A friend asked me recently how I got into writing.
It was the early ‘90s and we’d just moved 200 miles north for my husband’s job. With two small children at home, I was at a loose end. Having always enjoyed writing, I submitted a few verses to greeting card companies and was surprised – and delighted – when a couple were accepted.
I’d done my homework beforehand, of course, buying a selection of cards for research. When I came to buying cards for family and friends, I’d always bought humorous cards or cards containing a simple phrase such as Happy Birthday or Good Luck, so I was surprised how large the verse market was and how specific the verses could be.
And then, out of the blue, one of the card companies invited me to London to ‘brainstorm’ a new range.
A month later, fourteen of us gathered in a private room in Julie’s restaurant in Holland Park – the location of King Charles’ first stag do before he married Lady Diana Spencer – where, for two full days, we wrote twelve-line verses to order. The company paid us £40 for each verse, buying the copyright outright.
And that was the start of my writing career.
I now had the confidence to approach other publications.
I didn’t always get my pitches right – in fact, I often didn’t – but over the next few years I managed to build up a varied portfolio, until, at the age of forty, I was offered a job as a trainee sub-editor on my local newspaper.
The job was in the features department where I stayed for three years, leaving only when it became obvious to me that local newspapers were losing readership to the internet. At that point, a local businessman asked me to ghostwrite his memoirs, agreeing to pay me £10k in the process.
And then, Janet Holt called and asked if I’d take a look at her manuscript too.
There was something about Janet’s descriptions of farming in Derbyshire that intrigued me, and something about her manuscript when it arrived that intrigued me even more. Janet and I ended up collaborating for three years, with her manuscript eventually becoming the book The Stranger In My Life.
My friend also asked if I had any tips for carving out a writing career herself and, apart from having a desire to write and writing regularly, I’d say you need a dollop of good luck and an even bigger dollop of good timing.
With so many opportunities to write and self-publish it’s become easier to write but not quite as easy, perhaps, as ensuring your book or article is read. Maybe the timing fell right for us there too because the book was subsequently made into a true crime documentary.
From verse writing to appearing on TV. It’s been an interesting career.
The Stranger In My Life 