Writing What You Know (And Why I Stopped Proofreading My Own Life)

They always tell you to "write what you know." For twenty years, I knew the relentless rigour of freelance publishing, and for another five, the chaotic, vital rhythm of the GCSE and A-Level classroom. But beneath the red pen, the curriculum spreadsheets, and the towering piles of coursework, there was always a profound, consuming love for fiction. I spent decades dismantling other people's narratives—analyzing their structure, correcting their syntax, and teaching students how to pull a text apart to see how the engine worked. Yet, the entire time, there was a quiet, persistent itch to stop dismantling the puzzle and finally start building one of my own. I didn't just want to spot the lies in a text anymore; I wanted to invent them.

My obsession with the hidden mechanics of language actually began long before I stepped into a classroom. During my MA, I studied forensic linguistics, and I became completely captivated by the concept of the "stylistic fingerprint." I pored over real-world criminal cases where an impostor was identified purely by the syntax of a message. I studied the linguistic tells that proved whether a 'proof of life' text was genuine, or exposed the reality that a supposedly frantic 'runaway' email was actually penned by someone trying to buy time.

After twenty years of stripping back manuscripts and five years teaching teenagers, this academic theory became a daily, practical reality.

When you spend that much time inside other people's writing, you develop a terrifyingly accurate radar. I can tell instantly if a student has used AI or copied a template to write an essay. As an English teacher, my entire job is to try and elevate a student's working vocabulary and sentence style, but to change their baseline, you have to intimately know their baseline first.

I remember a specific piece of An Inspector Calls coursework being handed to me. I read the very first line, which described the character of Sheila Birling as an "embryonic suffragette." I immediately put my red pen down and refused to read any further. Why? Because the student who handed it in was a lad who frequently started his spoken sentences, even when addressing me, with a loud, blunt "Oi." The leap from "Oi" to "embryonic suffragette" is not a natural educational progression; it is a glaring stylistic forgery.

It is these exact, real-world experiences of the linguistic fingerprint that inspired my book. It is a concept I sit and think about obsessively. Sometimes, when faced with a towering pile of essays, I deliberately mark the work 'blind'—covering up the names just to see if I can guess who wrote it purely from their syntax, their hedging, and their punctuation choices.

This obsession is the absolute beating heart of my novel.

I also realised something else: all teachers are, at their core, storytellers. We use narratives to make our subjects make sense to a room full of distracted teenagers. English teachers go one step further, we tell stories about stories. We spend our days teaching students how to hunt for subtext, how to question an unreliable narrator, and how to spot the structural inconsistencies in a plot.

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense for an English teacher to solve a murder. There is a rich, glorious pedigree of literary educators moonlighting as amateur sleuths. Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote was a retired English teacher long before she became Cabot Cove’s resident murder magnet. Amanda Cross’s brilliant Professor Kate Fansler used her academic prowess to untangle deadly campus conspiracies, and Joanne Fluke’s Hannah Swensen was a literature major before turning to mysteries and baking. Educators are naturally wired to ask why a narrative doesn't add up.

But taking all of that, forensic linguistics, a publishing background, the teaching, and transitioning into a "novelist" was a jarring pivot.

When your default setting is the red pen, the blank page becomes a crime scene before you've even finished the first paragraph. I found myself proofreading my own imagination into submission. I had to learn the hardest lesson of all: how to turn the editor off. I had to stop proofreading my own life long enough to actually let the fiction breathe. I had to give myself permission to write the messy, ugly first draft*, letting the imperfect and the unattractive onto the page without worrying about an academic mark scheme.

Now that the story is finally breathing, I realise that 'writing what I know' doesn't mean writing a dry memoir about marking mock exams. It means infusing my thrillers with the lens those years gave me. It is the reason my protagonist, Harrison, treats a misplaced semicolon not as a typo, but as a psychological tell.

I may have finally traded the marking pile for a manuscript, but the core obsession remains exactly the same. I am still hunting for the lie hidden in the text.

Welcome to my new classroom.

OSW

P.S. Keep an eye on the blog in the coming weeks. We’ll be diving deeper into the world of the book, exploring the gentrified high streets of Beckdale, the suffocating, elite bubble of Caldwell Grange, the grounding, pragmatic force that is my protagonist's wife, Susie, and of course, Harrison himself: a brilliant, but deeply flawed man trying to untangle it all.

*There is a fantasic chapter in Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamont entitled S***ty First Drafts that I credit with getting me started.