Rather than a memory of being a writer, I’m going to give you my memory of becoming a writer… transitioning from a person who occasionally enjoyed a bit of word-play and, like many people, said, ‘I think I’ve got a book in me’, to the person who realised writing was the thing that had been missing all along.
So, cast your minds back to those hazy days of the pandemic… Shudder.
At the time I was working in financial services, and due to the nature of my role, everything intensified. I worked long, stressful days from home… and at the same time, started a master’s degree! I threw myself into work and study to give my mind something to chew on other than the horrific state of the world unravelling. Don’t get me wrong, my wife and I were lucky… we hunkered down, baked our banana bread and enjoyed our lovely daily walks. Relatively, we were safe and well when others weren’t so fortunate. But something was shifting in me, a changing tide that would become impossible to swim against.
Roll around the start of 2022… The worst of the pandemic was over, life was starting to click back into ‘normality’, but in the post-pandemic dawn I woke to find I’d lost my sense of purpose and was struggling to grasp my sense of self. Maybe it was burn out, maybe I just needed a change, either way… I took the brave (some would’ve said stupid) decision to step away from a fifteen-year career in retail-banking, not really knowing who I was without it, or what was next. Like a bear coming out of hibernation, I crawled out of my cave and squinted into the sun.
After a couple of weeks moping around navel gazing, I pulled out my laptop, opened a Word doc and just started to write. I wrote every day; every second I could spare. When I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about writing. It became the spark that lit me up, and it was all I wanted to talk about (sorry, wifey). The story just seemed to pour out of my fingertips onto the screen, and I felt so alive. I finished my first draft in four months.
Somehow, my debut novel was simultaneously the best thing I’d ever done and cringe-worthy bad… and I’d spend the next nine-months meticulously taking it apart, putting it back together, and learning the craft, because I owed it to The Weight of What Was to make it brilliant. I owed it to myself to invest in the thing that brought me back to life.
Pip Landers-Letts
Insta: @pipwritesfiction
book events, lesbian writers, lgbtq, lgbtq book festival, literary festival, nottingham, Pip Landers-Letts, queer the shelves
