Lyn tells us her formula for writing
Inspiring 30-plus-year career — she has published her 50th book
Lyn McConchie reckons she can find inspiration from anywhere. She was once asked, while giving a talk at a primary school, where she got her ideas from and she made up a story on the spot, taking inspiration from one of the children.
As writers often say, “everything is grist to my mill” and that’s pretty much McConchie’s philosophy too.
Her 30-plus-year career has culminated in the publication of her 50th book, but she’s not stopping there and doubts she’ll ever stop as long as she’s still able.
She still has a few awaiting decisions from publishers, including a post-apocalyptic novel set in Cornwall, England.
Like some of her others, she has included friends in one role or another and it’s something she gets a big kick out of.
Some of the inspiration for her stories has come from real life.
At the age of 17, she worked at a shirt and pyjama factory.
“We used this carbon tetrachloride and they were very careful with it because they said it’s lethal.”
That became part of the plot in one of the Sherlock Holmes books she’s written.
Another Sherlock Holmes novel she wrote included a fire she experienced.
It was 1969 and she was working as a cook at Sprott House, an old people’s home in Wellington.
“It caught fire in the early hours of the morning. At the height of the fire, I went in. It never occurred to me not to.”
She managed to get at least two people out, but seven died and it led to law changes. McConchie coauthored a book about the fire and some others in Wellington, called Where There’s Smoke, published in 2012.
Her website bio says she was in an accident in the 1970s which led to her being forced to retire in the late 1980s.
She bought a farm in Norsewood and the adventures of some of the animals made it into stories that were later published in a book.
Then some time later, she began writing a book set in the universe of a friend and fellow author, who passed it on to her agent.
That led to a collaboration with science fiction/fantasy author Andre Norton.
McConchie says the stories she writes come in one of two ways.
One is a book she’s thinking about as she writes.
“I’ll be writing about three and a half thousand words a day, 13-14,000 words in a week and I’ll plod through. I’m contemplating this, I’m contemplating that, there’s other things cropping up.”
She says this kind of writing is steady and slow.
Then she has the kind of story where it’s like an express “going downhill with no brakes”.
“I’ll have this idea, and a couple of days later something at the back of my head is busy hammering the hell out of the walls between conscious and subconscious saying ‘will you get on with this’.”
That can lead to a book being completed in five or six weeks.
She’s written a number of genres, from science fiction and fantasy to post-apocalyptic.
She has also written short stories set in the wild West, but with a weird spin on them. McConchie went to a writer’s festival in Feilding a few years ago and took about 30 of her books where she was asked: “Where do you find the publishers?”
“I said, ‘simple. I wrote the book I wanted to write, then I looked for a publisher who published that kind of thing’.
“You will be told a lot of stuff when you start writing. You’ll be told you have to go to a writing course. Don’t. You’ll be told you have to belong to a writer’s club. You don’t. You’ll be told that all the publisher wants is 49 books in a single series. That may be all one publisher wants. The others will be happy to look at 49 books in different things.” She says for those who want to send their works to publishers, don’t give up because one person doesn’t like it. “What you need to have is
determination and ferocious obstinacy. You’ll get rejected left, right and centre.”
There are a lot of writers whose works were rejected many times.
“You’ll be told to look at what the publisher publishes and write to that. Don’t. Look at what you want to write, and write to that, then look for a publisher that takes that kind of thing.
“What you’ve got to remember is editors and publishers are different too. What really gets one, the other one can take or leave.
“I’ve sold to publishers who sent me a lyrical couple of pages on how much they love this work. You can match it with half a dozen rejection letters basically saying this book is boring.
“Just because they’re saying this, doesn’t mean it’s true.”
McConchie has won several awards for her books, including the Sir Julius Vogel awards for science fiction and fantasy, which she has won six times, both for solo writing and collaborations.