Writing dreams can come true

NEVER give up

t feels as though I have been writing my whole life. Even as a child I kept a journal, wrote stories and plays, my head full of plots and scenarios waiting to be put down on paper. As I grew older dreams of ‘being a writer,’ whatever that , came and went. I wrote poems, the occasional one was published, then I stopped, convinced I wasn’t a poet. I wrote a novel and sent it off to agents and publishers. I had kind words, which are never enough. Disheartened I limited myself to diary entries and journalling.

A move of house and a new writers group in the area sent me back to my discarded novel and somehow I had the audacity to find a place on a creative writing MA at Sheffield Hallam University. My novel was rewritten and honed under the mentorship of Lesley Glaister and won a competition to be published. I had short stories accepted and was paid for them. I had done it. I was ‘a writer’. This was just the start.

Only it wasn’t. I wrote more novels. Agents and publishers requested full manuscripts but it never went any further. Life and work stress started to get in the way and the ink in my pen dried up. Without realising it I stopped writing, stopped considering myself a writer. My mother died and life seemed to spiral away from me. When writing could have saved me it wasn’t part of my life any more. I think now there was so much else in my head there was no creative space left.

Ironically it was the pandemic and  Lockdown which gave me the time, space and purpose to start writing regularly. It began as a daily journal, trying to make sense of the new world we all found ourselves in. I had time to walk and read and write. And I did.

In the August of 2020 my husband collapsed and almost died whilst we were on holiday. The bit of me which had been holding on and managing to do my job as a family solicitor, which I had hated for years, gave way. For the first time in my working life I gave in and took sick leave. And it was then, in the fear and confusion about my husband’s physical and mental health and about my own future that the words came forth again. I wrote a story about a book group in the pandemic and it was shortlisted for the Cheshire Literary Prize. I started to write another novel.

And I realized that writing is my ‘thing.’ You know that thing which makes you happy, which speaks to who you are and how you fit in the world. And I realized I had to find a way to make writing a bigger part of my life. I accepted that I was probably never going to make it as a novelist, may never have another book published. But I could carve out a life which put creativity front and centre. I could live on less if I was living a life which gave me joy.

I left my well paid job as a solicitor and began working as a self employed mediator. And I kept writing. I applied for Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice grants, spending hours on the applications, and was turned down. I spent days wondering if I was mad. Who was I to call myself a writer? To think  I could live a writing life, a life  where my creative practice wasn’t fitted round the edges of other work, which didn’t satisfy but which paid the inevitable bills. I thought at 55 it was too late to be more than a hobby.

And then in April I heard that I had been awarded one of six Artists Respond bursaries by St Hugh’s Foundation for the Arts. I would be given money to take time out to research and think and write. It’s something I only ever dreamed of and now it’s started it scarcely feels real. St Hugh's Foundation 2024 Award Winners

This is my first week of my Voices of Axholme project funded by St Hugh’s and it has been wonderful. I’ve walked and written and journalled. I’ve spent a day in the library among the archives and I’ve started to collect the stories of the land. I’m not sure what will come after this but I am certain I must use this to make a change. I have hoped for a time like this my whole writing life and I am so pleased I never gave up on the dream. People say ‘it’s never too late’ and I’m learning that it’s true. Keep hoping, keep dreaming, keep writing. If it is what you are meant to do, you don’t really have a choice.