Chloe Daykin (Children's Author): The Journey of an Author

In this episode, Claire speaks with Chloe Daykin a teacher, award-winning writer and children’s author. Chloe begins by explaining her journey of attending art school, becoming an artist and creating pop-up books. After becoming a mother, Chloe decided she wanted to follow her childhood dream of becoming a writer and set out to do just that. Chloe began writing and sending out short stories and playscripts in order to help her receive a bursary for a MA at Newcastle University. She was successful in attaining the bursary and completed her qualification. After receiving her postgraduate, Chloe began writing a children’s book, a young adult’s book and an adult’s book to help understand her target market and the text type she would like to explore further. She decided to complete the children’s book and shortly after writing the story, she met with her agent and began receiving offers from various publishers. In the podcast, Chloe speaks about her journey as a writer and author. She openly speaks about her three published books and how she generated the ideas for each story. Similarly, she talks about the concepts and experiences that inspire her to write, as well as, the risks she takes when writing. Chloe touches upon the editing process and how this is incorporated when publishing a book. Moreover, she makes direct links of how her books can be used within the classroom, in addition to why they should be used. KEY TAKEAWAYS Generating ideasIn addition to using her own creative mind, Chloe uses her day-to-day and life experiences to stimulate ideas for new texts. She begins with an image in her head and uses that to write the words for the text. She uses the image as her anchor and if the words don’t match the image she knows she has diverted from her original idea.   Risk takingChloe is confident enough to take risks when writing. She will allow herself to make facts up but will cross-check and validate them before publishing. This is done during the editing process. Editing processThe editing process varies from book to book and author to author. Parts of the text may be amended, reversed or removed. Subsequently, this affects the content and flow of the text and it may result to a sudden shift or alteration of the storyline. Links to the curriculumFire Girl, Forest boy – links to themes of rainforest, conservation, biomes, deforestation and any other big environmental themes. It also links to cultural themes of South America. Fish Boy – plastic in the ocean, plants and animals, life under the sea and extinction. It also links to PSHE topics of bullying, friendship, trust and being honest and open. The Boy Who Hit Ploy – links to self-discovery and identity, Using the books in the classroomFire Girl, Forest Boy – dual narrative, fast-paced, has a gripping story, talks about big environmental issues, beautifully written, exotic, set in an exciting place, includes adventure and mystery. Pulls everyone along and it can be covered in short sections. BEST MOMENTS “I love reading children’s books, so children’s and young adults books was kind of my thing.” “They are all so different…the latest ones is quite fast-paced, quirky, original and quite unusual but quite beautifully written that’s a very important part of it. They can be quite a lyrical, poetic quality to the writing. In terms of content, somebody described it as magic meets modernity.” “With the poetry ethic it comes quite naturally. It has to flow and if I think too hard about it, it doesn’t flow through. It has to come quite instantly.” “Reading other people’s book, meeting people, travelling and imaging. Being an artist first, I always have an image in my head before I start writing a book. I come up with that and the words come from there. I know if it’s gone off slightly, if I come back to the image and it doesn’t quite fit.” “I just wanted to really show people the world really and go ‘do you know what, come with me, read a book.” You don’t get to chose when you are a kid but you can through reading.” “Not yet, that’s next on my list. I would love to do a children’s play with some really cool songs in it and [it] just [be] really fun.” “[Schools] invite me down, I travel down and do the school assembly in the afternoon. Then the next day, I do a few workshops, working in different classes, particularly because ‘Fire Girl, Forest Boy’ really fits in with a lot of themes in the curriculum. We do really cool workshops, where we make pop-up books and we pretend we go on this big journey of discover to the rainforest and then we create museums of discovery books, where we invent magical objects that we find. Then we do writing where we unleash the power of the magical objects.” “I like getting ways of people writing where they don’t really notice that they are doing it. So they are so wrapped up and excited it about that it just flows and we are not thinking about spelling or different words and we are living it in the minute and do some really exciting, powerful work.” “I don’t think anyone uses the word ‘fun’. It’s not a fun period… it’s hard, it’s challenging. Sometimes it’s exciting challenging because you get to write new bits that go in and generally that’s what it is for me. I generally react quite shocked…so it’s often extra going in rather than cutting bits out.” “It’s about who it’s important to be important to. It’s really about search for identity, so in the times of YouTube and kids thinking it’s important to be popular with millions of people, this is about who it’s important to be important to. In it [the book] he’s kind of thinking do I want millions of fans on this or actually is it more important to be really close to my dad. Discovering who your family is and that can you be people who are outside of your immediate family and building your own families up. “We are all a mixed bag.” “A lot of my chapters are broken down into short little chunks to make it kind of accessible and fun.” “They’re [her children] very good, really good critics and very helpful. They don’t hold back on telling you what they think, which is great because you need to know. I like read it aloud to them and we axe loads bits.” “Michael Rosen; funny, poetic, great he’s a really lovely guy.” VALUABLE RESOURCES Faber and Faber: https://www.faber.co.uk/author/chloe-daykin/Fire Girl, Forest Boy: https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571349432-fire-girl-forest-boy.htmlThe Boy Who Hit Ploy: https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571326785-the-boy-who-hit-play.htmlFish Boy: https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571326761-fish-boy.htmlChloe Daykin’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/chloedaykin?lang=enReading Rocks North Conference: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/heather-wright-reading-rocks-10957775228The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/ LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/ ABOUT THE HOSTClaire Riley Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide. Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff. Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend. The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.