How I Became an Author


So... Skye has challenged the blog hoppers to recall how we became authors.

It's a long time ago for me, because I've been writing stories ever since someone taught me to write. My sister Anne and I used to roam about the farm playing a game which was really on-the-spot story creation. I was surprised to learn, later, that the Bronte sisters did almost the same thing.

I was good at story writing in school, and when I was in Grade Four, our teacher told us we'd be writing books, the best three of which would be entered in a state-wide competition.

I worked painstakingly on my story...mainly in trying to get my handwriting legible enough to not get a "do this again" note from the teacher. I illustrated the story with photos which I enlisted my sister to help me stage. We went so far as to take one of our ponies in the river with a calf across his withers. Why stage photos (which had to be taken over a week before I needed to use them) instead of drawing the way my classmates did? Easy! My drawing skills were on a par with my handwriting skill... i.e. stalled at the stage of about seven years old. In adulthood I found out there was a word for this- I have a spacial-awareness disorder. And no, one never grows out of it. Nearly sixty years later, my drawing and handwriting still look like those of a mildly illiterate seven-year-old.

I handed in my story, complete with taped-in pictures and a large silver foil star on the front, and a few days later my teacher said mine was one of the three entrants from our school.

I won that state-wide competition. The prize, I seem to recall, was $21.00 

I entered the contest twice more until I aged out... coming second in the second year and first again in the third. Mum knew a woman who wrote for the NSW School Magazine. Sally Packett kindly gave us the address for submissions, and I sold the story that had placed second in 1970. By then I'd taught myself to type from the Pitman's Typing Manual.

As I moved into my teens I sold more stories. Our cousin, who lived on the mainland, worked for Rigby publishing company and he supplied us with another contact who read stories my sister and I had written. He told us that Hodder & Stoughton were  opening an Australian children's imprint, and eventually my sister and I each had books accepted for publication. Hers was The Gift-Wrapped Pony and mine, published a few years later, Her Kingdom for a Pony. She went on to produce four Guara books for Hodder, while my second one was rejected (but published by Young Publications). We both contributed books to the young teen imprint Knight Riders--A Night to Forget (my sister's) and The Room Upstairs (mine). I was invited by letter to submit a story for a Magpies imprint, and produced the linked stories Down River, Time Off and Winter-Spring Garden, as well as the three-book Rosina series for Hodder. The last of these was published in 1988 when I was 31. 

In the 1970s, I had three books and several stories published, and in the 1980s thirty-eight more books, many of them for educational publishers.

 So, that's how I became an author!


To read the other blog hoppers' takes on this topic, visit them at 

Skye Taylor

Victoria Chatham
Anne Stenhouse
Connie Vines
Diane Bator

Bob Rich

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