Milly Johnson comes from Yorkshire in the North of England. She is a Sunday Times bestseller and has sold millions of copies of her books across the world. Her novels, which combine romance with realistic storytelling about “ordinary” women’s extraordinary lives, champion the strength of women and celebrate love, friendship, and the joy of second chances: all of which she writes about with humor, sensitivity, and wisdom. Connect with her online at www.milly-johnson.com; Instagram: @themillyjohnson; Facebook: @MillyJohnsonAuthor; X: @millyjohnson

I only ever had one real BIG dream all my life (unless you count marrying either Starsky or Hutch, either would have done) and that was to write books and I can’t even remember a time before I thought like that, it was just always there. I loved reading and I wanted to make other people feel the way I did when I’d finished a good book – bereft, moved, emotionally battered.

But it hadn’t happened by the time I was forty.

I was just cruising along doing third rate jobs, unfulfilled, still with these dreams inside me and there were plenty of times when I wished they would just go away because with them swimming inside me, I had no peace.

A Dream That Won’t Let Go

My life would have been so much easier if I could let them go, if agents to whom I was submitting manuscripts had said ‘You will never get a book published, your work is rubbish’. But, among the many (MANY) rejections I got a handwritten note at the bottom of one that said, ‘Your work is of a publishable quality, keep going’. And that was all the fuel my dreams needed to carry on existing.

Deep down I knew that if someone had said, when I was eighty, ‘You’ve never been on a private jet/never been to Australia/never parachuted out of a plane, how do you feel about that?’ I would have been fine. But if they’d said, ‘So… you never did write that book did you?’ I think the regret might have finished me off.

At age forty I had an internal ‘careers clock’ that was ticking, reminding me that time was moving on and I wasn’t in the place in life where I needed to be. So maybe it was time to push, up the ante, make it happen.

But wait a minute – that’s quite a big dream: ‘finally become a novelist’, especially when it hadn’t exactly happened before. All I had was a burning ambition and one single note from someone in the industry who had said that my work was publishable.

Those were the positives, far outweighed by the negatives which were: I’d never done a creative writing class, I had no contacts in the industry, I lived in the north of England in a very London-centric business. I was a single mum of two small boys, holding down a full-time job. And did people like me from working class backgrounds really get those plum jobs? Also I had been writing to agents for fifteen years by this stage. I had a devil on one shoulder whispering in my ear, ‘You aren’t good enough, get a proper job.’ And an angel on the other side saying,‘But this is all you want, don’t give up.’ I’m glad she had the louder voice.

Finding the Story All Around You

I had been looking on the horizon for a storyline when one day it hit me, that what I needed was all around me. Why wasn’t I writing about the town where I lived (no one else was, so this was mad, right?) and ordinary life: jobs, friends, women on the cusp of forty getting pregnant. I got out my pregnancy diaries and used them to start conjuring up a story of three friends who were pregnant together, because when I was pregnant, my two best friends also were. I started to write about the extraordinary things that happen within the parameters of ordinary life, working class life in my part of Yorkshire and I KNEW when I sent it off that I had something special. And sure enough the agent who had kept my hopes alive with her handwritten note rang me and said, ‘This is the one I have been waiting for’. And I never looked back.

23 Novels Later…

Twenty-three full length novels later here I am, one of the top ten female fiction writers in the UK. Now there are plenty of people who get a novel published and it doesn’t sell and the publishers drop them. I was determined that wasn’t going to be me. Imagine – all those years of gettng to where I wanted to be only to have the door shut in my face.

So I worked hard and I built up a following, a network, a reputation and a viable business. And I did eventually realise that I could never have written the sorts of books in my youth that have given me a career because I needed to be kicked around the ring, I needed life experiences to inspire me. I needed every little knockdown I’d had to make me rise up stronger. I came to this job at the right time, with a scrapbook of stories, learned from life, to call on. This is not a job for the faint of heart. You need to be rhino-strong and you need to be in it for the long haul. And really if you have the resolve and the talent to write, those are the two main tools you need in your kit. Things like luck you can’t control, but an ability to write and determination are a must and if you have those, you have the holy essential two to do your best to make it happen.

Against the Odds

I am a poster girl for what you can achieve when the odds are against you. When anyone says to me, ‘I’d like to write a book when I have time,’ I know they are unlikely to.

Writers write because they can’t stop themselves writing. If you have a passion for something, nothing can keep you from it. You make time for writing, you don’t wait for it to appear because it won’t. (I always say to people when they tell me they have no time—not even half an hour: Imagine there is a knock on the door and you open it to find Keanu Reeves standing there with a bottle of wine and he says, ‘Any chance you could have a drink with me for thirty minutes?’ I bet you’d find the time there and then!)

As I say, I was a single mum of two small children holding down a full-time job. I put the kids to bed and then wrote hours into the night. I drank a lot of coffee. But once my foot was in the door, I wasn’t going to let it shut me out. Likewise when people say ‘I would love to write a book but I don’t know where to start,’ my stock answer is ‘Neither do I.’ I don’t plan anything. I have a basic idea of what my book might be about but I have no idea what happens on page two until I have written page one. One word pulls out another, one hundred thousand times, that’s how I write. I don’t know what is inside me until I start to pull it out and at the end of a novel I always marvel that I took them from myself. None of us know what we can do, what we can draw or write until we try and we will always surprise ourselves.

Putting in the Work

I’ve heard all the excuses from people who are ‘burning to write a book’ but somehow never get round to it. In other words, they want to see their name on a novel, but they don’t want to put the work in or are afraid if they start to write, they might not be able to.

But also they MIGHT BE ABLE TO WRITE SOMETHING BETTER THAN THEY EVER IMAGINED.

‘But I’ve never been to a creative writing class.’ ‘Neither have I,’ I say. ‘But I don’t know anyone in the publishing world.’ ‘Neither did I.’

I learned all about the industry I wanted to be part of. This is a job where you have to drive and push yourself and make things happen. If you sit on a chair and wait for someone to tell you all about it, you’ll be waiting a long time.

My point being that whatever your dream: actor, teacher, shop-owner, comedian, gardener… none of them were born as a fully-fledged professional. They learned their craft and added to it and made it happen for themselves with their passion and acquired expertise. Don’t confuse things that are hard with those that are just ‘new’. The world is full of experts who had to learn the very first rudiments of the careers they wanted to pursue. Every pilot had his first lesson in a plane, every artist picked up their first brush, every novelist had a rejection letter (incidentally, so many of those agents who rejected me, contacted me after I got my first deal offering representation). If you want something badly enough, you should keep trying however many odds are against you. Don’t get to eighty and look back on your life with a very loaded sigh and say, ‘I wish I’d just tried harder…’ Give it your best shot. As I did.

The Accidental Rewrite by Milly Johnson

Polly Potter is burned out and stuck in a life that leaves her drained until a sudden accident causes her to wake up believing she’s Sabrina Anderson, the fearless heroine of her own novel. Taken in by a warm-hearted seaside community and a charming family restaurant, Polly begins to wonder if she’s finally living the life she’s always dreamed of. As her memory returns, she must decide whether to go back to her old life or keep rewriting her story with a new, happier ending.

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