, then it is a brochure.

You want your article to sound like an article, free of clichés and unimaginative descriptions. Sure, clichés are popular because they paint a good description, but readers tend to skim over them because they are so unoriginal.

So, yes, you need adjectives and descriptive prose, but try to come up with new ways to include them in your travel stories.

2. Make your holiday a little less ordinary. I am not suggesting you take up base jumping or rock climbing, but think of different ways you can approach standard holidays.

For example, when my husband and I headed to the Hunter Valley one weekend I wondered how we could make the trip a little different. So we packed the bikes and decided to ride between the vineyards instead of driving.

Not only did it make for an interesting travel feature, it made our weekend a whole lot more fun.

3. Make your travel feature personal. It's important to make your story different to every other feature ever written on the same destination.

Don’t just write detailed blurbs about the sights you see. Again, they belong in a brochure. Tell readers about the quirky, funny, sad, happy, unexpected, expected experiences that made your trip unique and that help paint a picture of what the region and its people are truly like.

When one of my former writing students from the Sydney Writers Centre asked me to look at a travel article she hoped to sell, I knew immediately she was onto a winner. Her entire article centred around one thing about India that I, personally, had never before read about: going to the movies. Obviously the Sun-Herald thought her idea was original enough to be published also.

4. Plan ahead. Before you go on your trip, research your destinations thoroughly so you know what sights your readers are likely to want to read about.

Pack a diary and write a daily journal or jot down notes as you think of them. It can also be a good idea to scribble captions to your photos as you go so you can identify them more easily when you get home.

While we're talking about pictures, I highly recommend you either invest in, or borrow, a good camera and try to take publishable shots while you are away. It doesn't have to be the lastest SLR, just something with a zoom that produces quality photos. Ensure you take pictures at a high resolution too.

With digital cameras you have the freedom to take squillions of photos and to get them as well-framed and focused as possible.

5. Lastly, don’t be shy about approaching people. Ask tourist operators as many questions as you need to get the answers you want, and talk to locals and ask if you can quote them and take their photos.

In my yarn about Israel and The Palestinian Territories I decided that telling readers about the lame souvenir t-shirts didn't add value to the story, and that sprouting forth my personal feelings about the way the region is being managed was self-indulgent. I didn't even go into detail about the machine guns, riot squads and water cannons we saw, but I did feel it prudent to mention that security here was high and that men with guns were unavoidable.

So, what do you take out - and leave in - when you're writing travel yarns? Better still, tell us what you like to read about in a travel feature.

Related posts
* The best thing about being a freelance writer is...
* Where on earth have you been?

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Where on earth have you been?

2010-10-12T12:17:00.002+11:00

"You're going where?" our friends asked incredulously. "Are you crazy!?"

Very quickly we realised few people understood our reasoning - or shared our excitement - for taking a month-long family holiday in the Middle East and North Africa.

After all, the Middle East is synonymous with AK47s and machine guns, terrorism, civil unrest, tourist kidnappings, exploding rockets, etc, etc. So why on earth would any parents in their right minds take their six-year-old and nine-year-old children into that fray?

"It'll be fun," we replied. "Besides, it's not like we're not going to Afghanistan." Nope, we're not that crazy; we were bound for Israel and The Palestinian Territories, Jordan and Egypt.

Still, this itinerary did little to appease our close friends who hugged us goodbye as if for the last time.

That was six weeks ago. Today, two weeks after returning home I can't help but smile as I sit here and recall the many highlights and memorable moments of the trip.

Of course we were ecstatic to see those ridiculously old and huge pentrahedrons in Egypt;

then there was the morning we spent riding camels in Jordan's Wadi Rum desert;

and, although I didn't get a photo, I can't not write about how we scurried past the swarms of police in riot gear with their water cannons and hummers mounted with machine guns on a particularly tense Friday afternoon in Jerusalem's Old City.

Through it all though, the only time I felt our lives were in danger was when we negotiated the manic, noisy, unrelenting and unforgiving traffic in Cairo. As one of our taxi drivers admitted with glee, "The traffic lights and lane markings here are just for decoration!"

Thankfully we did manage to cross the road without being squished and after four weeks in the Middle East and North Africa we made it home to Sydney safely.

So, I do apologise for being so quiet on WriteSmart for the past six weeks, but I am now back and am bursting with new ideas for blog posts for freelance writers.

My post next week will focus on how to write great travel features and how to make those features pay for themselves through income and tax deductions.

By the way, what is your favourite holiday destination?

Related posts
* The best thing about being a freelance writer is...

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Writing ebooks: with copywriter Glenn Murray

2010-08-23T08:17:00.001+10:00

When copywriter Glenn Murray began writing his first ebook he took an unconventional approach – he wrote about a topic he knew nothing about!

As a former technical writer who wrote manuals, Glenn had developed a habit of writing things down as he learned them.

So when he started his own freelance copywriting business in 2002 and realised he had to master the concept of search engine optimisation (SEO), it was natural for him to document the processes and information he learned along the way.

It was these detailed notes that eventually evolved into his ebook, SEO Secrets.

“When I started writing it I knew nothing about SEO and... everything I learned along the way was in that book,” says Glenn, from the New South Wales Central Coast.

“It was written for a small business owner... (because) that was exactly who I was.”

Ebooks now a popular means of self-publishing

When Glenn first began tapping out this ebook in 2003, the concept of practical manuals written solely as commercial, computer-based documents and not published in print was very new.

Seven years on and ‘everyone is doing it’, Glenn quips.

The ebooks referred to in this article are in the genre of non-fiction educational manuals and guides, not to be confused with the electronic versions of printed fiction books.

And, certainly, in this category there is a plethora of ebooks on just about any topic. (I even found one on taxidermy at home and another on building toy trains.)

Should you write your own ebook?

So this begs the question, in this era when too much information never seems to be enough, should - or could - you write an ebook? (It's a question I find an increasing number of freelance writers in my circle pondering.)

Glenn, who is now working on his fourth and fifth ebooks, says there is one pre-requisite for anyone considering writing an ebook; “You have to have knowledge that other people want.

“(That knowledge) doesn’t have to be in demand by a huge audience, but if not, it has to be in high demand in a niche audience.”

You also need to determine why you want to write one in the first place so that you can better identify your desired outcomes for the book. For example, is it something you plan to sell to make a profit, or are you writing it as a promotional tool to attract an audience or capture subscribers?

Writing an ebook is simple. Right?

A key element you need to consider before starting your ebook is whether or not you have the time and inclination to put in the effort that is needed to make it successful. Because, as Glenn believes, while ebooks have made publishing easier and more accessible to more people, they still require a lot of hard work and dedication.

“You have to have time to do it right because it is never just a case of banging out an ebook. You have to spend a lot of time refining it and marketing it,” he says.

"It is not a no-brainer. You have to do it right and you have to do it well to make money from it."

Glenn's top tips to writing a good ebook

There are five key elements that separate informative, good-quality ebooks from ‘the fluff’, says Glenn.

1. They have to be written with the reader in mind so that readers can understand the content easily and apply the information to their own situation; i.e. writing in a step-by-step, task-based format can be very helpful for the reader.

