I can’t think of a more obvious way to be inspired to write than to love reading. Even if you have a story to tell, you must still need inspiration of how to tell that story?

My mother encouraged me to read, and read I did. I love to read, I read every day and I cannot sleep if I do not read myself to sleep.

As a child, I read classics and children’s books from the school library. My mother had her head in a book a lot of the time when I was growing up and she mainly read crime fiction, chief amongst those novels was Agatha Christie.

The first adult fiction I remember reading was Agatha Christie’s ‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’ I had already begun to write short stories, and these stories featured lots of battles and blood and gore. The thing that attracted me to this crime novel in particular was the skull staring out from the cover. I think I struggled with the middle-class characters and settings.

My mother also liked a bit of horror, and I helped myself to James Herbert’s ‘The Rats’. This terrifying book was of course a game-changer, but as beautifully terrifying and gory as Herbert’s novels were, they didn’t contain characters that I could relate to. Most of the children’s adventure books and classics I had read were populated with upper and middle-class children going to boarding school and drinking lashings of ginger ale. Some of the more modern books dealt with poverty, bullying, the grimness of working-class life. A Pair of Jesus Boots by Sylvia Sherry, about a kid growing up and being bullied because of the clothes (and shoes) he wore certainly hit home. And then of course there was The Fib and Other Stories by George Layton which are some of the earliest memories I have of reading fiction that really spoke to me. (see What Fiction Means to Me for more on this topic.) It wasn’t until I read Stephen King that I rediscovered characters like me in books further down line. Stephen King was working-class, from rural Maine and was brought up by a single mother. I latched on to him and never let go.

Although I liked to write and I wanted to write, I also felt like I wasn’t good enough to write. In the later years of high school I was not a good student. My experience of school was not good. I was a very sad child. We were poor, we lived in poverty. I was bullied because of the clothes I wore, so I became a truant. I missed lots of work and fell behind. I decided to join the army to get away and was accepted well before I left school, so I had absolutely no incentive to learn or work towards my exams.

I didn’t write at all when I was in the army, but I continued to read whenever I could. I developed a conscience and my reading widened to encompass literary and historical fiction, and of course, Scottish History. When I left the army, I had the life experience to write something interesting. And through my reading, I was inspired to write. I began to train myself to be a writer. I read a lot, I wrote a lot.

I wrote a memoir of my army life that I had to abandon as it was far too personal. I began to write a historical fiction novel about a seer in the Scottish Highlands that lost its way. I wrote dozens of angsty, self-pitying short stories. I continued to read and I continued to write. I further widened my reading and found the styles I loved, and I began to find my voice. I also read about writing and I read about writers, and to help me focus, I even began to write about writing (the writing journal from which this post is extracted). I returned to education and gained a degree in Multimedia, in the workplace I wrote scripts and storyboards for the safety industry and later I wrote technical workpacks, which were beginning-to-completion stories of how to execute industrial projects. Through it all I kept reading and writing. I was writing because I needed to – I was writing for myself. It wasn’t until I read ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King that my reading became more focused and I really found the courage and inspiration to write for an audience.

My army memoir became a realism novel with an episodic structure and picaresque elements, with an anti-war, anti-capitalist message. The seer became an historical/speculative fiction fusion novel with supernatural and environmental themes. Some of my short fiction has been published, and all of my fiction has a focus on social and cultural equality – important issues that I have learned about and become passionate about because of my reading.