My (Deeply Personal) History of Writing

Even if my fingers were to clench and wither, even if I were to grow deaf or blind, even if I were unable to move a muscle in my body save for the blink of one eye, I would still write. – Dani Shapiro, Still Writing

Half out of love, half against my will

Why do you write?

I hear that a lot, especially now I’m grand and get to do the occasional interview. It’s a natural question to ask anyone who does something like this, because it certainly ain’t for the money.

I’ve touched on this before in a previous post, but I was writing as soon as I was physically able to. I could sit at my table in Reception Class (so four years old) and happily just sit there ‘writing’ while everyone else fidgeted and got bored (feel free to take a guess at some of my neurodivergences). By Year 1, I was essentially writing fanfiction. We’d read things like Percy the Parkkeeper and Kipper the Dog and then have to make up our own stories with the same characters. They really had trouble getting me to stop. I was also the best speller in the class, by the way. So I loved writing, I evidently, clearly, blatantly adored the thing by the age of six.

It was by the age of seven that I couldn’t speak.

It’s a hereditary thing and under control now, but there was huge swathes of my childhood where speaking was either physiologically or psychologically difficult (probably both). Honestly, as much as I will happily bang on about my other neurodivergences or my mental health, I still have trouble talking about this (pun not fully intended). Oh, and it also left me with auditory processing disorder, which only got diagnosed when I was twenty-seven.

So anyway, writing was left as the only way I could really communicate.

Lucky I was good at it and liked English, eh?

The hastily changed UCAS form

This was pretty much the story throughout my school years – I was the English (and later, Drama) student who would take any opportunity to get as creative as possible. That was how Coldharbour started, after all – Matthew comes from a short story I wrote which was a spin on Richard III. Another fun fact: I could always reliably speak when acting – because I wasn’t myself. I thought about going to acting school for a few years, but then I started getting stage fright at the age of seventeen, so I decided I’d do Psychology instead.

And then, less than 48 hours before I was due to submit my UCAS application (that’s the process for applying to universities in the UK), I kept bumping into friends, teachers, and so on, who all said the same thing:

“Oh. Why aren’t you doing English?”

Cue a late night of rewriting my personal statement. Luckily, I was already working in a bookshop, studied both English and Drama, read widely, and was writing fanfiction on the side. Also luckily, the places I was going to apply to for Psychology also offered great English courses.

So, off I went, to study an English degree with a stupidly long title, only to find that the lectures were tedious, some teachers were far better than others, and there were just other, more interesting things to do at uni. You know, like fall in love with inappropriate people, get too involved in politics, nearly break an ankle and find a dead mouse in a leftover rum and coke, that kind of thing.

After three years, I left with my 2:1 BA. Disillusioned.

All but one of my creative writing modules were poetry, by the way – I gave up on the prose when I wrote a short story that the professor just didn’t get. No, there was no more useful feedback than that. And that’s not to mention the four weeks of lectures only focusing on the concept of a beginning, middle, and end. I like formalism and structuralism as much as the next person, but come on.

The only unsolicited, and non-poetic, writing I did during this time was Coldharbour.

Oh, this is my job now?

However, in the meantime, I had been doing a lot of political/PR stuff, so eventually, I ended up working in advertising, where my boss quickly found that I was the one good writer/willing to put in the work to make the writing good. By the time I left, I was Content Manager and pretty much in charge of all the writing that the separate PR team weren’t doing. And working on my MA in English on the side, by the way. After a couple of years outside of academia, I had decided to make up for the first mediocre experience.

And the most valuable thing I learnt at the advertising agency? That I probably should’ve learnt at uni first time round?

That criticism of your writing is not criticism of you as a person.

Not only that, the criticism should (if constructive) improve your writing in some way. And even if it doesn’t, if the client wants it and you’ve explained your reasoning to them and they still want it, then suck it up.

I learnt to welcome feedback, knowing that it was only going to make my work better (it was around this point that I slowly began to get introduced to the concept of a growth mindset, which I am now fully behind).

The only unsolicited writing I did during this time was Coldharbour.

Running away to Mexico

Yeah, I got bored of writing about windows and mail services.

I left. I became a teacher. I lived in various places.

The only unsolicited writing I did during this time was Coldharbour.

The last seven years

In February 2019, life changed. My father was diagnosed with cancer. I dropped everything. Honestly, my mental health was so far down the toilet, my brain was soaked in sewage. So I quit my job, gave up the most beautiful house I’ve ever lived in, and came home. I helped care for him for the last ten months of his life and he died the day after his birthday (which is also a week after his wedding anniversary and two weeks before Christmas, so thanks for that, Alan, December’s great for us now).

And then the pandemic started.

Oh, by the way, in this time I’ve also had another two career pivots, during which time the only unsolicited writing I did was Coldharbour.

But something fundamental had changed inside me.

I now knew what it was like to lose someone who had actually really mattered to me.

And these characters and this town that had been languishing for sixteen years without a proper story suddenly had a purpose.

From Autumn 2021, all of that grief got poured into Coldharbour until I slowly started to consider that maybe this wasn’t just a fun little project on the side.

Maybe it could actually be something.

2022 to 2024 was endless drafting and editing as I worked out how to actually write a properly publishable book, followed by querying, and then me changing my mind about querying, and then…

Well. Here we are.

The first Coldharbour book has been published.

There are several more to come.

And what’s even more exciting?

The other projects I’ve got going on and not just by myself, with other people too.

I’d always believed that writing was just for me, just sitting in my little corner, all solitary and intense.

It’s not at all.

I have friends who are writers now.

Returning to Coldharbour

But all that said, for the next few years, Coldharbour is still my number one priority when it comes to publishing – so here’s the very beginning of Book II:

Once upon a time, Alex Wilde had walked straight into the chill, churning waves of a mud-black sea. The soft sand was speckled with the spray of her sparkling blood. There had been no seagulls squawking, no cats scrapping, no foxes on the prowl.

Well, once upon a time was actually one year ago, almost to the minute, and for all the medication, for all the hours in therapy, for all the cautious rewriting of her mind …

Drowning was beginning to look like an attractive prospect again.

Coldharbour II: The Dead Land comes out on Halloween. Read the first in the series, Coldharbour: A Gothic Tale of Love and Death, now.