Starting to Write

I always knew I could tell stories. In the early days at my prep school I was allowed by matron, at the request of the other boys in the dormitory, to tell a story after 'lights out' at night when we all had to be silent - on condition it didn't last too long. I would spin yarns about what I used to do at my home in Africa, some of them utterly fanciful.

It wasn't until I was fourteen that I came under the influence of someone who could channel what talents I had, a teacher of history at Bradfield who took my class for English and, since an 'essay' had to be written in one of the GCE English 'O' level examination papers, set us an essay for our 'prep' every week. JBA Burridge's titles were often challenging. In 'Fool's Rush in Where Angels Fear to Tread' I wrote about a missionary who insisted on trying to convert the African tribe which had killed his predecessor, with the inevitable result.

In 1991, on the spur of the moment and for no logical reason, I started to write a novel. Whenever I had a few minutes on a weekday evening, after I had finished marking my classes' books and done the preparation for the next day's lessons, I would switch on the family's Amstrad 6128 and write. It was a daunting task: the computer had such a limited memory that the largest file it could save only contained some 5,000 words, so the book was written in over twenty chunks.

While I ignored many of them, one rule of writing I did take to heart: one must know one's subject. So I set the novel in Kenya, partly on the coast and partly in Tsavo National Park. It was aimed at an age-group I taught, sixteen to eighteen-year olds.

I finished the first draft in October and immediately started to send a synopsis of 'Circles in the Sand', with the first couple of chapters, to agents. To my considerable surprise a London agent asked to see the whole book and, shortly afterwards, met me in London and agreed to try to place it with a publisher. As agents tend to do, she sent it to half-a-dozen publishers, but when none showed any interest she returned the typescript.

That I had been so close spurred me on but in a slightly different direction: I started to write short stories.