About Me

First words, working overseas, and writing it all down

I’ve had a passion for words for as long as I can remember. At seventeen I wrote an article about the floods that covered Mid Wales and the border country around Chester, my home town. It was published in a national magazine: I got my name on the front cover, a cheque for three pounds, and my first taste for the writing life.

It was a long wait before anything else I wrote found an audience, but soon I was busy with a different kind of writing: keeping a journal. I was trying to capture the feel of my life, the world of experience that was opening up to me after university. As a teacher of English I travelled to Sweden, Spain, Morocco, Switzerland, and the Middle East. My journals struggled to put into words the feel of exotic cities and landscapes, the truth of love affairs and friendships, the adventure of going out for the first time into the big world beyond home and family. I wrote them for me, a heady mix of story-telling, self-absorption and reflection, borrowing the style of whoever I was reading at the time: John Fowles, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, John Updike. As far as I know nobody else has read a word of what I put down in those A5 hard-back notebooks. I had no wish to open up my inner world to the public gaze. It was personal, private, and stayed in my desk drawer.

Linguistics, theatre and then Australia

I came back to the UK , took a Masters degree in Linguistics, and soon realised that I’d had enough of English teaching. The more I found out about the way we humans use language, the more interested I became, and the less sure of what I wanted to do with it. Then I joined a drama group, co-founded a theatre company in Birmingham , and began writing plays. I discovered what every playwright, novelist and poet knows: your best writing lays bare your beliefs, your view of yourself and the world, whether you want to or not. The more I tried to make my plays like those I admired, the more I attempted to make them clever and invulnerable to criticism, the less they worked on stage. And step by step I began to open up to my own stories, even though I didn’t know then that was what I was doing. My radio plays were broadcast by the BBC, then the ABC. In 1990 I took up the offer of a job as a theatre lecturer in Perth , and found a beautiful place to live, work and bring up young children.

Big changes

1996 was a year of changes. My marriage fell apart. My father died. I began working free-lance. In the middle of the emotional turmoil I took a UWA Extension course with a writing teacher called Barbara Turner-Vesselago. It was a revelation. I discovered that I could write fluently and tap into layers of memory, experience and feeling that had previously eluded me. I got an inkling of what Steven King means when he says that it’s the responsibility of every writer to tell the truth.

A piece that I wrote in half an hour during that course, sitting in the shade of a White Gum on the UWA campus one hot January morning, has just been accepted for publication, under the title In Flight. I was learning patience, as well as the need to write at full tilt and white heat when the words catch fire, as they did that day.

From PhD to Freeflow

In the late 90s I spent three years completing my doctoral thesis on creativity and theatre. I found that by using the approach I now call Freeflow I could write it fluently and efficiently, and well enough to impress the examiners. I came to understand that what I had thought were two quite separate worlds of writing – the ‘creative’ and the ‘objective’ – were in fact the same. The basic process of writing any text is exactly the same, and it all starts with intuition. My PhD was completed without any of the angst and despair that I had been warned of by others: I actually enjoyed writing it. It was often hard work, but I never felt blocked or hopeless or drained.

I could see with growing clarity how many people undermine their attempts to write, how they doggedly stick with an approach that they believe will work, despite all the evidence that it doesn’t. I began to read everything I could that might shed light on the process of writing, from psychologists, authors, improvisation experts, spiritual teachers, linguists and artists. A pattern emerged, a picture that fitted with my own experience of writing, and out of all this Freeflow was born.

Writing the flow – and teaching how to do it

For several years I taught writing classes at Albany Summer School, then in 2003 I decided to launch out on my own. I set up my Freeflow Writing in the Café courses and workshops. The first one was in Cottesloe, and quickly booked out. I found that there are many of us who want to write, to capture in words the feel and the truth of this fleeting life as we blunder and sometimes fly through it. It seemed to me that my writing was like my life – one big improvisation, making it up as I went along. I look back and I can find meaning, structure, certainty: but it’s only clear in retrospect. And that is what I’ve been teaching.

Not everyone wants to write in this way, but enough for me to delight in the responses I get in my courses and workshops. Now I regularly give talks and run classes in writing - in libraries, community centres and bookshops, for corporate groups, arts associations, country writers and schools. I have begun to teach the craft of reworking a story, to bring analysis and rationality to the work, alongside the intuition and passion that drive a first draft. Perhaps this is a way of reintegrating into my work all that science, logic and academic insight. Writing a good story is never as easy as it might seem to the reader – that’s the trick, to make it look straight-forward and simple – so we might as well bring all our faculties to bear on the task.

Put it in Plain English

Still, that first idea, those first words and sentences tumbling out onto the page or screen: that’s where so many of us need guidance. And that’s what I have set out to do, to teach others how to make use of what I have discovered. Writing cannot be reduced to a rational process; it is an unpredictable flow that leads us to discover what we mean and what story we are telling. Give up trying to impress, let go of the fear that people won’t like what you write, and the chances are your writing will come alive as you find your voice to tell your own unique story. And it will also most likely find a form in good old Plain English, rather than in some try-hard ‘impressive’ prose style that a reader sees through in an instant as a fake. I should warn you that I can be a bit of a fanatic about Plain English, a form of writing that appears to be increasingly under threat in this world of spin doctors and what I call ‘officialese’.

Why do I write?

My stories and plays have won prizes, my work is published and broadcast, I’ve written articles on writing that are published in corporate journals and arts magazines. Yet still, to be honest, I sometimes feel as if I’m faking it, starting from scratch each time I sit down with my computer or notebook. And I reckon this is probably a very good position from which to teach others the mystery, magic and hard work of writing.

Which brings me finally to the big question that always comes up in workshops: why write? Why do I write? All I know is that I have to. The words and stories compel me to put them down. Then as I write, rewrite, and read my writing I have an intense feeling of pleasure and satisfaction. Not all the time, but enough to encourage me to create space for the next story, the next sentence. Who am I writing for? It depends. But first of all, for me: if I'm not fully engaged by it, I doubt whether anyone else wil be. If the work gets published, broadcast or performed in public, that’s great, but that’s not why I write in the first place. It’s for the pleasure, for the fun of it.

Real life and true stories

If I’m writing a story about Morocco (like Casablanca) I take my memories of people and places, mix in a few things that happened to me and my friends, add stuff that was in the news at the time, sprinkle in some spicy drama, then run the whole lot through my imagination. The characters are a bit like the people I knew and met, but they aren’t real people. I’ve made them up. What comes out is a cocktail of fact and fiction woven into a story. It’s a construct, a piece of artifice that has the kind of light and shade, focus, structure and sense of resolution that real life (at least my real life) lacks as it is lived moment by moment. I play with the words and if I’m any good at it my story is truthful. It’s true, but not in a way you could check against any record book.

Making it up as I go along

I’m writing for the joy and satisfaction of writing. Nothing more – no great mission or philosophy – just the hard work and delight of playing with the words and stories, of watching myself make it all up, from thin air, over and again. Floods, ideas, people, places, love, despair, truth, lies, more love, laughter and floods of tears. And a sense that it goes on for ever.