I wrote my first book at six. I was very bored and had run out of books to read and so I decided to write one. The head mistress had a copy printed off for all the kids in the infant school after she’d corrected my spelling. I decided at seven years old, yes, I am going to write books, I’m going to live in a house with fruit trees and what have you.
Most of my heroines are motherless or homeless or there’s been some disaster, and it’s a plot device that gives them the freedom to have adventures that nice girls don’t. If I’d grown up in a lovely, supportive, nice home where I wasn’t scared and we were having sort of nice family discussions around the TV set, rather than me with three locks on the doors, hiding under the bed, I wouldn’t have read as widely, I wouldn’t have escaped into the world of imagination. I certainly wouldn’t have met the characters that are now in my books.
A friend who was a freelance journalist who I’d admitted I wrote in secret encouraged me to send some writing away. I wrote Rain Stones. I was using an old typewriter from the dump, the wombat left his droppings on it, the letter E was all soft and scuppy. So I wrote it without using the letter E and filled in the E with biro. So it was picked out of the pile because of the appalling spelling, the yellowed paper and wombat dropping smudges, and the letter E’ s written in biro. So the editor took it out to read it to everyone so they could have a laugh at the world’s worst manuscript and there in the officer she just read the whole thing aloud to everyone all that afternoon, went back into her office, rang me up and offered me an advance to publish it.
Things seem more dramatic because I am a professional storyteller, so I leave out the boring bits and I just leave the entertaining bits. Probably nothing I’ve said has been the whole truth.
