In the beginning

My first really long story started when I was on a camping holiday in France with my husband and two sons and it rained. We had no television or radio so we made board games and wrote stories. I continued to write the story when we got back home but I got bogged down and never finished it.

My next story was an autobiographical one, after we left the fundamentalist church we used to belong to. The story had a number of self-righteous characters who were trying to force their views on everyone in the name of God. It was very satisfying to write.

I found NaNoWriMo much later and completed three novellas, none of them remotely publishable. I've learnt that I need to plan to write a book because trying to edit an unplanned 50k work is painful or even impossible. I've learned how to write dialogue and the importance of characters but I'm still a complete novice at producing a believable plot. I work best with a time limit and I'm finding my current work is languishing because I've got too much time to write it in.

This was meant to be about how I started writing but it seems to have ended up as the story so far. So over to you now. How did you get started?

I owe the idea for this post to Writes in the City .