by Trisha Bleau Smith
T4JYM: Having now read and reviewed many of your books I have seen that God has truly blessed you with a talent for story telling. Where do you generally get ideas for your books? Knowing that every author is different how does the writing process work for you personally?
CM: Most of my ideas for books come when I am in one of two places. I often get ideas for books when looking through the children’s sections of secular bookstores. Don’t get me wrong – a lot of the secular material is simply wrong for Christians to adapt or be inspired by – but I often find that a lot of the simple, classic material that has been written well and produced to a quality standard simply gets me thinking – hmmm – What if we did something like that? Children like that story – can I use that format to share Jesus Christ with them? The other place I get hit by ideas is in church. I can often be singing a line from a Psalm or listening to some illustration or verse of scripture during the service and an idea will hit me. The music I listen to will also inspire me – especially psalm singing, gospel music, and folk. I find I am inspired by the culture I grew up in – which is strongly Christian and Celtic.
What I tend to do when writing is take a notebook and pen and hand write the very basic outline of the book – perhaps a paragraph or two summing up the main points of each chapter – and then the first two chapters in more detail. I sometimes have a line of yellow post-it notes several feet long stretching from my desk across the filing cabinet and onto my door. This again is another hand written memory aid to what my thoughts and inspiration have been. Not very tidy, but it does the job. I then have something in hard copy that I can turn back to if a disaster happens – such as a computer crash. But post it notes generally don’t survive other disasters – so I don’t know what I would do if there was a flood. But after all the scribbles and post it notes have been done I turn to the laptop and I type everything – straight from my head onto the machine. I always find this easier.
But I also find that I do need to be in the right mood for writing. This is a bit of a nuisance. I don’t write well if there is a T. V. going in the background or if there is a girl friend around to chat with or if there is a pile of laundry to do. I need to cut myself off a bit, make sure there is nothing else that needs doing, and stock up on cans of soup, bread rolls, tea, bananas and a little chocolate. I need to start writing in a tidy house – because by the end of it – it’s a “burruch” – old Gaelic word for incredible mess.
T4JYM: How much editing is usually involved? Do you do it all alone or do you send it to people to edit? How many times do you usually re-edit your works?
CM: I do a lot of editorial to my work before it arrives on the editor’s desk. Someone told me once that writing is rewriting and I have taken that on board. Ideally I like to have all the material written and then to have a break from it for a month or so before going back to it – re-reading it and changing accordingly. It is difficult to say exactly how many times I re-edit material – I will perhaps do one big re-edit but generally it is something I do all the time that I am writing.
At the moment my situation is quite unique. I was writing for Christian Focus Publications before I became their children’s editor. So now I am in a position where I am doing some publishing tasks on my own material such as cover design, page layout etc. However, when it comes to the time to put my material under an editor’s eye I send my own stuff out of house. It makes more sense to do it that way.
And just in case you think that as an author and children’s editor I get all my material published – that isn’t the case. There is an editorial team here who make the decisions and I have had material rejected too.
Balancing both the writing and editorial careers is tricky – but I find that seeing things from both perspectives is helpful. Particularly as a writer I now have a clearer idea of what a publisher needs and what I as a writer have to work towards. I have a clearer picture of the market, of what the sales team requires and all the different aspects of the whole process.
T4JYM: How did you get hooked up with Christian Focus Publications? Do you have books published through other publishers? How do you go about getting your works published?
CM: Well, there’s quite a bit to say here. I’ll answer the second question first – No I don’t have material published by other publishers although I am open to suggestions if any come my way. I have had articles published but these are just in church newsletters usually. So back to Christian Focus Publications: I think the reason for my loyalty to this firm will come out in the next paragraph or so. I have actually grown up with the business. The company though no longer a family business as it employs many people outside the original family structure still has a strong family connection. My parents are still involved in the day to day running of the company, my mother still writes, they both travel around the world on business linked to Christian Focus Publications. A cousin works on the adult side of the publishing company and both my sisters and another cousin have been involved in proofreading and other editorial tasks out of house. My parents originally founded Christian Focus Publications when we were just starting primary school. They saw a real need for bible stories and Christian material for children that told the real biblical story and not a fictionalized version of it. The bible storybooks that they had bought for my sisters and myself didn’t match their high standards. Very few publishers were publishing children’s material then that gave both a biblically accurate account of the scripture story or that actually applied it to the child’s life – focusing on their need of personal salvation. So that was what drove my parents to taking over a theological publishing house called Christian Focus Publications. Three ministers had started it and when my parents bought it over with the help of other members of the family – it was then that they introduced children’s publishing to the equation. Things took a while to get off the ground. There were lessons to be learned by the mistakes that were made but eventually the business got on its feet and in a few years it wasn’t just English books we were producing – but co-editions in almost all the major European languages.
