After my short-story course in summer 2016, I took a teaching job in Pamplona.

You may associate this city with medieval forts and running bulls, but teaching English to disinterested executives at an adhesive-manufacturing plant on a drab industrial estate was not what I expected from northern Spain.

Neil Gaiman says, ‘Boring jobs are good for writing’. I agree. My days involved exercises on the present perfect and second conditional tenses; my nights were fuelled by creativity.

To be fair to English teaching, learning and teaching more complex rules of the language did give me a good basis for writing more accurately and eventually editing.

I remember the moment I became a ‘published writer’. I was driving back from the ‘glue factory’ with a colleague. “It’s just 500 words or so,” I said. “But I have a piece out in Flash Fiction Magazine.’

She indicated vague interest.

“It’s about kids on a school trip to St. Petersburg who encounter a dead body.”

“Oh?” she said, then looked at her phone.

It’s actually about a dog that I saw on my trip to St. Petersburg. I didn’t see a dead body, and I was 18 at the time, not 9. Still, you can store little idea seeds in the bank of your mind until they are ready to be watered with a little thought.

The dog’s owner, a beggar, had taught it to hold a little bucket for coins on the street. There’s not a person on earth who wouldn’t want to give a humble pooch with a bowed head and hangdog eyes a few rubles.

I thought about how the owner trained it, how much money it made, why we are more inclined to give an animal money, and what, if it could, the dog would spend the money on. If you’re a writer, the questions, situations, and projections start firing in your mind when you have a mildly interesting experience. You can nurture this, but I don’t think it’s something that can be entirely trained.

V.S. Pritchett said most short stories are “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.” That was literally the case for the dog in Frozen Stiff.

Writers have to glimpse. We have to experience the character, the place, the event, the seed that is stored in our minds. The one that makes us ask a million questions.

And that connection has to be lived. That is a story’s biological link to the reader. Stories without any grounding in reality feel fake.

So, for the next few years, I set about finding all the seeds I had stored in my mind and putting them down on paper so that others could steal a glimpse.

#unphiltered