2. It has to be well structured and accommodate both the novices and the experienced within your targeted audience.

3. A good table of contents allows readers to more easily click through to relevant sections.

4. When you make claims ensure you credit your sources and provide links to any relevant material.

5. Edit the ebook thoroughly so that it is free of typos, errors, poor sentence structure and superfluous words.

Mastering the art of selling your ebook

Once you have the content it’s just a case of neatening it up and sending it out to buyers: right? Mmmm, kind of.

Here's what Glenn does.

He writes his content in a word document and then uses Adobe Acrobat to create a PDF of his ebook.

Although you can use free PDF creators, he's found that these often produce poor-quality files that are bigger (making them more cumbersome to download and store for buyers) than those created in Adobe. And often they are incompatible with some computers.

Once the file is ready for public consumption, Glenn advertises it on his website and uses the ecommerce support site, ejunkie, to help manage the sales process.

But, Glenn warns, this is not as simple as it sounds.

“You have to have a useful sales page and that has to integrate with your ejunkie account, which integrates with your paypal, and your paypal integrates with your bank account. All of that has to work nicely and if you have anything out of place everything falls over and it’s never clear why,” he says.

In other words, you have to be technically proficient if you are doing it all yourself.

It is within your reach

Glenn believes, though, that an ebook is firmly within the reach of anyone who is determined and has a product or service that others want.

“It is not out of reach for anyone, but if it does fall over you have to have time to resolve it,” he explains.

He adds that marketing an ebook is also very labour-intensive.

Successful marketing strategies for ebooks warrants another entire blog post, but in short it requires a few integral steps:

* utilising social media;
* developing sales techniques such as strategically-timed discounts and offers;
* good website set-up and maintenance;
* tapping into affiliate programs;
* fostering strong word-of-mouth recommendations.

So, with all that in mind, do you think you have an ebook in you?

Let us know your ebook writing, publishing and marketing experience. Also, if you want to learn more about the particulars of marketing an ebook, drop in a comment.

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Dainty cakes and talking heads

2010-08-11T20:26:00.006+10:00

The dog won’t look at me, the kids are feeling neglected and my husband is tiring under the weight of the dual role of primary caregiver and breadwinner.

And that's because instead of being with them I am spending my days this week at the Walkley Media Conference 2010 hobnobbing with colleagues and strangers, eating dainty cakes, drinking copious amounts of sponsored coffee and watching the talking heads that are the VIPs of the media industry.

I have plenty of highlights from the conference, the biggest of which are said dainty cakes. They are to die for, quite literally, with all that sugar and fat now pulsing through my veins.

My lowlight was hearing no less than five Mark Latham jibes in 24 hours. Can't we just forget him already?

Anyhoo, it’s all been worth it because I feel enlightened. I have gleaned quite a lot of information that, I believe, will make some aspects of my work days as a freelance journalist a little more efficient and fun.

I came to the conference, in part, to learn some techy skills, and many of the presenters have certainly given me that so I am happy to share my newfound knowledge here.

Newfound techy skills

Let me begin with what I learnt at Google’s offices overlooking the water at Pyrmont, Sydney; they have Guitar Hero, free chips, chocolates and colourful mobiles hanging from the ceilings.

Okay, so one would hope I learnt more than the fact that Google isn’t stingy with staff refreshments and office equipment. Luckily, I did.

One cool tool I discovered was Google Insights for Search. This nifty online tool allows you to easily sift through trends data that can paint a picture of what Google users are looking for and when.

Google’s Kate Conroy showed us, for example, how more Australians search for information on Julia Gillard’s earlobes than on Kevin Rudd’s gall bladder. What the?!!! was my first thought, but apparently you can’t argue with 'the search beat of a nation’.

Now, I would hate to think any journo would ever use this data as the only source of statistics for a broader trends-based article, but in tandem with credible, well-sourced data this can certainly help in a journalist’s research of painting a picture of what internet users are trawling for.

The other Google gadget that piqued my interest was Google fast flip, which allows you to instantaneously flip through news in a user-friendly, aesthetic format. (And, no, I won't go into the debate that Google doesn't pay for the content it uses. That's for another post.)

Meanwhile, the fast-talking folk at Google also encouraged us to check out the tutorials and videos on You Tube’s reporters center. They have videos on everything from interview techniques and presenting a story to production tips.

But one of the biggest Google tips I gleaned came courtesy of digital media consultant Claire Wardle in her social media presentations with University of Canberra journalism lecturer Julie Posetti. She informed us that Google's advanced search function was grossly underutilised by many Google users, and I put myself in that category.

By filtering, eliminating and fiddling with the search criteria, we can quite literally, ‘Wrap Google around your little finger,' explained Claire.

So from now on, that’s what I intend to do - wrap Google around my finger. (Hell, I can’t do it with the kids or the dog or the hubby, so I'll give it a go with Google.)

The other internet tool that Claire encouraged us to play around with was Netvibes. After just one hour navigating this tracking tool, I am a convert. As a person whose inbox collects about 50 emails every night from the many blogs, news feeds and occasionally-informative websites I subscribe to, I need my own personal filing clerk, so Netvibes has come to my rescue.

Claire also highly recommends delicious social bookmarking for sifting through and collecting the updates on specific news yarns we’re chasing.

Anyone interested in finding out more about a few of these tools can also find training handouts on Claire's website.

So, on that note I will now leave you to do what I intend to do over the next few weeks - collate my newfound techy knowledge and jump online to play, play, play.

For those of you coming to Thursday's conference sessions - dedicated to freelancers - maybe pop in to my session on Setting Up Your Freelance Business and say hi.

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

From manuscript to published book: with Penguin's Robert Sessions

2010-08-03T13:10:00.007+10:00

As a kid, I diligently posted my Christmas wish list to Santa every January (before he had time to figure out I wasn't always nice).

But whenever I slipped my glitter-smothered envelope into the big red box, I couldn't help wondering where it went and how my words never failed to materialise as my chosen gift under the sparkly tree 11 months later.

"What if the reindeer loses the mailbag over the side of the sleigh on the way to the North Pole?" I whined to my mum. "Who actually reads the mail and decides if I am naughty or nice: trainee Elves or Santa himself?" "If they are having a bad day, does my request get the flick?"

Similar concerns grip the nerves of aspiring authors when they slip their manuscript - their labour of love - into the post box at the end of their street: "Will it get there?" "Who is deciding my book's fate?" "If someone does like it, what happens next?"

Keen to get answers, I posed some questions to Robert Sessions, Penguin Australia's Director of Publishing, who provided these very articulate and informative responses.

1. When a manuscript is read and liked by a commissioning editor or a publisher at Penguin, what happens next?

It is almost certainly read by at least one other editor and then by someone in Penguin’s sales or marketing team. If all that is positive, the book will then go to an acquisitions meeting, attended by a group of senior executives, all of whom will have read at least some of the material on offer. The loudest voice will be the publisher who introduced the project, but it would be rare (but not unknown) for a book to be acquired without the agreement of the sales and marketing directors. A decision is made to either offer for publication or not, and if so the level of acquisition is set (based on an estimated sales profile), which results in the acquiring of certain rights, a level of advance (a ‘guarantee’ in dollars) and a rate of royalty to be paid on each copy sold. A publishing contract is signed, and when enough royalties have been earned to cover the advance paid, the author will start to earn additional income from sales.

