Ōamaru is now home to 11 more published authors, thanks to indie writer Corina Douglas. (4-minute read)

Corina ran a 10-week course at the end of last year, for 10 to 17-year-olds, and finally held the published collection of short stories, Out the Window, in her hands last month.

The idea to run the course “popped” into her head a couple of years ago, and wouldn’t go away, she said.

“When I was growing up, or when I started writing, I always wished that I had someone that could show me how to do it by myself, because all you hear when you grow up is that to become an author is impossible - especially a published author,” she said.

An indie author is a writer who self-publishes their work and retains and controls their own publishing rights.

Corina writes adult fantasy based on Celtic mythology. She has penned the six-book Daughter of Winter series, which has also led to the birth of a new series based on The Morrigan - the Celtic Goddess of Death.

She was also driven to run the course to show children a different way of writing from what they learn in school. She has four children, and found their story writing “flat”. 

They needed to “unlearn” what they knew, and learn to write creatively.

“Because what they learn in school is very different . . . it’s just ticking off those standards they need to meet to pass,” she said.

The course was limited to 10, and Corina's youngest daughter also joined the group. The main prerequisite was the children had to be passionate about writing.

“They had to love story, like I did, because I grew up sometimes leaving my friends in the playground to go and write a story . . . or home time, I was writing a story.”

Corina taught the group creative writing using a five-milestone formula she, as a self-described “pantser”, used to loosely construct her writing.

“I’m actually quite unusual, I’ve found out through talking to people. There’s various levels of pantsing. So some of them might have a little bit of outlining, some might have quite a structured outline, and there’s others like me, who freeze up if there’s any type of outline. 

“So when I go to write, I’ll sit at my computer with maybe a scene in my mind that I’ve had hours to days before, and I’ll just pop in front of the computer, and then one to two hours later I’ll have no idea what I’ve written.

“So it’s not until I go back and do my self-edit, that I’ll figure out what my story is.” 

The first “milestone” of a story was the set-up, she said.

“The setting, main characters, the genre - some of them wrote dystopian - so they’d have to make sure the setting illustrated that it was dystopian, and then a little bit of history as to why that was.” 

The second milestone is the “inciting incident”. 

“That moment of change, where something happens where the main character has a decision of whether they take one path or the other.”

Milestones three and four are both called “the slap”.

“Three is called the first slap and four is what we call the second slap.

“As you’re going through the story, the character is gaining ground in whatever journey they’re on . . . The story goes up and down, but eventually it gets to a point where . . . something happens that means whatever ground the character made, drops back down to zero - so they’ve had a really big fall, or a slap that basically sends them straight back down.

“Then the story carries on, they try to make ground again, and the fourth milestone is the second slap, but the difference is, with this one, the second slap doesn’t take them down to ground zero, it gives them a tiny bit of hope.

“So it’s just above ground zero and then a route they can take, which leads to milestone five, which is the conclusion of the story.”

A requirement of the course was to produce a 3000-word-minimum story, which was then professionally edited by Corina. Most ended up between 4-5000 words, she said.

Out the Window - available online at the Amazon bookshop.

The book containing the stories was then formatted by her, a cover designer was hired, and it was eventually published and is for sale on Amazon.

“They also learned about what it was to be an indie author, so not just how to write the story, but also how to market it as well, and understand competition and keywords and categories and that kind of stuff.”

Members of the group each had to decide on privacy issues and if they were going to use their own name or a pen name. They had to sign a contract with Carina giving her the rights to publish their story.

“The contract also said any profits made will go to the public library.”

The children got to decide what they wrote about, and Corina said it was fascinating how dark a lot of the stories were. 

“Hence the dark cover, to be on genre,” she said.

“Some of the stories, I think, were influenced by the pandemic. Some of them, I can see, it’s their way of managing that trauma that the kids obviously feel a little bit of.”

The name Out the Window, was chosen because all the stories had a window being described, to tie them together.

The children were “super excited” at the start of the course, but then realised the enormity of what it meant to be an author, Corina said.

“Each session had a different focus as we progressed through, and one of them was on mindset because I knew this was going to happen . . . every author gets this, even those that are famous, they all freeze - and it’s called imposter syndrome.

“So I talked a lot about imposter syndrome, and how you have to manage that and also how to keep your creative brain alive. 

“A lot of them would get so far then stop and just not know what to do - or just be too scared to start.”

The quality was “interesting”, she said. 

Some of the children, who she had been told were amazing at English in school, needed the most help.

“Some of them had thought that writing a story meant using 10,000 adjectives in one line . . . or describing every single person and a setting, but not moving the story along. So three paragraphs later we’re still talking about the dad, the uncle the sister, the brother, what they’re wearing, what colour the hair is . . . I had to be kind but fair, because they needed to learn something . . . There were heaps of learning from that.”

Corina is keen to run the course again, but is working at the Waitaki District Council three days a week, has her four children to work around, and is still trying to write her own books, as well editing other work, so she is unsure of when she can fit it in. 

“It definitely won’t be as much work for me, because I’ve already gone through and done lots of plans. So I can do it again. And what the kids learned is totally transferable to adults.”

All the young authors purchased their own copies of Out the Window, which is on Amazon at the cheapest possible rate, so it can be easily purchased. 

“I’ve already warned the library, I don’t know if you’re going to get much money.”

The parents were all happy and impressed, and the children “learnt a shitload”, she said.

“They all freaked out quite a bit when they held their book in their hand, as I did. I remember having a little cry when I got my own first. You could just see that in their face.”