I am so boring that I actually sat down and roughly calculated how many words I have written since leaving school. It comes out to something over 6 million. In fairness, about 4 million of those have involved careers in journalism, pr, advertising and copy writing. The balance is short stories, novels, the odd play and education.
Such a life long experience means that I am fortunate enough to have got beyond thinking about ‘writing’ and my brain can concern itself primarily with character, plot and all the other bits that make up a good story.
My ambition for you is that whenever you pick up a pen or turn to your keyboard, you forget you are writing and let the ideas flow, let characters come alive in your head and on the paper.
But… I have been incredibly lucky, every step of my working life has gifted me some incredible mentors, teachers and role models. As a free lancing journalist I learned to write for newspapers and magazines, everything from popular tabloids to the serious broadsheets. I reported on everything from golden weddings to domestic terrorism, from government statistics to road testing caravans.
These skills proved invaluable when I switched from journalism to press and public relations. For clients I wrote monthly business and technology magazines, press releases, instruction manuals, brochures, leaflets, tv and radio commercials, corporate video scripts…
In my spare time I helped community groups set up newspapers, I took poetry into pubs and got all sorts of weird stuff down on paper.
And then… I got bored with the promotion industry, slipped back into free-lancing as a copywriter and got myself a degree in English and Philosophy.
After a dalliance with education there was no way I wanted to go back to full-time agency work, so I trained and qualified as an English teacher in a school for teenagers. I thought I’d mastered writing, but here were new challenges. Not only did you have to pitch your words and ideas to a new generation, you had to get those students to embrace words, to enjoy them. You needed to convince adolescents not only to write, but that they had things to write about, things they needed to say.
Some years on and many thousands of words later, my aim is to help people find the pleasure to be found in writing and develop their creative talent in whatever form and genre they desire.