How a physiotherapist became a novelist by accident.
I’ve always loved literature. My mum still has the volumes of poetry I wrote in primary school. But even though English was my favourite subject and my teachers marvelled at the creative writing I handed in, I never seriously considered being a writer as a career option. Why? Because I’m Egyptian. I may have migrated to Australia when I was nearly five-years-old, but with me came my very big, very traditional Egyptian family. And Egyptians who do well at school become doctors, or dentists, or physios, or pharmacists or if you really don’t want a career in health, you can become a lawyer. No exceptions. Literally none. Ask my cousins!
I wrote for pleasure until I was about sixteen but then doing all those difficult science subjects at school kind of killed any creative instinct in me. I was too bogged down memorising the periodic table. I gave up writing.
When it came time to put in university preferences, mine were all health related. I got accepted into physiotherapy so that’s what I did. Luckily, I loved it, I really did. I thrived on the warm and fuzzy feeling of helping others and the job stimulated me. I got married and became a mum and a mum again and with my husband being my business partner, we moved interstate where we knew nobody and grew our business to become three physiotherapy clinics around Perth and we were busy-busy! No spare time to write a book that was for sure.
And then I read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. It wasn’t the best book I had ever read, not by a long shot. But the sense of longing and the torture of unrequited love, shifted something inside me. Even though the stories and styles of writing were vastly different, Twilight got me thinking about my all time favourite book The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. Both Bella and Edward and Francesca and Robert had that magical Romeo and Juliet tragic love that grabbed at my heart and wouldn’t let go. I watched Twilight, soon after reading the book, at the cinema. And that night I dreamed of Mel.
I woke up with her in my head, this woman who on the surface had everything but beneath the smile she was hollow. When Mel finally found what she was missing, there was no way she could have it. I didn’t know much about Mel except that she was a mother around my age, that we had a lot in common and that she was deeply unhappy and she needed me to help her out. I told my husband about her. He thought I’d perhaps had too much sun the day before.
Mel stayed with me as I went about doing chores around the house. Later that day, I was washing the dishes and looking out the kitchen window into the back garden when I saw a scene unfold before me in my mind’s eye as crystal clearly as if I was watching it on a big screen. There was Mel walking towards me. She was heartbroken and exhausted and hoping to go straight upstairs and curl up in bed. But her husband was sitting outside on the back veranda and he was waiting for her. And he knew what she had done.
I peeled off the rubber kitchen gloves, leaving half the dishes dirty in the sink and I called out to my husband that I was going into the study to write a book. I grabbed a notepad and a pen and I wrote the scene I had just witnessed. And then I started writing the book from the start. It took around a hundred pages to get to that scene. I wrote until 4 am that night. I slept for an hour and woke up and wrote for another twelve. For three days I only left that study to shower and go to the loo and prepare meals for the kids. Luckily it was a public holiday long weekend so my husband was home to entertain them while I wrote. They were bewildered by their mum’s sudden obsession with sitting on the study bed and writing. They brought their toys into the room to keep me company. I ran a fever the whole time but I wasn’t sick. It was crazy.
After three days I had a scrawled outline of the novel from start to finish. It took six years and nine re-writes to end up with Love at First Flight. But that scene when Mel gets home and is met by her husband Adam - that never changed. Through all the re-writes, it stands almost word for word now as how I wrote it the day when I saw it unfold from the kitchen window.
I never planned to write a book. The day before I wrote the book, I had no idea I was about to write it. Before writing a novel, I had not done one tiny bit of creative writing for over twenty years. I had never had anything published, not even a letter to the editor in a local newspaper! I knew nothing about the trials that lay ahead of me in taking an idea and creating a novel worthy of publication with it and then the trials of actually getting it published. But Mel’s story had to be told and she chose me to tell it.
I wrote for pleasure until I was about sixteen but then doing all those difficult science subjects at school kind of killed any creative instinct in me. I was too bogged down memorising the periodic table. I gave up writing.
When it came time to put in university preferences, mine were all health related. I got accepted into physiotherapy so that’s what I did. Luckily, I loved it, I really did. I thrived on the warm and fuzzy feeling of helping others and the job stimulated me. I got married and became a mum and a mum again and with my husband being my business partner, we moved interstate where we knew nobody and grew our business to become three physiotherapy clinics around Perth and we were busy-busy! No spare time to write a book that was for sure.
And then I read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. It wasn’t the best book I had ever read, not by a long shot. But the sense of longing and the torture of unrequited love, shifted something inside me. Even though the stories and styles of writing were vastly different, Twilight got me thinking about my all time favourite book The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. Both Bella and Edward and Francesca and Robert had that magical Romeo and Juliet tragic love that grabbed at my heart and wouldn’t let go. I watched Twilight, soon after reading the book, at the cinema. And that night I dreamed of Mel.
I woke up with her in my head, this woman who on the surface had everything but beneath the smile she was hollow. When Mel finally found what she was missing, there was no way she could have it. I didn’t know much about Mel except that she was a mother around my age, that we had a lot in common and that she was deeply unhappy and she needed me to help her out. I told my husband about her. He thought I’d perhaps had too much sun the day before.
Mel stayed with me as I went about doing chores around the house. Later that day, I was washing the dishes and looking out the kitchen window into the back garden when I saw a scene unfold before me in my mind’s eye as crystal clearly as if I was watching it on a big screen. There was Mel walking towards me. She was heartbroken and exhausted and hoping to go straight upstairs and curl up in bed. But her husband was sitting outside on the back veranda and he was waiting for her. And he knew what she had done.
I peeled off the rubber kitchen gloves, leaving half the dishes dirty in the sink and I called out to my husband that I was going into the study to write a book. I grabbed a notepad and a pen and I wrote the scene I had just witnessed. And then I started writing the book from the start. It took around a hundred pages to get to that scene. I wrote until 4 am that night. I slept for an hour and woke up and wrote for another twelve. For three days I only left that study to shower and go to the loo and prepare meals for the kids. Luckily it was a public holiday long weekend so my husband was home to entertain them while I wrote. They were bewildered by their mum’s sudden obsession with sitting on the study bed and writing. They brought their toys into the room to keep me company. I ran a fever the whole time but I wasn’t sick. It was crazy.
After three days I had a scrawled outline of the novel from start to finish. It took six years and nine re-writes to end up with Love at First Flight. But that scene when Mel gets home and is met by her husband Adam - that never changed. Through all the re-writes, it stands almost word for word now as how I wrote it the day when I saw it unfold from the kitchen window.
I never planned to write a book. The day before I wrote the book, I had no idea I was about to write it. Before writing a novel, I had not done one tiny bit of creative writing for over twenty years. I had never had anything published, not even a letter to the editor in a local newspaper! I knew nothing about the trials that lay ahead of me in taking an idea and creating a novel worthy of publication with it and then the trials of actually getting it published. But Mel’s story had to be told and she chose me to tell it.
