Award-winning journalist Ceri Jackson on the harsh reality of completing her true crime debut, The Boy from Tiger Bay.

During an interview in the late-1940s, Pulitzer Prize winning sports writer Red Smith was asked if his daily writing schedule was a chore.

‘Why, no,’ Red replied deadpan. ‘You simply sit down at your typewriter, open your veins and bleed.’

Over the years, I have collected manifold quotes on the challenges of writing.

‘Writing is easy,’ Mark Twain reportedly quipped. ‘All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.’

Then there’s Thomas Mann, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. ‘A writer,’ he said, ‘is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’

I could go on.

Anyone who’s ever written anything of meaning beyond the perfunctory – a wedding speech, eulogy, or job application for instance, something other expectant and potentially critical minds will assess – must have, I’m sure, at some stage during the process groaned in the manner of a weightlifter heaving a loaded barbell. 

It is a strain I have come to know well; one for which I have only myself to blame.

For almost as long as I can remember I have longed to write a book. To pinpoint the exact moment dreams are set in motion might be tricky for some but I can instantly recall that gloomy Sunday evening when, aged nine and lolling on my bed, I flicked on to the final page of Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, a classic children’s book of a horse’s courage amidst injustice and cruelty in Victorian England.

Those closing words. The dynamite of that small block of lines. The convulsion inside my head on reading what at a cursory glance is an unremarkable compilation of everyday words, fundamentally changed me.

Like a literary demolition worker, Sewell had detonated a chain of strategically placed explosives throughout her story, leading to her final-page blast under the force of which my young and fragile cognitive supports gave way. Dumb struck, I stared into the void of emotional overwhelm that precedes tears.

Never before had I felt anything like it.

The ancient Celts believed stories were so powerful they could quite literally cast spells. Bards would tour villages beguiling crowds with tales of magic and the after-life. Theirs was an oral tradition passed from one generation to another. In a pre-literate society, nothing was written down. How many times over the past couple of years have I wondered if the druids knew how lucky they were.

In my mind, there was no question; Anna Sewell had cast a spell. Dead and buried for over 100 years maybe, but her spectral voice had affected me like no other and altered the course of my life. Nothing about her beautiful mind, stirring empathy, passionate crusade for animal welfare, had ever really died. The experience was exquisite and I knew on that Sunday night I must shelve my goal of owning a sweet shop and instead strive to enchant, like Anna Sewell, or die trying.

Each subsequent profoundly memorable book I read in younger life further haunted my mind and stoked my ambition – the tragedy and hypocrisy of the British class system in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, the illusion of power in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, a young boy’s search for meaning in a hopeless world in Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave.

By the end of the 1980s, I had left Cardiff for London and was on course, having landed a job as a trainee reporter on a local weekly newspaper. Granted, there are those imbued with a God-given talent, but for the rest of us, learning to write is a trade, requiring an apprenticeship like that of a welder or plumber.

A mix of formal training and hands-on experience covers the basics of installation, cutting, bending and joining. Next comes trouble-shooting, repairs, temperature control, velocity, quality; all vital components in a smooth and efficient flow suitable for the function at hand. Pipes or sentences – there’s little difference in my mind.

And so, I began honing my (lack-of) writing skill on golden wedding celebrations, the drama of courtrooms and the tedium of local government committee meetings. The advantage of that traditional and, sadly, vanishing model of journalistic indenture training was the broad spectrum of experience it offered. The mechanics of compressing some stories into two or three paragraphs while expanding others to fill space were of equal merit.

In a pre-internet age, a fast and accurate shorthand speed was a non-negotiable, along with knocking on doors to get information and steeling oneself to make face-to-face approaches in often tragic and potentially volatile circumstances.

What I may have lacked in natural writing ability I more than made up for with a curiosity that bordered on pathological nosiness, and within a few years I had garnered a portfolio of feature writing sufficient to secure a staff job on a national newspaper.

I lived for picture by-lines on the once ubiquitous double-page spreads; the long-read features that delved into the background and emotional fallout of the real lives beyond the ephemera of news headlines.

At short notice I would be dispatched to write in-depth backgrounders on breaking news stories. Often, they would involve chaotic scenes. In the melee following a jury’s verdict, for example, I would be scrambling my subjects away from the competition and into the privacy of a hotel room for an interview, before staring motionless at the blank page of my laptop screen.

Bracing myself, I’d jump in at the deep end, and for the next few hours thrash around like a drowning woman, frantically typing 3,000-or-so words ‘on edition’ for publication the next day.

As my dial-up modem beeped and hissed my copy down a telephone line, I gasped with momentary relief. I’d got away with it this time. But the newsroom aphorism that ‘you’re only as good as your last story’ would lurk in the shadows of my mind. Nothing comes easy, I told myself. All the angst would be worthwhile when I finally reached the pinnacle of my ambition and became ‘an author’.

