Patrick Shepherd On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer

The first one is that you’ve got to read things you enjoy, because that’s where you’re going to get your inspiration for writing styles and for thinking about the kind of content that interests you. It’s also important for understanding structure and narrative. I get my motivation from reading too. Seeing other people share their thoughts and feelings gives me the confidence to do the same.

Some writers and authors have a knack for using language that can really move people. Some writers and authors have been able to influence millions with their words alone. What does it take to become an effective and successful author or writer? In this interview series, called “5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer” we are talking to successful authors and writers who can share lessons from their experiences.

As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick Shepherd. Patrick is an author, painter, and filmmaker who has worked extensively in healthcare and humanitarian communications across Africa, Asia, and Europe. His memoir, due to be released this spring, focuses on his career, first working in London’s homeless hostels, then as a filmmaker reporting from refugee camps, hospitals, and disaster response situations. Patrick talks candidly about the emotional toll of working in those environments. His journey into writing and communications was shaped by early struggles with dyslexia, leading him to create visual tools and narratives to make sense of the world.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Thanks so much for inviting me to share some of my experiences and the things I’ve learned. I live in London and work predominantly in healthcare communications, often trying to find simple ways to explain complex issues that are massively important to people who are affected by them. For example, heart disease, sight loss, and mental health.

If I think about how I got here, it probably goes back to being dyslexic and the difficulties I had in school in the 1990s. At that time, the education system in the UK wasn’t designed for people with neurodiversity. We were excluded, we were categorised as dysfunctional, as troublemakers, as people who didn’t apply ourselves, as people who needed to work harder. What people didn’t realise is that neurodiverse people are often working very hard, to the point of exhaustion and burnout, but the structure in which we were communicating and learning didn’t fit with the way our brains are built.

Quite often, I had to take information that was presented in a way that I found complicated, then translate it into something I could understand. That meant creating visual tools and building stories around subjects. From an early age, I started using these techniques as a means of survival. I enjoyed reading and writing, but I was being told by teachers — or given the feeling from teachers — that words weren’t my area, that words were for other people, not me.

So I went in the other direction and became interested in art, design, and photography. I went to art college where I started discovering authors like Anthony Bourdain, George Orwell, and Hunter S. Thompson. I felt that these writers injected a kind of truth, vibrancy, and saturation into stories that was missing from mainstream journalism. I found that exciting, and I think I wanted to do something similar.

The experiences I had in school didn’t leave me unscathed. They created an environment for depression and anxiety, and the erosion of self-worth. I discovered that drugs gave me a way to not think about those things so much. Drugs made the world feel brighter and happier. So I started self-medicating, and that continued for many years. I was living in that slightly detached sense of reality that comes from being high all the time. I think depression and anxiety also gave me a route to explore some of the darker and grittier aspects of society. I wanted to use art and storytelling to try and engage people in some of those issues.

I was angry at the way schools and society had tried to push me out, and that gave me a desire to stand up against things that I felt were unjust. After leaving art college, I travelled around for a while, painting in Istanbul and working as a cheesemonger in Edinburgh. Then one day, I saw a copy of The Big Issue, a magazine sold by homeless vendors. On the cover was a drawing by Ralph Steadman, whose work I admired. I bought the magazine, then noticed a job advert in the back for a support worker at a homeless hostel in London.

I thought I might be good at a job like that. I was offered the position and continued to work in that sector for several years. Through that role, I started to understand more complex sociological and political issues relating to exclusion, mental health, and self-medication. I had to write keywork notes, emails, and letters to probation officers and clinicians. I started developing more confidence in my writing, and I became more interested in the wider context of homelessness, social care, and health.

I also witnessed some truly terrible things. There was effectively a heroin and crack epidemic going on. Many of the people I knew and worked with in the hostels died in undignified and desperate ways. I became familiar with the sight of blood from injection sites speckled across the walls and ceiling. On one occasion, I had to give CPR to somebody who was overdosing on the reception floor. At night, my subconscious drew from that imagery to create vivid nightmares.

It was the beginning of the Great Recession and a time of austerity, where funding cuts were crippling services for social care. It began to feel like homeless hostels had become a dumping ground for society’s most vulnerable and abused. It often felt like there was too much stacked up against us, and that what we were doing had minimal impact on improving people’s lives. I wanted to see if there were more effective ways to tackle the crisis.

I used my annual leave to visit projects across East and Southern Africa that were addressing homelessness and insecure housing. I spent a month backpacking through Kenya, Tanzania, and Malawi. During that trip, I wrote about the things I saw and the feelings I was having. I felt like I’d thrown myself so much into other people’s problems that I wasn’t living enough of my own life. I was in my mid-twenties, and at that time, living to me also meant taking risks.

