Reading time: About 3 minutes
Rowena Rae says writers should never believe that everything they write will be publishable…
Rowena Rae writes both nonfiction and fiction for kids. Her nonfiction focuses on science, the environment, and health for middle-grade readers. Her most recent books are Why We Need Vaccines: How Humans Beat Infectious Diseases (2024) and Salmon: Swimming for Survival (2022). She also coauthors, with sister Elspeth Rae, the Meg and Greg series of phonics books that have decodable stories for kids aged 6 to 10 who are learning to read. Rowena lives and writes in her home on Vancouver Island, looking out at PKOLS, a beautiful mountain park just beyond her doorstep.
I was excited to talk to her about how she approaches writing.
Q. Roughly how much time do you spend writing every day?
On manuscripts for publication, from none to about five hours. On all sorts of other writing, many, many hours.
Q. What’s a simple activity or habit that makes you a better writer?
Simplistic as it sounds, writing makes me a better writer. Specifically, writing lots of different things, not just those I intend to try publishing. The practice of writing a journal, writing letters and cards, writing lunchbox notes, writing poetry (fun, but not my forte!), writing proposals, writing marketing materials, even writing for contract work. It’s all practice, and it all adds up to improving my writing skills.
Q. What interferes with your writing?
Oh, goodness. Lots of things distract me—contract work, home, garden, teenage kids, daily life—often in enjoyable ways. The only real interference to my writing comes from my nine-month-old kitty, Fig Newton. Her preferred method is to sit on top of my keyboard and watch the blinking cursor or string of random letters go shooting across the screen, line after line.
Q. How do you persuade yourself to sit down to write on days when you really, really DON’T feel like doing it?
Honestly, I don’t. I do something else: edit, prepare presentations, reply to the gazillion emails piling up in my inbox, send invoices, read, and so on. But most of the time, I find reading my previous day’s work out loud to myself makes me want to jump in and write more.
Q. Is there a particular motto or saying that you’ve found helpful for writing?
One of the people I’m inspired by is American science writer and biologist Rachel Carson. I love her writing so much that I wrote a biography of her, Rachel Carson and Ecology for Kids. As well as writing many science and nature articles, three books about the ocean, and her most known work, Silent Spring, Carson was a letter writer. In a letter discussing writing, she said, “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.” Keeping that in mind spurs me on to explore new writing ideas and feel confident in pitching some of them.
Q. Which stage of the writing process do you enjoy the most: researching, writing or editing/rewriting and why?
For my nonfiction writing, it’s a toss-up between the researching and the editing. Researching because I love learning new stuff and thinking about how it might fit into my narrative. Editing because I can release my editor-brain to romp through the text. For my fiction writing, it’s absolutely the story creation and writing that I love best. I do these along with my coauthor sister; we write together on the phone or in person, always with a shared document open and both of us yammering, writing, going off on tangents, laughing, and occasionally writing the exact same words at the exact same time. I suspect our shared writing benefits from the same synergy that made us an unbeatable Pictionary team as kids.
Q. What’s one of the best books you’ve read (either fiction or non) in the last five years?
A difficult question to answer! Here are three books that I’ve read or reread in the past few years, and love: Pax by Sara Pennypacker, The Moorchild by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, and A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh. They’re all middle grade or YA books.
Q. What book are you reading right now?
I’ve got dozens of books scattered about that I dip into frequently, and two main reads: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and The Internet of Animals by Martin Wikelski.
Q. What do you think is the biggest misperception that new writers have about the act of writing?
That the first things you write will be publishable. It can take a lot of practice to find your writing voice and style. With nonfiction, I started out with picture book manuscripts, and I wrote at least a dozen, maybe closer to two. I submitted most of them multiple times to agents and editors, but I never got more than a champagne rejection. It wasn’t until I shifted to writing for a middle grade audience that I began to find where my nonfiction writing fits. With our fiction, my sister and I started writing together in 2013, self-published our first book in 2017, and traditionally published in 2020. In the first four years, we wrote many stories that will never see the light of day (and that’s a good thing!).
