Feels like the first time
I wrote my first novel in the analogue 1990s. How different might it be if I was starting out again now in the digital age? Would I even finish it? I’ve been writing fiction for a living for almost three decades, a day job I once delighted in claiming I landed by accident, although looking back I can see how single-minded I was at 22 when I first set out to write my ‘magnum opus’ as my late father nick-named French Relations, the novel that launched my career. While it’s true that I hadn’t given writing professionally much thought to at that stage, finishing that first novel filled my every waking moment for over a year. What came next was pure kismet, the slushpile-to bestseller happy ending I hardly dared dream of.
My subsequent career has welcomed me into an industry like no other, taken me around the world to share stories, and enabled me to live in – and off – my imagination for years, yet the thrill of that first novel as a writing
