Who is watching your children play sport, do we really know?

 The writer's companion. Imposter syndrome.

Calling oneself a writer sounds terribly pretentious, don’t you think? Maybe it’s because I think I’m not very good at it. Maybe it’s because I’m not very good at it. It could be due to my complete and utter lack of tutoring or training, or it could be a man thing. It might even be a working-class thing, or maybe it’s just a writer thing.

I wrote in school despite being no scholar. I was never likely to be accused of being - what’s the word I’m looking for? – academic. I struggled in maths, terrified of the teacher in case she dragged me up to the front of the class and dared me to twitch my nose again. I was terrible at science, hated geography, and told the teacher that history was old-fashioned. I thought it was funny.

When old Mr Whitham, the maths teacher, told us if we wanted to learn, sit at the front and those who didn’t sit at the back and play cards, guess where I sat. That’s right, in the English class. I’d sit quietly writing stories about football, music, and occasionally, although I didn’t realise it at the time, politics. I left school with one big fat shiny O’ level and very little else. So, further education was never on the table, instead, I got a job and never wrote anything but birthday cards for the next two decades.

On the dissolvement of my marriage, I decided one bored, lonely, and angry night to make use of the crappy word processor I’d bought secondhand and never used. I wrote an autobiography of sorts. I wasn’t writing it for anyone’s eyes. Never intended to write more than a few lines. To my surprise, I found it therapeutic and enlightening. When forced to remember and analyse, to try to put into words my childhood, I discovered things about myself that had lay hidden for years. The dark cloud I’d been carrying around along with a bottle of white lightning lifted a little. The more I wrote, the better I felt. I wrote about my earliest memories, unsure if they were even my memories or hand-me-downs from people that were there – my parents and my sister. I retold the story of my first day at school, when the kindly Mrs Meades told us to get our coats on at the end of our first day in the grown-up world. I sat there, refusing to budge until Mrs Meads said please, because I’d been taught manners at home.

Common sense tells me that there’s no way I actually remember that (it’s also pretty comical, because I was obviously desperate to go home). The realisation in writing those events down was that maybe I had the tendency to cut my nose off to spite my face at a younger age than I realised. Awakenings.. I wrote about the place where I grew up, the place I had only recently left. Most of the people who live there marry someone else that’s always lived there, and together they stay there. I did too until it broke, so I left.

I wrote about the greenery and the farms that we’d walk over on Sunday mornings with our sturdy mongrel. The hills, the buildings and the scenery. When I described them, I remembered them fondly and yearned to return to them and was saddened by the knowledge they were no longer there. Maybe it was a metaphor for how my life was going but, in the sadness, and yearning I found some happiness as night after night I pounded away at the keyboard. I wrote next about my illustrious football career, where I made it all the way to under 16s level before I packed up with a dodgy knee. I remembered vividly some of the games I’d starred in, the games we’d been thrashed in and the games I got substituted. Then I recalled my earliest memories of going to watch United. I’d not been to a game in a good few years at that point, and immediately felt the urge to go to Bramall Lane and feel the excitement, anticipation, optimism, and dread.

I chartered my early teens, my first crushes and juvenile heartbreaks. They were serious at the time, I assure you. I wrote right up to the point where the story got grown up, where I left school and got a job. There, I stopped. Unable to find the tone, the voice; incapable of choosing the words that suitably described all those events that I wouldn’t necessarily want my kids to read about. Instead, I went back to the start and edited and polished my work until I was ready to share it with the world. Well, I say the world – I showed it to my mum. She read it and told me I should keep going... because she wanted to know what happened next. “You were there Mum,” I said. I never did finish it, nor did I share it with very many people but took pleasure in the knowledge that I’d written a ‘book’. It amounted to about seventy-five pages, and there was no serialisation in the papers. No headline, no smoking gun. Just a list of words put down on a computer in an order that when read back sounded like someone less stupid and uneducated than me wrote. I dare say I was proud of it. But not out loud. Telling people I’d written something just seemed... I think the word is cringe.