My first memory of publishing as a part of our family life is at eight years old traveling to the Frankfurt Bookfair and living in a caravan just beside the flooding Rhine with my parents and little sisters. There is a photo of us kids outside the caravan with water an inch away from the tops of our boots. And then a few months later a journalist turned up at our house to interview my mother who had just had her children’s bible stories: Bible Time – translated into over twelve different languages. He took a photo of us and my grandmother framed it. On it you can see my mother reading to my two sisters and me. My two little sisters are perched elegantly on the sofa whereas I am slouching in the corner, legs sprawling, school uniform looking a bit unkempt. Over the years – nothing much has changed. I still don’t take a good photo :-). Through the 1980s as the company grew I did summer jobs where I packed books, typed letters, and did an assortment of odd jobs for various people. One job that I did for a week during the summer was to phone up all the outlying bookshops in the Highlands of Scotland and Western Isles to tell them about the new books. I had a great time chatting to some lovely Christians who really appreciated the fact that someone had taken the time to phone them up.
But the company was changing again from being a Christian company with a strong Scottish influence to a Christian company from Scotland with a strong international base. Over the last decade or so we have seen the sales in America increasing steadily and our presence in countries such as Australia and South Africa as well as Europe has increased considerably.
It was towards the end of the 1990s that my relationship with Christian Focus Publications changed from one of the managing director’s daughter to someone who was taking an active role in her own right. After I left college, which incidentally was a course in Publishing, I took on various freelance jobs for the company in between temping jobs for local companies. At the same time I was asked by my father to try and write a children’s biography on Richard Wurmbrand. Weeks after having had my manuscript accepted at Christian Focus Publications I was offered a job as an editor for Scripture Union Publishing in Milton Keynes in England. It was the ideal opening for me as there was no opportunity for full time work at CFP. I continued writing for them though in my spare time. The Wurmbrand manuscript was completed during my first year at Scripture Union and during my second year I began work on a manuscript on Hudson Taylor. It was a huge surprise to me therefore to find at the end of the second year in my new job that the children’s editor at CFP was planning to move on. It was something we had never expected and it meant that there was a crucial gap in the company that needed to be filled quickly. The Frankfurt Bookfair was five weeks away and they needed to fill the post immediately. I was the obvious choice – and as I sat down after I got the phone call asking me to come back to work for them I was amazed at how things had worked out. I was ready for a new challenge. They needed a children’s editor. I had been working with an excellent selection of children’s writers and artists at Scripture Union.
All this meant that I wasn’t coming to work at CFP as someone’s child – but as someone with qualifications, experience and contacts. It is really cool how God works these things out.
T4JYM: Who have been your biggest influences in life? Who have been your biggest influences in your life as a writer?
CM: Spiritually speaking and over all the greatest influence in my life has been the Lord Jesus Christ. It is great to see his hand at work in my life – controlling, correcting, encouraging, developing me. If I had been left to myself I would be an arrogant, bitter, sinner. If I had been left to others, I would have been an arrogant, bitter and broken, sinner. In neither situation would I have been saved. Both situations would have been destruction. But Christ the deep love in my life continues to bring me up sharp, show me my faults. Victor Hugo has a quote somewhere that God loves us despite of ourselves. I have experienced that.
Humanly speaking it is hard to know who are the biggest influences. I am pretty certain my parents are high up the list but I am also certain that there are others who I will never know of until I breath my last breath and go home. I know that throughout the generations there have been Christians in my family praying for the children yet unborn. For example there is one man who I never remember ever speaking to me. But he grew potatoes out the back and smoked a tobacco pipe. He stands there in my memory as a strong, silent witness. There is no sound, very little action – just a quiet certainty on my part that my grandfather was a praying man. And that is a legacy that can never be measured.
