On writing

So, someone asked me the other day if I'd always wanted to write a book. And the answer is no, I never really wanted to write a book, but I always wanted to write. I'd write anything. When I was little, we moved around a lot, so I wrote letters to everyone I knew from previous places we’d lived, then when I ran out of people I knew (ie, pretty fast) I researched the family tree and wrote to second cousins and great-aunts and uncles. I wrote to Harold from Neighbours (my sister wrote to Gran. We were odd kids). I even wrote to the Queen. Eight times, in fact. (My mother stole one – sorry, ‘saved’ one of the letters to the Queen and read it out at my 21st. It began “Dear HRH”.)

Writing paper was my heroin. I constantly begged my parents to buy my next fix and sometimes ended up writing on that weird 80s printing paper with the perforated holes at the sides. As well as letters, I wrote cartoons and little stories and a newspaper for the dogs of the neighbourhood. (When I ran out of dog news I filled up the lines with woofwoofwoof – the lorum ipsum of the canine world.)

Eventually I went to boarding school, which was filled with composing long unhappy letters that I will never reread, and then to university, where I was far too busy having a very very good time to ever write everything. Even the essays I was supposed to be writing. (Creatively, university was my fallow period.)

After university I fluked a job as a copywriter (you can't do much with a Bachelor of Arts; I think that when someone asked what I could do I paused for a long time and said 'spell'). As a copywriter, words were my bitch and I was their daddy. I didn't really care if no one read what I'd written, or if the client changed every line. I was pretty damn happy to get paid to write. Even better was the discovery of the endless email discussion. I don’t know how people passed the time in their first jobs before email, but I'll bet it involved sniffing White-Out and making friendship bands out of typewriter tape. Ie, desperately boring.

Then at some point I started wondering if I could write a book. And then I did. More about that another time.