A WRITING JOURNEY BACK THROUGH TIME

I didn't set out to become a novelist, although now with nine published novels under my belt - and five more written, three of which are pending publication - I think I can call myself that without having to stretch the truth too much.

Novel publication came about for me after writing serials for My Weekly. The last - commissioned - serial I wrote elicited this comment from my lovely editor,Jean - 'You do realise don't you, Linda, that this serial is a terrible waste of what could be a very fine novel.' Could it? Well, with a few tweaks and a change of setting, and a few name changes as well, that's what happened. But serial writing, in the first place, only came about after I'd written rather a lot of short stories - stories which seemed to get longer and longer and longer for some publications who pay by the finished product regardless of how many words there are. 2020 was a truly terrible year for almost everyone but it ended on a writing high for me with not one, but two short stories out in December.

And now I'm going to take a step further back. Short stories only happened for me after I'd been writing articles on the Arts for various publications. Not that I knew anything about Art but I have a friend who knows everyting. And not that I ever intended to write said articles in the first place. My (sorta) daughter-in-law (Elisabeth Hadley) is a sculptor and she needed a bit of publicity for a mermaid sculpture she'd been commissioned to make for a private customer in Dartmouth. She knew I liked shooting off the odd rant to newspapers (more later) about this and that so asked if I could write something. So I did. I sent it to Devon Life and because it was such a good story (the statue is sited on a private jetty but just about the first thing sailors see when they enter the Dart from the sea and has become a well-known landmark)they took it, as they did the sixty or so articles I wrote that followed.

So this has taken us back to those 'Angry from Paignton' letters that started it all. It didn't take me long to work out that newspapers and magazines would pay handsomely for some things. I diluted the anger a bit and started sending in short, but to the point, pieces about all sorts of things - gardening, living in a seaside holiday town, my son joining the Cubs, riding pillion on my husband's vintage motorcycles.

So, perhaps the urge to write had always been there. I just needed a vehicle, a reason, to write - permission of a sort. Over the years I've found that writing articles and features has taught me to be precise, to cut the waffle, in my novel-writing. And that if there is a short story word limit I keep pretty much to it. Spot on. All the people I've met and written about for said articles and features - where they live, what they do, their stories - have provided some very interesting settings for my fiction. Each has facilitated the other. When fiction writing was in the doldrums I picked up my non-fiction pen again. And when fiction took off for me again, article and feature writing took a back seat for a while. Covid has put me in the novel-writing doldrums. Time, then, for an article or two?