A tutor at university once told me off for starting an essay about how I came to be there with the immortal phrase I always wanted to be a writer. It's a bit cliché, and a fair point, I suppose.

So let's go back, shall we?

I was born in the early hours of June 9th, 1982, and from all accounts began to display a natural affinity with the written word from a very young age. I taught myself to read at the age of three and subsequently immersed myself in anything I could get my hands on.

One Christmas I received a toy typewriter, and I soon discovered the joy in creating words as well as reading them. Early literary successes included several plays, performed from behind the sofa and starring an array of cuddly toys, and my first shot at magazine editing: a collection of short stories teamed up with my brother's illustrations to keep my mother occupied on a long train journey.

However, it was Primary 4 (at the age of seven) before my precocious talent received proper outside recognition. Our class were asked to produce a four-line poem of the style known as 'acrostic', i.e. each line of the poem would, when taken together, spell out a word. My contribution was deemed one of three worthy of rewriting and display on the classroom wall. In fact, I can still remember the poem:

H is for Home, where we live;
O is for Others, we all share and give;
M is for Merriment, playing together;
E is for Enjoyment, games for each other.

The style was obviously much beloved by my primary school because in Primary Six I received my first commission: a similar poem for display on the classroom wall with materials for our "European Community" topic.

Needless to say, I don't remember how that one went.

It was not until I joined Johnstone Young Writers' Group, under the tutelage of writer-in-residence Alison Armstrong, that my creative writing really found a voice. During this period I had some truly terrible original poetry published in local anthologies, such as Renfrew District Libraries' Spill The Beanz magazine and the group's own Put Wings On It And Make It Pink. I also won a competition organised by local writer Jack Hastie to come up with a short story or poem based on the title "Natalie and the Nine ____ Natterjacks". It wasn't until afterwards that I discovered that a natterjack was of course a type of toad.

My pet project at this time was, however, Do You Believe In Mutant Bananas?: a novel charting the adventures of a bunch of talking fruit fom outer space stranded on Earth after the destruction of their home planet. The only surviving copy of this masterwork lives in a banana-patterned ringbinder at home: if you're good, I might let you have a look some day.

Round about the same time I started to develop an interest in journalism: the most obvious way in which to write and pay the bills. I did a bit of writing for my school magazine, the legendary Le Bertie, toyed with the short-lived idea of becoming a football commentator and sulked my way through English class when a teacher who took an interest in me tried to get me reading Jane Austen.

And then, when I was sixteen, something amazing happened. I was studying through my standard grades, and procrastinating wildly by rummaging through the pile of CDs that my dad used to get from the Brittania Music Club. I put on something called Out of Time by R.E.M., and by the time the CD had reached "Country Feedback" I had fallen inescapably in love with a world I never knew existed.

But there were my studies to get through in the meantime of course: an LLB (Hons) from the University of Glasgow (where I was News Editor for the university newspaper, the Guardian) was followed by a year in Edinburgh and an MSc in Journalism at Napier University. Then there were the inevitable rejections, the interviews for unsuitable jobs and the crushing inevitability of dreams abandoned while I leafed through the clippings I kept in a faux leather-bound photo album. My plan was to go back to the law, but I was thwarted by a sideways stumble into a job with a legal training company.

Three years on I find my self-confidence restored as befits the editor of the UK's only national paralegal magazine, a superstar blogger in my spare time, still struggling with some vague idea of wanting to write a novel like Chuck Klosterman and writing about my favourite bands for whoever will have me. A heck of a ride, and only possible because I always wanted to be a writer.

So there.

(You might also want to read this interview for Young Scot.)