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| Nicole Murphy – Photo by Cat Sparks |
Did you have your own personal ‘darkest hour’ in the process of getting your novels written and published (for example, a moment you thought it would never happen), and how did you get through it to achieve success?
Oh boy, did I 🙂 It started around 2005/2006 – I’d not sold any short stories for a while, the novels were get knockbacks and I had started to get into editing, which I loved. I also moved from part-time to full-time journalism.
All these things said to me that maybe writing fiction wasn’t what I was meant to do. Journalism was relatively fun and easy. Editing was fun and I loved working with writers and helping them get their best work across. Maybe this was where my energies lay.
But the dream of having my own book wouldn’t go away. I’d first decided I wanted to be a writer when I was 11 years old and despite the years of not really trying, it was a part of me. The move back to writing actually started when Cat Sparks posted a blog on regrets, mulling over it all as she worked her way into a new decade alive.
It fired me up – I was a year and a half away from turning 40, and I thought I’d hate to reach that milestone and have regrets. So I made a list of things I wanted to do before I turned 40 and started working on it.
With the idea of no regrets on my mind, I had a sudden realisation that I needed to re-focus on my dream of being a published novellist. I had a vision of myself on my deathbed and I just knew that I’d be devastated if I got to that point and thought ‘Maybe if I’d tried harder…’
The rest is described in my answer to the previous question. I look back on that time now and I don’t regret it. I learned a lot from my time editing and being a journalist (and editing is something I hope to get back to) and it made me the writer I am today.
The important thing is to recognise what you dream is, and then do what you can to make it happen. Recognise that it might not – my aim was just to give it all I had, so that at the end I couldn’t blame myself for not being published.
So give it all you got, and know that that in itself is an incredible achievement.