Fast forward another 10 years and I decided to write something else. I started blogging after someone at work showed me theirs. I liked it. It distracted me, entertained me and when I shared it on Twitter and someone liked it, I was thrilled. When someone commented, I was ecstatic. To this day, I can’t express how great it feels to see a completed article and knowing someone has taken the time to read it, knowing it was written by me. They didn’t know me. I still didn’t call myself a writer – I used the less flowery word of ‘blogger’. Even that sounded a little pompous.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed local councillors, retired politicians, serving politicians, sexual abuse survivors, footballers, and writers, and I’ve written them all down. I’ve had an occasional article published in actual newspapers – on sale in paper shops. That’s also a proper feeling of surrealness and great pleasure. It never goes away. I’ve been fortunate to write regularly about football for an online magazine. I’ve written dozens of articles for them and every time I see one shared, it’s as exciting as the first time.

And then, my big break. I started writing about Sheffield United while I was off sick with a bad back. The days became weeks, and the pages became chapters, until the weeks became months, and the chapters became a book. I quietly sent a few chapters of it to small-time publishers – ones who specialised in local stuff. They had some ideas of how to improve my work, which sounded to me a lot like criticism, so I backed away. With my finger hovering over the delete button, all set to erase the whole thing, I decided to send it to someone I knew only on Twitter. Trusted enough to be honest, distant enough to not feel obliged to be polite, far away enough that if they hated it – they didn’t know me anyway. They were extremely supportive and liked it. Brimming with confidence, I resolved to have one more shot and emailed a bigger publisher. To my surprise, they asked me to submit properly – using their actual guide, so I did. About a year later I was officially a published author.

I’ve no idea how many books I’ve sold, but if the number is two, its twice as many as I ever imagined I’d sell. While writing it, I decided that to sharpen my writing skills and creativity, I would write some fiction. ‘Write about what you know’, I’d read. So, I started writing something about unconscious bias. I was exploring the idea of whether someone who on the surface is racist and judgemental might still be a good person, and on the other hand, could someone who always appeared noble, kind, and supportive turn out to be a lying rat? It turned into a novel. A handful of people have read it and so far, the reviews are positive. No matter how fabulous though, I’m still the uneducated lad off a council estate masquerading as something as I’m not. I’ve been accused at work occasionally of being intelligent and educated and it makes me duck beneath my protective shield to hide for when they discover they were wrong, and I’m not. If I was a psychologist (another subject I didn’t do), I’d probably surmise that it is a class thing. I’m too common, too poor, too unqualified. On occasion, I’m also too old, too fat, too grey, and too short to be a proper writer. I talk regularly to some proper writers on social media. Some of them have published several real novels while holding down jobs as university lecturers or journalists or Police officers – making the most of their university education. I still don’t know an adverb from an adjective.

Despite myself, in moments of fleeting madness, I think I might like to stand up and tell the world that you should not and cannot allow yourself to be defined by the postcode in which you were born, the number of tests you passed or the occupation of your parents. I’d love to go into schools on the poor northern estates and tell kids off council estates that they too can be journalists, lawyers, writers, poets, ballerinas, artists or anything their heart desires if they are willing to work at it. But then I ask myself, why would they listen to you? And back comes the writer’s companion – imposter syndrome.

It's a constant battle but one which I will keep fighting. If I fail as a writer, it will be because I’m not good enough, not because I’m working class or because my internal moderator told me I couldn’t. Recently, I was invited to a fancy affair where there were some well-known people – some of whom I had interviewed.  One former high-profile politician asked me if I was still scribbling. I was flattered he recognised me. Then, another fellow introduced me to someone as an author and journalist. My heart swelled with pride but inside my other me was screaming “Nooo! You’re not! You’re nobody!”

Galvanised by this, I sent the first three chapters of my novel to one agent. Well, why not? Of course, they rejected my piece, but actually said some quite reassuring words about it, so I have sent it to another. They are yet to respond, but I’m optimistic. Of course, tomorrow I will probably be tempted to delete it and stick to playing solitaire on my laptop instead of pretending to be a writer.

In the unlikely event that the agent wishes to represent me, and I become a published fiction author as well as a published non-fiction writer, I still won’t be able to call myself an author or writer without blushing slightly.