How to grow a story

Insider tips from inspiration to The End

May 04, 2025

We are celebrating a brand-new Team YKNR Book Baby this week, with the publication of WILLOW BRIGHT’S SECRET PLOT by A. L. Tait.

Isn’t she lovely?

You can find out more about the book here and listen to Allison read the First Chapter here on our podcast. Megan’s review is below.

To celebrate Willow’s arrival in the world, we asked Allison (A. L.) Tait to share some insider secrets on how Willow went from being a seed of an idea to a complete novel.

Where did the idea for this book began?

“As with most novels, Willow’s story grew out of compost. Sounds glamorous, doesn’t it? In practice, it’s where a writer gathers together a whole lot of different bits and pieces, sometimes over many years, and they turn over and over in your mind until… a story appears.

So, Willow began over a decade ago with a writing exercise for a course I did. It was one paragraph about a country kid in a battered hat standing outside an inner-city school, wondering if the spiky blue fence was there to keep the keeps in or the world out.

But the seeds were planted much earlier than that, deep in my memories of being ten years old and moving from the Northern Territory to the NSW south coast. The impact of that big move stayed with me for a long time. Of starting again somewhere where I didn’t understand the rules of engagement.

Swirled into this mix was an episode of Australian Story (ABC TV) about Gluepot Reserve, an advertisement for a ‘reality’ TV show about the different ways in which people parent, and then a conversation with a young student at a children’s literary festival I attended.

The student had been flown in to attend the festival from the station on which she lived and we were chatting about whether she was having a good time.

“It’s fun,” she said. “But there’s too much light to sleep.”

In drawing together all of those ideas, Willow’s story came together.”

Where do you go from there?

“Getting to know your character is key, because it’s your character who drives the story. Once I knew who Willow was – and her actions in the opening scene, where she ropes a calf to save a bunch of kids showed me that straight away – I was able to follow her into the story.

It’s the decisions that your character makes that create the story. So I needed to make sure that everything that happens in the story came back to who Willow is and what she would do– not what I would do – in any given situation.”

How do you get to The End?

“It’s a super boring answer, but the only way to write a book is to… WRITE the book. That means showing up every day, putting words on the page, pushing forward until you find out what happens. It is the most fun you can have sitting down – but it also takes a huge amount of discipline.”

Get your copy

UPDATES FROM TEAM YKNR

Are you coming along to the YKNR events at the 2025 Sydney Writers’ Festival?

We promised you a reminder and with just under three weeks to go, available tickets are dwindling for the Your Kid’s Next Read event on Saturday 24th May!

Inside tip: we’ll have something beyond exciting to announce at this event. Be there to hear it first!

We would love to meet you in person, so book a free spot and come along.

Book your free spot now

And don’t forget we’ll all be at the wonderful SWF Big Family Day as well on Sunday 25th May (also free). Megan will be in conversation with the wonderful Costa from Gardening Australia and Allison Tait and Allison Rushby will be sharing their secrets for writing mystery stories with young readers and writers.

We’ll also be signing books, so bring the kids along to say hello!

HELLO FROM MEGAN DALEY

Megan is an award-winning teacher-librarian working in Brisbane, the author of Raising Readers: How to nurture a child’s love of books, and co-host of the Your Kid’s Next Read podcast. Her debut picture book THE BEEHIVE is out now! More about Megan here.

The DaleyArk family had a most excellent holiday in Agnes Waters recently, highly recommended if you want an old school beach holiday vibe with family friends – in fact our holiday was very much like the one in ‘The First Summer of Callie McGee’ by A.L. Tait to be honest!

I had the pleasure of catching up with author/poet Kat Apel while in Agnes Waters and it was such a lovely opportunity to spend some time with one of my favourite verse novelists near her home town.

As we step tentatively into Term Two I’m neck deep in planning new units of work for Prep–Year Two and trying to balance the PH of the rainforest pond – such is the variance in my day! Just today I started the morning with a Prep lesson where we practised ninja-fast book part naming and an excited student told me the book they borrowed last week was SO SCARY IT WAS GREAT, then I had morning tea with Mr Jahnke in the rainforest.

Mr Jahnke is my former Agriculture and Biology teacher from the 1990’s (yes I work at the school I went to!) and he founded our school rainforest. It’s such an honour to be able to still work alongside the now-retired but still active Mr Jahnke and I wrote about how much he means to me in the anthology I edited, ‘Teacher, Teacher’.

MEGAN’S BOOKMARK REVIEWS

Each month, I share full reviews of two outstanding books that have crossed my desk. Bookmark these for your young readers.

