In lesson one I told you to read.

In lesson two I told you to write.

Now, it’s time for lesson three, and again the whole lesson can be summed up in one word – and today’s word is: wait.

That’s right. If you want to be a children’s writer you need to learn to wait.

If you have been trying to get published for a while, you would be excused for presuming that the waiting I am referring to is the long wait you can expect when you start submitting manuscripts. And, though that is in fact not the kind of waiting I’m talking about, it is probably a good time for me to make mention of the fact that when you do submit manuscript, you can expect to wait months. And months. And months.

But, back to today’s lesson (I’ll talk more about submissions another time). You’re new to writing. You’ve read a lot, and now you’ve started to write a lot. That’s great. The next thing you need to do is develop the bottom drawer principle.

This principle relies on you having a bottom drawer. If your desk does not have drawers, or your bottom drawer is full of unpaid bills, or pretty envelopes, or something else, then you may not have a bottom drawer available. You may instead have a pile on your desk. Or a shoebox.  Or a basket. Or a shelf  in your cupboard. It doesn’t matter where your ‘bottom drawer’ is, but you need to have one.

Your bottom drawer is the first place your finished story should go. That’s right, as soon as you type the words ‘the end’ and print your story out, and before you rush it into an envelope to post to a publisher, or race off to show it to the lady next door/your husband/your children/your grandma, even before you show it to your critique partners – put it away in your bottom drawer, and wait.

How long should you wait? As long as you can. At least a day, but preferably a month. Ignore that manuscript for as long as you can bear. And wait.

During that wait time don’t give up on writing. Write something else. Write ten something elses. If your buried treasure is a picture book, write a poem. Or a novel. Or a short story. Or, if you must, another picture book. But don’t rewrite that same story. Leave it alone for as long as you can.

Then, when you have left it alone for so long that you’ve almost forgotten it, get it back out, and reread it.  Chances are, something strange will have happened to your story while it was mouldering in that dark drawer. Remember the pride you had when you wrote ‘the end’ and hit print? Remember how absolutely perfect your story seemed?  But now, with passage of time,  your perfect piece is no longer so perfect. Because during that wait time you have done other things, hopefully developed new skills, but most importantly you have distanced yourself from that piece and now you can see  it for what it is.

Hopefully you will see the strengths of that story and feel proud that you wrote them, but at the same time that distance will also help you see the flaws in your story. You’ll see how you’ve overwritten one part, how your characters are underdeveloped, how you’ve used the same word over and over.

And, because you’re coming to your story afresh, you’ll be able to rework it and make it as perfect as you imagined it to be – or at least a whole lot better.

So there’s your challenge for today. Go set up that bottom drawer – and start waiting.