Gregg on why he writes:

I’ve always wanted to do two things in life, to write, and to have adventures. When I was a kid I imagined grand affairs. Kayaking across Canada, cycling to Australia. Whole summers in the Arctic. Did it happen? Well, partly.
I’ve been lucky, I spent some years abroad teaching English. I worked in sailing schools in Greece and Spain. I really lucked out with a job testing windsurfing boards for a surf magazine. I made a questionable decision (ok, a bad decision) to buy a windsurfing centre in Egypt. I’ve also done my fair share of less exciting jobs. Packing and stacking potatoes on a farm, which got me fitter than I’ve ever been in my life. A few years in local government that got me fatter. I spent a pleasant few months in a giant book warehouse, where I would deliberately get lost among the miles of shelves, luxuriating in the smell of brand-new books.
I did a bit of writing too, at least I learned how to write. The magazine I worked for is long gone but it did have a reputation for being well-written, and a very fine editor who would cover my articles with red pen until he was happy with them. But the big adventures never came. Nor did the real writing.

Then a few years back, my brother announced he was going to become the first person to windsurf alone around Great Britain. I don’t know why. Apparently it was something he’d always wanted to do (this was news to me.) But there was no doubt it was a proper adventure. It was dangerous, exciting. They put him on the TV news when he announced it, in one of those segments reserved for local people doing crazy things. A lot of people thought he was reckless, some that he was inspirational. Most thought he’d fail.

But he didn’t. There were times when it was hard, but he didn’t give up. He just kept at it, day after day, and eventually ended up where he started (it was a circumnavigation after all). It was inspiring.

It made me pull my finger out. By then I’d been writing novels – or trying to write novels – for a good few years. But it was touch and go whether I was destined to be one of those ‘writers’ with a half-finished story on a hard drive somewhere, rather than someone who might actually finish a book. But I thought – if he can do that, why can’t I do this?  

So as he finished his adventure, I finally finished a book: The Wave at Hanging Rock. I had no idea what to do next, but I put it on Amazon and watched in amazement as it started to sell. People actually liked it! So I kept going, writing a second book that probably wasn’t good, but taught me a lot. And then my third novel: The Things you find in Rockpools became a #1 bestseller on Amazon. To my continued amazement it allowed me to do this for real, to actually make a living as an author.  

Since then I’ve kept writing – and hopefully kept learning from my mistakes – about stories and how they work, trying to make each book better than the last, trying to make each character unique and feel real. And I’ve discovered how much there is to learn, the hidden structure that underpins a story, the moving parts that make it work. But my brother was busy too. He sailed the entire coast of Europe, criss-crossed it by bike, and now he’s in Japan, a genuine adventurer, though he’d hate that term. But maybe I felt a tang of jealously. I dreamed of adventures as a kid, all I was doing was sitting in front of a computer bashing out stories.    

The problem was obvious, and there were two of them. Our two kids Alba and Rafa. And while really this is nothing but an excuse, it is hard to trek across the Arctic when you need to back by 3:30 for the school pick-up.   

So we settled for mini adventures. I persuaded my partner María to begin translating the books into Spanish. We wrote and published a book with the children: The Hole in Casey’s Garden. Every chance we’d get we’d get away in our rusty old van, camping in the rain in Wales. Hiking in the Purbeck hills.

But the yearn for big adventure was always there. And in 2022 we made a big decision. After twenty years on the south coast of England we moved to the north coast of Spain, and a new life between the high Cantabrian mountains and wild Atlantic coast. For me it’s a staggeringly beautiful place, and though my Spanish is terrible, I’m doing my best to learn and fit in (obviously the kids have already learned, and now laugh at me using words I don’t understand).

And all the while I’ve kept writing and I’ve realised, slowly, gradually, that even though I’ve never seen the north pole, I haven’t missed out on adventures at all. The books are adventures. Every one of them is a chance to discover a whole new world, to explore it, to go wherever I like. To face dangers that in the real world would scare me stiff. Every time I sit down to write I literally get to visit the world of my dreams. And what could be a better adventure than that?

And it’s an adventure I get to keep having because of you – the readers. Whether you’ve read one of my books, or all of them, I can’t thank you enough. I write because I love it – but I get to keep writing because you keep reading.

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