The number of people who actually care about where to put apostrophes (depressingly few). The best time of the day to schedule tea breaks. How to fall asleep on a train in the morning and still get off at the right stop. I learned the difference between writing for someone else and writing for yourself.īy the time I graduated, I had stopped writing stories. I went to university, where writing came with grades and books were to be approached critically. I tried revisiting the story and the girl several times over the next few years, but it never came together. They weren’t the right words, and it wasn’t the right time. But I also knew something else – it wasn’t right. There was something about the story, something about the characters, that worked. There was something different about that story about a girl, not least because it was the first full-length novel I’d ever written. A book that had a sentence in it that made someone’s eyes go wide with “yes. Each abandoned and finished project was a step closer to Being A Writer my ultimate goal. I’d written countless stories by the time I was thirteen – the first at age 6, in which the acknowledgements page listed all our family pets by name, including the guinea pigs – of varying length and quality. And maybe, if you got them just right, that world would be a place that would mean something to other people.
Put them in the right order, and you could create a world of your own. Words had all the magic and possibility anyone could ever need.
Planets that spoke to each other, mice who lived in the Underground, magic meerkats and friendly boats. Writing was my thing it was beyond a hobby and more than just something I enjoyed. I was thirteen at the time, and writing stories was what I did. Fourteen years ago, I wrote a story about a girl.
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