The month of January for me has been a month on pause: time visiting family in the city, holidaying overseas, finding this year’s routine back home, and of course, cranking up the air conditioning and washing pool chlorine from my hair. Today I watched a video of people in the snow in New York, but outside my window I can hear the unmistakeable rumble of a much-needed summer storm. It’s just one more sign of how the Australian experience is different to that of our English-speaking friends in the Northern Hemisphere.

December 31, 2015 marked the last day of my “Australian authors only” challenge, but I’ve begun 2016 with three more Australian books. It’s not a self-imposed reading requirement anymore, and I do have several books in my “to read” pile that are from overseas. But it’s a sign of how positive my experience was: there was no sigh of relief, only a moment’s acknowledgment that years go fast, and maybe I don’t spend enough time in mine reading.

So without further ado, here’s what I learnt.

There are movements out there working hard to promote the work of quality Australian writers.
The 2015 challenge began as a random goal that I set for myself. I’d been looking at agent websites and found a few titles that caught my eye, and I realised that here I am, an Australian writer looking to break into the market, and I barely knew any Australian writers who weren’t on the HSC list somewhere. But as the challenge progressed and I started tweeting my reviews, I also began looking around for other recommendations of what to read next. I found #loveozYA, a wonderful movement that hasn’t given me a bad recommendation yet. I found Australian Women Writers, using the #aww2015 hashtag. I found many other teachers in the English Book Reviews for High School facebook group. I found other blogs like Bianca Hewes  and the Readings blog. If you like the feel of paper between your fingers better than the push of a button on an ereader, Dymocks bookstores now have a separate Australian Fiction section. All over the country, people are reading, loving, sharing, recommending, reviewing, blogging, tweeting, shelving and teaching. I just hadn’t taken enough time to notice.

Multicultural and diverse voices are a great strength of Australian literature.
Early on in the year, I joked about getting a map of Australia and pinning the locations that I had read about. We’re a big country, and I did metaphorically travel to every state or territory (except ACT, but I can just drive there). But our diversity doesn’t stop at the coastline. In 2015 I read books set in England, Iceland, America and the fictional Kingdom of Cello. I read about second-generation Lebanese-Australians, backpackers of every nationality, Indigenous Australians, many mixed-race characters and some whose physical appearance was never described. Protagonists ranged from seven to eighty-seven, and were from every socio-economic background. One character had a prosthetic leg, another had Asperger’s, another was mute. These books reflected the diversity that I see every day in the Australia I know, but more than that, they revealed to me so much of Australia that I haven’t yet experienced.  

Reviewing takes more time than you’d think.
It’s possible that I’m just slower than others – I certainly seem to read at a slower rate, and blog posts take me hours to write. But I also have a new appreciation for those who do review the piles of books they read each week. Whether self-published or traditionally published (or a hybrid), the one comment I keep hearing from my writer friends is that reviewing someone’s book is worth ten times as much to them as just buying it. There is a reason Amazon has had to crack down on “reviewers for hire” and false five star reviews. Word of mouth is a very powerful marketing tool, and the online review is a form of that. But I’m beginning to understand why it’s so hard to get people to leave their thoughts. It takes time. I used a sort of template for mine and they weren’t in depth critiques by any measure, but still, a set of 2 or 3 reviews would take up the time from when my kids fell asleep at night to when I did. That said, it’s worthwhile. I found many of these books on recommendation pages or other blogs, and I’m so glad I did. As I noted above, I’m not limiting myself to Aus-only this year, but I do think I will continue to make an effort with the reviewing. And I will appreciate other reviewers that little bit more.
 
In 2015 I also learnt:

• That I have a few more favourite writers.
• That I unashamedly love YA and am not “too old” for it
• That I like verse novels and should teach them more
• That I don’t read as much as I thought (or maybe all my time is spent reading for my critique group!)
• That without books, I don’t think I’d have much to tweet about.