2. Are contracts fairly standard, or do they vary for all authors?

A publishing contract is a fairly standard agreement and needs to cover: the rights licensed (including territories and such things as digital rights, film rights and foreign rights), the advance to be paid by the publisher (how much, when and how), and the rates of royalties to be paid on various kinds of sales. It also sets out the legal responsibilities of the publisher and the copyright owner (who is called ‘the proprietor’). The more successful an author is the more ‘negotiating’ they are able to do, but the vast majority of contracts are very similar to each other.

3. How extensive is the editing process and how much control does the writer have over their intellectual property and cover pages?

This is one of those questions! It would be rare for a manuscript to receive no editing at all, but when it comes to extensive editing, that becomes a matter between the author and the editor. In all cases, it is the author’s book, and a good editor will make changes by persuasion and argument (if necessary) rather than by using a heavy blue pencil.

4. What can an author expect in a typical marketing campaign?

Whilst much will depend on the perceived market for a book, every book published by Penguin receives individual marketing attention, and a publicist who will be attached to that book and author during the publication process. The publicist’s task will be to gain maximum exposure for the book and the author: in print, with reviews, and by appearance where appropriate on radio, television and in the print media. Once the publication date has been set, an author is likely to be required for around two weeks for a series of interviews. A launch may or may not be arranged. Generally we do not believe they help sell books as much as, say, a radio appearance. The online world is increasingly important: Penguin has an award-winning website, and utilises Facebook, Twitter and online sales and promotion. We even have a full-time social networks editor these days!

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Catherine's gutsy freelancing experiment

2010-07-20T20:44:00.010+10:00

Some aspiring freelance writers take their foray into this industry calmly and simply, easing their way onto editors' contact lists.

Not Catherine Boundy. She's driving a metaphorical Mack truck right through their front doors.

She has embarked on an experiment to pitch 100 stories in 100 days - just in time for her 30th birthday.

The motivation for her gutsy experiment, she explains on her blog Pitch Fever, is to finally realise her dream of becoming a writer.

Her idea, she writes, is simple: "To pitch like a madwoman, 100 story ideas to a whole host of publications over the course of 100 days, and see what comes of it."

Interestingly, Catherine's hoping that what comes of her first pitch to Australia's only pig hunting magazine, Bacon Busters, is a rejection.

"Fingers crossed this one will get the big red rejection stamp, as I’ve just remembered that I’ve been asking for a miniature domestic pig for Christmas," she writes.

I, for one, am eager to see what does actually come of Catherine's feverish pitching exercise.

When she mentioned her plan to me a few weeks ago at the end of her first feature writing class at the Sydney Writers' Centre, I was impressed by her tenacity and enthusiasm.

Wearing my sensible shoes that night, I suggested she pare it back to 10 pitches in 10 days.

But, I have a feeling that once Catherine gets an idea in her head, she doesn't let go - a little like the times she took trapeze classes and paraded naked at the Opera House.

I am wishing her the best of the luck. If she gets a lot of commissions from this exercise, she may well have to give up her day job just to ensure she can meet the deadlines.

If, on the other hand, editors don't share her passion and desire to experiment a little, she can always have a 500-word rant about their lack of spunk in the Sydney Morning Herald's Heckler.

Related articles
* The perfect pitch
* Be the freelancer editors want to commission
* Which publications will commission your work?

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

My tools of trade - recommended resources for freelancers

2010-07-16T10:20:00.002+10:00

There are certain things I just can’t get by without during my workday:

* 57 cups of tea (or thereabouts).

* My fitball to bounce around on when I need inspiration.

* My puppy’s doe-eyed face to remind me to take breaks.

But there are also a few resources that I simply cannot do without.

The cups of tea, the fitball and the dog all make my day comfortable. These following resources make my work possible.

Research and statistics

As a journalist, I hate numbers. Sheesh, I’d rather do English homework than maths with my primary school kids any day. But for journalists, numbers and statistics are absolutely vital.

Without them you often can’t validate the points you are making in a story and you can’t paint the bigger picture for readers.

No matter what topic you are writing about, there is a good chance someone somewhere at sometime has received a research grant to study it.

My advice is to google your topic, but be succinct in your searches. For example, if you are looking for Australian research on the health benefits of home-made lunches, google home-made lunch + health + research + au as a starting point.

Naturally, depending on the search results, you can chuck in a few variations and see what comes up. And you know what? Something always comes up.

My favourite stats website is the Australian Bureau of Statistics because it has a phenomenal array of health, social, demographic and occupational data.

Finding sources and case studies

Every established journalist will confess to badgering their friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances for case studies.

I’ve been a case study no less than half-a-dozen times myself.

But one website aims to fill the gaps that our mates, family and PR contacts can't.

Set up by Aussie marketing and PR girl, Bec Derrington, SourceBottle is a leads service that connects journalists with sources, experts and other contacts.

I have used the site a few times when trying to locate particularly hard-to-find case studies. Once, within an hour of posting a request to find someone who had a short-term memory like a sieve, I had three very professional, willing case studies eager to chat about their forgetfulness.

To find experts, your best option is go to the industry bodies who operate in the field you are writing about. For example, a story on cancer would see you calling the Cancer Council Australia and its state-based affiliates. A yarn on financial services in Australia would require a phone call to the Investment and Financial Services Association.

Another option is to track down academics with a particular interest in the field you are writing about. A succinct Google search will help you identify any university professors with an unhealthy amount of knowledge on your specific angle.

Wordsmiths

I’ve said this before, my favourite book in my office is my 2223-page Macquarie Dictionary. It is so huge and heavy that if it accidentally fell on my neighbour’s cat, it would certainly put an abrupt end to the midnight wailing outside my bedroom window.

But, I confess, I have a few other favourites. The Style Manual by Snooks & Co makes sense of grammar gobbledegook, as does Pam Peters’s The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage.

If I need an expert to answer a specific question on said grammar gobbledegook, I email the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A with my query. Sometimes I get a direct response within 24 hours, other times I find it on the monthly Q&A list.

Meanwhile, Mignon Fogarty is super savvy when it comes to understanding the quirks of grammar. It’s a highlight of my working week to read her weekly newsletter from her Grammar Girl site.

Modern history

Knowing yesterday’s news is often vital to a freelancer reporting today’s news.

When I am writing about current topics that are running daily in the newspapers and online, I set up Google alerts with specific keywords to see what else is running on the topic.

Often it is pretty random and you get alerts for all and sundry, but it does occasionally capture what you want.

I also trawl Google news timeline for the same reason.

The best bet to ensure you are not missing the latest news, though, is to regularly check the News Limited and Fairfax sites to see what each of the metropolitan newspapers have on the topic too.

In short, there is a massive wealth of credible sources for journalists to tap into. My recommendation is to make a note of all those great ones that you come across and develop your own 'favourites' list.

Related articles

* What I learnt at grammar school
* Forget reality TV, try reality instead
* Great friends and good karma

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

My baby niece's selfless story and her gifts to us all

2010-07-07T08:42:00.002+10:00

Every July, I give my niece a small gift. It is not for her birthday, not an early Christmas present. It is for the anniversary of her death.

