MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT

Adele Parks is oneon of Britain’s Britain’s most successful novelists. The 46-year-old46-yea ar-o lives in surrey with h her husband Jim, 44, directordir rect of the Guildford BookBoo ok Festival. They have one son, Conrad, aged 15.1 5. I ALWAYS wanted to be a writer. Growing up on Teesside, I’d fill notebooks with stories of fairies and witches and then sell them to my grandad for 10p each.

But I didn’t have a clue how to become a published novelist, and though I studied English at Leicester University, I then got a job in advertising and spent my 20s working and playing hard in London.

Still, I wrote — late at night or at the weekend, page after page, until I had a whole novel finished. But was it any good? I wasn’t sure, so I put it away in a drawer and threw myself into my marketing career instead.

Then, one miserable January evening 17 years ago, I found myself in a bookshop, killing time before meeting a friend. It was the big Waterstones on Oxford Street and to me it was both a magical and a frustrating place. I loved it, yet all those colourful paperbacks were also a vivid reminder of my own failure to fulfil my dream.

I felt horribly thwarted — and as I wandered the shop, my eyes began brimming with tears. Then my friend arrived and, after I’d explained, she somewhat impatiently said: ‘But Adele, you’ve never shown anyone your work! You’ve got to show people.’

That was my light bulb moment. Of course the advice sounds blindingly obvious now. How was I ever going to be published if all I did was fantasise about it? The truth is, I wanted it so badly, I was afraid to take a chance in case it ended in rejection.

My life as a real novelist began that evening. I ran home to work on my manuscript. The next month, on the eve of my 30th birthday, I delivered it to a literary agent and that same year it was published under the title Playing Away. Since then, I’ve written a novel a year.

Adele’s latest novel, If You Go Away, is published by Headline, £7.99.