 
List of Reviews
For those who missed reviews or are searching for one in particular, here’s a list of the books I posted about in 2015:

Middle grade
Intruder by Christine Bongers
 
Young Adult
Hate is Such a Strong Word by Sarah Ayoub
Zac & Mia by AJ Betts
Pieces of Sky by Trinity Doyle
Risk by Fleur Ferris
Brown Skin Blue by Belinda Jeffrey
The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl by Melissa Keil
The Cracks in the Kingdom by Jaclyn Moriarty
Friday Brown by Vikki Wakefield
Green Valentine by Lili Wilkinson
Wildlife by Fiona Wood
The Sky So Heavy by Claire Zorn
The Messenger by Markus Zusak
 
Adult
Floundering by Romy Ash
Lost and Found by Brook Davis
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
Free Falling by Nicola Moriarty
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simpson
 
Verse novels
Cinnamon Rain by Emma Cameron
Runaways by Sherryl Clark
 
Non-fiction
See Australia and Die by Wendy Lewis
Adam Spencer's Big Book of Numbers
 
Journals
Tincture Issue 9 (and while I’m reminding you all that literary journals are a great place to find a variety of quality short fiction, read issue 12!)

When a young writer wants to take the next step and publish their work or submit it to a contest, often the first person they will ask for advice is their English teacher. Unfortunately, unless that teacher also happens to be a writer, they may not know where to start either. I've compiled here a list of places that accept submissions from teenagers, but before I get to that, a few things to keep in mind (or tell your prospective writer):

"Previously Published"
This is very important to know if you intend to submit your work for publication: most magazines and journals do not take previously published material. If the submission guidelines say "first publication rights" or similar, it means that they will not accept work that has been published elsewhere, including work that has been self-published. Wattpad, tumblr, personal blogs and websites count as "previously published". If you want to submit your work later, do not post it on a public website or blog!

Rejections
Rejections are just part of the game. You can't be a writer without a thick skin, and there are countless stories of famous books that were rejected dozens of times before a publisher finally took a chance on them. Students should know not to feel discouraged by rejection letters, many of which might be a "form" letter that doesn't include feedback about their piece.

Response Times
Students who are used to getting their assignments back after a week or two may balk at common response times - a month is considered "fast" and some journals can take close to a year to send responses. It's worth warning in advance that it may take quite a long time to get even a simple "no thanks" email. Most (not all) of the markets on this list respond within 3-6 months.

"Simultaneous Submissions"
A simultaneous submission means that you've sent the same piece of writing to more than one place at the same time. It's a common practice, because of long response times, and many journals don't mind it so long as you tell them immediately if the piece is accepted somewhere else. Check individual submission guidelines to see if they allow simultaneous submissions. If your work is accepted at one of several places you submitted to, the polite practice is to immediately withdraw it from the other journals - don't send any "Journal X wants to take this story, would you like to make a counter-offer?" type emails; it is considered incredibly bad taste to have a piece accepted somewhere only to turn around and tell them they can't have it anymore.

A Note About Pay
Literary journals are mostly staffed by volunteers and unless they have a lot of paid subscribers, running costs tend to come from the editor's back pocket. This means that there are a number of quality journals out there that cannot afford to pay contributors, or only pay a token amount (e.g. $5). Higher pay does not necessarily mean more readers - things like government grants, fundraisers etc can impact pay rates on offer - but as a general rule, the higher the pay, the harder it is to get a piece accepted. Some journals also run competitions with prize money or offer additional pay to a "best of" each month or year. To my current knowledge (September 2015), none of the journals below charge a fee to submit work or enter competitions.

And with that, here's the list:
Voiceworks (http://www.voiceworksmag.com.au)
Voiceworks is a quarterly Australian literary journal that only accepts submissions from writers under the age of 25. It is exclusive to Australian writers and International Students who are currently studying in Australia. They accept fiction, non-fiction, poetry and art and pay $100 per piece.  Voiceworks is committed to helping young writers grow and they send specific feedback to every piece they receive.

Vine Leaves (http://www.vineleavesliteraryjournal.com)
Vine Leaves is an Australian based journal dedicated to the vignette, a short form of writing that differs from flash fiction in that its focus is on an element such as mood, character or setting, rather than plot. The journal has a "Blooming Vine Leaves" feature for writers aged 12-17. They pay $5 AUD per acceptance into the journal.

