My Writing Life

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I have lived in the Lothian region (just outside Edinburgh) for roughly half my life,
which comes as something of a shock when I think about it. When my wife and I
moved north, back in the early 1990s, we thought we’d give it a couple of years to
see how we liked it, and if not we’d head back south. But more than thirty years later,
I’m still here. There must be something about the place….
I haven’t always dreamed of being a writer. Well, I daydreamed about it in my youth,
but my early attempts were so bad that I shelved the idea and knuckled down to
getting a ‘proper’ job instead. Years later, following the arrival of a child, I returned to
story telling through making up bedtime tales to entertain him. I found that I really
enjoyed it, and the reaction they got. My wife loved them too, so she pestered me to
write them down and told me I should think about writing full time.
In those days it was easy to find the right voice for a child audience. But as he grew
older, and as bereavement hit our small family, that became much harder. What
inspired me afterwards was to write something that would help channel grief into a
more positive form. I’m not sure that The Forgotten God achieved that, but I did find
the process of writing both theraputic and absorbing. I went on to write a further
three episodes of that series, and still intend to finish it at some point.
However, like a magpie attracted to a shiny object in the long grass, I became
attracted to the idea of writing a full-scale novel about dwarves. But not dwarves as
they’re usually portrayed: medieval barrel-chested figures of fun, with beards down
to their knees and hefty appetites. No, my dwarves have modernised a bit. Their
world is undergoing an industrial revolution, and all of the societal pressures that
goes along with such upheval, and as a result they are far more interesting to write
about.
I take inspiration from a lot of things. Sometimes it is news items, at other times
something I come across in a book. A TV programme can throw up something that
stirs the grey-matter, or it might be an idea from left-field that hits me on a walk, or a
bit of a conversation overheard. What I do is try to jot it down somewhere before I
forget. Then see if I can work it into an existing scene or story, or park it for later.
Best of all is feeling a story evolve as you are writing. The act of getting words onto a
page somehow triggers ideas and the plot can change direction quickly. Characters
end up doing something unexpected, or different to what you’d intended, and you
have to follow them, much like we ended up following that ginger kitten around those
Greek ruins many years ago. Sometimes all it takes is an exasperated miaow.
Being a writer had its downsides. The creative part is fun, but editing your work can
be a painful process. It is necessary though. Then, when it feels as good as you can
make it you give it to an editor who will bring it back a few weeks later with so many
recommendations for changes that you wonder why you bothered starting in the first

place! It can be daunting. What is finally committed for publication bears almost no
resemblence to that scruffy first draft you thought was perfect.
But when the proverbial dust settles, you have to admit that it is much better.
Then, you start again!