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My journey into writing began with teachers scratching red lines through misspelled words. The pages often looked like a game of hangman played by someone who couldn’t quite remember the rules. And so, writing meandered away from words on a page and manifested instead as a dream that I would sit down and confront ‘one day’.

Fifteen years later, as 2024 ticked into 2025, I made a resolution to sign up for my first ever writing course — flash fiction, to be exact. I loved it, but at the end of the first session we were told that each week someone would submit a piece for the group to read and provide feedback on. Who wanted to go first and bring something next week?

Shit.

My hands remained firmly down. I had never written anything before, had nothing to pull on, no scraps to Frankenstein together, no honed voice that could be critiqued. I unchivalrously nominated myself for the last week and bought myself some anthologies. I read. Journeyed through hundreds of perfectly contained worlds. The baked bean factory, the depths of the ocean, the nucleus of an atom.

I finally put finger to keyboard after the penultimate session. I had three days to submit something so everyone would have time to read it. How to Be a Lobster materialised over the course of two hours. It poured out in scraps of fleeting ideas that had been lingering for a long time. Places that mean one thing to me but perhaps something entirely different to others. Emotions that I had only ever witnessed as a flicker across the face of a stranger. Observations that became something entirely different once they reached the page. I have of course picked at it since, wiggled and shifted, googled words only to discover that I have been using them incorrectly my entire life. But it's done. It exists. And I'm very proud to say it's the first piece of writing I ever finished.

Since then, I have been searching for community. People who understand. People to bounce ideas off. People who help to build worlds, characters and emotions that don’t exist yet. My search has manifested as lots of different writing courses which give me accountability to show up, make time and write. Life is busy, but the world writing allows me to dive into is the one I have searched for in everything I have ever done. It scratches the itch that my science degree never could, where you can notice a tiny seed of something and, sometimes, make it grow into whatever or whoever you want. No references, no conclusive data needed.

But to do that I need people around me, beyond my fabulous partner, family and lovely friends. People who have walked the same paths before, or taken the scenic route; who see the world entirely differently or are in the same position as me — at the start of a journey and bursting with questions. My day job has taught me the importance of community and connection, and that the most important thing people can do is open doors and leave them open for others. I hope that one day my writing takes me to a place that I can do that.

For now, writing exists for me as an opportunity to keep exploring and noticing, deepen my connection with nature, get creative and meet new people.

And for anyone who, like me, is just starting out, the most important thing I have learnt so far is quiet and close storytelling is just as powerful as huge and far-flung storytelling. The most authentic stories are ones that only you can tell. Start with a place in the world that you know intimately and give yourself permission to dream something fresh, new and imagined into it. Oh, and the second most important thing is that spellcheck will always be your friend!