Confession

I asked Daughter what to put on the blog. 'We're here,' she said. So there you are. Daughter and her Chap are here. Hamilton is beside himself with joy.

Daughter's Chap's Mum and Dad invited us to their party on Friday night. They live near to where we lived when the children were small, which meant there were familiar faces to meet again. One of them was a lady who made an enormous difference to my life.

Many years ago, when LYS had just started school, I saw an advert in the local paper for a Short Story Writing course, geared particularly to the magazine market. As somebody who'd written for years on and off and never got anywhere with it, I saw this and decided to give it one last try. One of the exercises was to take a newspaper article as the starting point for a story. This was just after Christmas, and there were two pieces in the paper that looked promising. One was about a very aged couple who were drunk and disorderly at New Year and the other concerned a courting couple and a stolen bottle of whisky. But the trouble with these stories was that they were already there. They were too ready made. Instead I turned to a very simple, rather cosy account of a Boxing Night Dance. It mentioned the food and the band and the dancing and I thought of all the things that could go wrong.

By the time I'd finished, revised, and polished The Boxing Night Dance, I decided that this was my very best and if I couldn't get that published I'd never get anything published. It became my first story in print and earned me all of £40.00 from My Weekly. Then there were more stories. Then a serial. Then my first book...

...and on Friday night I chatted with my teacher from that course. I'd kept her informed when my stories and my first book came out, and we had a long catching up chat talking about all the things writers do talk about when they get together. She still does short fiction and drama. I mentioned that I'd sometimes taught Creative Writing courses, and made my confession. Here it is. I'm a trained teacher. I know how to write. But I've never trained to teach Creative Writing.

It turned out that she hadn't either. Her courses were the model for mine, and we both had happy students!