My Writing Career: How It Started
My career as a novelist started on December 15th, 2009, in a frozen-over carpark in north-east Scotland. I nipped outside between calls and after sucking in a few deep breaths of ice-cold air I called my boss in the main office in Aberdeen. My hands were trembling, a combination of nerves and the freezing weather. But the sky was cloudless and bright blue and I like to imagine the sun shone a little more brightly as I finally released my confession.
‘I’m leaving,’ I said.
My boss sighed. I joined him.
His was born from frustration. Mine, from relief. I’d done it.
I was 29-years-old and I’d been working as a newspaper reporter for five years. A year earlier I’d been promoted to chief reporter for one of the paper’s regional offices. I lived in a beautiful seaside village called Burghead and worked in the city of Elgin, mainly covering court and council stories. Mostly, I was happy with my life there.
But I had a dream. Two dreams, actually.
The first was no surprise to anyone: I want to travel more, specifically in Latin America. I’d previously lived in Spain, Chile and Mexico so most people barely raised an eyebrow when I talked of exploring the wilds of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize.
The second dream was one I rarely mentioned mainly due to how absurd it sounded: I wanted to write a novel.
I’d always been a keen reader and enjoyed the writing process. During my teenage years I endlessly wrote terrible poetry and in my twenties I turned to song-writing and singing. I recorded two albums in a studio and did fairly regular pub gigs. I’d never seriously thought about writing anything longer…until one day I woke up to discover that a girl called Ruth Morrison had climbed into my head overnight. I didn’t know what to do with her. I remember telling a few friends about her and nervously explaining that I felt compelled to write her story.
Trouble was, I had no idea how.
I’d never done a writing course and I knew no writers. I reluctantly joined a writing group at my local library but felt far too embarrassed to share my scribblings and left after a few weeks. Sometimes I sat at my dining table after work and tried to get some words down, but after spending the whole day writing newspaper articles I was often too tired to make much effort. And I was frightened, probably, because writing a novel seemed like such an impossible task.
And yet…Ruth Morrison lingered. I kept trying to start the book, with little success.
But somewhere in me lay the belief that I could do it - if only I set my mind to it and gave myself a proper chance. I often wonder where that conviction came from and I think most likely it came from my mum and dad and family.
I’ve been blessed with parents who instilled a great sense of self-belief in me - and who’ve never tried to hold me back when time and again I leap merrily off the beaten path.
And that’s how and why I ended up in that car park on that freezing December morning.
From that day on, my plan was simple: I’d take one year to travel from Mexico to Chile and I’d write Ruth Morrison’s story along the way. Optimist? Me? Well, yes. I am, actually.
Needless to say, the whole thing took a lot longer than expected. I stayed in Latin America for almost three years, then moved to Andalucia in southern Spain. I never went back to news reporting but relaunched my tour-guiding career to pay the bills. I got an agent after completing that first novel, but it was never published. Neither was the second one I wrote. Then finally, exactly ten years to the day after quitting my job - on December 15, 2019 - I was offered a book deal for my debut novel, The Silent Daughter. It was a complete re-write of my first ever novel, set in Scotland instead of Guatemala. But Ruth Morrison was still the protagonist. It had taken me a decade, but finally, both of my dreams had come true. I’d travelled and lived abroad. I’d written a novel. And after so many years of carrying her with me, I told Ruth Morrison’s story to the world.