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Naomi Simmons Interview

Writewords talks to Naomi Simmons , writer for children and WriteWords site expert.

What’s your background? Can you give us a biog of your work?
I write books for children around the world to teach them English. I have just written 36 books for Chinese children. These teach English through fun stories, songs, poems and raps. It was really challenging to do as all the stories were set in China and had to be both relevant and funny for Chinese children. I then was really fortunate to get a wonderful commission. I composed and wrote 32 children’s songs which are currently being published by Macmillan in four CDs/book anthologies along with lots of poems, chants and raps. I have also written for teenagers and pre-school children.

How did you first get involved with writing for children?
I never planned to write for children! I was a struggling writer of adult short stories and magazine features. To make ends meet, I took a number of jobs in just about every area of the publishing industry, from editorial and production work through to sales and marketing. I worked in various parts of the world to make this happen. Due to my detailed knowledge of the markets, I soon found myself being asked to write and rewrite parts of books to get them to fit publishers’ expectations. I was then asked to ghost write quite a few educational fiction books. Seeing the success of my books being attributed to another author spurred me on to move forward as an author in my own right.

Who are your favourite writers/books and why?
I have two small kids so most of the children’s books I read are books that I read to them. My favourite kids’ author is Roald Dahl, and luckily my kids feel the same way or we’d have problems. Although they are not wonderfully written, we all love the Mr Men and Little Miss books. What all these have in common is that they celebrate the bizarre in everyday life, something that kids usually appreciate more than grown ups. As for grown up books, recently I have enjoyed books by Ian McEwan, Maggie O’Farrell and Esther Freud. As I’m usually exhausted by the evenings, unless a book seems to speak directly to my life now, I’m usually asleep before I’ve read the acknowledgement page. For this reason I tend to prefer to read women authors at the moment.

What excites you about writing- what keeps you interested?
I find the whole creative process incredibly exciting but my favourite bit is planning and mapping out a new project from scratch. I’ve been very lucky in that for the last few years I’ve got to write my own publishing briefs. Then the writing itself is always so unpredictable. It always takes on a life of itself, which is very motivating. There are real frustrations too, and most of them do not come from the writing process. The worst for me is when publishing goalposts keep moving, or commissioning editors or even publishing companies themselves change mid-project. The new editor or publisher may want something very different from what you had originally agreed or the project may even be axed mid flow!

What do you think are the most common mistakes new writers make?
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