Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?
I grew up in a very small village in Fife, Scotland. I tended to feel like an outsider there for much of the time as my parents, although both Scottish, had met and married in England, where I and my brother were born. One of my friends later pointed out that I hadn't quite lost my English accent even ten years after moving to Scotland.
I think feeling like an outsider is quite possibly an advantage for a writer as it encourages you to see things from a different perspective and to try to understand various points of view.
When did you first start writing?
Almost as soon as I could physically write, I wanted to write stories. The first one I can remember writing was when I was six years old. I sat at our dining-table all afternoon laboriously writing away with a pencil in a notebook which I still have somewhere. By the time it was getting dark, I had a story in four chapters and a lump on my finger where the pencil pressed against it - I still have that too.
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