Early Stories and Spooky Beginnings

The first story I can remember writing was in junior school, when I must have been about eight or nine years old. It was a proper adventure tale — a band of explorers setting off in search of some hidden land, a bit like a junior version of The Lost World.

The details are a little hazy now, but one thing has stuck with me all these years: my teacher’s comment that the explorers couldn’t all “feel a spear in their backs,” they had to “feel spears in their backs!” It was my first lesson in the power of words, and how a single letter can change a whole picture in the reader’s mind.

Not long after that, I entered a children’s writing competition with a story about a little boy who could talk to flies and other insects. I poured my heart into it, convinced it was brilliant. To this day, I’m still waiting to hear how I got on in that competition… maybe the letter’s still in the post!

A few years later came what I now think of as my first “novel.” Of course, I never tried to publish it — probably just as well — but it was the first time I really wrote something long and fully imagined. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a ghost story.

The idea was simple enough: a group of friends gather for a party. One of them turns up with an old grimoire — a book of spells they’ve stumbled across in a second-hand shop. They can’t resist reading one of the conjurations aloud. And of course, later that night, strange things start happening. Banging noises downstairs. Shadows that don’t belong. The sense of something lurking in the dark.

Looking back, I realise I borrowed the spookiest element from my own home at the time. The house we lived in then had this unnerving quirk: you couldn’t switch on the hall light from upstairs. So if you wanted to go down in the night, you had to step into the dark hallway first, feeling your way until you reached the switch. Not great if you already had an overactive imagination — which I certainly did! That detail found its way straight into the story, and even now I can feel the chill of that darkened hall.

It makes me smile to think how early experiences shaped the stories I wrote. And it makes me wonder: do you write too? If so, do you find yourself drawing on the places you’ve lived or the odd little quirks of your own childhood homes?

I’m sharing little glimpses of my writing journey in this series, “A Life in Reading and Writing.” There’s more to come — so do check back if you’d like to follow along.