A very good place to start.

I started writing when I was young and since I’m a woman of a certain age that was many moons ago now.

I remember sitting for hours in my bedroom scribbling in notebook after notebook. Young writers today will never know the anguish of writing out your story by hand and then making a mistake on an otherwise pristine page…with no delete button! This was pen (or pencil) and paper and if you made a mistake you could either ignore it or scribble it out and run the risk of making your whole page look scrappy and unprofessional. Or use an ink rubber and just gouge a crater in the middle of the page instead.

Of course, on the plus side, we had those pens with multiple colour options and rulers with wavy edges and rubbers that were shaped like tiny burgers or flowers. They might have smelt of them too but that was lost on me – I have no sense of smell.

I will freely admit that almost everything I wrote when I was younger was crap.

It was the biggest load of tat in the world; self-serving, unfocussed, and usually morbid. I was obsessed with concentration camps in World War 2 and child labour in Victorian workhouses. Probably because that and sheep farming were the only things we learned about at school but still…I remember spending hours at the local library looking through books. The librarians probably thought I was depressed, homicidal, or both.

I remember I even wrote a play – the very first one I ever wrote – and it was all about being a child in a Victorian workhouse and how awful the conditions were and how many of us died. I made my mum sit through it and she must have spent the whole time just cringing or trying not to fall asleep.

But I loved to write and my parents loved to see me writing. I mean, what parent doesn’t like seeing their kid taking an interest in something as wholesome as writing? Reading and writing are always going to be encouraged, even if it does mean you might have to sit with a smile fixed on your face and listen to plays and stories written by your little darling that make your toes curl!

Fantasy was also a big thing for me. I had watched things like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal and saw myself as the Uncrowned Queen of All Things Portal and Adventure. I must have written at least a dozen stories all a variation of the ‘young girl gets mysteriously transported to another world where she battles bad guys with her band of mythical friends and wins the day and everyone cheers!’ style of writing.

I was the main character in all of my plays and stories and everything was alright in the end.

Ah, the innocence of youth.

And in some ways, I miss that stage of my writing journey. I was convinced that everything I wrote was good. Not great maybe, but good. Just as good as anything I saw on the telly or up on the big screen. If Steven Spielberg could just read one of my stories then it would be made into a movie overnight and I’d be the star and then I’d be famous and have a house with a pool and…and…

And I miss that enthusiasm and faith in myself.

When I get a good idea that I can’t wait to write I feel a little bit of that coming back but most of my writing is tempered with a big dollop of anxiety and fear of failure.

I don’t miss writing everything out by hand because my laptop is my friend (most of the time) and I can type at a fairly good speed to keep up with my thoughts…and the delete button is a godsend.

And I don’t miss writing about workhouse death and concentration horrors. I seem to have taken that and channelled it into a love of all things slightly macabre or creepy and I’m not ashamed to say I watch more than my fair share of true crime. I’ve even written a book about a lovely little old lady with a dead body in her bedroom so it all came in useful at some point.

So while I briefly pine for the 70’s and my brightly-coloured notebooks covered in stickers I’ll stick to what I have now – and just try to inject a tiny bit of that obnoxious self-confidence now and then.