‘Willow Bright’s Secret Plot’ by A.L. Tait

After moving to the city from the country, Willow Bright feels like she’s lost her mum all over again―and landed on another planet.

Her clothes are wrong, her taste in music is wrong, and even the food she eats is wrong. But when Willow spots a pattern in a series of puzzling accidents and mishaps, she forms an unlikely friendship―and finds new purpose.

Can Willow solve the mystery and find room to be herself along the way? Or will her plot to run home to the wide-open spaces and memories of her mum land Willow in even more trouble?

‘Willow Bright’s Secret Plot’ is warm and witty, full of heart, mystery, and just the right amount of dirt under the fingernails. It weaves themes of identity, belonging, grief, and the shift from country to city living into a super engaging story. With a subtle thread of gardening running throughout, there is also a reminder that even when you feel out of place, you can still bloom where you’re planted.

Perfect for readers 9–12. Well blooming done Allison!

‘The Girl and the Ghost’ by Jacqueline Harvey

A French village, new friends, fabulous food, a local mystery to be solved and . . . a ghost.

When almost-thirteen-year-old Josephine Eloise Thomas moves from Sydney to a chateau in the southwest of France, she expects many things – adventures, inspiration for the stories she loves to write and maybe finding out more about her French mother, who tragically died when she was a toddler. What she doesn’t expect is to find a beautiful gold locket with the ghost of Louis XVII trapped inside!

Josephine (nickname JET, initials of her full name) is an aspiring writer and the emails to her friend in Australia and her diary entries are lovely examples of different text types and keep the story rollicking along. ‘The Girl and The Ghost’ even has a sweet teen romance – Gabriel and Jet are definitely in crush territory and I think readers 12 – 14 will connect with the feelings of both awkward and ‘argh…I feel something here’.

Mystery, history, romance, gorgeous setting, lots of delectable French pastries – this is perfect for readers who want lovely escapism from their books and for fans of Alice Miranda, Friday Barnes and Stella Montgomery.

HELLO FROM ALLISON RUSHBY

The award-winning, bestselling author of many, many books for children and adults, Allison Rushby’s novels are firm favourites in the Your Kid’s Next Read community. Her latest illustrated junior fiction series, The Wish Sisters, is fast gaining fans. More about Allison R here.

It’s all getting very exciting around here as behind the scenes the YKNR team is prepping hard for our events at Sydney Writers’ Festival. We always get a little over-excited about our catch ups, but this time we’ll get to see lots of lovely YKNReaders too, so things are definitely reaching fever pitch!

On the home front, things are also reaching fever pitch as I try to cram in all the work before I head off on a massive month-long overseas trip (part work, part research, part play) at the end of May. I’ve already planned all the reading I’m going to do and loaded up my trusty Kindle (first things first!), so I guess I’d better plan what I’m going to pack and a few things I’d like to see, too…

THREAD OF THE MONTH

I already knew we were a fantastic little hive mind here at YKNR (actually, we have just hit 38K members, so not so little at all!), but this thread was truly illuminating.

I must admit I knew nothing at all about licensing within libraries before this wonderful thread cropped up. What follows in the comments is a COMPREHENSIVE overview of just how it works. Read the full thread and all comments here.

Our members really are the best!

Join the YKNR community

HELLO FROM ALLISON TAIT

Writing as A. L. Tait, Allison is the internationally published, bestselling author of three middle-grade series: The Mapmaker Chronicles, The Ateban Cipher and the Maven & Reeve Mysteries. She is an in-demand speaker, a writing teacher for kids and adults, and co-host of the YKNR podcast. Her latest novels include THE FIRST SUMMER OF CALLIE McGEE and the brand-new WILLOW BRIGHT’S SECRET PLOT. More about Allison here.

As well as my own new release, Megan Daley and I are undercelebrating the 200th episode of the Your Kid’s Next Read podcast by inviting listeners to ‘Ask Us Anything’ – there’s a great range of questions answered, so I hope you’ll have a listen.

On top of that, I’m also celebrating the release of a brand-new single by Joe Visser (aka, Book Boy). ‘After Lucy’s Party’ is a beautiful, mellow contemplation of life and love. As author Cassy Polimeni wrote: ‘Love this! Takes me right back to my 20s!’

‘After Lucy’s Party’ is out now on all streaming platforms, so please give it a spin, add it to your playlists, tell your friends, etc.

Apple Spotify Triple J Unearthed

What were you doing in your 20s? I was writing for a living (as a journalist) and I was contemplating embarking on my first novel…. What about you?