Writing advice often focuses on craft, productivity, and marketing, but some of the most important lessons have nothing to do with plotting a novel or selling more books. They come from the people who shape our confidence long before we ever reach readers. Whether it’s a parent, teacher, mentor, or fellow writer, the right words at the right time can make the difference between a story that gets written and one that never gets told.

In this week’s blog, Ginger opens up on a personal level, reflecting on the loss of his father and the unexpected writing lesson it revealed. Through a moving family story, he explores the lasting impact of encouragement, the hidden cost of discouragement, and how a few simple words can shape a writer’s creative journey. It’s a powerful reminder that believing in a writer may be one of the most important gifts you can give.

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My father passed away recently. At 89 years of age, it wasn’t exactly unexpected, but it’s still left a huge hole in my life. I realize now that I’ll never get to tell him about the next great book I’ve discovered, or tell him about a television series I saw that he’d like. The last time we were together, we binge-watched the first season of Reacher and I’d been hoping to do the same with 1923 (the TV show that broke my heart) but I guess now I’ll never get that opportunity. 

But there’s more. Over the last couple of years, my father had grown aware that I’d been struggling to write anything new, and now I realize I’ll never get to have another Skype call with him in which he encourages me by asking: “Are you writing anything new?” 

No matter what I write next, I’ll never get to send him a copy. I’ll never again get to hear him tell me that: “It was a very good read—except for all the sex!”

Technically, my mother has always been the writer in the family. She had several non-fiction books published during the 1970s and 1980s (if anybody needs to know anything about pigs, she literally wrote the Book of the Pig.) Watching her was what first planted the idea that writing was something I could actually do myself, that it wasn’t just a thing that happened to distant, mythological people. She’s the one I credit most often for inspiring me to become an author. 

But since my father died, I’ve also been thinking about how I wouldn’t have become a writer without him, either—and in a way that is harder to see but cuts just as deeply.

The Bookshelves

I grew up surrounded by books. Literally. My parents always considered a creaking bookshelf to be a much better decoration than wallpaper, so our houses were always veritable libraries. 

In the farmhouse I lived in during my teenage years, I remember the bookshelves in one particular corridor that were filled with science fiction paperbacks. These belonged to my father, who’d been a fan of science fiction his entire life.

All the classics were there. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and countless other Hugo and Nebula award winners. 

I know why my father liked them. The whole grand architecture of imagined futures defined his generation of readers, men who’d grown up during the war and come out the other side into a world that seemed to be accelerating toward the stars. In science fiction, they found a literature that matched the speed of the age.

I read them all, favoring the shorter reads and short story compilations, because of their efficient and accessible storytelling. My father’s science fiction books were some of my earliest education as a reader. 

But although many of them inspired me, my father’s real gift wasn’t the books he made available for me to explore. It was that he dutifully read everything I wrote as a result of that exploration.

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was nine years old, and right from my earliest attempts at storytelling, no matter how rough or tentative or frankly terrible they were, my father read them.

All of them. 

I’d hand him pages of typed stories and he never flinched, not even at the truly bad ones. He never offered the kind of muted enthusiasm that children learn to read as disappointment—Dad was always genuinely, consistently, vocally encouraging. It was that encouragement that drove me to put my work out there and finally find an audience for it.

For years I accepted this as simply what fathers did, the way you accept gravity, as a background condition of life rather than a deliberate choice.

It wasn’t until much later that I understood it was one of the most intentional things he ever did for me, and understanding why required knowing something about him that took a long time to surface.

The Daily Express, and the Story He Never Sent

In the mid-1960s, when my father was a young accountant making the commute to London five days a week, he didn’t have a smartphone to doom-scroll on. Instead, in those days, you’d be flicking through a newspaper as the carriages trundled through the English countryside. 

My father’s choice was the Daily Express. In that era, the Express had leaned hard into the post-war obsession with the Space Age, running high-profile science fiction short story competitions that attracted serious attention.

My father was a devoted reader of these stories. He looked forward to them, even though, by his own account, he was often disappointed by them. He didn’t read them with contempt, but with the particular frustration of someone who could see what a story was reaching for, but felt it falling short. 

My father told me that the thought which visited him whenever he read these stories, regularly and insistently, was one that will be familiar to every writer reading this: 

I could do better.

And like all authors invariably must, he eventually did something about it. 

He wrote a story. 

