Having spent most of her life making TV programmes, Anne M. McLoughlin thought that approaching seventy would herald a life of ease. But a whole new exciting career path lay ahead. Here she tells her story.

From my school days I’d always loved English, and unlike most others in my class I particularly liked writing essays. A bit of a nerdy teen, while others were interested in going to ‘hops’ (dances for those younger readers), I preferred to lose myself in the imaginary world of creative writing.

In the early 1980s while working on the childrens’ TV programme Anything Goes I got my first writing break when presenter Mary Fitzgerald was looking for stories to read to younger viewers. I submitted a few and they were included. However, as working in the world of television is all absorbing, I never had time to develop my writing skills.

RTÉ at that time was Ireland’s only television station until TV 3 (now Virgin) was launched in 1998, so we were a bit of a novelty travelling the length and breadth of Ireland. A TV crew always got a great welcome, particularly in rural Ireland where we were always sure of a lovely tea of homemade brown bread and scones in whatever house we were shooting.

I was fortunate to work on programmes that took me around the world and served as my university. Would You Believe provided the opportunity of filming in Kenya, Guatemala, Israel and Rome.

Following the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra on their European tour involved a few adventures that I hadn’t expected. In Belgium, we ended up being hauled off by armed law enforcement to the local police station. We’d been hunting our musicians around Antwerp Zoo and had used walkie-talkies to communicate. Unfortunately, we somehow managed to get onto the same network as the police and were cutting across their system. The young police officer who nabbed us was very excited at his big arrest, but was most disappointed that we were released with nothing more than a rap on the knuckles.

EARLY ADVENTURES

My next adventure on that trip was in Germany, when on the night of the concert I fell down the beautiful big marble staircase, the metal clapperboard shooting out of my hands, creating a right racket during the slow movement of some beautiful symphony. Suffice to say I survived.

But then a sudden train strike meant we had to drive to France to get ahead of the orchestra.

Fortunately, one of the crew was a rally driver, which was just as well, because I was no help, merely closing my eyes and praying as he negotiated the roundabouts of Paris at breakneck speed.

A wonderful life, but at fifty it was time for a change. I left RTÉ and went freelance to do one-off projects – setting up training courses, teaching on media courses and having a hand in starting Brendan O’Carroll’s Mrs. Brown on her video career.

After a few years freelancing it was a case of ‘What next?’ I’m one of those people who always has to have a project to keep me going, so with more time on my hands I decided to get back into researching my family tree, a task with no end.

Emigration in the late 1800s saw my great-grand uncle Michael O’Keeffe leave Clare for America where he opened a grocery store. ­ is led to his becoming founder and President of over 1,600 of the first supermarkets along the east coast of America. He employed lots of relatives who’d followed him over and I managed to trace the descendants of some and hear their stories. Here, at home, when telling friends of my discoveries, they too started sharing stories they’d heard from their grandparents. It left me with my head on fire with a mountain of ideas for a possible fictional family saga. I had my new project.

GETTING STARTED

I’d already got back to dabbling in writing again, publishing a series of social history books on the Macamores in County Wexford and articles for newspapers and magazines. ­ Then I struck lucky and was highly commended in the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Competition in the Wexford Literary Festival. I knew then I could write. ­ Then in my late sixties, I realised my runway was getting shorter, so it was the time to follow my dream of writing a novel.

­The first step in the process was a trip to America to meet my relatives and to walk in the footsteps of the ancestors. Write what you know – always the advice given to new writers, and as I’d never been to Boston, the place I’d decided to set part of my book, I knew I needed to go and drink in the atmosphere of the location.

­The other was County Clare, more accessible. Several trips there weren’t a problem, and so with the locations firmly embedded in my head I got down to the writing.

Some people plot their books to the last detail. Not me. I wrote an incident at a time, with no idea whatsoever where it might be leading. Ploughing on, I allowed my characters to develop from these cameos and as they began to take on their own personalities I allowed them freedom to go wherever they wished, even when it wasn’t necessarily where I wanted them to go. Each character was an amalgam of individuals I’d met, or in one case created from just seeing an old sepia photograph of my great-grandfather with his sculpted cheekbones and handlebar moustache.

Some of the incidents came from an idea that cropped up in real life, usually something that moved me or made me laugh, and which I developed further.

Deciding to base my story around a framework of a farm, US supermarket and lodging house made it less complicated. It meant that the characters always had a way of interacting in locations common to them all, without having to rely on coincidental encounters. I know I sound like I had all this technique worked out, but not a bit of it, I just had faith that somehow it would all come together, somehow. I consoled myself that even if the novel never came to fruition I might have the material for a series of short stories.

What I didn’t realise was that writing out of sequence would create structural difficulties in jig sawing the novel together. Communing with nature in the garden or a walk by the sea at Cahore, near my home in County Wexford, usually cleared the head and provided a solution to any writing problem.

So, book written, no agent, and not a lot of time on my side, I entered a ‘Meet the Publisher’ competition in the Wexford Literary Festival. Long story short: I met Paula Campbell of Poolbeg Books over Zoom during Covid and did my pitch. I signed up for a three-book contract. And so, in my seventieth year the first book in my trilogy Lives Apart was published.

Lots of hard work and many new skills, like social media learned along the way. So be careful what you wish for, but having said that I wouldn’t have it any other way. Seventy – the new forty?

Follow us on Instagram