Words in the blood

I've written  regularly since the age of twelve.  My first scribbles occupied my time between homework and bed, and were written up in the privacy of my bedroom, just for me.  Later in my twenties I progressed to writing the novel.  I still have that first attempt.  It's a hideously bad, derivative, fantasy tale about a wizard whose heavily influenced by Gandalf.  I wrote 30,000 words then ran out of steam.

Through twenty years of full time jobs as a lawyer, personnel manager, and trainer, all of which I hated, the writing kept me going.  I got good at ferreting out early morning coffee shops to frequent for that precious half-hour's writing before the work day began.  And gradually, through a succession of novels, I learned my craft.

Around ten years ago I realised I'd produced over fifteen novels and I'd learned my craft.  And apart from sending out the odd short story for a competition, I still hadn't done a thing with my writing.  The words in my blood were pouring out and being recorded, but they were going no further.

Now I've been writing seriously for well over twenty years and I have twenty-two completed novels sitting on my shelves.  I kept on writing through the years of constant rejection.  I would periodically withdraw from the fight to get published.  I would have months when I refused to have anything to do with the bruising world of publishing.  But I didn't stop writing.  A writer is who I am, the words are in my blood and they need recording.

If you don't have that word infection you're not going to stay the course on the rocky slopes to publication.  Becoming a publishable-standard author takes stamina, and bucket-loads of belief in yourself when nobody else has any.  It takes the courage to show up at that blank page every day and fill it with words.

Sometimes when we've just received a bruising rejection we ask ourselves why we write.  But for the person born to be a writer the words in the blood demand to be birthed.  The stories inside clamour to be told.  And even though getting someone to read and publish our work feels like climbing the tallest and most forbidding mountain in the world, we keep going,

We keep going because we're writers, and because the words in the blood keep flowing.