Writing
And How I got Started...

When I was very young I used to be terrified of my bedroom at night. I'm not sure precisely why, but I used to refuse to go up the stairs to bed by myself, and I couldn't be left alone in the bedroom without having hysterics (these days I wonder if that room was haunted - though my sister telling me that wolves lived under my bed probably didn't help). I used to sneak into my parent's room at night and lie down on the floor at the end of their bed, until one of them woke up and carried me back into my own room. Even the fact that through-out most of my childhood my sister slept in the bunkbed above me, didn't help.

As I got older I improved, but only because I started to get ashamed of my own screaming and crying. My mum was aware that I was still having terrible trouble getting to sleep, lying awake in the bedroom with the light on, and so she made a decision that was to change my life forever. She decided to gave me a book to read, to take my mind off my fears. It was 'The Magic Faraway Tree', by Enid Blyton.

At that point I wasn't a particularly good reader. It took me more than a month to read through that book (it might even have been longer). But the sense of joy and pride and achievement when I finished it is something I can still remember today. And somehow, when I closed the pages for the last time, I was a different little girl than the one who had first opened the book weeks before. I had realised - without realising how - that there was magic in books. In books, whole new worlds were conjured into being, and people - characters - lived their whole lives. Words - stories - could keep my fears and nightmares away. I fell in love with books from that moment. I was a Reader. 

I started making little books of my own out of bits of paper. First I copied stories out of books, tracing the illustrations from Beatrix Potter, Dick King Smith and The Worst Witch books. The first story of my own I remember writing was about a pig and a rabbit having a party. I know they bought apple juice and cake, and that this feast cost them 50p. I can even remember drawing lines on the paper in red pen (red was my favourite colour) and borrowing my dad's tippex to neatly whiteout a mistake.

The first story I wrote for other people to read was called 'The Magic Shoes'. It was about a poor girl whose family had no food to eat. She wandered away into the forest, crying, and fell asleep in a clearing, and when she woke up she found a new pair of shoes on her feet. Green shoes made of leaves. Everywhere she walked, beautiful, magical flowers with a beautiful perfume sprang up behind her. She danced back into town (past the houses of the mean, rich girls who had taunted her) and back to her family's house. Her parents ran out and gathered up all the amazing magical flowers and sold them for fantasic prices, and from then on the little girl danced through the town every morning so that her parents could sell the flowers, and they always had enough to eat.

I read that story out aloud to Mrs Oxby's primary school class, and all the other children clapped without being told to. Mrs Oxby gave me a gold star, and pinned the illustrated story to the wall above her desk. That was when it dawned on me that there was a real difference between reading stories and writing them, and that, much as I loved the former, the latter was what I was going to be doing with my life.

As fate would have it, my father was the manager of a shop which sold office supplies. At first he brought me home paper, coloured pens and tippex. Then it was a tiny, royal blue typewriter on which I taught myself to touch type. Then an electric typewriter. Then a word processer (A StarWriter, it was called - I always thought that was a lovely name).

Neither of my parents were writers themselves (though they'd both enjoyed writing and telling stories when they were younger). But they both loved reading and encouraged me to write all I wanted. They would read my stories and praise them, which gave me the confidence to carry on. They also bought me all the books I could have wanted. As the years passed, some teachers also understood my urge to write, and told me they thought I was gifted (though some also seemed to think that 'telling stories' was a waste of time, and that I should stop day-dreaming and get real. I ignored those ones, and so should you).

When I got into my teens I decided that it was time to start getting serious about this writing thing. Being a reader, I started doing my research, taking out all the library books I could find on writing, and getting published. At the end of this process, I was a little depressed (all the books emphasized that getting published was incredibly difficult and that it could take years) but much wiser.

Since I was reading a lot of Point Horror at this point, I decided that Point Horror was what I would write. That lasted about a year, I think. No dice. Couldn't finish. Then I started reading adult books - Mills and Boon and Harlequin romances. Aha, I thought. This is what I'll write. That lasted two or three years. Again, no dice. I finished a book, but it was rejected by Mills and Boon, and by that time I wasn't sure I wanted to write that stuff anymore anyway. What about Crime Fiction and Thrillers? I gave that a go. I got halfway through and stuck. And I stayed stuck for about three years, trying this genre and that, never feeling really passionate. During this time I wrote dozens of poems and won a lot of contests, but much as I enjoyed poetry, I knew it wasn't what I really needed to be doing. I was a writer with too many ideas - without a passion. I needed to find The One.

The One hit me with a lightning bolt when I was eighteen, and once more, it was books that showed me the way. My sister had just given birth to her first child, and I wanted to buy my new niece a present - so, typically, I decided I would buy her some books which I had loved as a kid. I had vivid memories of a writer called Tamora Pierce, so I went online and tried to find some of her books. I ordered 'The Song of the Lioness' quartet, planning to put them on the shelf in the new nursery.

But when the book arrived I was on annual leave from work, and it was a nice day and I was bored. So, although I hadn't deigned to look at any children's fiction since my early teens, I picked one of them up and took it into the garden to re-read.

It was like unexpectedly bumping into my dearest old friend. Someone whom I hadn't seen for years, someone I'd been missing for ages without realising it. My old friend hugged me, and I knew This Was It. This was The One. I was going to write books like this - fiction for young adults. Fantasy for young adults. It felt so right and so obvious that I couldn't figure out why I hadn't been doing it all along.

It wasn't all plain sailing from there. I started and abandoned several YA projects, and I was rejected many, many times with the one that I did finally finish. But then I remembered something - another old friend, a story which had been very special to me when I was young. The story of The Wild Swans, as told by Hans Christian Andersen. 

I had made a promise to myself that I would write that story again - write my version - when I was older, and I had never completely forgotten that promise. But I had never been sure just how I should do it, or and what form my version was to take. Now I could see. The Wild Swans would make a perfect book for teenagers. I started work in August 2003 and finished in August 2004. I submitted the manuscript to Walker Books in the same month and was invited to go to London and speak to the publisher about it in November 2004 - and I got my first publishing contract for The Swan Kingdom in February 2005. 

Now - to answer a question that comes up fairly often. I did pretty well at school, especially in subjects where I could do written course-work (I was terrible at maths, however). I got a few A's and a few A*'s. I went to college but I didn't enjoy it much. When I left I got a job as a dental nurse and did that for just under three years, until I was close to going mad. Then I managed to get out and went into the civil service, which was a vast improvement. 

I never went to university and I don't have any other qualifications. There are no qualifications that will show you how to become a writer. 

Education is really important, and looking back, I think I was very stupid not go on to university, even if just to enjoy the experience of learning. Having better qualifications might also have saved me a miserable experience as an under paid and exploited dental nurse. If you have the chance to go to college and university, I urge you to take it, and enjoy it all you can. But don't expect to be taught to be a writer. Even the creative writing courses some colleges run now can't do that (I went to one once, and left after two sessions, embarrassed beyond belief and never to return).

The best thing you can do when it comes to writing is to read everything you can lay your hands on, to do your research like I did (the books are there in the library - take advantage of them!) and to write, write, write. Even if you never finish anything, or if everything you finish seems terrible, keep writing. That is the only way you'll learn how to be a writer. 

Write, and love writing. It's the best hobby and the best job in the world.