What I did not know, however, was how quickly that life-long dream would come crashing down to earth. And that happened not long after I got a book deal.

Who the hell did I think I was? This was sacred territory I had no business encroaching onto.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: ‘You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.’

Finally, in late 2022, over four decades on from that Sunday evening with Black Beauty, I knew in my heart that if he appeared before me as an apparition I could confidently reassure F. Scott that I did indeed have something to say.

For the previous four-or-so years, I had been working on a story for the BBC that can be summed up as ‘the murder inquiry from hell’. In 1988, 20-year-old Lynette White was brutally killed in an unlit flat above a bookie’s shop in Cardiff’s docklands. A distinctive white man had been seen bleeding and crying outside the murder scene. Ten months later, five innocent black and mixed heritage men were rounded up as guilty. And so began a 29-year saga that has been described as ‘the UK’s greatest miscarriage of justice’.

You might think that a 10,000-word long-read, a 13-episode podcast series and a three-part TV documentary would be enough to sufficiently tell the story but no, it wasn’t.

The devil of the injustice was in its detail, the depth of which could not be easily conveyed within the constraints of broadcasting. No, the only option for that was a book. So I sat down to write the opening chapter.

Ernest Hemingway had urged fellow writers not to be discouraged at this point. ‘The first draft of anything is shit,’ he said. 

And it really was shockingly, unremittingly, mortifyingly ‘shit’.

If I was forced to choose between having that first draft published or walking naked into my local Co-op, I genuinely would need to pause to weigh up each option before deciding.

I had always lacked self-confidence: forever convinced everyone around me had it all nailed down while I stumbled about chancing my arm. Maybe in the past, self-doubt had propelled me to go the extra mile, making that bit more of an effort, spend that little longer on trying to get it right. But now, faced with the reality of realising my long-held dream, the grip of imposter syndrome reached a crippling level. Who the hell did I think I was? This was sacred territory I had no business encroaching onto.

But with a contract to fulfil and an advance to pay back in book sales, I somehow, albeit slowly and painfully, manoeuvred myself out of my own way. 

The mechanics of writing a book – the actual black and white of words on a page, perhaps particularly in the case of one so daunting, controversial and legally fraught as this – are like scaling a mountain. But that aside, there are a myriad of other challenges.

No longer tethered to a news organisation, you feel utterly exposed and, even for someone who loves their own company, intensely lonely at times. You wrestle with guilt over the many innocent victims who would, you’re sure, rather you didn’t do what you were doing; those embroiled through no fault of their own in a scandal that rocked the British criminal justice system. You empathise, of course, and apply the necessary sensitivity while reminding yourself of why you should carry on. After all, not much work of importance would be written if that was a good enough reason to stop.

Frequently, the seriousness of the material at hand made me baulk. I would nervously triple and quadruple check that I had got the facts right.

Chapter deadlines consumed my life like a never-ending time-table of exams, waking me at night to scribble another note on a bedside check-list pad. My small home became as lost to me as socialising and watching TV, eclipsed by towering stacks of cardboard case book files, every available surface covered in piles of documents – including the floor, which I became used to crossing, laden with shopping bags, in the style of a tight rope walker.

I somehow, albeit slowly and painfully, manoeuvred myself out of my own way. 

And then the last round-the-clock writing marathon is done, the final deadline is met, the final round of proof-reading comes and goes and the tyranny does eventually subside. But the longed-for sense of accomplishment never comes. If only I had that time over again; I would re-write the entire manuscript.

Once again, Ernest offers some comfort on that score. ‘Writing,’ he said, ‘is something that you can never do as well as it can be done.’

There is one consolation, however. No matter how poorly I might compare, I can look the nine-year-old version of me squarely in the eye and say that at the very least we ventured into the same daunting terrain that even the colossuses of true crime writing, the Norman Mailers, Truman Capotes, Michelle McNamaras and Ann Rules, found spooky.

To that younger version of me, the book I had written might appear to be a world away from a Victorian classic about the mistreatment of horses. But let me finish with one final quote, this time from Anna Sewell herself. It does not speak of the process of writing, but more demonstrates her enduring and diffuse influence far beyond a genre or ingenuous front cover.

‘Do you know why this world is as bad as it is?’ Sewell wrote, in the early pages of Black Beauty. ‘It is because people think only about their own business, and won’t trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doers to light… My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.’

Whether children’s fiction or true crime, surely Sewell’s doctrine on injustice is reason enough to trouble ourselves, and bear down on the hard work of writing it all down.

Ceri Jackson’s book, The Boy from Tiger Bay: A True Story of Murder, Betrayal, and a Fight for Justice is out now.