Spine Out (http://spineout.com.au/)
Spine Out is an Australian website aimed specifically at a YA audience (12+). All work published on Spine Out is from school students in Australia. They accept creative works of all kinds, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry, but also music videos, cartoons and short films. I was unable to find any back issues on their website and the most recent edition (as of September 2015) was from March. Contributors are not paid.

Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things (http://emberjournal.org/)
Ember is a US-based literary journal aimed at fostering a love of reading and writing in young people.  Their website states that they accept work for "all age groups" but strongly encourage work from writers aged 10 to 18 and writing for a middle-grade or young-adult audience. They accept poetry, short stories, flash fiction and creative non-fiction. Ember pays 2c per word or $20 per piece, whichever is more. It is published semi-annually. The majority of their responses are "personal" (i.e. with feedback).

One Teen Story (https://www.oneteenstory.com/)
One Teen Story is a US literary magazine that publishes one story per month. Of the twelve stories published in a year, four are from teen writers. They accept short stories between 2 500 and 4 000 words directed at a Young Adult audience (13+). They pay $500 but only accept one story a month, so competition is fierce.

Cicada (http://www.cicadamag.com)
Cicada is part of a "family" of US-based literary magazines aimed at different age groups, the best known of which is Cricket. Cicada is the Young Adult member of the family and takes submissions by writers aged 14 to adult. From time to time competitions are held specifically for young writers (i.e. adults over a certain age cannot enter), but it is unclear whether Australian writers are able to enter these. Pay varies, but their rates for general submissions are some of the highest I've seen. Cicada accepts non-fiction, fiction, poetry and comics.

Young Adult Review Network (http://yareview.net)
Another US-based journal, YARN is aimed at Young Adults 14 and up and accepts work from writers of all ages. They are looking for poetry, fiction, essays and interviews. YARN is published online and does not pay contributors.

Cast of Wonders (http://www.castofwonders.org)
A UK-based podcast website, Cast of Wonders targets a 13-17 year old audience and specifies in their submission guidelines that they are interested in work from younger writers. They pay £5 per story, which they then post as an audio reading in 20-30 minute "episodes". They are seeking writing between 3000-4500 words in length but do accept shorter works and work up to 7500 words.

Other journals that do not specifically request young writers, but have been known to publish them:

• 50 Word Stories (http://fiftywordstories.com) - a collection of stories written in exactly fifty words.
• Inscription (http://www.inscriptionmagazine.com/) - a fantasy/sci-fi young adult magazine
• Smokelong Quarterly (http://www.smokelong.com) - a weekly online journal for flash fiction up to 1000 words
• Rattle (www.rattle.com) - a poetry journal 
• The Adroit Journal (http://www.theadroitjournal.org) - a fiction, poetry and art journal that also runs an annual competition for high school and university students

When I enrolled in my Masters at university, I was a little frustrated by how prescriptive it was. I wanted to be a novelist, after all, but I was also required to write poetry, take a subject dedicated to blogging (turns out that was useful, thanks Ben!) and one for scriptwriting. If it hadn’t been a requirement of my degree, I would never have picked scriptwriting, because writing for film didn’t interest me. As it turns out, there’s a lot of gold in the scriptwriting world. Here are five things I learnt that can be easily applied to short stories and novels.

#1 It’s about the audience

As my study guide from that time so delicately states: 
An audience doesn't care about your pain and your suffering. They care about their own. They are human beings after all. Your pain and suffering is only useful to an audience to the extent that it can assist them in addressing their own pain and suffering. Unfortunately, taking the particular pain of one person, especially when the writer is so close to the subject matter, and turning it into a universal statement that speaks to countless people is a hard act to pull off.

There are forms of writing where it is about you (e.g. memoir), but generally speaking, you need to think about what the audience will enjoy and how you can make your ideas interesting to them. This does NOT mean you should jump on the bandwagon of whatever form or genre is popular right now. It just means that your primary purpose is to entertain, not to lecture. No one cares about your opinion until you can prove it in a good story. So, write what you know, but your experiences and interests are just a starting point.  You need characters we can relate to, emotional experiences, and universal themes. 

#2 Plan. Lots.

Before I was even allowed to start writing my script, I had to present a premise, a plot outline, a breakdown of how my story followed The Hero’s Journey, answers to questions about my story, and a scene-by-scene summary. At the time, this annoyed me. In hindsight, it saved me a lot of editing. 

