16th June 2024

Ian has the “write” stuff

HOW I CAME TO WRITE

I’ve always enjoyed writing & telling stories – although the only one I can remember from my time at St Mary’s finished with the lines about the hero knocking out an attacker by throwing a model soldier at his head. ‘Fortunately, it was a heavy dragoon!’ From then on, I acquired the nickname (perhaps there were others) of ‘the colonel’.

But serious writing only began when I finally retired. Pete, an old college friend, contacted me to say that ‘we’ had agreed that, when we retired, we would write together. Not something I had any recollection of. However, the idea of writing did have a certain appeal. But what to write? We shared a love of history and Pete, it turned out, had a particular love – make that obsession – with the French Revolution. We’ve since gone on to write five books of crime fiction beginning in 1789 ( The Bastille Mysteries: https://amzn.to/2G00gNF  )  We’re currently working on a ‘locked room’ murder set during covid – so a bit different.

Co-writing is as difficult as it sounds. Each story has to be carefully planned: plot and characters. An awful lot of lunches are required. The first pieces we wrote for book one – ‘The Eighth Prisoner’ – caught us out as Pete had written it in the past tense and I’d used the present tense. Should have agreed that up-front!

I live in Godalming in Surrey and, in 2015, I joined a very small local group of writers (called the Godalming Writers group) and we’ve been busy publishing four books of short stories with a local link ( Godalming Tales: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B07KV3PRZY )

 Some are true-ish and others are blatantly untrue.

Writing is something of an escape from real life. Coming up with an idea and then turning it into a story is a very enjoyable challenge. Especially if someone else then bothers to read it! And actually selling a book – which occasionally happens – is enormously satisfying. Particularly if the purchaser doesn’t later demand a refund!

Ian Honeysett