This month, it will be the fourth anniversary. This month, my niece would have been almost five years old.

This year, I am going to give her the gift of words, of remembrance, of thanks.

Her life was short: just eight months. But please don’t cry for her or for her family. Don’t give them your pity. It is such an empty, wasted emotion.

My niece’s story is hers alone and it is unique and special. I know I speak for everyone who knew her when I say we feel privileged and proud of her story and prouder still that we could share in her short life.

I am a writer, but I could never have written a story as beautiful and selfless as Zoe’s.

Yes it is a sad tale. Yes it has been, and always will be, tough for those who loved her. But there is no point energising regret.

She gave her life so that her family and their friends could stop occasionally and see through the haze of habit and really consider the important things in life.

She took her last breath so that her younger brother could take his first.

She gave her older sister the opportunity to learn many life skills and coping strategies that will keep her strong of character and spirit.

To her parents, she gave herself: their beautiful, irreplaceable second-born.

To everyone who knew her, she has given them their own gift, something that enriches their own lives.

To me, she gave an experience that, although so desperately sad at times and unwanted, makes my life special too and just a little less ordinary.

So that is why I am giving her the gift of these words: to honour her memory, to give thanks and to remind her that she will always, always be loved and remembered as the sweet angel who got to ride the rainbow to heaven too soon.

Thank you to my generous brother-in-law and sister-in-law for allowing me to share yours and your beautiful baby girl's story.

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Literary festival speakers share their advice & experiences

2010-07-04T21:11:00.002+10:00

Last Saturday, I gave up my role as a screaming soccer mum to be a beret-wearing, latte-sipping literary festival fan.

Alright, so I admit I don't own a beret, but if I did the 5th Children's and Young Adult (YA) Literature Festival held in Balmain, Sydney, would have been the perfect event to wear it to.

Put on by the NSW Writers' Centre, the festival is a shindig for aspiring writers to network with published authors, literary agents and publishers and lap up their advice and personal stories.

Of course, all the wide-eyed aspiring writers were warned that tackling a publisher to the ground to make them read their manuscript was not the way to publishing success.

"Just politely ask them for their business card," explained Brian Cook, who runs the Manuscript Appraisal Agency and is a mentor and publishing consultant.

Brian's snippet of educated wisdom was just one of the many comments I enjoyed on the day. As such, I thought I might share a few more with you now.

On writing

These following quotes and first-hand experiences relate to the writing process.

I spend 10 percent of my time writing. The other 90 percent is thinking and planning. - Crime writer Gabrielle Lord, Conspiracy 365.

Writing painful and emotional stories, you suffer along with your characters. – Author Moya Simons, Let Me Whisper You My Story.

You need to be extremely self-motivated. You have to write, and you have make deadlines and be professional about it. - Author Michelle Cooper, The Rage of Sheep.

I plan a very detailed plot-line before I write a single word. – Author Michelle Cooper.

Find your strength as a writer: write what you love, what appeals to you. - Author and scriptwriter Stephen Measday, Send Simon Savage.

On getting published

Now, a literary festival wouldn't be complete unless aspiring writers got some insight into how the hell they can get themselves published.

The thing that helped get me here (to being a published author) was a mentorship. – Author Michelle Cooper. (Michelle won a mentorship with the Children's Book Council of Australia, NSW).

Be patient. I know it can be tortuous, but we will get back to you. - Lisa Berryman, HarperCollins children's publisher.

Everything in your submission counts. Be professional. - Zoe Walton, Random House children’s and YA publisher.

You have to get out there and network: enter competitions, do courses, attend writing events. - Author Mo Johnson, Boofheads.

The writing journey is amazing and fantastic. Publication is part of it for some. For others, it’s not. It doesn’t matter. - Author Susanne Gervay, I am Jack. Susanne is also the co-head of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).

On editing

The key message on editing to come out of the festival is that successful authors understand the need for collaboration with their editor.

I took on board everything (my editor) said. You have to have broad shoulders and not lose confidence. Everyone wants the same thing: a good book. – Author Moya Simons.

Courage is essential for a writer. The courage to listen. - Author Susanne Gervay.

I use Google timeline when I am fact-checking. It’s great. – Zoe Walton.

So, on that note, if you remember a quote from a published author, agent or publisher that resonated with you, let us know. Aspiring writers can never have too many inspirational messages post-its stuck to their computer.

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Robert Engwerda's long road to publishing success

2010-06-25T06:09:00.001+10:00

The process of turning the seed of an idea into a published novel is, for most writers (except one-book-a-year-Bryce-Courtenay), a lengthy one that can take many years.

In Victorian author Robert Engwerda’s case, it took 24 years.

“I wrote my first draft of this book when I was 29. I am 53 now. So, it's been a long time coming,” he says of his new historic fiction novel Mosquito Creek.

Although he didn’t work on the book continuously over those years, it was his passion for the story and dedication to refine his writing that kept him coming back to the manuscript for more than two decades.

“I had this really clear picture in my mind. The genesis for Mosquito Creek really came when I was a school teacher and I read - just a snippet - about these goldminers who had been stranded and marooned in the floodwaters in the 1800s, and that image... really stuck with me,” he says.

“I just write for the love of doing it and I write what I would like to read myself. As a consequence, I would just write reams of the stuff and it would go off onto different tangents.

“While I think that my writing was okay, there was often a lack of structure, a lack of pace and a lack of development of characters.”

A winning break

Robert got the chance to finesse these skills in 2007 when he was selected for the Australian Society of Authors mentorship program for his novel Backwaters, which was published in 2004 and long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award the following year.

A few months later, with his newly polished Mosquito Creek manuscript in hand, Robert sought out literary agents to represent him.

“None of them were interested. Some said no-one was interested in historical fiction anymore. It was pretty demoralising,” he admits.

Convinced it was harder to find an agent than a publisher in Australia, Robert sent a copy of the manuscript straight to an editor at Penguin.

For months he heard nothing, so one Friday afternoon he emailed a reminder to the editor.

“(The editor) took it home over the weekend and called me back on Monday morning at 9am... and said, ‘Let’s talk,’” says Robert.

When the unexpected happens

"It was unexpected. You always hope someone will pick up your manuscript and think there is merit in it, but after a lot of years of never having anything published you are not expecting someone will leap at your work either.”

That was 18 months ago. Four weeks ago, Mosquito Creek went on sale in book stores around Australia.

A passionate writer, Robert has not been discouraged by the hard work that is required at every step of authorship – from creating a story from a seedling to getting someone to notice your book.

He already has two new books in draft: one on WWI set in France, and the other a contemporary human drama set in Melbourne.

Eager to try a new genre and to stretch his skills, Robert is planning on putting most of his energies – and his ever-present tenacity - into the contemporary story first.

“I think you need to challenge yourself and stretch yourself.”

* Mosquito Creek is a historical fiction with a number of plot threads that are woven against the backdrop of the Victorian goldfields. There are the stranded goldminers, the police commissioner who was reluctantly sent to Australia and the police sergeant who had originally earned his passage to Australia as a convict. Robert’s writing is understated and descriptive, allowing the reader the freedom to wonder at times while being able to visualise a world from times past.