He worked on it carefully, a proper short science fiction story, crafted with genuine effort, that he thought was worthy of publication. He truly believed in it. To his dying day, he always thought it good enough for the pages of the Daily Express.

But then he showed it to his mother, my Scottish grandmother. She was a woman I barely remember, but who was not (by any account that reached me, at least) known for her warmth. 

Apparently, my grandmother told him it wasn’t good enough and—in a sentence—closed a door on what could have been. Because of what she said, my father never sent the story for consideration in the competition.

Instead, he put it away. 

After that, he kept commuting. He remained an accountant, a good one, a devoted husband and father. He built a life that was full and meaningful and genuinely happy in many ways. But he carried that story—and specifically the knowledge that he had believed in it, but had been told not to—for the rest of his life.

I don’t know if my father died with many regrets, but I know that was one of them.

Becoming the Opposite Parent

There’s a piece of advice that circulates in therapy and parenting circles: 

Become the parent you wish you had. 

My father wasn’t much for those kind of circles. In fact, he once gave his lifelong best friend (a practicing psychiatrist) a sign which read: “9 out of 10 therapists are just plain nuts.”

But despite his skepticism of therapy-speak, he lived it anyway. Dad actually knew what it felt like to create something you believed in and have it extinguished at the first gate, so he made himself into something different for me: A reader who could always be trusted, and a first audience who would never diminish.

I’ve thought about what would have happened if his mother had responded differently to his first efforts as a writer. If she’d read that story and said: “This is good! Send it in!” 

If the Daily Express had published his story (which, if my father is to be believed, they would have done) the trajectory of his whole life could have been different.

What could that have meant? A young man in his twenties, commuting through the English suburbs, seeing his name in a national newspaper beneath a piece of fiction he’d written himself. That’s not a small thing! It’s the kind of thing that rewrites a life. 

But we will never know where it leads, because that version of my father doesn’t exist. Instead he became the version I knew, loved, and recently lost.

That is what discouragement costs. Not just a story. A whole lifetime of opportunities. An entire branch on a journey never taken.

What He Gave Me Instead

But what my father sacrificed with that decision, he turned into encouragement for me. 

As I grew up, he was always encouraging. He helped me find the stories I wanted to tell. He introduced me not only to science fiction, but also to the writers who’d become my true north as an author: Leslie Charteris and the Saint, Jules Verne’s great voyages, and Ian Fleming’s cool, precise glamour. 

These were the books that shaped how I understood storytelling: that adventure could be intelligent, that genre fiction could have genuine literary quality, and that entertainment and artistry were not always opposites.

I ended up finding my niche by writing adventure stories in the format of romance novels, which he perhaps didn’t entirely anticipate, but he read those too! He remained, until the end, a first reader of almost all my books.

Since then, I’ve sold 71,000 copies, and that’s because my father taught me to believe in myself, and to keep showing up, story after story. He gave me his attention and his honest enthusiasm and I made a life out of it.

And when I write again, it will be in some part to make up for the story he never sent in to the Daily Express. I think that’s the debt I owe to him, and refusing to write would feel like a betrayal of everything he invested in me. 

He fulfilled his role as a father. As his son, my job is to keep taking the risks he didn’t get the chance to take himself.

The Lesson for Every Writer Reading This

The practical lesson my father’s story offers is not subtle, but it bears saying plainly:

Encouragement is not charity. It is the precondition of everything.

If you’re part of a writing community, be the reader my father was. 

Read the rough drafts. Show up for the early work. Understand that when someone puts a story in front of you at the beginning, they’re not showing you a finished thing, they’re showing you a fragile possible future. Handle it accordingly.

And for the sake of my father, listen up. If you’ve ever been told at some point, by someone whose opinion arrived too early and landed too hard, that your work wasn’t good enough—to hell with them! 

Do they even have the knowledge required to make that judgment? I doubt it. My grandmother certainly didn’t. 

She couldn’t have known what my father’s potential was, and she didn’t want to know. She looked at a story by her son and all she saw were its flaws sans its potential. She didn’t even see the simplest thing, that he’d had the courage to have written it at all.

The Daily Express might have published my father’s story. You don’t know. Neither did she.

Send the story in.

And finally, if you’ve had someone in your life (a parent, a teacher, or a friend) who encouraged your writing when it mattered most, I’d love to hear about them in the comments. 

And if there’s a story you’ve been sitting on because someone told you it wasn’t good enough: Consider this your nudge!

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