“If you’re not enjoying your work, you should either change your attitude, or change your job.” – Leo Tolstoy
The first job I ever craved as a young girl was to be a ballerina – romantic costumes, music and storytelling. What more could I ask for? I later went through phases of wanting to be a pilot, a scientist – with the humble goal of curing cancer – and an actor.
I constantly had my nose in a book, to the point where I put myself in grave peril. While reading on the way home from school, possibly engrossed in the adventures of the Famous Five, I walked into a lamppost. After that, I restricted reading time to when I was stationary.
When I finished school, I studied electrical engineering, mainly because I liked maths. I sailed through the course, socialising, having fun, finding a wonderful boyfriend Andrew – now my husband of almost 30 years – and mastering how to ace an exam without understanding the material. I landed a cadetship with Telstra, so after I graduated, I walked straight into a job.
And that’s when I realised I’d made a terrible mistake. I’ve seen great engineers – my dad is one, and so is Andrew – and they have an insatiable curiosity about how things work. What makes a car run faster? How can you send electricity across oceans? But me? I’d ducked and weaved through an entire university degree without having a clue how an internal combustion engine worked and, honestly, I didn’t care what the electrons were doing as long as the light came on when I flicked the switch.
I was, however, endlessly fascinated by people. Within five years at Telstra, I’d already experienced two restructures, and I observed some of the many ways employees responded to stress. All sorts of survival mechanisms kicked into place: forming coalitions, ruthless self-promotion or grabbing the opportunity to leave with a package. I realised my interest lay in human behaviour.
I now faced a quandary. Should I go back to university and study psychology?
Rather than start again, I did a postgraduate diploma in organisation behaviour.
I moved to Right Management Consultants and worked as a career transition consultant, looking after people who’d been made redundant. The perfect antidote for corporate life. I couldn’t believe the company paid me to talk to people all day.
I may have stayed in that field, but seven years and two kids later, Andrew was offered a job in Nigeria. At first, we baulked. It seemed ludicrous to take our kids to a place where massive dangers lurked, from opportunistic crime to malaria and typhoid. There was no call for outplacement work in Nigeria, so I wouldn’t be able to continue my job.
After much soul-searching, we saw this as an opportunity to see the world. Without a nine-to-five job, I decided to become a writer.
I dived straight into a project to raise funds for a school in a remote district. For our first fund raiser, we wrote an anthology: Nigerian Gems, Expatriate Tales of Adventure. Expats bought it to show their friends and families what their life was like, and local companies used it as a recruitment tool.
I also took up salsa dancing and wrote stories told through dance for my instructor’s company.
After four and a half years, we moved to Houston for Andrew’s next assignment, where I was in for a shock. The creative arts industry was so much more established; I had no chance of breaking into it. I ended up writing, directing and producing two productions for my children’s small private school.
I continued my dance lessons, broadening my scope to all the Latin and ballroom dances.
Read: So you’ve signed the contract and handed in your manuscript … now what?
We remained in Houston for five years. Next stop: Doha, Qatar. While I’d gained significant writing experience, I was no closer to writing a novel, so I retired from dancing – ballroom dancing wasn’t culturally acceptable there anyway – and took an online novel writing course.
I wrote and wrote and wrote. As a side project, I self-published two children’s picture books.
At the end of our three years in Doha, I had the draft of my first novel. By then, we’d been away from home for 13 years. It was time to return to Melbourne.
In Australia, I kept writing. I took courses. I rewrote. I tucked a couple of pitiful novels in the bottom drawer never to see the light of day. I found an agent, drafted a series of four mystery novels, pitched two of them with no success, left my agent, rewrote my books and started an editing business.
This summary of this time in Melbourne is spilling onto the page quickly, but there was nothing fast about it. Writing is hard. It’s not just about getting words on the page, it’s about massaging them, changing them, crossing them out and starting again. Tolstoy made career change sound so simple, but he’d glossed over the fine print.
But … now I’m glad I persevered because, finally, I found a US publisher, Wings ePress, which loved my novel, the first Jade Riley mystery, The Godfather of Dance, which was published earlier this year. The second, A Killer Among Friends, is also out now.
What would Tolstoy say about my long journey to publication? Perhaps he’d stroke his beard and tell me not to complain. He never said it would be easy. Without the struggle, I wouldn’t fully appreciate the joy of achieving my goal. When I look back at my journey from engineer to author, I realise the wealth of amazing experiences I’ve had along the way and am thankful for every step.
And … if you do find yourself in a career that’s not for you … there’s always a chance you’ll find a husband instead.
Andrea Barton’s books can be found globally in print and online here.
