A Picture of Me

Some people come into writing because they are chosen by it and some people come into writing because they choose it. It’s a fine distinction and it can make all the difference between those who write to live and those who write for a living. I belong to the former, first, even though now, writing is my main job description.

I do not know when I started wanting to write but I know what it felt like. It’s like a sense of pressure building up inside your head and staying there, not going away, making you feel like you are going to explode. And the only thing that can relieve it is … writing.

Funnily enough I studied Chemical Engineering as a career, before making a sideways leap at graduation into technical writing, at first, and then journalism. My short stories appeared in some of the UK’s most cutting-edge literary magazines, then I branched into business writing and business journalism before doing a long but rewarding stint in business communications and PR for one of the UK’s blue-chip retailers.

I sometimes view these as detours, but in reality they are all connected by a number of threads. Writing is all about communication. I grew up wanting badly to write fiction and despaired at ever being able to get the pictures inside my head onto paper. I learnt, along the way, that the challenge of communicating is constant, that the thrill of connecting with readers never goes away and that every book is a challenge of its own.

I made the transition into full time writing in 2011 with the publication of my third book on search engine optimisation (called Brilliant SEO: what you need to know and how to do it). I have been fortunate that up to now each book I have written has made it to the Amazon best-selling charts. The feedback I get humbles me and, in the social media age, connecting with readers in such a direct way is a privilege I had never imagined possible.

What really drives me these days is the fact that the world of business and the world of marketing are so closely integrated in their impact on daily life. It is exciting, it is challenging and writing books which have practical value makes me feel that I contribute in a very tangible way towards the shaping of a world that is a little bit better than the one we have left behind.

Do I write fiction at all these days? All the time. I have notebooks filled with characters, storyline ideas and situations. I have told myself that I need to get through the business book writing phase and then do some real writing. So, that’s what I am doing now. Writing.