The moment I decided to take writing seriously

April 2020. The UK was in full lockdown. One hour of exercise a day. Nowhere to be and nowhere to go.

I had just finished a consulting contract in mid April and had planned to take a couple of months off. A rest. Some breathing space. Nothing more ambitious than that.

My partner had other ideas.

He knew how much I’d wanted to write. He’d heard it for years, probably longer than I’d care to admit. And he looked at the situation we were in, both of us at home, the world paused outside our window, and he said what I already knew but hadn’t yet said to myself. That I wasn’t likely to get another chance like this. That the excuses I’d always had, the contracts, the clients, the pace of a consulting career, had been temporarily removed. That this was it, if I wanted it to be.

I thought about it. Properly, this time. And I realised he was right.

Instead of two months off, I took four. And I wrote the first full draft of The Weaver.

What made this attempt different from every previous one wasn’t just the time, though having four uninterrupted months helped enormously. It was what happened when I stopped treating writing as something separate from everything else I knew how to do.

I’m a designer by background. I’ve spent thirty years working with personas, journey maps, systems thinking, structured problem solving. For some reason I’d always kept that part of myself at arm’s length from my writing, as if the two things had nothing to do with each other.

During those four months I finally took the wall down.

Design personas became character profiles. Journey maps became narrative arcs. The structured thinking I’d applied to product and design problems for three decades turned out to be exactly the foundation I needed to plot a novel. I went from serial pantser, someone who’d started many novels and finished none, to a committed plotter almost overnight. And suddenly things that had always stalled before started to flow.

I also did something I’d been resisting for a long time. I listened to my inner voice. The one that had been telling me for years that writing wasn’t just something I wanted to do one day. It was something I needed to do. I’d been rebelling against it without quite realising it, choosing the career that made sense over the one that felt right.

The pandemic didn’t give me the desire to write. I’d had that for decades. What it gave me was the circumstances that made it impossible to keep putting off.

Four months later I had a finished draft. Five years later I had five published novels. And somewhere in the middle of all of that I sat down and built a five year plan to make writing my full time life.

That plan has two years left to run. This publication is part of how I intend to finish it.

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