Memories, memories...

[John Dean]

I am interested in the journeys that writers take to their chosen way of life.

My passion for writing stretches back to my childhood. I was fortunate in that I had parents and teachers who encouraged me to write and, during my teenage years, I knocked out novel after novel on a battered old typewriter. Sorry, that should be rubbish novel after novel!

I always wanted to be a writer but the novels were continually rejected and gradually my career as a newspaper journalist took over.

I still kept writing but a newspaperman’s life is a demanding one and over the years the amount of fiction I wrote reduced (and no jokes about everything that goes in a newspaper being fiction, please) as career and family took up more and more of my time.

By the time I had reached my forties I had all but given up. Like most other writers, I could have papered the living room wall with rejection slips. By 2003, I was working as a freelance journalist, having spent the best part of twenty years in newspapers, much of it as a crime specialist.

One morning, I read an article about a Midlands journalist who had had a crime novel accepted by Hale. As it happened, like all authors, I had a novel lying round, the clichéd box under the bed. It was my only crime novel so I dusted it off (literally) and sent it away. Thankfully, it did not come back.

Today I am with The Book Folks and I still find writing as absorbing a pastime as it was in my childhood and I am acutely aware that, all these years later I am still learning, a mindset that I think all authors have.

This train of thinking was prompted because I went back to my old secondary school (Hummersknott in Darlington) for an event at the weekend. Many memories came flooding back, among them those of my English teacher Tom Cowley, who constantly encouraged me to write (Judith Kent did the same at my primary school).

I thank them both.