Welcome to new writer diary
An informative and entertaining account of the ups and downs in the lives of new writers.
Whether you’re writing fact or fiction we hope you’ll like what you see. Thanks for having a look and good luck!
Blog
Expect handy tips, helpful suggestions and guest blogs. We’ll share links to a variety of information and advice on courses, competitions, finding literary agents and getting published. We’ll cover stories, synopses, treatments and scripts for books, films, podcasts and websites.
About
The new writer diary site is edited and published by Kim Brooke trading as Perceptive Words. With a twelve year career in UKTV Factual Entertainment Kim has a wealth of experience in factual writing but when she decided to start writing fiction there was a lot to learn.
Contact
We’d love to hear from you. Tell us your own anecdotes, hints and tips and we’ll make every effort to include them in our Blog Posts. Share your successes and even your disappointments. If you have managed to publish your first book send us a link and we’ll do a review.
How to get started as a new writer
As a freelancer used to short term contracts I’ve always found it difficult to fill the gaps with anything other than looking for my next job. As a creative person my head has always been full of ideas for stories but after jotting down the first few ideas they stayed in my ‘To Do’ pile for years.
This time, while searching the internet for jobs, two offers of free coaching sessions came to my attention. I signed up for a free online business coaching course, the first I’d ever signed up for in my life but was disappointed to find it consisted of nothing more than motivational therapy sessions. I thought they were going to actively help me find new contacts, job offers and opportunities that I didn’t know about. Wrong! I did the sessions anyway, over four weeks, as they were free. The first one started with breathing exercises and was all about ‘My Journey’, the second about my ‘Inner Tiger’ and the third about my ‘Road Map’. Hmmm. Definitely not what I expected.
The second course proved much more productive. The mission was to encourage me to actually put ‘pen to paper’ to start writing the stories that I had been thinking about for years and this was one-to-one coaching with a published writer. It started off well. On the first call my Writing Coach asked me what I wanted to write, who was it for and what particular age group. I admitted that I didn’t have the answers, I just wanted to write a children’s book. So my Writing Coach gave a me a few bits of information that would help me pinpoint my audience then suggested that I should write a synopsis of my children’s story and the first 100 words ready for the second session the following week. Okay, I thought, this is more like it…….
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Finding a Literary Agent for my New Book
I was feeling very pleased with myself for finishing the third draft of my first Children’s story. My grandson was five and my granddaughter was 20 months so I had imagined I was writing it for them. I could see their bedroom bookcase in my mind, full of picture books that I had read to them many times, so I decided I was writing a Children’s Picture Book.
Keeping to the Guidelines
Once I’d done some research on the target number of words required it had become easier to write the story. Having a limit made me edit as I went along and I was very conscientious about not going over a thousand words in the book, so I managed to make it 999 words long.
During my research I’d discovered the guidelines for Children’s Picture Books. They should be 32 pages long, with four for the covers and publication information, leaving 28 pages for the story.
I had spent about seven years thinking about writing my story and could see the characters clearly in my mind. I have a small artistic talent so decided to make a rough version of the book, just to see what it would look like.
I had written in rhyming couplets, as this style was a particular favourite of mine, and they fell easily into two or four lines per page. Soon I had a little mock-up book in front of me. I had literally cut and pasted the text onto the pages just like in the old days. I was enjoying myself.
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