It’s only in retrospect that we can see what shaped our lives, though this is subjective to the moments we remember. We can’t always see them at the time, nor when we might affect the lives of others. Later we imagine those moments must be dramatic. Something obvious. Something everyone in the room would recognise as important.

In reality I think it happens in classrooms, libraries, newspaper offices and rehearsal rooms. Someone notices something in another person and says a sentence they probably won’t remember a week later. But the important part is that the other person often carries those words for decades.

Everything I’ve written has fingerprints all over it. The work is mine but sometimes it exists because of something, several things perhaps, which happened in the past.

My mother is probably the first. I could read before I started school and I was a confident and capable reader. School stopped testing my reading age early because I was already reading off the charts. My mother is a freelance writer, so writing was never presented to me as some mythical profession inhabited by extraordinary people in London. It was simply work. Interesting work, admittedly, but work all the same. She wrote educational books, comics and short stories, later publishing children’s novels. I watched her do it and absorbed, without really noticing, that creating things with words was an entirely reasonable way to spend your life and that self employment was nothing to be afraid of. I meet so many people who find the thought terrifying. I never have. It wasn’t brave because I’d already seen it. It looked perfectly normal.

Then there was Julia Davis, my GCSE English teacher. There are teachers who deliver lessons and there are teachers who alter the architecture of your confidence. Julia belonged firmly in the second group. She saw something in my writing long before I saw it myself and treated it as though it deserved to be taken seriously. Looking back, I realise what she gave me wasn’t praise, it was structure. Her faith in me settled somewhere deep inside me and supported everything built afterwards.

Ian Birkinshaw had a similar gift. In my first year of secondary school he told me they could put me in for GCSE English immediately and he believed I’d pass without difficulty. I was eleven. I wish someone had let me try.

Whether I would have passed or not almost doesn’t matter now. What stayed with me was that somebody who taught English for a living believed it was even a possibility. Children have a curious habit of growing into the expectations placed upon them, whether they’re positive or negative.

Later came work experience at a small local newspaper. The office staff, for some, thought I would spend a fortnight making tea, filing paperwork and generally occupying whichever chair happened to be empty. One secretary seemed particularly delighted to have somebody else available for the jobs she didn’t fancy. I hadn’t asked for work experience in an office, the idea horrified me. So I went to see the Editor in Chief and explained that wasn’t what I was there for. I wanted to write. So she let me and my articles appeared in the newspaper, I was fourteen.

At the time it felt exciting because my name was in print. Looking back, I can see it was another moment that there was evidence of capability and that other’s accepted my writing as being good enough to publish.

John Highfield reviewed one of my performances at The Crucible and described me as outstanding. I still remember reading it because reviews carry a peculiar weight when you’re young. You desperately hope to be noticed, to get that first level of recognition. John did more than that. He enabled me to become a junior theatre critic. Suddenly I wasn’t only performing, I was analysing. I was learning why productions worked, how lighting altered mood, how movement shaped meaning, how audiences would react. For the princely sum of around three hundred words a review, I was given a thorough and expensive education in theatre which would influence everything I’ve done to earn money since. I was eighteen.

Deborah Paige came next. She sat in the Green Room at The Crucible as I plagued her with questions about where she liked her casts to have been trained. About which drama schools she had the greatest faith in. Where she would recommend I should go. I ended up at Bretton Hall, one of the best drama schools in the U.K. at the time. She influenced my decision and I was keen to follow through on her advice, to be earnest in choosing the right path. And soon I was out touring my own professional shows, writing the highly sought after Equity contracts with my own membership safely achieved and stashed like treasure.

Before I was twenty I had been published many times as a reviewer, critic, performer and writer and my Nannan kept every cutting. She was preserving evidence that she believed I was becoming something.

Many years later, when my daughters attended workshops at the local library, they met Nik Perring, then Writer in Residence. Eventually I attended the adult writers workshops too. Life has a lovely habit of bringing people back around when the timing is right. Nik later edited one of my manuscripts and was the driving force which published my work in paperback for the first time. It was my first

Then there was Berlie Doherty. I have written before about the writing exercise she gave us during a workshop. The lonely pigeon keeper on the roof of a tower block still lives somewhere inside my imagination, waiting patiently for his story to be finished all these years later. What stayed with me even more than the exercise itself was Berlie telling me that he deserved expanding. Writers spend an awful lot of time wondering whether characters are convincing and sometimes all it takes is one respected writer saying, “There’s something here.” That sentence can echo for decades.

Jodi Taylor probably doesn’t know how much she influenced me either. I adore her books. They reminded me that history could be clever, funny, chaotic and gloriously alive all at once. When she selected one of my stories for the Sands of Time anthology supporting Scope, it was thrilling enough. Then she selected another piece soon afterwards. There’s something exceptionally affirming about being chosen by someone whose work you admire. Simply because, for a moment, someone whose opinion carries weight has looked at your work and thought, yes, this belongs.

More recently I’ve had the pleasure of talking with Dacre Stoker. Conversations about Bram Stoker, Dracula and the extraordinary legacy left by one family have reminded me that generosity seems to run through creative people far more often than we perhaps acknowledge. Those willing to share their knowledge, answer questions and encourage enthusiasm leave marks they may never see.

When I look back now, I don’t really see a writing career unfolding. I see a trail of people who paused long enough to notice. People who opened doors, who offered opportunities, who said they could see my ability when I didn’ have the skill to judge it. People who spoke a sentence and moved on with their lives, probably never imagining that years later someone would still remember exactly where they were standing when they said it.

It’s made me wonder if I’ve unknowingly done the same. As a therapist or a supervisor. As someone running workshops and drama classes. As a parent. A lover. Perhaps all of us have. None of them were trying to change my life, they were simply paying attention, giving positive feedback. And looking back, I think that may be one of the greatest gifts we can ever give another human being.