Rebecca Lim mentors young Early Harvest writers

How do award-winning authors get their start?

According to writer, illustrator, editor and lawyer Rebecca Lim, through years of writing bad poetry, unpublished novels and entering writing competitions.

But grit and determination pays. Today Rebecca Lim is the author of over 20 books, including the Astrologer’s Daughter (a Kirkus Best Book of 2015 and CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers). Her work has been shortlisted multiple times for the Aurealis Awards and Davitt Awards, and longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award.

It is this grit and determination, and her resolve to ensure that people like herself are reflected in the stories she saw on TV and in books, that makes Rebecca the perfect mentor for the diverse young writers in our 2020 Early Harvest program.

Read on for her insights on diverse stories, adventure writing and why children should trust their own thoughts and actions.

Why is it important to you to feature strong female characters from diverse backgrounds in your story?

I don’t have enough time and space to talk about why it’s important to foreground strong female characters from diverse backgrounds.

Published books in English still don’t have enough strong, non-stereotypical non-mainstream characters in them, let alone female ones! The impact of reading a novel like Bernadine Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ with 12 interconnected stories about black women living in England at different ages and stages, and identities, is so immense because books in English don’t, and never have, authentically portrayed the whole spectrum of human experience or humanity.

To be invisible, or misrepresented, in books and stories is incredibly damaging, and part of the reason people are continually screaming that ‘novels are dead’. If you get more validation and legitimacy from other forms of media, like television, film or theatre, why persist with an art form that denies or twists your experiences?

As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, women and girls still bear the brunt of unpaid domestic work, of financial and other abuses in the private sphere, of entrenched inequalities in the public sphere, and this is particularly so for women and girls from diverse backgrounds who often have less agency or control than their mainstream counterparts. To foreground strong, diverse female characters in my stories is to try to right, in some tiny way, the injustices intersectional women face, every single day. It’s me saying: I see you, feel for you, you aren’t alone.

What excited you about Early Harvest? Why did you want to get involved?

Early Harvest is trying to reach the kind of child I was in the late 1970s and 1980s. I loved reading, was desperate to be a writer and join the global conversation between readers and writers but unsure how to get started. I used to want to ‘write myself into the story’, the same way that a lot of the children that take part in Early Harvest are hoping to do as well.

Writing and reading and stories should be for everyone, every kind of human being there is. It shouldn’t matter what your background, circumstances or challenges are. Early Harvest is a powerful, democratising force in giving children the tools to find their voice and enter the conversation.

The theme of the 2020 Early Harvest book is ‘Adventure’. What are the three things that you would ask children to keep in mind when writing an ‘adventure’ story?

1. Fill it with strong characters (that can be just like you or the people you know) and a sense of pace and wonder, not filler, not tonnes of description that readers will want to skip over just to get back to the exciting bits of the story.

2. Don’t get lost in the woods – know how it starts and how it finishes, but in between just let yourself go ‘off road’ and see what happens.

3. Be true to you and your voice. Reaching out to children online over video, as we are doing this year, requires new ways to build engagement.

How are you approaching the process?

I’ve had to tell myself to speak a lot more slowly!

And I’m also focused on treating kids like human beings who get it. We don’t give our children enough autonomy or control over their own thought processes or actions. Especially in times of crisis like this, we need to trust that our children can process things and work things out for themselves. No one likes being talked down to or patronised. So I’m really keen to put the building blocks of writing out there for children to pick up, use and experiment with. It’s taken me years to articulate the process in short bites, so hopefully viewers will get some benefit out of what I’ve distilled from getting published.

We know the children will gain immensely to be mentored by you on creative writing. But what do you hope to learn from the experience of working with children?

I have three children of my own, all vastly different, and am privileged to work regularly with children from a wide array of backgrounds and lived experiences. What I always hope to get out of working with children is an interchange of ideas and energy. To keep learning and understanding and keep the wonder in every interaction, and in everything that I do. Children are wonder personified. So working with children is always tapping into wonder and new, fresh ways of seeing things.

Early Harvest is a dynamic program for upper-primary students that gives them an in-depth experience of the publishing process. Under the program, we bring together an editorial board of Year 5 and 6 students who publish an annual fiction publication written by their peers.

The Early Harvest 2020 publication will be launched in November 2020. You can view and buy all previous publications.