But out of the list of the people I have known and touched, spoken and listened to my parents have had the strongest influence. My mum, who is a writer, definitely inspired me to do that – but more importantly she and Dad inspired a life long love of books and most importantly of all they brought me up to love and respect the Lord Jesus Christ. As a child I was a bit sickly and often had to have antibiotics to tackle ear infections that I was plagued with. The one problem was that I absolutely detested that medicine. It tasted of sickly sweet cherries and was a bright lurid pink colour. I have never liked the colour pink as a result – and refuse to wear it. So every time that I had to take that medicine my mother had a fight on her hands. I was the typical little red head – and would scream and stamp my foot. I could be kind and placid all day, a veritable saint all week, until I had to take that medicine. (Perhaps the saint is a bit of an exaggeration?) Anyway one evening my father came home from work to the usual medicine temper tantrum. Now comes my first memory of a book. He took a lovely little bible storybook out of his briefcase and showed it to me. It was about Gideon and had pictures all the way through it. I wanted that book. I really did. “You’ll get the book if you take the medicine.” I looked at the medicine and made a face. “Oh well then, if you don’t want it.” He made a move to put the book back in his case. That did it – I opened wide and swallowed. I got my book. And this about sums up my life in a funny way. Books have always been important to me.
My sisters liked stories but not to the same extent that I did. They were keen at sports and hockey – If I could have done it I would have run a mile to avoid the athletics track. My parents once bought me an ornament of a little girl on her way to bed carrying a pile of books almost as big as herself. The pile of books on my bedside table was like the Great Wall of China or perhaps a better description is the Leaning Tower of Pisa. When my sisters would be sent to bed early I would go too because I wanted to read my book.
However, throughout my life I have had a whole host of influences and heroes both real and fictional: Jane Eyre, Gladys Aylward, Anne of Green Gables, Mary Slessor, Laura Ingles Wilder, Brother Andrew, C.S. Lewis. And then three sisters: Dolly Mackenzie, Meg Byres and Annie Macangus. You won’t have heard of the last three. Dolly Mackenzie was my granny. She evangelized me, and all her grandchildren – explosively though perhaps not always precisely aimed. Meg Byres – blind for as long as I had known her – she was a true woman of prayer. Steeped in scripture she was a spiritual powerhouse. Annie Macangus – the one who remained single, who loved children with a deep compassion and who when she was beginning to lose her mind made a point of getting out of her hospital bed and following her family out of the ward to make sure that they all knew that she loved them. “I want you to know that I love you.” They weren’t exactly her last words – but they are the last words I remember her saying to me. I aspire to be like each one of them in their own unique way – they all gave me the ability and the freedom to be me.
T4JYM: How has the fact that your mother is also a published writer affected your own writing?
CM: It has affected me in one simple way – she and my father focused from the beginning on the fact that these children’s books must be biblically accurate. Many times in the past I have been tempted to write something because it will write well, give the story more adventure impact or an attention grabbing line. My mother’s influence balances out my natural impulse to run with just my talent and excitement when writing biblical material. I must remember particularly when writing bible stories – that there is another author to consider – the author and finisher of our faith – the Lord Jesus Christ. The Word of God is my brief.
T4JYM: How are your books usually received by the general public? Do you hear positive feedback? Any negative feedback?
CM: I hardly ever get any feedback at all. I suppose I consider the sales of the material a good guideline and the fact that I do hear from the retailers that some people are looking for my next book. I have perhaps had a handful of responses from readers. Some people speak to me about how they have enjoyed a book – usually friends or family members. Sometimes I hear from further a field – about the young boy whose parents noticed a real change and new maturity in him and in his prayers after he had read about the life of Richard Wurmbrand. I hardly ever get what I would call negative feed back – but I do get suggestions for improvements that I take on board. None of that is negative in my opinion as it only goes to improve the material in the long run. Most of my biography titles will go for a reprint within two years if not one years time. That means that if there are changes that I want to be made to the manuscript I can suggest these in time for the reprint.
T4JYM: What are your next plans for writing? Do you plan to do any more books along the same lines as these books? Will you move on to new writing genres?
CM: I will always continue doing biography I hope. I enjoy the discipline of the Trailblazer series. But I have also started one or two fiction lines. There is a series of books called: Stories from Canterbury Place. I am just writing the third book in that series and I think the next one after that will be the last in that series. I am thinking about trying out some devotional material for a more adult market. I would like to write some good quality devotional material for the 14+ age range. One of my problems is that I get so many ideas for books that my mind can be in a bit of a fuddle with all of these ideas charging about in there. I have started a list of projects that I would like to write and if I keep a note of all these ideas hopefully things won’t get too out of hand. I would like to write more bible stories for children. I like what I did with the Hall of Fame books where I took the lesser-known characters of the bible. Writing something like that but perhaps in more detail would be interesting.
T4JYM: What is generally your target audience? Do you write specifically to children or have you written other books targeted at other audiences? How do you decide on what audience to focus your writing on?
