I get asked this a fair bit, usually with a slightly puzzled tone, as if the maths don’t quite add up. Someone discovers I’ve written well over two million words, am working on something in the region of thirty-five books, and have a couple of awards to my name — and then they find out I didn’t start any of this until relatively late in life — in my mid-50s, to be precise. The two facts don’t seem to sit comfortably together in people’s heads.

Fair enough. They didn’t sit entirely comfortably in mine either, for a long time.

A Teenage Horror Story

To understand why I started so late, we need to go back to the long-lost days of my youth. In my earliest teens, I was at school in Cyprus. One day, just before the summer holidays, the English teacher told us he wanted us to write a multi-chapter story about whatever we wanted. There were no limitations. It just had to be at least three chapters long.

Now, at that time, I was into astronomy and had recently discovered science fiction. Horror and fantasy were to come later. I wrote a story about a grand tour of the solar system by a spaceship crew; one chapter for each planet. There was even an accident at the end, which sent them careening off to Alpha Centauri, where they met a very alien species. It was as scientifically accurate as I could make it, but also a little tongue-in-cheek.

Come the new term, like everybody else, I handed in my work.

When the teacher was handing the things out after marking them a couple of weeks later, he said things like, “That was a lovely story about your summer holiday visiting your grandparents,” or “So you learned how to sail, did you?” and so on. Then, when he got to me, he handed my work back and looked me straight in the eye.

“Do not ever write this science fiction rubbish ever again, Stephen!” he said.

It took me over 40 years to get over that!

Three Decades of Something Else Entirely

Before I lost my mind and decided to become a writer (their words as much as mine, by this point), I spent more than thirty years doing other things. Not writing-adjacent things either — just life, work, the ordinary business of getting on with it, the way most people do. Writing wasn’t part of the plan. It wasn’t even really on the radar.

Don’t get me wrong, I did a lot of writing, but it was pretty much all non-fiction. I was, after all, a software engineer working in Switzerland, so I was writing analysis documents, programme specifications, programme code, handbooks, and all of the rest that goes with the job. I’m pretty sure I wrote several million words during that time, as well. 

And then, somewhere along the way, writing was back on the radar. I won’t pretend I can point to one single dramatic moment: a lightning bolt, a long-lost manuscript discovered in an attic, anything like that. It was quieter than that. A pull that got harder to ignore. A sense that stories were sitting in me that weren’t going to write themselves, and that I’d run out of excuses for putting it off.

I know I must have tried to start on various occasions, but nothing really sticks in my mind. A couple of years ago, as I was searching through some old hard drives before discarding them, I found a manuscript for the beginnings of a YA science fiction tetralogy. It was dated 25 years previously. That was in the middle of my 30-year hiatus, but I don’t remember actually writing anything like that at the time. It was based on a science fiction idea I’d had while at school. They’re now part of the 30+ books I’m working on.

It was when my parents decided to return to the UK so that my father could be closer to my sisters, whom he only really saw during holidays, that I decided I would return with them. My thought was that I would be able to find work anywhere!

Wrong!

I discovered that they wanted ‘young and dynamic’ programmers, and ignored me when I said that I could provide them with an ‘older and still dynamic’ software engineer with decades of experience.

I couldn't find any work.

It was at this point that the Muse stepped in, and the tug of a career as an author became too strong.

I must have been out of my mind! 

The Bit Nobody Warns You About

Here’s what nobody quite tells you about starting late: you don’t get a slower, gentler version of the learning curve just because you’ve arrived after everyone else. If anything, it’s steeper because you’re acutely aware of the time you didn’t spend doing this when you were younger. There’s a temptation to think you need to catch up, to make up for lost decades in record time.

I gave in to that temptation almost immediately, for what it’s worth. Over 2.19 million words in roughly thirteen and a half years is not what most people would call a measured, gentle pace. I’m not entirely sure ‘measured’ and ‘gentle’ feature anywhere in my approach to this. Even so, this actually works out at only 438 words a day. Heck, I can pound that much out in about 20 minutes nowadays. It just goes to show how much of writing isn’t about the original writing.

What Late Actually Gave Me

But here’s the thing I didn’t expect: coming to it late wasn’t the disadvantage I assumed it would be. Three decades of doing other things meant I arrived with three decades of other things to draw on. Observations, half-remembered conversations, the strange and the mundane, all sitting there waiting to be turned into raw material. Not to mention all the stories I had read during those years, giving me sources from multiple genres to mash together to create new stories and ideas. I wasn’t starting from nothing. I was starting from a life’s worth of somethings, most of which I hadn’t even realised I’d been collecting.

It also meant I arrived without the patience for messing about. I didn’t have decades left to spend ‘finding my voice’ in some leisurely, unhurried way. I had stories that wanted out, and a Muse with absolutely no interest in waiting for me to ‘feel ready’. She stands over me with a whip, driving me on.

No Regrets, Mostly

Do I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d started thirty years earlier? Of course I do. There’s a version of me somewhere out there in the Multiverse with a much longer back catalogue and considerably more grey hair to show for it. But I came to writing relatively late in life, and that ain’t gonna stop me now, not when there are still books being written, a sequel to Shuttlers underway, and a Muse who shows no sign of slowing down.

I’ll be done writing when my life is over, and not before.

Late start or not, I got here. That’s the part that matters.