Yeah, I know that sounds terribly condescending, that the writing is just some sort of unimportant hobby. The thing is, that’s how too many people do see it. They don’t see the hours spent working on a first draft, which then has to be edited. They don’t see the hours spent rewriting. They don’t see the hours spent proof-reading, and the frustration of just when you thought you had it all sorted, one glaring typo leaps off the page and smacks you in the face.

Nope, it’s just some unimportant hobby.

When I wrote my first story, I was still in school. I can remember another girl in my year grabbed the notebook in which I had been writing, and waved it around, mocking me. Yep, I wanted to curl up and die just then. I was anything but confident about what I was doing. My writing was a way of hiding, of living in my little dream-world with my hunky heroes, able to defend me against any detractors. Yet, despite that, I continued to write. That original story, scribbled down in a pocket notebook, became something much bigger. Recently, when I worked it out, I had written over 300,000 words, more than enough for the trilogy that I had fondly imagined that it might be one day.

Bear in mind that this was all in the days before the internet. My mother typed out a draft of my scribblings on a golf-ball typewriter. That’s how long ago it was. Now, the bulk of that story is stored on a computer, along with all the other stories I have written with my friends, but back then? Pen and paper and a typewriter if I was lucky.

I was in my forties before I plucked up the courage to show someone else what I had written. I still knew nothing of self-publishing then. But my friend read through what I had written and made some suggestions on how I could improve the story, which I incorporated. Still, I didn’t think to publish it. After all, who would want to read it?

The thing is, it is almost a case that it didn’t matter if no one wanted to read what I had written, because when it came down to it, I didn’t write for someone else. I wrote for me. I wrote about ideas and behaviour which was the ideal for me, the sort of ideas that I had on what would make a hero and heroine, how the world could be a better place. To a great extent, it was an idealistic view of behaviour, of a clear good guy and an equally clear bad guy.

Of course, life is not that simple. It is much more fun writing about a complex character, one who feels pain but also feels triumph when things work out to their advantage. As for the bad guy? Well, it would be too easy if the ‘baddie’ lost all the time. Sometimes you need to have a hefty degree of adversity for the ‘goodies’ to overcome. It is all about making a better story.

Hopefully, that is what I have achieved. And going back to real life? Just remember the adage:

“I am a writer. Anything you say or do may be used in a story.” Be warned!