Much of this blog is going to be day-to-day thoughts: what I’m doing, how it’s going, whether the process of translating the voices in my head into words on paper that actually work is happening well or not. But I feel like you’re owed a bit of context too, so you know what you’re getting into. We need some kind of origin story.
It starts with being a reader of stories. I devoured books as a kid: read incessantly and insatiably. I loved the way books transported me to different places and times. I read quickly, constantly and fairly indiscriminately: adventure stories, histories, myths and legends, fairy tales, science fiction, fantasy, pretty much anything I could get my hands on. (The back of the cereal packet if nothing else was available.) From almost before I can properly remember, I internalised the simple truth that books can be transformative and transporting.
It also starts with inventing stories. My parents were head-teachers who ran a school: it was an old Victorian building set in several acres of grounds, and until I was nine years old we lived above it, in the attic; in what had once been the servants’ quarters. After the school day was done the building was echoing and dustily empty; the grounds seemed limitless. I spent hours outside, often entirely alone, exploring, building camps, creating fantasy worlds with toys or just in my head. Some kids would have found this lonely, but I was an introverted little creature who was perfectly happy with the solitude. In many ways I was extraordinarily lucky to grow up in this environment: wild-seeming, but safe.
Solitude worked for me, but I was less good in company. I was nerdy and bookish and while these things were assets when I was on my own, they grated on others. A nerd with a big vocabulary has two targets pinned to their back, and I got bullied at school. Instead of keeping quiet and trying to blend it, I tended instead to answer back. This didn’t help much. It just made me a smartmouth nerd with a big vocabulary; one who was asking to get bullied. And the things I found fascinating – computers, science and science fiction, books and comics – marked me down as weird. I got called freak a lot.
This went on for a while, but gradually, gradually things improved. The other kids got to know me a bit better, and I learned to tone down some of the ‘freak stuff’ just a little. The two worst bullies were in the year above me, and finally they left the school; life lightened up quite a lot at that point for several of us who’d been their victims. I found – a little to my surprise – that I had a small but loyal group of friends around me, kids with whom I could talk about science fiction or computer games without being ridiculed. By the time I was twelve, I was genuinely enjoying myself.
And then everything changed. In 1985 I left my familiar little day-school; said a final goodbye to the handful of friends I’d managed to gather around me; and moved to a huge, imposing boarding school. It was about an hour from my home town but might as well have been on the far side of the moon. There were seven hundred pupils. I had never boarded before; was terrified at the prospect; didn’t dare tell anyone that although I was proud to have got in, I just didn’t want to go.
All the things that had singled me out when I was small suddenly snapped back into focus. Weird kid. Freak kid. Not welcome here. Not one of us.
There’s a year of my life here, between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, which I’ve all but erased from my memory. I retain glimpses of it, but only glimpses. Most of them are pretty deeply unpleasant.
Again, gradually, gradually things improved; and by the time I was doing A-levels, aged seventeen, I was once more in the position of having found my place in the environment; of having some friends; of feeling okay in myself. I genuinely enjoyed my last two years at school.
But rewind back to the thirteen-year-old whose life is coming apart. (And it really was. The fleeting memories that I do retain are of genuine despair.) I was being bullied again: worse than before. I was lost in an enormous environment that felt implacable and uncaring. I was far from home; there was nowhere safe, nowhere familiar, no-one to turn to.
My reaction to this was to start writing a novel. I wrote it on A4 schoolpaper in a black binder that I carried around with my schoolbooks. I wrote it in lessons, at the back of the class, under cover of whatever textbook we were using. I wrote it in my free time. I wrote it urgently, with fierce determination, as though writing was saving my life: which I now think it was.
I got caught writing it, by a Geography teacher, and punished for writing it with two hours’ Saturday detention. (And, in those two hours, kept writing it. Wrote a whole stack of pages. Two hours was like a gift.) There was anger and hurt going into it, but also all the love and hope that felt missing from around me. I put them into the story and I lived in the story, and the real world faded a little and became faintly more bearable.
For what it’s worth, the book was about a girl called Jo (the first of many female characters I’d end up writing). On the first page, she dies in a car-crash and wakes up in a strange afterlife; the book is about her journey through it, the people she meets, what she has to overcome and accomplish. It was a fantasy story, because I loved fantasy as a genre and because the idea of a dead girl on a quest through the afterlife was clearly a fantasy idea. I called it Jo’s Game, and if I remember right, the first sentence was “It is a very curious thing to be dead.”
Writing a book was utterly different from reading. I wasn’t just inhabiting the world of the story the way I would as a reader: I was creating it as I went along. Whether the story stood or fell depended on whether I could craft it well enough. The characters were my responsibility. What happened to them was up to me, and how real they were was dependent on my ability to write them. (And the more I wrote them, the more I cared about them, and cared about getting them right; doing them justice.)
Writing was difficult – sometimes very difficult indeed – and I liked how difficult it was, how much it asked of me.
(And it’s still difficult; and I still love how difficult it is.)
That year, aged thirteen, writing became the lifeline that saved me from drowning. I clung to it with the ferocious determination of someone who knows that the water is closing over them but that this is the way out. I wrote and wrote, and finally finished the book; got Jo and her friends to the end of their journey.
(The story doesn’t end there: although Jo’s Game was never published, it played an essential role in my becoming a published author. But I’ll save that for another time.)
And, like I said, things started to get better for me after that. But something of the way in which this first novel came into being marked me permanently. So little of that school year remains, but the process of writing is one of the things that I still remember with utter, vivid clarity. And I suddenly understood that being a writer was something that I could do. All you needed was to write, and keep writing, and not let anyone stop you. I loved books so much that I think I had imagined writers to be almost mythical creatures: but there was an actual novel in that black ring-binder, and I had written it, even though I was just a kid (and a freak). It might not be very good; no-one else might want to read it; but the pages were covered in words and I’d put them there. There was a world in the pages that I’d not just inhabited, but invented. It was the most astonishing feeling, and I carried it with me, small and warm and wonderful, from that point forward.
