By day, I work as a learning support practitioner for children with medical needs. This means that I spend the majority of the week on sofas teaching maths, English and science to children who would otherwise be in school. But at night I write stories for young adults. I’ve been writing properly for six years now having got the bug while working in a library, and my debut novel The Baby is out now.
This means that I have to write in the evening, after a full day at work. Most nights, I tend to slope into the kitchen around nine. I kick my son off the computer and bash away at the keyboard for a good couple of hours. It’s hard, but I enjoy it, and it’s a brilliant way to unwind from my job.
I love my day job too, though. Most of the children we deal with have anxiety issues – young people who for some reason can’t face school. Anxiety seems arbitrary. It affects boys and girls; it affects the academically weak and the startlingly intelligent. It affects primary and secondary children, introverts and extroverts. I’ve had to take lessons through bedroom doors, through blankets, through a mother’s arm and from behind the shield of a laptop. But what I love most about this job is that we’re given the time and the opportunity to work at this anxiety and to use every available ounce of experience, common sense and sensitivity to help that child face their fears to get them back into school. As a mainstream teacher with 30 odd kids in each lesson, we were never given that opportunity – it just wasn’t logistically possible.
And it works: this term I’ve seen one student re-integrate into mainstream school, another take six exams with her old classmates, and a girl take her first steps into a hospital school, who last year would only engage with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down sign from under her quilt. It’s immensely rewarding.
But I love my writing too, so how does this all fit in? I write for young adults so it makes sense that I work with young people. I’d never use my students in my writing. My fictional new mum Nicola, for instance, is not the teen mum who I have on my caseload – that’s just a very weird coincidence. I must, however, glean some of their issues, their stories and their language and morph them into my fiction. I have two teenagers of my own and spent 17 years as a teacher, so it’s difficult not to think of these young people when I’m creating characters for my stories.
The Baby concerns the unexpected birth of a baby girl and the impact she has on the five friends who witness the birth. I chose this subject because I wanted a dramatic opener – not because I’m a specialist in teenage mums. The dramatic event could just as well have been a car crash or a house fire, but as I started writing Nicola’s chapter I knew I’d enjoy describing the cocktail of emotions she’d be experiencing. I’m used to working with vulnerable youngsters and I don’t think you can get more vulnerable than a 17-year-old mum who has no boyfriend or family support.
So, give up my day job? Certainly not yet. Financially it would be suicide. Most new writers earn on average less than the minimum wage. While it is interesting, writing is solitary. I’d be worried that I’d spend all day at the keyboard in bad pyjamas with the curtains drawn, muttering to myself and drinking wine at 10 in the morning. I’m not ready for that – not quite yet.
So for now I’ll continue with my students in the day time and give vent to my creative urges in the evening, in the quiet of my kitchen, while the rest of the world seems to be watching TV, socialising, or catching an early night.
