I came to writing by accident. Divorce first, then the army. I hammered out thousands of words of self-pitying prose in the cold interior of a yacht, then spent years writing intelligence reports in a portacabin in Kurdistan. Neither taught me how to write a story.
Divorce was the first spur. Sitting in the frigid interior of the yacht to which life had temporarily banished me, hammering away at an old laptop, hurling my prose at the fates. It was, at least, a catharsis. The volume of self-pitying poison I eventually produced is something I would rather forget.
The army helped me back onto my feet. It threw an awkwardly avuncular arm about my shoulders and despatched me shivering in the bowels of vast aircraft to places most people would struggle to find on a map. Hours in seats made of cargo netting, the roar of engines drowning thought. The dim glow of phones lighting the faces of the soldiers around me.
Military intelligence is rarely the dark art Hollywood would like it to be. In my experience it was backstopped by uncomfortable beds, wearying hours and, occasionally, time spent ferreting information from the strangest of corners.
Kurdistan. A village barely a hundred miles from the Iranian border. A nearly five-tonne civilian armoured Toyota, its white flanks thick with mud, parked akimbo on an uneven street. Dark-faced men in the broad sashes and turbans of their tradition. A café a hundred yards away where two men sat in deep conversation with a local leader. Glock 19s in their waistbands, a round in each chamber, Glock's clever trigger-mounted safety doing its quiet work. Assault rifles under a blanket in the boot, three hundred rounds alongside them, encrypted phones in their pockets.
The meeting produced a report. Worked up in an ageing portacabin, the author propped on threadbare pillows leaning against a filthy wall. Clothes drying on makeshift lines overhead. Weapons resting against what might generously be described as wardrobes. The words stripped of emotion, of character, of anything resembling beauty. Structured within rigid guidelines. Gleaming with military precision. As dry as a Walkers crisp.
It was, nonetheless, writing. It refined the mechanics. Reinforced the essential discipline of actually sitting down and producing the thing.
But staring at the contrast between that armoured Toyota and the sleepy Kurdish village around it, something else began to move. Western military might, parked on a third-world street in the rain. A metaphor for everything. It sparked a creative urge of an entirely different kind.
The problem was I still had no idea how to write a story. That took another decade of trial and considerable error. And even when my most honest friends conceded that what I had laboriously produced was worth the read, it remained nowhere near good enough for the most discerning audience of all: the literary agent.
For that, I needed to be taught. And as luck would have it, I stumbled across a certain Mr David Baboulene, and the rather clever people at DreamEngine.
More on that next week.