So You Want to be a Writer?
Allison Tait and Valerie Khoo enjoy a successful writing, teaching and podcasting partnership despite rarely meeting.
This photo was taken on one of the rare occasions when Valerie Khoo and I were actually in the same room. Not only in the same room, but having just hatched a plan to co-author our book, ‘So You Want To Be A Writer (How to get started while you still have a day job)’.
It’s a totally natural pic, taken by Australian Writers’ Centre team member Rah Gardiner, to mark that moment. The caption I shared on it that afternoon: “Watch out… we are conspiring.”
It might seem crazy to listeners of our weekly podcast ‘So You Want To Be A Writer’, but Val and I hardly ever see each other. We met when we shared a small, windowless, airless room in the offices of a national women’s magazine, and, since then, our careers in the writing and publishing industry have taken very different paths.
Val is now CEO of the Australian Writers’ Centre, with campuses in four capital cities and online, and more than 50,000+ student enrollments over the centre’s history, while I am the author of two epic adventure series for middle-grade readers, The Mapmaker Chronicles and the Ateban Cipher, wrangling writing, family life and ever-increasing commitments to the children’s literature community.
It’s those two different paths, with the wealth of experience that they taught each of us, that informs a lot of the discussion and information we share through our weekly podcast (which we record via Skype, with Val in Sydney and me on the south coast of NSW).
And it’s the many, many questions that we are each asked over and over that made us decide to distill that experience and information, along with advice and tips gleaned from interviews with 200+ authors, into our first co-authored book.
‘So You Want To Be A Writer (How to get started while you still have a day job)’ was published in June 2019, about a year after this photo was taken. We had spent the day brainstorming the content for our book and dividing it up into sections for each of us to write. We knew that we wanted ours to be a motivating, inspiring and useful guide about how to be a writer, and we knew that it was just the right kind of book for us to write. I think you can see how happy and excited we were!
People ask us if we found it difficult to write together, but the truth is that Val and I have known each other so long that we understand how to work together. We divided up the chapters based on our areas of expertise and we agreed on our ‘voice’, which is really just the conversational and friendly voice we have on our podcast. When you have a lot of experience in writing for different publications, picking up on a uniform voice becomes second nature.
Now that the book is out and being incredibly well received, we look back on that brainstorming day and have just one question for each other:
“Why didn’t we do this sooner?!”
You can find out more about So You Want To Be A Writer, the book, here, and So You Want To Be A Writer, the podcast, here. Connect with Allison Tait on her website, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
Allison Tait, also known as A.L. Tait, is the internationally published, bestselling author of two epic, middle-grade adventure series: The Mapmaker Chronicles and the Ateban Cipher. She’s also a creative writing teacher and in-demand speaker, for which she has a raft of authorial blazers. Allison and Valerie Khoo host the popular weekly ‘So You Want To Be A Writer?’ podcast launched in 2014 which recently hit over a million downloads. This post was first published in August 2019.