I am interested in the journeys writers take to their chosen way of life. My passion for writing stretches back to my childhood. I was fortunate that I had parents and teachers who encouraged me to write and during my teenage years I knocked out novel after novel on a battered old typewriter. Sorry, that should be rubbish novel after novel.
I always wanted to be a writer but the novels were continually rejected and gradually my career as a newspaper journalist took over. I still kept writing but a newspaperman’s life is a demanding one and over the years the amount of fiction I wrote reduced (and no jokes about everything that goes in a newspaper being fiction, please!).
By the time I had reached my forties I had all but given up. Like most other writers, I could have papered the living room wall with rejection slips. By 2003, I was working as a freelance journalist, having spent the best part of twenty years in newspapers, much of it as a crime specialist.
One morning, I read an article about a Midlands journalist who had had a crime novel accepted by Hale. As it happened, like all authors, I had a novel lying round, the clichéd box under the bed. It was my only crime novel so I dusted it off (literally) and sent it away.
Thankfully, it did not come back and A Flicker in the Night was published in 2005 by Hale. I will forever be grateful to Hale for giving me the opportunity to finally achieve my dream. Eleven other novels followed with the twelfth, A Breach of Trust, due out in six months.
I still run my own busy freelance agency, and run the Global Short Story Competition as well, but I try to find time to work on my fiction writing every day.
I find it an absorbing pastime. I am aware that I am learning all the time, a mindset that I think all authors have, a sense that what you have written may be ok but it could be so much better.
So what’s your story? You can tell us on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Inscribemedia/183385438479538
John Dean
No comments:
Post a Comment