Authors as performers.

As you may have noticed I've recently seen three children's authors at the Imagine festival, Francesca Simon, Cressida Cowell and Andy Stanton.
Although it's common now for writers to speak at schools, back in my day (the land of long ago yore) we never saw a real life author ( they were allowed to stay tucked away writing funnily enough,) so this was my first experience of seeing authors live.

I have to say that they were all brilliant but very different in the way they interacted with the audience and the aspects they chose to talk about and it gave me some hope that one day if (and I know it's a big if) I was ever expected to go to an event like that I'd be able to find a way to do it.

Francesca Simon - author of Horrid Henry and The Sleeping Army - was very calm and assured. She chose to spend much of her time talking about how she writes, where she gets her ideas from and discussed her research into her new book in detail.

Cressida Cowell - author and illustrator of How To Train Your Dragon - was a bundle of enthusiasm and her presentation was themed very much at the children in the sudience. She shared amusing slides and stories of her childhood with us and was hugely popular with her audience.

Andy Stanton - author of Mr Gum - jumped around the stage, danced and played the harmonica in a marvellous performance aimed most definitely at the kids. He ran up and down the aisles, told jokes, messed about and generally made his audience roll about laughing.

I'm not entirely sure where I'd fit in among these - much would depend on the genre and age group you write for I imagine and of course on what you'd personally be comfortable doing on stage (my harmonica playing isn't up to much for a start!). What I did take away was that the fans, the children in the audiences were enraptured at the opportunity to see their favourite authors, very keen to ask questions and no doubt inspired by the whole affair.

I would hope that the authors took some fond feelings away with them and perhaps felt inspired to keep working and pleasing their fans who show such love for their stories.

It did strike me that these three authors were at the top of their game, they've written many books, sold all over the world and have a huge amount of fans and yet they're still expected to put in the hours promoting their work and still find time to write, edit and everything else a normal person has to do.

These are the things we must accept now and embrace, being an author now is not just about writing, editing etc you have to put work in to promote your book, have a presence on the internet and keep your fans and your publishers happy. It's a tall order and yet most aspiring authors would chew off their left arm just to have the opportunity. Besides I'm sure I could learn to type one handed??

Cressida Cowell - behind the story

Cressida Cowell is the author and illustrator of the very succesful "How to Train Your Dragon" series which recently spawned the very succesful animated movie of the same title.
I was lucky enough to see her speak at the Imagine festival at the South Bank Centre during half term. She bounded on to the stage with huge amounts of enthusiasm and spent the next hour entrancing her audience.
She started off by discussing the beginnings of her writing career at the young age of twelve. Dragged off to an uninhabited isle off the coast of Scotland for a two week camping holiday every year by her nature enthusiast father Cressida spent hours imagining the first inhabitants of the island - vikings - who had left some very small dwellings behind. She'd write many stories about vikings and dragons but never combined the two until much later.
She used slides to demonstrate how her imagination had been fired up by the creatures they would fish up from the sea - including a moray eel that attacked them in their boat, had to be dragged along behind them and then took her father half an hour to kill!
Cressida encouraged all the children to write their own stories and even brought along one of her first handcrafted creations to demonstrate that they don't have to be perfect. She suggested making plans or perhaps a map to start off with and told us each book she writes takes her about a year. She's been writing pretty much non stop since she started as her fans are always desperate for the next story.
Her next book - "How to Steal a Dragon's Jewel " is out in October (where we get to meet Valhalarama's dragon the silver phantom) and if you can't wait that long she has a story out for world book day in March called "Day of the Dreader" of which she read us a sneaky extract!

She answered many questions and discussed the dragonese language she created, Cressida is quite keen to write a whole dictionary!

Cressida was signing books after the talk and my son was thrilled to have a brief chat with her while she autographed a copy of his book. He asked her "if Alvin was ever going to die?" and she told him probably not! She also told us it had taken seven years for the film to get made but she was very pleased with the outcome.

I was also very happy to receive a special bag with the dragonese phrase "YUM YUM ON THE BUM!" written on the side from her very kind assistant!!

Cressida was a fabulous speaker and I'm sure her enthusiasm sparked off many budding authors!

I am off to see the author of "Mr Gum", Andy Stanton on Sunday so stay tuned for another author post soon!