Creative Writing
Facilitated by Mitch Stevens, Headmaster of Hogwash School of Writingcraft and Wondery
Because of technical difficulties, the first part of the Roundtable wasn’t recorded. To learn more about the Hogwash School of Writingcraft and Wondery, please visit http://www.
What is your advice for crowdfunding a project?
- When you meet someone who is potentially interested in your project, give him or her your elevator pitch. If that person is interested ask for an email address, or give your website address where he or she can go and subscribe to your email list.
- Build up an email list, even a year in advance. Then, you tell whoever is interested that when the project goes live, you will send him or her an email and ask that they go to your project and support it.
- Kickstarter works like a reverse bell curve: it’s all spikes at the start and all spikes at the end. So if you can blast hundreds or thousands of emails out as soon as you start the project, you’re going to get all that traction to that site, and your project will start to get backers, and all of that energy will lead to unpaid marketing/free impressions online.
- So essentially, if you’re considering crowdfunding, create a timeline for yourself and then think about when you want to launch your project and then work backwards from there. Then, figure out how many days, weeks, or months do you need to collect as many emails as you think you’ll need to reach your funding goal.
What tips do you have for those who want to publish children’s books?
- The biggest thing my company looks for is inspirational children’s books. It needs to have something that hits you emotionally, something that people connect with.
- A lot of people have clever ideas for their children’s book, but sometimes (although having a niche is good) sometimes the niche is so small that the book is never going to have longevity. It’s going to be hard to continually market that book. Find something not so niche, something pertinent to public discussion, and then do it in a way that emotionally connects with the reader’s soul.
- It’s important to have a clever book—the writing needs to be clever, the story needs to be solid, the illustrations need to be good—but just think about how big your idea can be! We don’t give ourselves enough credit for how good our ideas could be because we don’t go big enough. Pixar does this all the time: when you watch a Pixar film, you’re not just entertained, but you feel like you want to be a better person, to be changed That’s because of the emotional substance that their stories have.
- So, for a children’s book, try to approach it from a more emotional perspective. Why would a parent want to read this to their child? Why would I want to read it to my child? Solve that problem for the parent. You want the parent to have an enjoyable experience with their kid. Reading to a child is an intimate moment for a parent. It can be funny, witty, etc. but it needs to have that emotional perspective.
Where do you get the inspiration for your writing?
- For me, the things that connect with people are the things that I’ve overlooked in my own life as good writing material. Like any writer, I’ll try to think of that next groundbreaking idea that’ll blow people away, but coming back to those real human moments (e.g. funny stories from dad) is always a good place to start. A real human connection or human insight is going to connect with readers.
- When I try to invent a feeling out of thin air, there’s nothing to guide my story structure or writing because I’m sort of inventing it. Inventing is important, of course; the creative aspect of pulling things out of thin air is going to happen, but you need to know what the human element or human insight is from the beginning and, for me, that comes from my childhood.
What specific things are you looking for in Dreamling Books?
- We are very much looking for inspirational children’s books.
- We’ve teamed up with a bigger publisher out of Layton, Utah: Gibb-Smith. They publish baby literature and children’s literature and they’re looking to us to create some more nature-based and outdoor-based.
- Again, that flavor of inspiration to it is crucial because they want outdoor and nature but, for us, what’s crucial is to know that it’s going to affect people in a really positive way and make them want to follow their own dreams. Emotional, inspirational, nature-based—that’s what we are looking for right now.
Do you have any other tips on the writing process?
- Make sure you set time every day to write. Even if you don’t have a project, or aren’t working on something you know will be published, just sitting down and building that habit is the thing that leads to success (e.g. reading scriptures).
- If you want to be successful at writing and finish something, you’ve got to finish something! Don’t worry about it being perfect, don’t worry about understanding every aspect of the story arc, just tell a human story, and do it every day. Make it a habit. Then when the opportunity arises (you meet an agent, illustrator, or publisher who asks “Do you have any ideas?”) you have dozens of ideas ready to go.
- Writing is re-writing. It’s never good the first time. I’m embarrassed by a lot of things I’ve written. It’s always a process of writing and re-writing.
- Also, especially for children’s books, read your work out loud. By reading it out loud or having other people read it out loud, you’ll see right away where your writing doesn’t work. This is because a lot of the kids who will be seeing these books can’t read or are new to reading, so having something that audibly engages someone is huge for children’s books.
- Be honest with yourself if something you’ve written isn’t working. It’s always easy to fall in love with our own ideas, but without pleasing the audience, you won’t be a successful writer.
Do you have any tips on finding an agent or working with an agent?
- I think we all have in our minds this idea that to be a published author, you just have to get your manuscript on the right person’s desk and it’ll be a free train ride from there. That can happen, but that’s not very common, nor is it what publishers look for.
- The best way to get someone to invest in you is to show them that you’re willing to do it on your own first. Prove to people that you are a self-starter. So, write a book and get it printed, even if it’s just ten copies that you give to your family for Christmas (great gift idea!). Then, when you go to a publisher, you can say “Look at this thing I made, this is what I’m capable of and if given more resources I’ll make it that much better!” (this is a huge thing we try to accomplish at Hogwash).
- Finish something and showcase it so that you can hold it on a pedestal and, even if it’s not good, you can show people that you finished something and that you can make things, and that’s what agents and publishers are looking for.
- Agents and publishers don’t want to hold your hand. They want to find people who are already willing to go out and build a following.
- Another good idea is to build a blog; it shows that you’ve already got a following and that you can write stuff!
Any last-minute thoughts?
- I’m reading a book by Seth Godin called The Icarus Deception: How High will you Fly? It’s great because it tries to beat the fear out of you.
- Make art, make stories! That’s what the world needs more of: we need more human connection so that we can understand each other and get along better. I don’t think we need more lawyers, accountants, or doctors. We need people who can tell stories, who can make art, and who can connect from human to human.
- Don’t give up! Keep making your thing— whatever story you’re working on, whatever project you’re working on, and if you don’t have one start one!
- Build bridges between people with the human connection that art always portrays.