Every book needs an inciting moment. It’s a change that leads to conflict, or a conflict that leads to change. It’s what gets the story started. They say everyone has a book in them. I have five now, and a short story in an anthology. The journey has been interesting. I was an avid reader as a child, but didn’t rally aspire to be a writer. I wanted to be a pilot, but became a civil engineer. You can read why in my post about colour blindness. I was working on a project in Manchester, away from home. It was 1993 and personal computers were gaining popularity. I could either go to the pub every night, or buy a PC and teach myself how to use it. I decided the latter was healthier and probably cheaper.
After I’d worked out how to create files and save them to disc, I thought I’d write something. Everyone has a book in them, why not spend this time away from home writing a best-seller? I tried to write an aviation based crime novel, a sort of Biggles of the computer age. I’d written perhaps three or four chapters while in Manchester. When I got home I gave it to Claire to see what she thought. She thought it was awful. She wasn’t wrong. So if the Manchester episode was an inciting moment in my writing journey, it was a damp squib.
Fast forward to 2009 and a colleague asked me if I’d like to make a presentation with him on procurement risk. It was to the Institution of Risk Management. Jonathan Norman was in the audience. He was publishing editor with Gower Publishing. He contacted my colleague and asked him if he’d write a book about procurement risk. My colleague said he wouldn’t, but that I might. I met Jonathan and sold him the idea of a book on project sponsorship instead. He took my idea to the board and they agreed to my proposal. I thoroughly enjoyed writing that book, and it was well received. Jonathan emailed me one day to say that the University of Toronto had bought 120 copies. I was already an Open University addict, and decided to do the creative writing course. I had a brilliant tutor, Brian Evans, who gave me massive encouragement and great advice. I entered my second assignment in a short story competition and it was shortlisted and published in Something Hidden. On the back of that success I had ambition to write crime fiction. I made a mind-map of my detective hero. But nothing happened. I did enrol on the advanced creative writing course. While doing that I was reading a biography of Sir Francis Drake. A paragraph grabbed my attention. It was about Sir Anthony Standen who was providing intelligence to Walsingham on the Spanish Armada. Standen was my mother’s maiden name so I read the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on him. It was the most amazing story I had ever read, but I kept asking – why did he do that? And – how did he do that? So that was my inciting moment. Now there are four books in the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures, and I don’t intend to stop, now that I’ve had my inciting moment.