Mosquito Creek
By Robert Engwerda
Published by Penguin Australia
31 May 2010

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Great friends and good karma

2010-06-16T14:56:00.001+10:00

"I have a favour to ask," I said to a good friend one day. "I’m doing a story on cervical cancer and I want to write an article about your experience with the disease. Will you let me interview you?"

Without hesitation, my friend said yes.

Then there was my travelling pal who was addicted to over-the-counter painkillers when we lived overseas as twenty-something backpackers.

She readily agreed to be quoted too.

I’ve asked friends about their insomnia, parenting struggles, financial woes, their joy at finding a career they love, their relationships, their eating habits – all so I can pen stories about their experiences.

Now, I’m sure that as friends, some of them said yes out of obligation to me and our friendship.

Equally, though, I know some were chuffed and proud to realise that I - and my editors - thought they had interesting stories to tell.

I know others who were prepared to be quoted in the hope it may help others in similar situations.

Really, though, it doesn’t matter why they agreed to let me publish their stories in magazines and newspapers. What does matter is that I am forever extremely grateful that they did.

You see, a big part of the job of being a journalist is asking people for favours, either to hook you up with experts and interviewees, to use their photos or to be case studies themselves. (In fact, if everyone I owed favours to were to call them at once I would be busier than the Pope at Easter.)

So, I always feel indebted to my mates and to those people who have been eager to help me out.

Good karma

That’s why, when a friendly, bearded fellow from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) came calling last week to ask me to spare 90 minutes of my precious time for a social trends study, how could I say no?

"It’s my duty," I explained to my husband when I asked if he could come home early to look after the kids while I completed the survey.

And, in my mind, it is. It is my duty because I am one of those people who uses ABS research on a weekly, if not daily, basis to lend credibility to my stories.

I am the one who is usually asking other people to give up their precious time to talk to me for the sake of public interest.

So, to my friends and interviewees, I say, "Thank you. Thank you."

To the bearded ABS man, I say, "Sure. I’ll help you out."

To karma, I say, "It’s nice doing business with you."

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Phillipa Fioretti: on writing competitions, sequels and the annoying adverb

2010-06-07T11:11:00.018+10:00

“I just wanted to scream!”

That’s how debut author, Phillipa Fioretti, recalls the moment a stranger called to say she had won a writing competition.

“It was terribly exciting because I didn’t really know if I was any good at writing or not, so being selected was a huge boost of confidence,” says Phillipa.

That was in 2008 and the competition was the Queensland Writers’ Centre/Hachette Manuscript Development Program.

Today, her romance novel, The Book of Love, can be found sitting at eye-level on the front shelves of many major bookstores.

“I never expected a contract,” Phillipa says, explaining that the program’s organisers stressed that from the eight writers selected to participate in the program, there was no guarantee any would earn a book contract.

But Phillipa and two others did.

As part of the program, Phillipa spent time learning about how the publishing industry operates and working with editors on her manuscript.

“They suggested changes to the manuscripts. Then the ones that they liked they took to an acquisition meeting and those that everyone liked got through,” she says.

A manuscript so good they wanted two

But Phillipa did more than just get through. The publishers at Hachette were so impressed with book number one that they offered her a two-book deal.

Although she had written The Book of Love as a stand-alone novel, she says it was fortuitous she liked the central characters - Lily and William - enough to spend more time with them developing the sequel.

But she admits it has been challenging.

“The couple’s relationship is at the core of the story, so I had to pull them apart and bring them back together to get that romantic tension that pushes the story along,” says Phillipa.

“It was a real challenge to do it. It’s been full of the usual despair and agony and there have been lots of highs and lows, but... I have learned a hell of a lot, and I think I’m there.”

Annoying adverbs and perplexing points of view

In the absence of any formal writing education, Phillipa has learnt the craft simply through being a voracious reader.

However, she admits to discovering many vital elements of good writing style from the program’s experts and her editors at Hachette.

“I don’t know what syntax and grammar means. I don’t know the formal rules of it. If you are a big reader, I don’t think it is necessary to know it all,” she says.

“But one thing that was really handy to know was point of view. My point of view was all over the place. In, say, two paragraphs, I’d jump from Lily’s point of view to the dog’s point of view, to William’s point of view without distinguishing who was talking."

Another tip she gleaned from the experts was the need to trim excess adverbs in the text.

“I can see why: it clutters the page and it’s too much. You're wading through the description and it doesn’t work,” she says.

Now, as Phillipa wades through the final stages of her sequel, she is already mentally preparing for her next book.

“I have a number of ideas that are in development. I would really love to do something different, still romantic comedy, but I want characters who are very different Lily and William.”

• The Book of Love is a tale of romance spiced up with ancient Roman erotica, theft, betrayal, retro fashions, the stylish back streets of Rome and a dog named Otto.

The Book of Love
By Phillipa Fioretti
Published by Hachette Australia
April 2010

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Pay day procedures for freelance journalists

2010-05-28T12:00:00.003+10:00

© Freud Dreamstime.com
In the freelance journalist's ideal world, editors would pay well and pay on time every time.

But there is no freelancing utopia and occasionally we minions are forgotten - accidentally or on purpose - on pay day.

There's no need to biff your notebook at the wall and resort to the job ads though, because there are things you can do to rectify the problem and prevent it happening in the future.

So, let's start with the basics.

$$ When to bring up the question of money $$

You wouldn’t roll up to a new job not knowing what rate of pay you had signed up for, yet it’s surprising how many new freelancers are prepared to work on a story without knowing what – or if - they will be paid when it is published.

I blame this on the gene that most freelancers seem to have inherited that results in palpitations and panic attacks at the mere mention of the words, 'Let's talk money.'

My solution? Drink a cup of harden up, take a deep breath and ask the editor up-front what the word rate, story rate or day rate is.

The appropriate time to bring up money is when the editor agrees to commission your work from your story pitch or is prepared to see your completed article on a speculative basis (meaning they will decide whether to commission you after reading the story).

It's simple really. Just say the magic words: ‘By the way, what is your word rate?’

If you consider the rate to be too low, you can try to negotiate or politely tell them to shove their coins back into the matchbox from which they came. I phrase it like this: ‘I respect that is your rate, however, it is just not viable for the time and effort I will need to put into it so I will have to withdraw my offer of the article for your publication.’

Other questions to ask the editor at this stage include:

* Do you pay on publication (meaning when the story is in print) or on acceptance (when the editor is happy with the final, edited version of the article but it hasn't yet gone to print)?

* Do you send out a recipient-generated invoice or do I send my own invoice?

* Is there a kill fee if the story doesn’t run?

* Is the final rate calculated on the words published or the words commissioned?

A word of warning here; a proactive student of mine kindly sent out a story on a speculative basis to an online editor before discussing money and only found out later that said editor had published the piece without her knowledge and without further discussion or payment.

So ensure that when you do send a story 'on spec', you make it clear to the editor you are allowing them to view your article on a speculative basis and that it is not a press release or a yarn that you are offering free of charge.

$$ What rate can you expect? $$

The reality, these days, is that more and more start-up publishers are hoping to get copy for free.

While traditional publishing houses such as metropolitan and regional newspapers, consumer magazines and trade publications pay a reasonable fee for content (45c to $1per word), some blogs, online magazines and local newspapers simply don’t have freelance budgets at all.

