Posted on Friday?21st?August
Hello, my name is Lyn Gardner and I'm the author of Into the Woods and Out of the Woods. They are stories about three 'almost' orphans called Storm (who is just like her name), Aurora and Any.
I began writing Into the Woods in a creepy old house in the middle of a forest. I wrote it for my children who are called Ellie and Izzy and for their cousins. Every day I would write some of the story and then I would read it to the children that night. One of the things I've learned is that writing takes lots and lots of practise. So much so that often it makes you're hand hurt from holding the pen so tightly. Sometimes I write on a lap-top. While I was writing Into the Woods I used the B key on my laptop so much it stopped working, so I had to write sentences that didn't have a B. You should try it sometime, it's very, very difficult.
I get lots and lots of practice writing because I don't just write books but I also work as a journalist on a newspaper called The Guardian. I am a theatre critic on The Guardian and I write a review almost every day of a show I've been to see. I expect you know what a review is and you might have written some book reviews yourself.
If you want to be a writer, you really do have to practise. A lot of people like the idea of being a writer, but don't really want to have to do the writing. This may sound obvious, but to be a writer you have to actually write, and get your words on paper. You write a few words and they become a sentence and the sentence becomes a paragraph and the paragraph becomes a page. Sometimes it's very slow and painful, but often the more you do of it the easier it becomes. I loved writing Into the Woods. After a while there was no pain at all in writing, only pleasure. It was like watching a movie unfold in my head and I just had to write it down.
Where do I get ideas from? Like all good writers, I steal them. This doesn't mean that I copy down chunks of other people's books because that would be cheating, but it does mean that I use all the stories I read, the movies I see, the things I over-hear, even songs and poems as inspiration. I file them away in my head?and sometimes in a notebook?and them some point later I use them in a novel. I think that writing a novel is a bit like cooking. You get all the ingredients and you chuck them in the pot, stir it and season it a little, let it cook on a low heat and if you're lucky and your ingredients were good in the first place, you end up with something delicious. The best moments as a writer are when the story itself takes over and takes on a life of its own. That happened when I was writing Into the Woods. There were times when I was writing Into the Woods when I was surprised by where the characters took the story. It's a bit like magic.
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