M.G. Leonard, author of 'Hunt for the Golden Scarab' - British Book Award Winner discusses making your work stand out, an ideal working day, and living your research
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
M.G. Leonard is the author of 16 children's books, which have won heaps of awards. She was awarded Sainsbury's Childen's Book of the Year, and the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year 2021. Meanwhile, as a child at school, she was told she'd never become a published author - that she simply wasn't smart enough.
Before becoming a writer, she managed bands, ran an indie record label, and worked as a professional actor with some of the biggest names around. She now uses her performance experience to help her write, by reading her work aloud to get the flow and editing that way.
Maya started writing her first children's book to overcome a lifelong phobia of insects. So, to get past her fear of beetles, she wrote about them, turning the story 'Beetle Boy' into a bestseller, and now has over 100 of them.
She has co-written the 'Adventures on Trains' series with Sam Sedgman, published 'The Twitchers Quartet', along with other books for young readers. Her newest novel is 'Hunt for the Golden Scarab', it's the first in the 'Time Keys' series, which tells the story of Sim who discovers his Mum has the power to open doors through time.
You can hear about the cabin she's had made to stop her lazy children from interfering, also about the way writing and publishing for children has changed rapidly and why, and we discuss how she dives into extremely thorough research.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome along to writers' routine where we take a look inside an author's |
| 0:12.7 | working day. This week we're chatting to M.G. Leonard. Maya is the author of 16 children's books, |
| 0:19.8 | won heaps of awards along the way too. |
| 0:22.8 | We talk through how her writing day helps her get them down. |
| 0:27.3 | You can hear about the debut era of trying to make things too good, |
| 0:31.4 | also the stark realities that hit an author when you finally get published. |
| 0:35.8 | Oh my goodness, I'm an author. Here we go. Was my publisher saying, and we'll need book two in six months, please, because it was part of a trilogy. I hadn't written book two. And it had taken me 10 years to write book one. And he said, if you want to be an author, you have to be producing a book a year at least, if not more. And you have to be able to write one in six months. |
| 0:56.3 | And that's when I realized, oh, I need to develop my craft. |
| 1:00.4 | I don't know. |
| 1:01.3 | I don't have a process. |
| 1:02.9 | I didn't have a way of doing it. |
| 1:04.8 | I'd just, you know, gone at it for 10 years and eventually got there. |
| 1:08.3 | And we talk about the intentionality about what she writes and why it's there to make her stand out. |
| 1:15.3 | If you go into children's bookshops, you'll find thousands of different books about dragons, |
| 1:20.0 | hundreds of books about witches and wizards. |
| 1:22.4 | There's only one series of books about Beatles. |
| 1:25.2 | And that's written by me. |
| 1:26.8 | And if you want to have a book that will |
| 1:29.6 | be evergreen and stay in a bookshop shelf, you know, anything that comes out about dragons this |
| 1:36.4 | year is going to lose when it's considered against the Hobbit or, you know, Cresta Cowles, |
| 1:42.0 | how to train your own dragon. These are the Evergreen |
| 1:45.3 | Dragon books. You'd have to write something better and more impressive than them to stay on |
... |
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