Golf made me a writer

I had a story to tell, but I thought my natural story-telling format would be a film or television series. I didn't consider writing a novel. All those words! I'd never manage it. But I had written, directed and produced documentaries for television. Moving from fact to fiction seemed logical, even easy. But it wasn't easy. I attempted, and failed, to make a screenplay of my story work. While I was wrestling with it, I was also becoming a golfer.  Not a good golfer, but keen as mustard and enjoying not just playing but reading about the history of golf, and about the wonderful golf courses in Ireland. The screenplay I was trying to write had stalled, as had a project I was researching  for BBC drama. I had the idea of writing a holiday guide to golf courses in Ireland. Appletree Press agreed to commission and publish it. When 'Emerald Greens' was finished, and published, I realised I had written over 70,000 words. My fear of writing a novel fell away. I turned the first scene of my failed screenplay into the first sentence of my first novel: 'We were drinking champagne in the kitchen when the nun telephoned.' 
Golf made me a novelist. Perhaps that's why golf gets a mention in all of my novels. (In 'Bogman' a golf course is central to the plot.) I love the game and am grateful to it. Not least because my favourite way of falling asleep is to play my way around favourite golf courses. Which is why I love 'NIGHT GOLF" by one of my favourite poets, Billy Collins.

I remember the night I discovered,
lying in bed in the dark,
that a few imagined holes of golf
worked much better than a thousand sheep.

that the local links,
not the cloudy pasture with its easy fence,
was the greener path to sleep.

How soothing to stroll the shadowy fairways,
to skirt the moon-blanched bunkers
and hear the night owl in the woods.

Who cared about the score
when the club swung with the ease of air
and I glided from shot to shot
over the mown and rolling ground,
alone and drowsy with my weightless bag?

Eighteen small cups punched into the

bristling grass,
eighteen flags limp on their sticks
in the silent, windless dark,

but in the bedroom with its luminous clock
and propped open windows,
I got only as far as the seventh hole
before I drifted easily away - 

the difficult seventh, 'The Tester' they called it,
where, just as on the earlier holes,
I tapped in dreamily, for birdie.