Beginning the writing journey

The wonder pf possibility and the first hesitant steps

So, having had a meander around the wonders, dangers and threats of AI, I come back to that point in Covid lock-down. My tourist business in the Pyrenees had been closed, and in all honesty, I didn’t mind at all. To think I could sit down and spend quality time being creative instead of answering the same old questions from anxious holidaymakers while trying to make the beds was heaven indeed.

I had all my cameos of life seen and experienced, and considered an autobiography. I didn’t consider it for long. I am a pretty special person to me, but I doubt very much I’m that special to anyone else, my husband excepted. An autobiography would be boring.

It actually took me a while to break through to considering I could write fiction. I’d been set on real life, wanting to share it, wanting to use my experiences to hopefully enrich and inspire others. What is creative art about if not to achieve this? Slowly, I began to understand that this is exactly what fiction does. The story gives a framing which is personal to the reader where autobiography or recounting of experience is framed around the writer.

A whole new world opened up as understanding seeped in, all those stories I’d read where I’d tumbled into a world which was more real than the real world, simply because it was unreal. Because by not being real, it escaped the constraints of real life and let a reader dream, escape, go on a directed journey.

This felt like an amazing gift from life. I had been granted the time and opportunity to indulge in such creativity, to create such worlds within worlds. But what, exactly, to write, I wondered, and did I have the capability to do it?

I shelved the capability question because as a complete beginner, that was obviously a no. As it was for every novice writer. I’d have to learn, as I went along. Considering the what question lead to a whole set of new questions.

Was I embarking on a mission, one driven by passion, trying to change the world or some of the people in it? Was I undertaking a business venture, securing a semi-retirement income so I didn’t have to welcome the tourists again? Was I trying to provide much-needed escape routes for people to enjoy? Or was I looking for a new passionate interest for my own sake, to keep me happy and contented?

I couldn’t separate these elements out. It was all of them, I realised. That’s how big writing is.

I’m not a dabbler. I don’t practise things, I get straight in and do them. I need that motivation, that end goal. I had some evidence of an innate writing ability or style from my well-received cameos and that was enough, my reasoning said, to launch into a full-length novel. Just as well I didn’t know then what I know now, about how long and arduous the journey would be.

I had been a professional engineer when I started my working life, developing heart valves. There’d been many different jobs since, although all had been at fundamentally practical and often human-centred problem-solving. I ran a specialist hospital clinic. I became life coach, with particular interests. I campaigned against climate change in the eighties and nineties. I spent time in an intentional grass roots community. I was a founding director of a sustainability advice and action group. I became briefly a hand-holding contractor with a team of highly skilled craftsmen. And I ended up running a tourist business, the least fulfilling thing I’d ever done.

What genre of fiction did all that experience add up to? What genre of fiction allowed me in some way to explore climate change and our response to it? What genre of fiction allowed me to help individuals along their paths of development or overcoming their struggles?

No obvious answer stared me in the face, and no obvious answer presents itself now, seven years later.

I considered climate change and thought about where it came from, when the damage really began. In the Industrial Revolution. Maybe writing about that period when we moved from farm to factory held a key to our future. Historical fiction, then. But romance, because romance would let me explore deep issues in a light, accessible way. A mix of escape, entertainment and deeper stuff for those ready and willing to look for it.

My USP, then, could be my engineering background looking at that industrial change, letting my life coach side consider how it affected people. And so my historical romance project was brought into being.