As a child, a deep competitive impulse took hold of me. I had to win because being less than the best felt catastrophic! I only realised much later how unhealthy it was. When I got serious about writing, this impulse inevitably affected it. I had good reasons to write – I wanted to create worlds and beautiful sentences and, eventually, express the interiority of my life – but I also had one bad reason and that was this unhealthy ambition.

I wrote about 100 short stories between 15 and 18 years old, most of them science fiction. I had a photocopied list of short story markets only several years out of date that my dad had procured from the wife of someone he worked with. In the 90s there was still a memory of the golden age of short stories; I weighed up how many cents per word each paid, as if writing would make me proper money. And as if I could be fussy about who published me. The old writing short story guidebooks on library shelves were of that golden era, misleading aspirants like me. I sent off my stories in C5 golden yellow envelopes with a stamped self addressed envelope and a covering letter in at least a few of them declaring that I was 16 and had an ambition to be the youngest writer published in their magazine. My brashness looked a little silly when there were plenty of big names (and even forgotten names) in science fiction who had cracked the biggest titles at that age or even younger. I dreamed night and day of seeing my work in print. It’s what I wanted more than anything.

One editor from a startup SF magazine in Australia took an interest in my work. He called STD one day but I was at school and so he had a chat to my mum instead. He diplomatically told me that although he found my ambitions interesting, they might put others off. He eventually published one of my stories, “Strands of Self” and it even had an illustration.

I became obsessed with the post, the noise of the postie’s motorbike. I couldn’t bear it when a drunk driver wiped out our brick letterbox and there were no deliveries for a week, just as I was waiting on some submissions. The thrill of seeing an envelope arrive in my own handwriting was intense. Any of them could bring glorious success even if most brought rejection.

For a high-schooler I had quite a lot of success in those days. A story on ABC Radio my economics class all had to listen to. Several publications in small journals. Wins in junior and regional competitions. But if ambition overwhelms the other motivations, success isn’t a joy, only a relief.

Once I was at uni, I focused on writing a novel, building on a story about a tournament in a fungus ravaged Perth that I had written in the last weeks of high school. It took years, but it became my novel, The Fur, published in 2004.

I didn’t resolve that tension between writing to win and writing for the good reasons. The problem intensified in the writing of my second and third (unpublished) novels and it was one of the things that doomed me as a fiction writer.

But maybe the real truth is that non-fiction writing suits me better and the very act of working in my natural form means my motivations are better balanced. I enjoyed writing my Katharine Susannah Prichard biography far more than the three novels I wrote.

Since then, being permanently sick has finished the job of tempering my ambition to healthy levels. I have no hope of keeping up. I can plod on, accepting my meagre outputs and trying to make sure there is enough reward in the writing itself, on those days I’m up to it.