There’s an ongoing argument in the writing community about “plotters vs pantsers” and ultimately, if you spend an appropriate time editing it probably doesn’t matter too much. But if you can look at your plot outline and ensure that you have logical progressions of events, motivated characters, tension that gradually builds to breaking point etc then you’re less likely to write yourself into a scene you can’t get out of or produce a story where nothing happens. 

The planning process isn’t just about knowing where you are going. It’s about identifying problems with structure, contradictions in how your imaginary world works or how your characters behave, and ensuring that you have a complete story arc and character arc.

We tend to teach school students to “plan” by giving them character profiles and having them think about the different elements of storytelling, like setting. This isn’t really a plan. I’ve posted before about using goal, stakes and obstacles as a simple way to decide what your story will be about. From there, I think it’s very useful to develop a dot point outline of what will happen in each scene of your story, then share those outlines with one another for feedback. 

#3 Premise is everything

Premise, theme, moral, message. Lajos Egri popularised "premise" but it doesn’t really matter what word you use. The point is, a story needs a purpose. What are you trying to prove? Why should your audience care? What universal theme do you explore that gets their interest and helps them to empathise with your main character?

There’s a formula for premise that looks like this:
Value ascendant over its opposite value for a reason.

That’s a mouthful, right? To write your own premise, fill in these blanks: ___________ is better than (or defeats) _________ because ______________. In the first two spaces, you want two values that contradict each other. Good and evil. Love and hate. Honesty and corruption. The “good” value doesn’t always have to be the one that wins, but readers tend to like stories where our moral code is reinforced.

Egri lists a number of possible premises in the first chapter of his book, The Art of Dramatic Writing. If you’re struggling to come up with an idea of what to write, have a look through them and think about a story that might prove each of those lessons. If you already have an idea, answer the questions: what opposing forces are battling one another in your story? What lesson do you readers learn?

#4 Flaws don’t just make a character interesting; they’re essential to their arc.

We like characters with flaws. They’re more relatable, more human. This is a well-established fact and you’ve probably already been told to let your characters fail sometimes or give them a trait that isn’t as appealing. You need to balance this with qualities that make them likeable; otherwise people won’t care what happens to them.

But it goes further than that. The flaws that you give your character should exist for a reason, they should impact his/her story, and they should be addressed by the end. In scriptwriting, everything had a formula. The formula for character arc was this:

Act One – There is a flawed Hero who sets out to achieve something
Act Two – The Hero’s flaw gets the Hero into trouble and stops the Hero from achieving their goal. Ultimately, the flaw gets the Hero into fatal trouble and the Hero is forced to address the flaw
Act Three – The Hero overcomes the flaw, freeing him/her to pursue his/her goal

Notice how it is the flaw that gets the Hero into trouble and the Hero cannot achieve their goal until the flaw has been overcome. “Fatal” trouble can be taken more metaphorically, but the idea is that it has to hurt. A lot. It should be impossible to move forward without facing the truth and some kind of self-improvement.

#5 Drama happens in positive and negative shifts

If you go back to your premise, you should be able to identify the two values that are “battling it out” in your story. A one-sided battle is boring and usually it’s finished quickly. Of course your reader is going to want – even expect – a particular outcome, but getting there is the fun part. 


Maintaining tension is a game of “almosts”. You want your character to almost win, but not quite. The you want them to almost lose, but not quite. Harry Potter didn’t destroy Voldemort in the first book, but he stopped Voldemort from getting the stone, and that was enough to keep a generation reading through the sequels. Harry almost died in the battle, which also helps. 

Look at your plot outline and see where the power shifts. If your premise is about proving that good is greater than evil (because ________), then there should be alternating beats where good is winning, evil is winning, good is winning again. If you think about your character’s goal, it should look like they will achieve it, then that they will fail, then that they might achieve it again. And of course, to generate tension, the stakes can be getting higher each time, the battles should be getting harder, and the time can be running out.


As a rule, writers hate rules, and of course there are always exceptions. But I’ve found these 5 principles to be good rules – the kind that give you something to work with, rather than constraining you. I hope you find them helpful.