CM: Someone told me once that we should always have a particular person in mind when writing a book i.e. the boy next door, the child at Sunday school, the teenage girl at youth group.
I find through no conscious effort on my part that I end up writing for the age range of child that I am most involved with at a particular time. Four years ago for instance I was spending a lot of time with my sister’s little girl – watching her beginning to bottom shuffle across the room – she never really could be bothered with crawling, then seeing her as she experienced the wonderful new adventurous world. I remember her opening a book with a bright yellow picture on it – her excitement lit the whole room. So three years ago I was writing quite a few more board books for toddlers than I am now. At the moment I seem to be focusing on 9+ – this just happens to be the age range of my Sunday school class. But I am also thinking about material for early readers as the little toddler is now at school and desperate to read books on her own. At the moment it has been purely children that I have focused on – but I may be writing one or two books for women in the next year or so.
T4JYM: What training do you have in writing? Did you take any writing courses in college to obtain the skills you have currently?
CM: Life has generally been my training – a life spent reading and reading and reading – classics, fiction, biography, Poetry, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller Plays, Neil Gunn, Tolkein, C.S.Lewis, Christina Rossetti, Ted Hughes.
People watching – another pastime of mine – has proved an invaluable training ground for writing. I did a publishing degree at college – but that did not include any creative writing.
The only course I did was a one off course run by a Christian group in Denmark. The classes were all done in English, thankfully – and the lecturer was Elizabeth Sherrill who was the ghostwriter for The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom and The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson. I found that week invaluable and if I could I would definitely try and do another course with her.
T4JYM: What advice would you give to someone who wants to pursue a career in writing?
CM: Read lots and read widely. Read the people who were and are extremely talented. Read those people who are talented but not necessarily Christian. Read those people who other people are reading – the kind of writers who you wish were Christian because they would have so much influence on our world today. Read, Read, Read, Read, Read and then write.
Recognize your strengths as a writer and your weaknesses. Don’t be ashamed to play to your strengths. Allow yourself to experiment – but don’t expect that your experiments are going to get you published. Doing something different is good for your creativity though. So go whacky once in a while.
Recognize and acknowledge other people’s strengths. If I have one problem with Christian writers it is that many think that because C.S. Lewis was a Christian every Christian writer should then write Christian fantasy in an allegorical style. Recognize the fact that C.S. Lewis was a literary genius; he had a lifetime of reading, research, lecturing, and studying behind him. He was an expert in medieval literature and mythology – and all that was before he became a Christian – and long before he wrote children’s books. If that is your calling however, don’t be put off – but be prepared for a long hard slog before you will ever be able to write anything that will reach the appropriate standard.
Recognize that as a Christian you are not bound to just writing Christian books – being the Salt and Light in the writing world can mean that you write good books, good adventure stories, activity books, fiction, poetry, recipes, science books etc. And then as a Christian witness to your colleagues – the editor, proofreader, publisher – in the same way that you would witness to your colleague if you worked in a supermarket or bank.
T4JYM: What advice would you give to someone interested in publishing their works?
CM: Read a publisher’s writers guidelines (a small but useful thing to do). Learn your market – find out what each Christian publisher is looking for before you send in your material. Gaps in the market can be there for one of two reasons –
- There may be a need for that material that nobody has thought of before.
- This is more likely – there’s a gap because there really is no need and if you try to fill that gap it will just drop straight down to the bottom. And lie there – going moldy.
Also – If you have an idea for a book, talk to several publishers before you go too far. Phoning is better than writing I think in this instance. You will get an immediate reaction hopefully and your letter won’t just be put to the bottom of a pile. But be prepared for a very brief call if the editor in question is busy. If they sound busy ask for their email address and communicate that way with them.
Remember that writing is not always about getting published. One woman spoke to me about writing a story simply so that she could tell her children the truth about her life. She had been neglected as a child and abused as a teenager and she knew that this had affected the lives of her husband and children. She couldn’t speak to them about it but she felt that if she wrote the story down this would work. Perhaps you have something you want to tell your daughter about her grandmother, about the great-uncle who died in the war, about that mistake you wish you’d never made. Perhaps you feel that you would do anything to make sure she doesn’t make the same mistake in the future. Tell her about it – write it out. Your written words will help illustrate your spoken word and your life. Writing is about communicating and communicating well to someone else. Something even as basic as a scrap book or journal can tell your family how much you loved them, where they have come from and help them on to where they are going. A record of this type can be part of a deep spiritual legacy to the next generation. Sharing your faith – when you cannot share it any more.
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