The Accidental Author

This post was written by our guest blogger Lisa Rose Wright. She is the author of the Writing Home trilogy of travelogue memoirs, which follow her adventures in Galicia, and the Travels Around trilogy. Below she shares the story of how she became an author.

I’ve always been a scribbler. From the moment I could hold a pencil and form my alphabet, I was writing. I was also, and still am, a voracious reader. One of my earliest memories is of clutching my little buff-coloured library card in my hand whilst walking to that hallowed institute with my godmother. What a world that tiny, dusty, silent room held.

My earliest writings were focused on retellings of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (complete with my own illustrations), stories about magic carpets, or a square, blue alien from Saturn called Soapy and looking remarkably like SpongeBob SquarePants, though a couple of decades before he was born. Maybe I could sue for copyright…

I moved onto rewriting, in my best hand, every single episode of the American detective show, Starsky and Hutch. My Sunday mornings were spent filling exercise books with precise recollections of each piece of dialogue from the previous evening’s episode. What a memory I had once upon a time!

But, and this is important, not once, not one single time, did I aspire to become an (whisper here, please) author. Authors were those untouchable giants whose photographs I saw peering at me from pristine dust covers, whose names I traced with a daring finger on the library shelves. Authors were godlike to me, and way beyond my ken.

Time moved on, as it has a habit of doing, and a lifetime of serendipity claimed me – pushing me this way and that in the maelstrom of my existence.

Eventually, in my forties, I washed up in rural Galicia, a beautiful, green and verdant part of Spain, together with a wonderful man. There, we bought a two-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse – empty for twelve years, unloved for many more, and falling apart as we watched; we had bats in the hallways, birds nesting in the bedroom, and gaping holes in the rotten wooden ceiling where the rain had come in, mirroring the same holes in the wooden floors beneath. We were constantly busy – demolishing and rebuilding, putting in floors and ceilings, fitting electrics and a working bathroom, tiling and plastering. Throughout, I kept a daily diary and wrote long weekly letters to my mum in the UK, telling her of our adventures.

Seven years later, Mum moved to Galicia to become a part of our adventures, bringing with her sixty-three years of accumulated erm…possessions, including three boxes of my letters home; she had kept every single missive, with a dedication only a mother could display.

It was Mum’s hoarding instincts, together with my diary-keeping habit, which gave me the material for my first book. At first, I couldn’t imagine writing 80,000 words to produce a full-length book. What on earth would I fill the pages with? And who would want to read about two ordinary people moving to a remote and little heard of area of Spain? My first short story, a comedic tale about cabbages, was published in an anthology of life in Galicia and won a prize. That one thousand words had taken me months to construct into something I was happy with, but the achievement gave me confidence and the structure for a book began to take shape in my head.

I initially got a contract with a young publishing house, but their dubious proofreading skills and lack of understanding about where the story was taking place worried me. Their cover designs showed a white cottage surrounded by Mediterranean plants rather than a traditional Galician granite-stone house surrounded by plums, courgettes, and green beans, which would have been more appropriate. It was a writer friend who gave me the confidence to self-publish, helping me navigate Amazon Direct Publishing; and the COVID-19 lockdown gave me the time to work it all out.

In July 2020, I published my first travelogue memoir, Plum, Courgette & Green Bean Tart (A year to write home about – seeking la vida dulce in Galicia). I was amazed when it shot to number one in some of Amazon’s more obscure categories. The thrill of writing, coupled with the success of my first ever memoir had grabbed me by the throat. I couldn’t let go.
Two more memoirs followed in the Writing Home series, then I turned to travel stories, beginning with my beloved Galicia and swiftly followed by two books of our travels around the world. My final memoir ends back in Galicia during that COVID-19 lockdown, bringing the whole series full circle.

Galicia has given me both the freedom to write and the adventures with which to flavour my books. My stories are peopled with real characters and the beautiful landscape in which we have found ourselves. I have so much to thank my adopted home for.

I may be an accidental author but I’ve enjoyed every bit of the journey and in the process I’ve managed to raise money for Dementia charities, a cause dear to me since my beautiful mum was diagnosed in 2023. Sadly, Mum died in June this year, but we continue to raise money for Race against Dementia, a charity set up by racing driver, Sir Jackie Stewart to fund research into the causes of dementia and its possible cures. Readers have helped me raise over £1,000 from royalties of my final book since it was published in November 2023.

I feel that I’ve not only shared a story, but have helped make a difference too. If only my younger self, staring in awe at those dust cover photographs, had known what was ahead.

Illustrations provided by the author.

Visit the website of Race against Dementia here.