Authors Answer 19: How did you get into writing and what made you select your genre of choice?

I didn’t exactly ‘get into’ writing. For me it was never something I just took up, in the way one might decide to take up golf or macrame or yoga. I’ve always been ‘in’ writing. At school, I loved those free-for-all creative writing exercises. Not the ‘what I did on my holidays’ dullathons, but the ‘imagine you’re a fairy’ stuff. Not that there was much of that after primary school. Secondary school was far too serious for such frivolities. So I turned to writing my own comic strips, and (later) extremely bad fan fiction, although I didn’t know then what it was.

A few years later, when I lived abroad and couldn’t work, I bought a manual typewriter and bashed out most of a Regency romance. Why Regency? Because that’s what I was reading at the time, trawling methodically through the entire Georgette Heyer catalogue.

For a few years, the stories stayed in my head, but then I had a dream. I mean that literally, an actual being-asleep dream, with grim-faced men in black with swords. There were several dreams of that type, and gradually waking-me began to mull over the stories being tossed out by sleeping-me and make some sense of them. And eventually the characters came alive and tapped the inside of my skull. “Look,” they said, “this stuff’s getting complicated and you’re going to forget things and then what will happen to us? You need to write it down.”

“I’m not a writer,” I protested.

But they insisted, and I started writing and I just never stopped. I didn’t have a name for the sort of stuff I was writing, but I discovered later that it was fantasy. So really, you could say that fantasy selected me, not the other way round. Or rather, my characters selected me. More recently, I came full circle and returned to my original genre, Regency romance.

Footnote: Authors Answer is the brainchild of blogger Jay Dee Archer, of I Read Encyclopedias For Fun. You can read the answers to this question by his eclectic bunch of authors here. More recently, Erica Dakin, of the Theft And Sorcery blog, has been answering the questions independently. You can read her answer to this question here.