Growing Pains as a Writer

Back in the grand year of 2008, I wrote a book.

Not just any book, either. A proper technical book about web development, published by an actual publisher with an actual editor. It all felt wonderfully official. There were deadlines, edits, the occasional disagreement and, eventually, a printed book with my name on the front.

Smashing.
I was an author.

Only a year later, I found myself thinking something wasn’t quite right. I sat staring at the screen long enough to concern a pigeon outside the window before eventually reaching a conclusion.

My writing wasn’t missing anything. It had too much… stuff.

That’s about as technical as I can make the diagnosis. What I really meant was that I wasn’t trimming hard enough. I wanted to write with more precision.

“I know!” I announced to the now thoroughly alarmed pigeon. “I’ll write like a journalist.”

Off I went, full of ambition, only to discover something rather important. Journalism isn’t really about writing. It’s about finding things out.

Wonderful profession.

Not quite what I was looking for.

So I kept digging and discovered feature writing instead. That sounded much more like me. I enrolled on a diploma with the London School of Journalism, worked hard, passed with distinction and thought, Right. That’s sorted then.

It wasn’t. Because then I discovered blogging. That complicated everything.

Feature writing has rules. News reporting definitely has rules. Blogging, on the other hand, cheerfully ignores the entire concept of rules. You can be formal, conversational, thoughtful, ridiculous or all four in the same paragraph if the mood takes you.

The trouble was, my blog posts still sounded as though someone was about to interrupt them with the weather forecast.

Eventually I loosened up. Not by abandoning what I’d learned, but by allowing a little more personality to creep in. A little more freedom. A little more anarchy.

Excellent. Now I’d cracked it.

I hadn’t.

The next stop was copywriting. Surely this would be the missing piece. I signed up for another diploma, learned how to write clearly, economically and persuasively, passed that one with distinction too, and once again congratulated myself on having finally worked it all out.

I hadn’t.

Naturally, I decided the next logical step was to write a novel. Off I went, producing thousands of words a day with enormous enthusiasm and very little ability. The result was twenty thousand words of absolute rubbish.

Into the bin it went. Probably for the best.

Since then I’ve written nine novels. Only two remain on Amazon, which should tell you something about my quality control.

I’ve changed the direction of my blog more times than I care to remember. I launched websites under half a dozen different domain names, convinced that the next one would somehow reveal my true north.

It didn’t.

I tried WordPress. Medium. Substack. If there’s a platform for writers, there’s a reasonable chance I’ve wandered onto it at some point. Somewhere during all of this, I stumbled across a statistic that should probably have made me feel better.

Apparently, it takes around three to five years—or roughly a million words—for most writers to discover their own voice. Some people reckon it can take the best part of a decade to stop imitating other writers and become confident enough to sound like themselves.

That was reassuring.

Until I realised I’d been at it for the better part of seventeen years.

Then something rather odd happened.

Instead of chasing the next technique, the next qualification or the next platform, I found myself drifting back towards where I’d started.

Columns.
Features.
Observational writing.

Only this time, they sounded different. They sounded like me.

Not because I’d stopped admiring other writers. Quite the opposite. James Herbert, Spike Milligan, Douglas Adams, Tom Sharpe and Alan Coren are all still sitting somewhere on the bookshelf in my head.

The difference is that I’m no longer trying to sound like any of them.

I’m quite happy sounding like Andy from Coventry, writing whatever peculiar thought has wandered into his head that morning.

Looking back, I think I spent years trying to catch the brilliance of the writers I admired most.

It turns out that was never really the job.

The job was simply to keep writing until I discovered what my own voice sounded like. Looking back, that was probably always going to take a while.