I remember spending a couple of days staying with some fishermen in a warehouse where we smoked grey powder off tin foil. I was so curious. In those moments, I think my curiosity put me in quite real danger. Somebody had tried to attack me with a broken glass bottle in the days before. I probably had cortisol and adrenaline rushing through me, clouding my judgment.

On other parts of the trip, I visited housing development projects for people living in urban poverty. I was taken into one of the world’s largest slums by a journalist who had grown up there. It was in a neighbourhood of Nairobi called Kibera. I was beginning to realise how impactful stories could be in engaging people with different issues. I had more clarity after that trip about what I wanted to do with my career. I applied for a master’s course in development and emergency practice, feeling that I would need a more academic qualification to be taken seriously.

Then I started working in journalism. Predominantly as a video journalist, but that also involved writing scripts. I worked for a news agency in India for a while. It was at a time when the news cycle there was dominated by stories about sexual violence and abuse following the gang rape and murder of a woman on a bus in New Delhi. I covered stories about heinous crimes like abduction and murder. Creating stories that responded to news cycles left me feeling hollow. I found it difficult to engage with a story, then to move on to the next story without being affected in some way.

I found myself gravitating towards stories about healthcare initiatives, pinning them to reports and publications from humanitarian agencies. It felt, in that sense, like the stories were part of the solution. For many years, that became the main focus of my career. I told stories for humanitarian agencies across Africa and Asia, reporting from crisis situations in refugee camps and in countries impacted by conflict or disasters like earthquakes. Pointing a camera at human suffering for years on end erodes your soul. You either have to replenish that or numb the feeling. I did both.

I spent a lot of time in nature, going on safaris, swimming in the ocean, and hiking. I also took a lot of drugs. That life I was living was not sustainable. Ten years passed by, and I started to wonder who I was, where my roots were, what my future looked like. I decided to return to the UK shortly before the pandemic. I was offered a job in the communications department of a hospital that specialised in care for patients with heart and lung conditions.

As the pandemic unfurled, I found myself reporting from the frontline of the COVID response, and I produced documentaries and patient information about specialist treatments. It was whilst working at the hospital that I was diagnosed with a heart condition. Aspects of my personal life had collapsed in ruins around me. I knew that I needed help if I was to survive, and so I reached out to a therapist.

Over the next couple of years, I talked about my difficulties in school, about my experiences working in homeless hostels and refugee camps, about the nightmares I experienced in which malnourished children picked through garbage, planes exploded, and mutilated bodies lay half exposed under rubble and fire. I had seen all those things happen in real life. It was those therapy sessions that helped me to form a structure and a narrative around my memories and feelings, which is what gave rise to my memoir that is coming out at the end of April this year.

Can you share the most interesting story that occurred to you in the course of your career?

There are things that I get interested in, or absorbed by, even consumed by, at different points. Right now, neurodiversity is a big one for me, having buried so many of the feelings that I developed through the course of my childhood, adolescence, and later in life. Mental health is a big one as well. Dealing with depression and anxiety requires maintenance. You have to keep going at the healthy things that you put into your life. For me, that’s spending time with my wife and family, playing the clarinet, painting, writing, hiking, and kayaking.

I break down aspects of my career into genres, like the homeless hostels, working in news, working for humanitarian agencies, and working in healthcare. I have lots of stories about those experiences, which I share in detail in the book. My interest in healthcare and anatomy goes back to my childhood. Growing up in a medical household, my mum worked as a nurse, and my dad is a doctor. We had a lot of medical books and anatomy books around the house. As I started to explore the idea of visual communications, some of the early resources that were available to me were anatomy illustrations.

Now working in healthcare, I have filmed surgeries and filmed in laboratories. I’ve had the opportunity to see beating hearts, to see a human brain, to learn about how the eye works, and about human psychology. So I think those experiences stand out for me. The first time I saw a heart beating inside someone’s open chest, the theoretical concept of what a heart is and how it works evaporated. As somebody who thinks visually, I was able to understand it better after seeing it. So I’m always looking for opportunities to see things working in real-world situations.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in your journey to becoming a writer? How did you overcome it? Can you share a story about that that other aspiring writers can learn from?

For me, one of the biggest challenges was the process of getting my writing to a point where people can actually understand what I’m putting on paper. How do I turn my thoughts into something that is grammatically correct? How do I get somebody to take my writing seriously when it’s full of missing prepositions and words that have been autocorrected wrongly, or when commas are in the wrong place?

