MEET THE AUTHOR

Wendy Orr is an award-winning author with 40 books for children, teenagers and adults Her books have been published in 29 languages and her Nim’s Island books were made into movies. We’re thrilled to be talking to Wendy about her latest book – Honey and the Valley of Horses.

From the publisher:

When Honey was four and her brother Rumi was a tiny baby, her family loaded up their converted ice-cream-van-camper and drove away from all they knew, as an illness swept the sad wide world. High in the mountains, they crossed a bridge to follow a mysterious herd of enchanted horses into a sheltered valley. The bridge and the track disappeared behind them – and now they are trapped in paradise.

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The magical horses are the stars of the book. Is Moongold based on a horse you’ve known?

He’s a combination of our family’s first horse, Biddy, who was an American quarter horse with a touch of Thoroughbred, and my father in law’s palomino Australian stock horse, Pancho. Biddy was over 12 when we got her; I was ten, my sister eight and my brother three, and she behaved differently with each of us, deciding just how much she had to look after us. So she was always completely trustworthy with my little brother, but once I’d learned to ride she’d test me quite a bit – and when we did a paper route for a while, she got bored with doing the same ride every day and started throwing me every time! Pancho was probably the best trained horse I’ve ever ridden, an absolute delight to ride though a very spirited stallion. He had a fantastically smooth gallop, which was as wonderful to watch as to ride, and when he was galloping loose in his paddock, loved to race towards something and stop dead or spin around just before he hit it.  And there’s a bit of my own horse Tala, who I got when I was fourteen. She was an enormous mostly Standardbred, who was quite neurotic and very flighty, but always tuned in to my moods and would be very affectionate and gentle if I was upset.

Honey’s family are living in a sort of paradise, but the catch is that they also face isolation and have to find their own way to survive. Was your storytelling influenced by Australia’s recent lockdowns?

Absolutely. Although we live in a rural area, we were classified as metropolitan Melbourne for the purpose of lockdowns, so it was very strict and long. My son and his wife and toddlers lived with us for the first year, but when they moved out they were more than 5 km away so for long periods we weren’t able to see them, or my daughter and her toddlers, who were on the other side of Melbourne. My parents and siblings were in Canada, and with the borders closed for so long I was very aware that I might never see my parents again – which in fact happened, as my dad became ill and died during 2021. So the isolation, the sense of not being able to see people we loved, and also the general fear and anxiety during this time were a crucial part of forming this book. The good thing is that it meant it was all the more important to create a fun and adventurous paradise for the family to escape to. It was certainly very important to me to escape to it while I was writing! And I hope that the reader will enjoy that escape too. We all need special places in our lives and our minds.

What did your editor think about you sending the editor in the book (Mum) off in an ice-cream van to the unfindable Valley of Horses?

She loved it! At first she was worried that no one would know what an editor does, so I hope I explained that during the book. But she loved escaping to the valley too, which made life easier for me.

Can you tell us a bit about what you’re working on next?

I have several things which range from already in a first draft, to an idea I’m quite excited about but don’t know very much about yet. All I can say right now is that I love thinking about how many thousands of people we’re all descended from. Each one of them had their own story – which is quite mindblowing when you think about it!

Do you have a tip for young writers who’d like to write stories with a touch of magic?

If you’re going to use a touch of magic, you need to have clues that something strange could happen, right from the start. It doesn’t need to be much: in Honey and the Valley of Horses I start with the sentence, ‘In the mountains there was a valley, and in the valley were the horses.’

The rhythm of that sentence suggests that this is a story-telling type of story, not a realistic ‘kids going to school’ type of story. Even saying, ‘the horses’ suggests something different than if I’d said, ‘There was a valley in the mountains, and lots of horses lived there.’ Those could be any horses, but saying ‘the horses’ suggests there’s something special.

Making up a world that has a bit of magic means that you can do anything you like – but it doesn’t mean that there are no rules. You need to work out what the rules are for your magic. In this book, the horses certainly have some kind of mysterious magic, and are stronger and faster than other horses – but they are still horses. For example, they can’t talk or fly. You could write it so they do talk or fly, but you would need to show that from the start, or if you didn’t want them to do it until the end, you could have a detail early in the story so that it made sense if they flew when they absolutely needed to. For example there might be a certain grass that people said would make horses fly if they ate it, or there might be old stories about a horse that flew, and people have noticed that this horse looks just like her ancestor, with the white snip above the left fetlock… Just some little hints.

Everything that isn’t magic has to make sense. Unless it’s part of the magic, water can’t run uphill, the sun rises in the east, people and animals need food, water and sleep…

Any touches of fantasy need to be significant for the story.  They need to show the reader something important about a character, whether good or bad; or about the place; or they need to move the plot along. If you have a scene you really want to write –  a purple sun that shines at night; birds standing still while dogs sing, whatever your imagination has built for you – you can use it as long as you work out why it belongs in the story. Working out the reason might take your story in a different direction, but that’s okay too.

If you roll all these tips into one, it would be, ‘Your story has to make sense right through. If magic is going to help resolve the problems, it needs to be hinted at from the beginning. And it should always be your character who actually solves the problem, whether it’s by being brave enough to dare to use a power, or by passing a test that makes a power appears, or by harnessing a power to do the right thing.  But definitely try to avoid having a realistic character in a difficult but realistic situation, when suddenly at the end of the story, Abracadabra! everything is magically solved.

Also, don’t forget that good stories usually have many drafts. If you really liked that Abracadabra! scene you can keep it. You just need to go back and weave in some hints earlier in the story.

 But don’t forget the most important writing tip of all, no matter what genre: Have fun, play with your story, and see what happens!

Honey and the Valley of Horses is out now! Ask for it at your favourite bookshop or local library.

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AWESOME EXTRAS

Watch Wendy Orr talking about the book [YouTube]

Are you in Melbourne? You can meet the author and hear her talking about Honey and the Valley of Horses! 2pm, Saturday, 26 August 2023 at Readings Kids in Carlton. Tickets are free but bookings are essential.

Download the Teachers’ Notes at the publisher’s website.

Visit Wendy Orr’s website for more about her and her books.