How a short writing course launched Lisa Shanahan’s career as an author

Author Lisa Shanahan spoke to us about how she got started as a writer. Lisa is author of a number of picture books including Gordon's Got a Snookie and The Postman's Dog. She has written her first young adult book and has just released My Big Birkett through Allen and Unwin.

In fact, the thing I love about Lisa’s background is that she did a short course in Writing Books for Children and had “a fabulous, life-changing experience” as a result.

Valerie: What’s the most challenging thing about writing children’s books?

Lisa: The most challenging thing about writing children’s books is doing it well. To find just the right combination of characters, the deep emotional impetus and then the words that sing off the page is so difficult. Sometimes after I’ve finished a picture book that feels like it has come together; I get this buzz in my body that lasts for days.

It’s highly addictive, for me the literary equivalent of heli-skiing down some impossibly high mountain. But there is always the realisation, that for every text that has come together, there have been probably at least four or five others that have skied right off the slope into the abyss.

Valerie: What inspired your recent book My Big Birkett and do you draw on the lives on your own children?

Lisa: ‘My Big Birkett,’ my first novel for teenagers, had it’s beginning in the jumble of emotions I felt in the late nineties when both my stepsister and my dad were diagnosed with cancer.

Although their story won’t be found in the novel, all the feelings from those years, the humour, the tenderness, the fear, the confusion, the doubt, the despair and the joy, are all woven up together and channeled into the story of this wry, self-possessed girl called Gemma who is trying to find her wings in her wacky, eccentric family and her feet in the world.

Even when my family directly inspires my stories, for example in my picture books ‘Daddy’s Having a Horse’ and ‘My Mum Tarzan’ - those stories in the end are never wholly about them.

Valerie: What would your advice be to aspiring children’s book writers on writing and getting published?

Lisa: My advice to aspiring children’s book writers is to pay close attention to what Kate Di Camillo, the American writer calls the ‘straw of everyday life, the fragrant, dusty and dried pieces of human existence’ that can somehow be turned into the gold of a story.

I’d advise them to persevere in the face of rejection; taking on board the criticism they receive, without letting it crush their hopes. Lastly I’d encourage them to find at least one person who believes in what they are doing – that one champion who can confirm when doubt comes stalking, that writing for children is a good thing!