Lindsay J Sedgwick

It was something I was always aware of wanting to be. I always had a love of words but was also aware of their power – it wasn’t great, for example, using five syllable words in the playground. I was the youngest child of eight, with quite a gap between me and my sister, and I think I was always observing. The first poem I remember writing was about life from the perspective of being so small that all I could see were knees and I can remember that getting a response, so maybe that was when the spark was sown? I wrote my mum a book of poems for her birthday when I was six and I can remember getting up before I was called for school to write a poem a day because time was running out.

When I was nine, I sat down with a jotter and wrote my first book. It was 56 pages long – but I can remember the words got very large towards the end so they’d fill the pages. It was My Cousin Nora and the Adventures She brought With Her. I remember being interrupted by a friend of my brothers asking me what I was doing and I pretty precociously told him I was writing a novel. That’s probably when I started saying I wanted to be a writer. My mother steered me towards journalism – as a way of making a living from words, because it really didn’t seem feasible to have a career as a writer back then. But I kept writing books, stage plays and for TV on the side until I could do it full time.

Every rejection is hard. I’d been sending books to publishers and agents since the mid-90s with positive responses, generally – or none – and every few years, I’d feel strong enough to try again. I’d created Wulfie for my daughter. I knew it had series potential and needed an experienced publisher. I’d sent two novels to Little Island that they had turned down, for various reasons, but when they heard the pitch for Wulfie, they loved it. I dived in and sent the book, thinking This is it!. I’d really liked the work Little Island produced, the size of the company and I would also have read Siobhán Parkinson’s books growing up so it felt like a good fit.

When they turned it down, I ended up developing it in a different medium, but knowing that I really wanted to do it in book form. It was only after I had gone on to self publish a few novels, that I went back to Wulfie in 2018. I completely rewrote it, a different story and this time I gave it to lots of young readers for feedback before I wrote to Siobhán again to see if she might be interested in another version. Fortunately, she was. She loved it and I haven’t looked back. It is such a lovely experience working with a team of people all of whom love your work and want the best for it!

One bit of sideways feedback that made my heart sing came through a friend who had sent my first novel to a friend of hers in Australia but neglected to say she knew the author. The friend’s daughter, who was 13, had taken the book to school with her for a Show and Tell and done a class presentation about it. That was amazing to hear!

More recently, I’ve had some amazing feedback from kids who read early drafts of Wulfie for me – their feedback is always invaluable! A nine year-old wrote me a lovely ‘report’ saying it was “...one of those books that when Mum says, ‘Put the book down, go to bed,’ you say, ‘Just one minute. YOU CAN’T PUT IT DOWN!” As a child who read under her covers with a torch all through my childhood, that really resonated.

I grew up loving AA Milne’s books of poetry – and I can still recite many of the poems. I loved the Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton – the idea that there would be a different world at the top of the tree each time. Favourite books I remember after that were The Once & Future King by T E White and Susan Cooper’s series, The Dark is Rising. (I got one of the five books for my birthday (June) and Christmas so it took me 2.5 years to get the set. I was so anxious the last Christmas in case they’d forgotten!) Sadly, when I went back to read it a few years ago, I found it had dated.

The only Roald Dahl book I had was The Magic Finger but I discovered The Twits and BFG with my own child and I’d love to entrance kids the way he does. My mother also read Pilgrim’s Progress to me as a child, which seems an odd choice now but I’ve never forgotten The Slough of Despond! I was a bit of a voracious reader and loved trips to the library to load up!

Badly! I built a shed in my back yard fourteen years ago and I can still remember my daughter, aged 7, coming to the door in her pyjamas to remind me that I had forgotten to put her to bed. It was always a real tussle to move out of my writing world and into my daughter’s when she came home from school –I wanted to be there with her but I also really wanted to be still writing.

I generally juggle a number of writing projects at once and it’s often four in the afternoon when I remember I’ve forgotten to eat lunch. Offers of coffee from friends do tend to take precedence when the work isn’t going as smoothly but I think your mind is working things out while you’re doing other stuff and something that seemed impossible to resolve can also be solved after a 30 minute lie down or swim.