OVER TO JULIE….

Becoming a writer

All my life I’ve read and dreamed up stories. Sometimes, as a child, I didn’t know which world I was really living in – the dream story world in my head or the real one. Often, I preferred the dream world. I never wrote my stories down, I just enjoyed ‘living them’ in my head, or playing them out with my friends. And books sparked my dream stories, they were magic carpets that would fly me into all sorts of exciting places and adventures.

Telling lies

I wanted to be a writer like the girls in the books I’d read – Jo March in Little Women and Anne of Green Gables – but I thought that an ordinary girl from an ordinary (if crazy) family in an ordinary place like Scotland couldn’t ever be a writer. Surely you had to come from a family of writers or artists and live somewhere exotic like Paris or London or New York? Not Glasgow. It wasn’t possible. But at sixteen, just like my fictional heroines, I did manage to publish my first piece of fiction, in my local paper. It was a review of my brother’s rock band and it was complete fiction because the band were horrendously bad – but I gave them a brilliant review and amazingly the paper printed it. Wow, I thought. I can tell lies and publish them! So that was the beginning of a career in telling lies….more politely known as writing fiction.

I went to university and became a teacher then a journalist, but I still couldn’t seem to shake the daydream habit. This wasn’t normal, I told myself. It was time to grow up and quit the dreaming. Well, I tried it and I didn’t like it. Life without dreams felt flat and grey. I decided there was only one thing for it. I’d have to do daydreaming for a living.

I tried to ignore the nagging voice inside that told me I didn’t stand a chance. Instead I waited until I felt a daydream grow strong into a story then I began to write – up till now I’d mostly kept it all inside my head. The idea for this first book grew out talking to the 12 year old children I was teaching in Glasgow who wanted to read stories about people like themselves, living in Scotland, now. Almost no stories of that kind existed so I decided to write my story for these children. I even used some of their real names and characters in the story that was to become The Spark Gap. The setting of that story of three homeless teenagers is the rooftop of the giant towerblock that sat right outside our school.

For two years I kept dreaming that story and writing it down in my spare time. Once it was finished I had to find the courage to send it to a publisher. (You need a lot of courage because just imagine if no one likes this story you just spent two years writing?) Then one day I got the best phone call ever. My story had found a publisher. It was going to be a real book! And that, to cut a long story short, is how I came to do the thing I love: daydreaming. And nowadays, it still amazes me that I actually get paid for telling lies!

I found out I was wrong about being ordinary. No one is ordinary. Whatever your dream, you can make it come true if you work hard to follow that dream, don’t give up – and are lucky.

I was wrong too about Scotland being ordinary. I find inspiration for stories in the world right outside my window as much as in the world beyond. All you have to do is open your eyes and mind. The world is never flat and grey when you are flying on the carpet of your imagination.

Daily Life

Every day I have the same fight with myself. I write when my young daughter is at school, which makes a very short day once I’ve dealt with the ever-increasing e-mails, letters, publicity and book events and a hundred other things that are part of a writer’s job, but are not actually writing! So I mustn’t waste time. But I do. I drop my daughter at school and tell myself I must grab a coffee in Little Italy to jump-start my brain. Staring out of the window at the traffic and flicking through a newspaper or a book is essential. I used to feel guilty about this until a friend told me work rituals are a warm-up for your brain, so now I do it with relish and think smugly of everyone else stuck in their offices and classrooms! Often something I’ve serendipitously spotted in the newspaper sparks a new angle and works its way into the book I’m writing. An idea for a character, facts about global warming and refugees for Exodus, and recently an article on teenage pregnancy, which is the theme of The Opposite of Chocolate, my next book – or maybe just a phrase or a way of seeing things…. I’m usually writing before my coffee is finished. Sometimes I end up writing in cafes all morning and go home to type it all up in the afternoon – where, first of all, it’s essential to do a certain amount of staring out of the window at the trees……

I never really stop writing. Travelling is the best jump-start to ideas, other than coffee, that I know. My partner is half-Italian so Italy is a favourite but I love discovering new places and always come home with a notebook full of scribbles. My young daughter is a well-seasoned traveller! On holiday I’ll be noting things in the margins of a novel, on the backs of plane tickets or even on the back of my hand, if I’m stuck for paper, while my little girl plays. Bereft of a notebook in an airport I once tried to scribble in my passport until my partner suggested this might not go down well with Greek passport control. Saturday mornings, I sometimes do a trek of music and bookshops (because music gives me ideas too and you can’t be a writer if you’re not an insatiable reader) until my little girl turns mutinous.

I love the moment in writing when something clicks and you ditch all the delaying tactics. You bound out of bed in the morning and can’t wait to get back into the story. At night, you dream about it. The world of the story takes you over and you become obsessional, addicted to it – like an athlete, that addictive ‘high’ is what I work towards.