A very warm welcome and thank you to Victoria Browne joining me today at The Novel Cafe.....
Read about Victoria's amazing, courageous journey to becoming an author and the release of her debut novel Gut Feeling...which is available now!
As a young girl I remember my mum reading
to me “The Famous Five” by Enid Blyton. As I listened to my mum read, her words
would capture my entire imagination as if I was one of the characters in the
book. My love for books grew with each story my mum read to me, along with a quiet
desire to be able to read the words for myself. My first attempt at writing a
story was age ten. I somehow managed to scribble a few pages into one of my
brother’s old school exercise books, before giving up frustrated that I could
not spell the words I had in my head. It was a horror story! I stayed
struggling with this genre throughout my childhood and into my teens. A few short
stories or scenes from my imagination made their way onto paper if they were
lucky. At this point I had no idea that I had a talent that needed to be
nurtured. I used to think, how can someone who can’t spell be a writer? So I
never told the adults in my life how I felt about reading and writing. My brother
had a talent for art, you name it and he could make it or draw it. So I put
down my pen and picked up a pencil. Let's just say I did not have the same
talents as my brother. I would not write again until I was about thirteen where
the horror genre continued along with a fantasy.
During my time at high school I became
unruly and despondent. I had an attention span of about six minutes and a sharp
tongue. From my teacher’s eyes I was a naughty child with no intention of
learning, from my eyes I was surviving the best way I knew possible without being called stupid. I was quick to learn that if I were loud and aggressive
then people would not pick on me. I left school with bad grades and no career
prospects but a wild imagination.
I fell into my first real job at seventeen within
the dental industry. I studied to pass my dental nurse qualification. As an
adult I would still write short stories and scenes from my imagination however
my genre was not horror or fantasy but erotica and romance. I managed to
struggle through every page of Rider’s
by Jilly Cooper and had fallen in love with the Mills & Boon section at
Waterstones in Oxford Street. I would show my writing to the other nurses who
thought it was outrageous but loved everything I wrote. This gave me the
confidence to keep writing. At aged twenty I was writing erotica poetry and also
some general philosophy. Looking back I can see the natural creative path I was
taking myself on. Just like an artist I was trying different genres and writing
styles.
Dyslexia for a creative writer is a cruel
disability. I carried a vocabulary in my head that did not match my spelling
ability. Spell check and computers were not around when I was younger, so I would find myself substituting words on paper in order to make my writing legible,
unaware that this only detracted from my writing and the impact it had on the
reader. Aged twenty-four I sought help, determined to learn to spell, I found
out that I had a weak short-term memory. In short, it went in one ear and out
the other! So now all I needed to do was get the information to go in one ear
and stay there. I worked on developing my memory with a therapist called Margaret
Chawke, which helped me go back to basics and teach myself to spell. Towards
the end of my program Margaret asked me to write a diary to help develop my
reading and writing skills. I explained that I did not like writing diaries but
I did write erotic and romantic scenarios. Margaret suggested building a
beginning and an end to one of my erotic or romantic scenarios. This was the
birth of my first book Gut Feeling and
the final step in finding my genre, Chick Lit. I put a beginning to one of my
romantic scenarios and then carried on writing an ending. This ending came 165
pages later in 2010. It took me another two years to believe in myself enough
to publish in 2012. I am currently publishing the first book in a two part
series “Third Time Lucky – The Honey Trap”
due for release In June 2014.
Spelling is only one part of dyslexia for
many and low self-esteem is a sad consequence.
As an adult it still brings a tear to my eye when I think back. For many
years “the if only(s)” would play on endless loop in my mind. If only I had not
been so naughty at school, if only I had tried harder, if only I had wanted to
learn. I blamed myself for many years. It wasn’t until I was in my late
twenties I realised that I had been shouldering all the blame. I was a child.
How could it be my entire fault? Throughout
the years this regret had silently suffocated me. I had allowed Dyslexia to
become larger than me. I had let Dyslexia define who I was and in turn it had
crushed my self-esteem. It was time to let go of “the if only(s)”. It was time
to be happy that I can now read and write, and content that I can also use my
journey to help other young people with their journeys.
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