So it is important to talk money early on so you can decide if the publication is the right one for you.

Of course, you may be prepared to write a few articles for free to establish a portfolio or make contacts, or to take a mixture of low and high-paying gigs depending on job or personal satisfaction. It's entirely up to you to decide what is reasonable remuneration and what isn't.

One thing to note is that the rates of pay can vary dramatically depending on the company and the work you are employed to do (i.e. feature articles, corporate writing, copywriting, proof-reading, sub-editing, etc).

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) currently recommends a 'freelance rate' of 89 cents per word, but in my experience most publications don't pay this much and the ones that do generally ask for more in return such as extensive research or worldwide copyright.

$$ Time to invoice $$

When the story is ready to be put on the page - i.e. the editor is happy with it and is sending it to the sub-editors for final proofing - it's time to invoice.

Don’t invoice before the editor is finished negotiating the state of the final copy with you, but also don’t leave it for months afterwards to get your invoice out.

I typically invoice the same day the editor says they are happy with the final version.

Now I’ve said it before in this blog but I will say it again, be organised. Create a simple spreadsheet that enables you to keep track of the stories commissioned, completed, paid and outstanding.

You will already know if the editor pays on acceptance or publication so write down the date you expect to be paid (eg, four weeks from date of publication or acceptance) and set yourself a reminder to chase up the payment if it doesn't arrive by then.

$$ Managing slow payments and bad debts $$

Occasionally payments are late. When they are, it's up to you to be proactive in chasing them.

If a payment doesn’t arrive when you expect it to, call the editor and ask them who it is in human resources you need to speak to.

Most editors will happily chase late payments for you, but some will refer you on to the relevant bean counter.

The important thing is to be persistent (call every week if you have to) and to have your records (date of commission, word count, date of publication, date of invoice) up-to-date and at the ready.

If the money just doesn't arrive there are a few strategies I recommend.

Firstly, if you are a member of the union (MEAA), ask them to advocate on your behalf.

Experienced Sydney freelance journalist Fran Molloy once joined forces with another contributor to chase an editor who had more excuses than money.

“We joined forces, kept in touch with each other and let the editor know we were both concerned,” Fran says.

“Eventually we contacted the union and after a long process they helped put pressure on the publisher and we both recovered our money.”

If you feel it is worth increasing the pressure further, you can send a 'letter of demand'.

The Arts Law Centre of Australia has some great tips on how to go about this, helpful contacts and a 'letter of demand' template.

Alternatively, employ a debt collection agency to do the footwork for you.

$$ Prevention $$

As soon as I catch a whiff that an editor has a lax payment policy I implement procedures to reduce my risk of doing unpaid work.

If I trust them to a certain extent, I will continue to work for them but will not agree to further commissions until any outstanding invoices are paid. It’s amazing how many editors will suddenly remember to pay you when they want something else done.

If I don't trust them at all, I pressure them for the outstanding payments and then graciously refuse to accept any further work from them.

Also, I tend to only take on commissions from reputable or well-established publishers.

I don’t work for start-ups or unknown entities, but if I were to do so I would seriously consider changing my policy and asking for 50% payment up-front.

On a positive note, it will be reassuring to you to know that in ten years I have never once had an editor refuse to pay or had to write-off a bad debt.

Related articles

The business of freelance writing
Money management for freelance writers
Going for the kill on fees

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Author and illustrator Jo Oliver talks about picture books and publishers

2010-05-19T07:21:00.004+10:00

As a children's librarian, Sydney author Jo Oliver has the inside scoop on what children want from a picture book.

"It needs to read well... and flow well with the match of the pictures and the words. The cover is (also) important, I don't think you can get away from that," she says.

It is little surprise then that Jo's second book, Tatiara, meets both these requirements.

As both author and illustrator, Jo knows what it takes to create a book that is informative and inspiring.

In Jo's story about a young girl forced to wear a back brace who befriends an injured seal, readers are taken on a journey of healing and hope.

In today's podcast, Jo offers hope to many aspiring writers by discussing both the writing and publishing process.

Listen to Jo's full interview, or use the index below to navigate to the sections you are keen to hear Jo discuss.

Download podcast: Interview with Jo Oliver
(Duration 11:33. Size 6.7MB)

1. Many people say that getting a picture book right – the right pace, a great story in few words – is difficult. How did you find the process? 00:00

2. You also illustrated this book. Tell us, how long does it from start to finish to create a picture book? 01:28

3. Getting published in this highly competitive genre in Australia can be a struggle. Tell us your publishing story. 03:46

4. What are the benefits of a smaller, independent publisher over a large one? 07:00

5. As a children’s librarian, what have you learned about authorship through your job as someone at the frontline – so to speak - dealing with parents and children. 08:11

6. What makes a book ‘read well’? 10:20

Tatiara
By Jo Oliver
Published by New Frontier

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Make freelance writing fun

2010-05-14T07:00:00.001+10:00

"You make learning fun."

Two people have said this to me in the past two weeks and I reckon it's a darn good rap. (Oh, would you look at that, my head is swelling!)

After all, you don't want people saying, "You know what Pam, you make education boring," or "coma-inducing", or "painful", or "more frustrating than sitting through 10 consecutive episodes of Big Brother: sober."

The first person to say it to me was my evaluator at a speech contest - that I won (I had to get that in here somewhere so I could show off my trophy up above) - which was run by my local toastmasters club.

The second person was one of my enthusiastic students from my latest feature writing course at the Sydney Writers' Centre.

Writing should be fun

'Having fun' is something I have always encouraged in freelance writers.

When we're regularly writing articles for newspapers and magazines we can run the risk of taking ourselves, our topics and life too seriously.

So, whenever it is appropriate (i.e. a cancer story is no laughing matter, neither is seeing Australia's Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in his budgie smugglers on prime-time television), have a little fun with your stories.

Here's how:

* Use quirky or interesting metaphors and motifs in your stories.

* Always look for a light-hearted angle to your story and, if there is one, use it.

* Inject humour and lightheartedness into your interviews so that your subject relaxes and responds in kind.

* Consider your target audience and use witticisms and puns that are relevant to them.

* Use your writing tools - alliteration, hyperbole, idioms, rhetorical questions - to spice up your stories.

* Above all, look beyond the deadlines and the sometimes dreary articles you have to write and see the job of a freelance writer for what it is - ripper fun and bloody interesting!

When you can inject a little lightness, fun and humour into your stories, you will make the task of passing on information to your readers fun.

So, go on, get waggish and witty.

Related articles

* Writing a feature is like going on a first date... it's about connecting
* What makes a story well-written?
* Forget reality TV. Try reality instead

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Ideas and style with best-selling author Melina Marchetta

2010-05-07T12:03:00.002+10:00

Well known Australian author Melina Marchetta talks to Pamela Wilson in today's podcast about her new novel The Piper's Son and also discusses many aspects of her writing style.

Listen to Melina discuss:
* how the story of The Piper's Son came about and the internal struggle she overcame to write this story;
* the importance of voice in creating a true portrayal of characters;
* drawing parallels between a character's world and reality to bring authenticity to a story;
* how to 'show' the reader a character's inner turmoil instead of 'telling' them.

