Guard Your Heart – Author Corner (Published in Paper Lanterns Literary Magazine)

Confession: I am always terrified when someone asks me about my writing process.

Here’s my story, behind the story, of Guard Your Heart. It begins with two things. 

The first is boredom. Think single parent evenings: child sleeping, tatty armchair, no babysitter, stuck in the house, every night, after work, day after week, month after year... Somewhere around year two, I got an idea for a story and started typing. The characters came alive and the plot twisted and turned. ‘I’d have been a bloody brilliant rioter if I’d been born in the Troubles,’ Aidan would say, and I’d scribble his lines in my notebook… 

The second is professional. I work in peace and reconciliation in Derry, Northern Ireland. In 2016 there was a lot of talk around the ‘Decade of Centenaries.’ We were one hundred years on from 1912 – 1922 when Ireland faced violence and power struggles about Irish independence. People were asking how can we explore the past in a way which helps our future? Home in my tatty armchair after work, my brain was asking who is telling today’s story? ‘What’s the point in peace if you still think like we’re at war?’ Iona would say, and I’d scribble again in the notebook. 

Guard Your Heart is the story of Aidan and Iona, both eighteen, both born on the day of the Good Friday peace deal. They’ve never lived a single day during The Troubles, but their lives are impacted by their legacy. Building peace is complicated. It takes courage. And risk. For me, that message is particularly significant here in 2021 (the centenary of the creation of Northern Ireland and the Partition of Ireland). It’s also relevant to any group of friends, family, community, or country trying to solve conflict. 

As a teen, I read Wilbur Smith. My dad owned practically every novel he wrote including all the African sagas. I was five novels in before realising that I was reading history blended with fiction. The injustice of racism struck a real chord. Reflecting back, that’s when it dawned that writing can tell something real. Writing teaches, but not like a textbook – it connects beyond our minds into our heart.  

In my teens, I wrote poetry. Recently, I came across a short story I wrote at 16 for a homework. Reading it after all these years, I smiled. And cried. I remember the exact moment, hugging the school radiator at the lockers before assembly, when my English teacher marched past. He stopped, turned, and said he’d given it full marks. Clueless how anyone got to ‘be a writer,’ I didn’t do creative writing after school. If I hadn’t been a single parent, bored in my armchair many years later, I might never have written a novel. But I’m glad I did. 

So, here’s my question to you: What’s your story? What makes you mad, sad or ridiculously happy? Don’t wait twenty years. Grab that notebook. Write now.