Born in 1968 in Salford, an event that haunts my writing to this day.
I left school wanting to become a comic strip illustrator.
Through some misunderstanding or miscommunication with my art teacher I
ended up on an Art & Design course that didn't have any illustration module
in it. I flunked the course and worked
in a hotel for a while – too long a while – doing various portering jobs.
My confidence in my artistic ability had taken a battering but
working in the hotel had shown me clearly that a non-creative, repetitive job
would destroy my soul, sooner rather than later. After quitting that job I had a little bit of money from the sale
of my flat, enough to live off for a year perhaps and try to be in a band with
my best friend. We programmed the sequencer
and drum machine together, he did the vocals.
I’ve the happiest memories of that period. Making music with my friend was the greatest fun. When it came to actually gigging I suffered
another crisis of confidence. I think
we managed about four of them. Although
I had faith in our ability to compose real tunes my inability to read music or
play live with any authority was too much for me. It didn’t enter my head to have music lessons. I quit.
Damn.
I spent a good deal of time on the dole. I wrote a play in order to impress my friend’s sister, because
she was becoming an actress. Without my
knowing about it her mother entered the play into The Contact Young Playwrights
Festival. To my delight I won a
place. I got to go on a residential
rewriting weekend with my fellow young playwrights, our plays were produced and
performed at the Contact Theatre in Manchester – I even did a radio interview
and wrote an article about my experiences.
Had I at last found the creative outlet that I could feel good about?
I wrote a film script next and got an agent. The script was good (it still is) and the
getting of the agent was a piece of cake.
We sold an option on the script to a production company and these new
connections also led to my writing cartoon scripts for children’s
television. So far, so easy. But I still had a way to go on a certain
learning curve: the one about taking professional criticism. Sometimes we don’t appreciate the things
that have come to us easily.
The film didn’t get made (yet).
I wrote quite a lot of cartoon scripts in a fairly short space of time,
enough to get jaded with it, despite it being the best and easiest money I’d
earned in my life. I got married and
got a proper grown-up job: teaching basic skills to adults with a learning
disability, a worthy enough endeavour, replete with the best of
intentions. But again, the haunting
feeling of faking it, as I had felt as a musician. I could do it, I just couldn’t do it with authority, with
confidence.
I divorced. Then I quit my
job and ran off to Scotland to an ‘intentional community’ in search of a
creative, non-conformist way of life with peculiar and like-minded folk. I was very excited about this but had
another one of those learning curve things to grapple with. What is it with those? Disillusioned with the search for community
I went off with my new partner to Africa.
I would work on my latest writing project while she completed her
Masters degree. While I was out there I
decided it was pointless doing anything unless it was something I could be
excited about, something I could love doing.
I would come back and be a writer full time.