The Piper's Son is a tale of personal struggle and family bonds that follows the lives of Thomas Mackee and his aunt Georgie.

Tom's story picks up from Melina's best-seller Saving Francesca.

Listen to Melina's full interview, or use the index below to navigate to the sections you are keen to hear Melina discuss.

Download podcast: Interview with Melina Marchetta
(Duration 20:16. Size 11.5MB)

1. How is the Piper’s Son doing now that it has been out for two months? 00:00

2. Why do you think it is doing so well? Is it because it is a sequel to Saving Francesca and readers want to pick up where the story left off or because your work is now quite well-known? 01:01

3. You just mentioned that the fans of Saving Francesca , which was a young adult book, have now grown up and are in their twenties. Is that why this book is in the adult fiction genre and not the young adult category, because it has moved with the fan base? 03:11

4. How did Tom's and Georgie's stories come about? 06:05

5. I wanted to talk to you about your writing style. Firstly, I notice that when you include background information in your stories, you pepper it in in little increments instead of devoting whole chapters, or sections of chapters to it. What is the advantage of doing it this way? 09:25

6. When reading the background and personal information in this story, it also becomes clear that your characters experience a lot of inner turmoil. How can an author best show inner turmoil in a character? Is it about pace, or showing and not telling? 11:56

7. That brings me to voice. This story is written in the third person and in the present tense. Why is that and how do you know what the best voice for a story is? 15:22

The Piper's Son
By Melina Marchetta
Published by Penguin Australia March 2010

Melina's other titles are Saving Francesca, Finnikin of the Rock and On the Jellicoe Road.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy the following articles and podcasts:
* On writing, with young adult author Julia Lawrinson
* Author Helene Young's perfect pace
* Sonya Hartnett breaks all the rules

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

What I learnt at Pam Peters's grammar school

2010-04-23T09:45:00.004+10:00

I am sure that by high school social classification standards, I would be considered a bookish geek. Hell, maybe even by junior primary standards.

Do you know how I know this? Because when I booked my place at the NSW Society of Editors advanced grammar course a few weeks ago, I marked the date in my calendar with pink highlighter and heart stickers. I won’t mince words here—I was excited! I was off to grammar school.

Now, as a journalist and editor with 20 years experience, I pride myself on having an understanding of grammar that my grade 12 English teacher would be proud of. I know the difference between fore, four and for; I cringe at a greengrocer’s apostrophe (pumpkin’s for sale); I know when to use an em dash; and I love colons (or ‘two pricks’ as Caroline Taggart and J.A. Wines call them in their grammar guide, My Grammar and I).

I believe that with something is as fluid as grammar, though, we need to upskill regularly to ensure we evolve with it.

I also took the course because I wanted to gain confidence in knowing how and when to break the rules. (Besides, I've always been in awe of linguistic experts and figure that if I hang around them long enough some of their wisdom might rub off on me.)

Pam Peters, Emeritus Professor at Macquarie University and author of numerous English usage guides, including the Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage, was the expert I was going to hang out with at grammar school.

Over almost six hours, she navigated us through the complexities of verb morphology, interjections, determiners, syntax, lexical cohesion, proximity agreement and so much more. (I now pepper these words throughout my social interactions to give the illusion of brilliance. It’s dazzling, I’m sure.)

Sure, at the end of the day I was ready for a mind-stilling glass of chardonnay, but I left grammar school having achieved exactly what I had set out to do. I had a better idea of when it was okay to break the rules of grammar and I had more of an idea of the shifts currently guiding today’s English usage.

So, here’s a little of what I learnt. (These are my personal interpretations.)

Be true to the style you are writing in

Because different audiences require different writing styles, a blanket approach to grammar and punctuation doesn't work.

If you are writing a document for a government department, business folk from the top end of town or someone who feels capital punishment is appropriate for writers who begin sentences with ‘And’, you’d be wise to follow conservative grammatical conventions.

However, if you are writing for youth or for an audience in a specific region, a formal structure may jar with them and they may feel as if you are talking to someone other than them.

For example, the spoken word and written word often don't complement one another, so if you want your work to encapsulate a more spoken style you will need to factor this in.

A spoken style might dictate that you use gotten instead of got or learnt instead of learned because they sound more natural in speech. Meanwhile, sentence fragments or one-word sentences—‘Whatever.’—may sit comfortably in the text and get the message across well.

To cater to audiences of a certain region, you may need to think about the words you choose. An American audience, for example, will be accustomed to: He left soccer practice early so he could start practicing for his music exam.

In Australia, our preference is that the noun remains as practice, but the verb becomes practising.

Here are some tips to help you better portray your preferred style:

• Ask yourself how it sounds. Is it likely to jar with the audience, or
does it sound natural? If it sounds right, consider leaving it in.

• Is the word or the element of your style that has you perplexed
becoming common usage, or is it common to the region you are writing for? If
it is then great, if not then maybe it is worth a re-think.

Breaking rules

The two main grammatical 'agreements' are formal and notional.

In grammar hierarchy, formal agreement is king. Basically, it rules with an iron fist saying that verbs must ‘agree’ with their singular or plural subjects.

The following example was discussed in class.

The office looks shut. The offices look shut.

Self-explanatory, I hear you say. But then in comes the Queen, notional agreement, who admonishes the King for being too rigid. According to her, it is quite acceptable and common these days to say:

England are all out for 101.

The Style Manual gives another example:

The police have been alerted.

"Here, the plural verb is based on the notion that the word ‘police’ refers to many officers of the law, even though the word is singular in form. This is notional agreement rather than formal agreement.”

So, the two main things I gleaned from Pam’s session on agreements were: A, I now had a name under which to search when I came across singular/plural subject/verb quandaries; and, B, although the formal agreement is always correct, it can sometimes stop the flow of a sentence and sound less comfortable than a notional agreement.

Look for accepted changes

As I mentioned, grammar is an evolving beast. For example, it is becoming increasingly common for nouns to be used as verbs.

She diarises on a daily basis. The boy was stretchered inside very quickly.

It is worth noting that many dictionaries are slow to catch on to these shifts, so it’s worth updating them occasionally.

You’re the author, take charge

Stand your ground with editors—if you know what you are talking about.

If you know your audience implicitly and know what will work for them and what won’t, don’t be scared to put your reasoning forward articulately so that your voice is retained in the story.

If, however, you’re still not sure of the difference between to/too/two and you think txting is the grt new way 2 rite BTW, remember that grammar rules are there for a reason—to get your point across succinctly and easily—and that you need to understand the rules before you can successfully bend them.

The apostrophe's extra job

In Pam's class, I raised the conundrum of illustrating 'dos and don’ts' clearly in text. After all, I wouldn't want people thinking I am discussing computer operating systems when I'm talking about the dos and don'ts of matching fashion accessories.

However, as one of my classmates pointed out, apostrophes are just tools to replace missing letters or indicate possessive, so I wouldn't use one to make dos (do's) clearer.

But what if the apostrophe could be used as what Pam Peters called an ‘auxiliary device’ to distinguish between the stem of the word and the inflection.

If we gave the apostrophe that extra job then surely it would make do’s and don’ts a little less ambiguous. It would also help in this instance: 'There are too many s’s in Sassi’s name.'

