Nicola wanted to write but didn’t know quite where to start. She had read and listened to plenty of interviews with successful authors and knew that if you wanted to write you had to jolly well just get on with it. So, Nicola just got on with it.
She had huge amounts of bouncing creativity and would feel a great frustration if she came to the end of the day without something tangible, colourful, to show for it. She hoped to plough as much colour and texture into her writing as she ploughed into her gardens.
Nicola remembered hours of satisfying toil in the libraries of school, college, university. She remembered those who marked her essays and reports praising her imagination and ability to research insightfully. Nicola remembered the English teacher at her all-girls school commenting that if only she put as much effort into her handwriting as she applied to the humour that littered her comprehension homework, that she might well achieve better marks.
Art was her best subject. At least, Art was the only subject where she was recognised as very talented. Nicola could draw, she could capture likeness and form and had a sharp eye for colours. Art was her future (it must be a relief for a teacher to see an obvious exit point for teenager approaching the end of school) and she was steered towards, pigeonholed and shown the correct corridor along which she was to travel. But she was abandoned somewhere along that corridor and she had not the maturity to steer herself. She was left disillusioned by the art world. Failing to find a mentor, a path or a vocation within the subject.
Horticulture rescued her. Gardening gave her the daily challenge she needed. It was her creative release, therapy and, as the years went by, it gave her an authority. She put in those 10,000 hours and became an expert (as much as you can ever be an expert in horticulture ~ 10,000 years would not be enough) but still she wanted to write.
She wrote delightful Thank You letters to family and friends; she wrote her blog. She read countless novels spanning several genres (apart from sci-fi – she had no time for sci-fi) and encouraged her children to take as much pleasure from reading and writing as she did.
And then it boiled down to making decisions. Nicola never really was a great one for making decisions, especially those perceived as important decisions.
Fact or fiction?
Nicola decided that she must just write. She must write as frequently as possible. She must publish her intentions on her website and once her intentions were out there she would have to keep on writing.
Nicola hoped to get better and better
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