I’ve been a cook, retail worker, door guard, film school student, cable wrangler and grip’s assistant. I co-owned a video production company for a while, and now I work for myself as a freelancer.
Books, film, theatre, YouTube, short stories, animations … I’ve dabbled with a bit of everything over the years, spending my 20s experimenting, learning, growing, failing, then trying again and doing better.
I published my first novel in 2017 after one (perhaps naive) day of throwing my hands up, exasperated that short stories – the place writers were supposedly meant to start – were too small. Anyway, how hard could writing a novel be? I’d been writing professionally for businesses for a few years, it couldn’t be that bad.
Spoiler alert – the first draft was awful.
Thankfully, my editors were firm and publishing went well – the book was well reviewed, and here I am many years later still going.
I’ve been very privileged to be able to use my varied writing skills to help businesses and individuals, and can now spend my time teaching other writers some of those same skills too, hopefully saving someone else the trials of having to learn it all from scratch on their own.
So what made me want to be a writer?
You know, the answer to that question couldn’t be more simple: Nothing. I can’t point to any one moment which made me want to be a writer, because there was never a moment where I didn’t.
Right from the age of five or six I’ve been producing scribbled stories. I used to sit at a little plastic table at my gran’s house folding bits of paper into book shapes and writing out wild fantasy tales, drawing the covers, writing blurbs for the back, and even drawing the barcode – although I didn’t know what a barcode was at the time.
The earliest story I recall writing, I believe, was my first, called “Zombie Rose” – about an eponymous rose which, when sniffed, turned its beholders into zombies. Scary stuff.
Since those early days I’ve been writing fairly consistently. This passion later lured me into video production in 2011 when I studied at the NZ Film & Television School in Wellington, and I began producing shorts and video content after that point. I co-owned a video production company from 2012-2014, whereafter I got my first proper writing gig at a marketing agency.