I’m hoping that the apostrophe as an auxiliary device gathers momentum, but until it does I still feel that I have little choice but to stick with the ambiguous, yet formally correct, ‘dos and don’ts’.

What if you are really stuck?

Back away. Get out of there. Run for your life!

If you’re really in a grammatical bind, one approach is that of avoidance. Scrap the sentence in question and start again to avoid the problem. (Unless you enjoy a challenge, that is.)

After attending grammar school with Pam Peters, I find I now enjoy grammatical dilemmas even more because I do see them as challenges to conquer rather than annoyances to avoid.

The one comment Pam made that had the most impact on me was a line she wrote on the handouts she gave us in class.

When I read this one sentence I finally realised that while it was right to respect the rules of grammar, it was also okay to fiddle with them when appropriate.

I now have the words stuck on a post-it note covered with pink highlighter and hearts on my computer monitor: 'Not all grammar is cut and dried, right and wrong, but imbued with points of variability to explore.'

Related articles
Ain't got good grammar?

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Author Fiona McIntosh - from apprentice to authority

2010-04-12T11:13:00.018+10:00

Photo Anne Stropin, 2010
After publishing 20 books over four genres, Adelaide author Fiona McIntosh feels she now knows her craft so intimately she can write in any genre. She talks to Pamela Wilson about writing for different genres, knowing when your 'apprenticeship’ is complete and researching publishers.

If you can write in one genre, you can write in any, believes Fiona McIntosh.

“I don’t want to make it sound like it’s a very simple task, but it is not learning how to cut into someone’s brain,” she says.

“If you are (a storyteller) then the writing can be learned whether it’s a thriller, a children’s story, a great big romance.”

Fiona is one author who has learned how to pen a tale in many genres. Her latest book, Fields of Gold - a historical fiction saga - is quite a leap from her books in the fantasy, crime and children’s categories.

She believes that no matter what tale a writer is telling, the elements of story arc, pace, characterisation, voice, etc, are the same, but it is how well they understand the genre they are writing in.

According to Fiona, some of the vital elements of certain genres that a writer should understand include:

Historical fiction

“I think it is accuracy and detail of the period. You have to get that right,” she says.

“If I can’t evoke a period properly I have lost my reader before they have begun. It is all about the research for the historical stuff.”

Crime

“It’s knowing how to lead your reader. It’s a sleight of hand... but the clues are all there. I know what great crime feels like when I am reading it."

Using Michael Robotham’s latest book, Bleed for Me, as an example of great crime, she says ‘it is seamless writing’.

“You really care about these characters. You are forgetting about concentrating for clues, you are just swept away with the characters.”

Fantasy

"It comes down to having a fantastic set of lead characters because they have to last for three books. Fantasy writers write three books to one story,” she says.

“They are doing heroic stuff... and achieving massive, against-the-odds human struggle. It is swashbuckling and swords and galloping into danger and those sorts of things I can’t do in historical fiction. In historical fiction, you have to make it feel a lot more real.”

Completing the writing apprenticeship

If Fields of Gold is anything to go by, it would seem that Fiona certainly has a firm grasp of what makes a good historical fiction.

According to the king of sagas, Bryce Courtenay, Fields of Gold is a ‘blockbuster of a book that you won’t want to put down’.

From the first few pages of this tale of two men from different backgrounds who find themselves chasing a single dream in southern India, readers are drawn into an era when the world was a very different place. (Read a synopsis here.)

But Fiona admits that because of the intimately personal nature of this story, it was a long time in coming.

“The one book I always wanted to write was this one. But when I found the courage to write my first manuscript I knew in my heart I wasn’t ready to tackle this particular subject,” she says.

“It was very close my heart because it was going to be sort of plumbing the stories of my own family, but I just didn’t feel I had the right skills.”

Fiona had to complete what she terms her ‘apprenticeship’ and learn the authorship skills pacing, dialogue, tension, research, etc, before she could tackle Fields of Gold.

After writing 19 books in numerous genres, she was ready.

“There was no lack of faith in myself in actually writing a story. I was wondering where I was going to get all this information sourced from, but I wasn’t lacking in confidence for writing the story,” she says.

Finding the right publisher

Sourcing material for the story is not the only research she recommends when it comes to getting published.

She believes that while most new writers will send their manuscripts to numerous publishers in the hope that someone – anyone - will like their book, there is merit in investigating the choices available.

“When you are just setting out, me included, you’d pay a publisher to pay you. It’s a whole different mindset when you have established yourself. I run this as a business, so when I am going into a new genre... I think, ‘Who is my best business partner for this?’” she explains.

Researching the right publisher involves:

• Looking at how well a publisher promotes other writers.

• Talking to other writers about their experiences. (If you don’t know any published authors call your state writers’ centre and talk to them. See links to writers’ centres in the WriteSmart sidebar.)

• Ask yourself if you want a big publishing house or an independent publisher.

Possibly the main element to consider, though, is who else they publish.

“To me that is number one. Are they publishing my favourite writers... and how do I fit in amongst the stable of writers they publish?,” she says.

One thing is for certain for Fiona, though, she fits snugly into the career of a writer.

Fields of Gold
By Fiona McIntosh
Published by Penguin Australia
March 2010

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/

Money management for freelance writers

2010-03-26T11:01:00.012+11:00

Dianne Hill, Robert Peake and facilitator Emily Chantiri

As a freelance writer, do you manage your cash flow well?
Do you know what tax deductions you are entitled to claim?
Is your superannuation sorted?
Do you have income protection and if not, should you?
What about GST; do you know if and when you should be charging it?

These were just some of the questions raised at this week’s speaker event held by the Sydney Freelance Journalists’ Group.

On hand to answer the questions were our two well-informed and articulate experts:

Dianne Hill: company director and management consultant with a background in chartered accounting, banking and project management, and also the co-author of the book, The Money Club.

Robert Peake: long-time partner of Herkess & Partners Chartered Accountants with a long list of clients who are individuals and small businesses.

I have broken down the 80-minute panel discussion into five shorter segments, covering the main points that were raised.

Section 1
The pros and cons of setting up yourself as a business or a sole trader.

Download podcast
(Duration 2:45. Size 2.5MB)

Section 2
How freelance writers can best manage cash flow and the common mistakes freelancers make with regards to cash flow. This section also covered the various tax deductions that freelancers are entitled to claim.

Dianne also offered some tips to managing cash flow.

a) Have online access to your bank account and regularly monitor you incoming and outgoing funds.
b) Prepare a cash flow forecast, either on a weekly or monthly basis. This forecast should include:
- where your income is derived from;
- when it will be paid;
- the opening balance for each period and estimates of incoming and outgoing funds.
c) Compare your estimates to actual cash flow according to your online bank statements. This allows you to better forecast and plan for ups and downs.

Download podcast
(Duration 3:56. Size 3.7MB)

Section 3
When to charge GST and when not to.

Download podcast
(Duration 4:49. Size 3.3MB)

Section 4
Understanding the different types of superannuation products available.

Download podcast
(Duration 5:45. Size 3.3MB)

Section 5
Assessing your need for income protection, how to pick the better products and how to lower your premiums.

Download podcast
(Duration 2:42. Size 2.5MB)

For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/