Doug Allwright

Most of my teenage years were spent doing Iron & Steel Research. However National service changed my life and I became a Radio Officer working for H.M. Government. My twenty five years as a Civil Servant didn’t do me any favours regarding writing . It took me a long time to stop writing reportage and develop a style of my own.

 

If anyone thinks that being a Civil Servant was easy, have a word with my Cardiologist!  I now enjoy writing but hate marketing so I have started to write for myself rather than for other people. But if we were all like JKR then the readers would get bored and all writers would be rich.

 

80% of fiction readers are women. Men tend to buy fact magazines or novels. This puts a bit of a strain on the male short story writer when he tries to market his work. Most of the Writers I meet started early in life, some when they were still at school and most of them are women; whereas I did not start until I retired from work. However I did have a driving force, I wanted to write what I liked to read and try and improve on it.

 

One of the main edicts of writing is to write about what you know.  Unfortunately most of my work knowledge can’t be written about so I have to resort to my own tips to be creative.

 

For marketing I subscribe to Duotrope and get regular magazine guideline updates from the magazine editors. I also attend the Swanwick Summer School every year to keep in touch with my writing peers.