My Story

How I Became a Writer (Whether I Meant To or Not)

By Gary J

I began writing at a very young age. In grade school, I would scribble out little plays and convince my classmates to act them out. By high school, I was still writing constantly and imagined myself someday becoming a journalist. I wrote about anything and everything, and one day after class, my English teacher told me something that stuck:

“It’s hard to be a writer until you’ve experienced life.”

I don’t think he meant what came next.

I didn’t like school much, so I quit and joined the Navy. If I was supposed to “experience life,” I figured I’d go out and find it. What I actually found was the world, rough seas, foreign ports, long nights, strange cities, and the kind of people you only meet once in a lifetime. It wasn’t the path my teacher had in mind, but it certainly gave me stories.

Over the next forty years, I kept writing. Nothing elaborate, little stories, bits of verse (not poetry, exactly, but something like it), even a phase where I tried writing songs. I was the editor and publisher of Ideas Magazine, and later became editor of the ship’s newspaper while I was still circling the globe. I wrote columns for two different newspapers. And through it all, I kept slipping in the occasional short story, just because I needed to.

After retiring from thirty years in the military, I still didn’t stop. Writing was simply something I did, the way other people garden or carve wood. I didn’t think much of it until the 2000s rolled around.

That’s when I got involved in the movie business.

Like most people starting, I wondered if I had any talent at all. I took an acting course, and for reasons I still can’t explain, the instructor and I became close friends even though he was at least thirty years younger than me. He was the one who pushed me to start writing screenplays. Thanks to his encouragement, I eventually made several short films, as well as a full-length feature, Wendy and Wanda.

But I was getting older, and I began thinking about all those half-finished screenplays sitting on my computer. One day, someone would hit Delete, and they would all vanish. That didn’t sit right with me. So I gathered them up and put them into a book called How Not to Write a Screenplay. As I read it, I realized just how rough some of it was, but at least the stories weren’t lost.

A few years later, while digging through those old files, I found a screenplay called Cuban Chum. I had always hoped to film it in Cuba, but reality finally caught up with me: it wasn’t going to happen. For some strange reason, instead of letting it go, I decided to turn it into a novel. I kept the bones of the screenplay but reimagined everything else, and the result became The Driver—my first full novel.

One of the main characters in The Driver is a Canadian writer named Graham Grant. He’s fictional. At least, he was fictional. Today, he’s my pen name, my author identity for The Livingston Mysteries, a growing series of detective novels that somehow found a loyal audience.

If you’d like to hear more about my unusual journey, check back here often. I’ll be adding more stories, memories, and insights as I go.

Thanks for visiting, and if you’re looking for your next great read, why not drop by Amazon.ca and pick up one of my books?

Gary J.