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On my home page, I mentioned writing in my Care Bears notebook as a child, and I want to expand the subject of always being a writer. Because it wasn’t a clear cut path, and it took me some time to realise that what I was doing was a part of a writing process.

At four years old I started school as one of the youngest in the year. Once I had learned to write the alphabet, I would practice by writing all my family and friends names, ages and addresses. All very normal at this point…

But what no one knew, is that in my head I would jumble it all up. Someone I went to school with would become the child of a family member and they lived in another town entirely. And thus began a character and world-building imagination that evolved through childhood as I started to invent my own characters instead of using people I knew.

I probably got through several forests worth of paper as I would write everything about my characters, what they looked like, the type of clothes they wore, who their friends were, what their personalities were like, what their hobbies were etc. The only thing I didn’t do was to write down the ‘Once upon a time…’ part of their stories. That played out in my head only, usually to music, but I never once formed their stories into words.

It was when I was clearing out my mums house a few years ago, that I found my old Care Bears note book, which was an absolute gem of a find! It was very obvious to me now that I was meant to be a writer, that I was a writer all along.

But as a child, I had no idea that what I was doing was part of a writing process. I just thought I was being silly inventing people and was embarrassed about it, and therefore never discussed it with anyone who could point out that it was a writing process. It was a private part of me that no one knew about. In school, when we were given a creative writing assignment, I would go completely blank. I struggled so much with this, that there was no way anyone could ever have guessed or known that I had this skill of inventing characters and worlds.

It was much later in life that my lightbulb moment came. I was between jobs and home in the daytime for the first time as an adult. The TV was on in the background and I wasn’t paying too much attention. I couldn’t tell you what the programme was or who the author was that they had on, but they were talking to a writer about how her latest book had completely different characters to the last one and was in a completely contrasting setting. Upon hearing this, the lightbulb came on in my head. I thought; I like all different characters in different settings. Maybe I should try and write something.

And that really was it. I sat down at my big old grey box of a computer, if anyone remembers them?! There was no Microsoft office. I think the programme was Lotus, if I remember right?! And I know I saved onto a floppy disk!

In that moment, I typed my first few words as a writer and I was blown away at how easily it came. I’m not saying that what I wrote that day was any good, far from it, but that little narrative voice that had always been there in my head, flowed out onto the screen. And as clichéd as it sounds, a floodgate was opened.

I haven’t stopped writing since, and I credit that moment as hugely significant for me personally. Up until that point in life, I didn’t know what my place in the world was. I had no idea where I was going or who I was meant to be. But in that moment, I suddenly knew who I was. And who I am. I’m a writer. Always have been, always will be.