Linking into a literary world was a big step. So much of the communication that we do and so many opportunities that we try to access start with an email. When you’re dyslexic, even writing those emails is a challenge. One of the tools that I use to overcome that obstacle is the read aloud function in various applications. I play back audio of what I’ve written, and through that process, I can hear when I’ve missed a word, or autocorrect has presented the wrong word, or when the flow of a sentence doesn’t feel right. I only discovered that function recently whilst writing my book; I went for decades without it. That’s a game-changer for me.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I felt that to be a writer meant you had to live the things you were writing about. To a degree, I still feel that way. However, the pursuit of that led me into all sorts of surreal, ridiculous, and sometimes dangerous situations. It’s not ha-ha funny, but I do find it slightly amusing that I thought being a writer meant you had to take a lot of drugs and drink heavily. Because now, my perspectives of being a writer are more about being observant and curious, making notes, listening to people, and engaging with the world.

In your opinion, were you a “natural born writer” or did you develop that aptitude later on? Can you explain what you mean?

My imagination has always been very active, and I’ve always been observant and curious. But I don’t think I was a natural born writer. I think the process of turning my thoughts, feelings, and observations into text required me to develop skills that worked for me. Another tool I sometimes use is audio-to-text, where I speak my thoughts into an audio recorder, then I use software to transcribe what I’ve said. I write bullet point lists and turn those into sentences as well. So, I had to come up with all sorts of workarounds.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

My professional work is in healthcare communications. It’s a pretty interesting time with AI and other advances for diagnosing and treating complex conditions. Telling stories about patients whose lives are being transformed through those developments is exciting. Outside of work, I’m constantly getting involved in projects, putting on painting exhibitions, creating postcards, and thinking about my next book, for example — where the stories for that are going to come from and how I’m going to tell them.

As we come out of winter and move towards spring and summer, I’ll be doing more outdoor activities. I have some hiking and kayaking trips planned. March through to October is a really active period for me. Then, from November through to February, I tend to hunker down and focus on turning ideas, notes, and sketches into bigger projects. I wrote my book through the winter, and I do a lot of my painting in the winter. So, the year kind of breaks down like that.

Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what are the “5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer”? Please share a story or example for each.

These are going to sound obvious, but they’re obvious because they’re true.

1 . The first one is that you’ve got to read things you enjoy, because that’s where you’re going to get your inspiration for writing styles and for thinking about the kind of content that interests you. It’s also important for understanding structure and narrative. I get my motivation from reading too. Seeing other people share their thoughts and feelings gives me the confidence to do the same.

2 . Number two is take notes. This is particularly true for something like a memoir, where you could be covering a lifetime. Notes are your memory prompts. They can be anything, such as audio files, journal entries, emails, lists, drawings, and photographs. I often use my photographs as memory prompts. If I want to describe a scene, I can look at a photograph I took. It will remind me of the colours and the things that were happening in that moment.

3 . Number three is to engage with the world. You have to have conversations with people, listen to them, and learn about issues. Take on board other people’s perspectives and allow your own ideas and opinions to evolve.

4 . Number four is to be observant and curious. Think about what things smell like, what you can see, what you can hear, and most importantly, how you feel in a particular moment. If you can write about those things, then you can recreate the world on paper.

5 . Number five is about time and structure. You have to make time and structure in your life for writing. You can’t just fit it in after work or for an hour on the weekend. My book took me six months to write, and I structured my days like a regular job. I went to the library with a thermos and sandwiches, and I stayed there from morning until evening, sitting at my computer typing. If you don’t have time and structure, it’s very difficult to make any real progress.

What is the one habit you believe contributed the most to you becoming a great writer? (i.e. perseverance, discipline, play, craft study). Can you share a story or example?

I guess there’s something in this about mortality and our experience of the world. What does it mean to be alive? What do we bring to life? What are we going to leave behind? These questions are big motivators of writing for me. I also find it therapeutic to categorise and collect my thoughts and feelings, to give them narrative, and to share them. It’s grounding, and you gain a sense of purpose and place.

If you think about trees, for example: They have roots in the ground, they absorb carbon, birds build nests on their branches, bees collect pollen from their flowers, and their roots give structure and integrity to the soil, which helps mitigate erosion. A tree exists in, of, and for its ecosystem. Writing is the same. When we put our thoughts on paper and make them available for other people to read, we become a part of our ecosystem. That gives meaning to life.

Some of the themes I touch on in the book are about neurodiversity, self-medication, and mental health. I wrote about those things because it’s healing, but also because I hope other people can read them and learn from them, so that perhaps they can find routes to joy, hope, and happiness in the places where I found those things, and that they might be more aware of the challenges and suffering that exists in all of us, I guess.

Which literature do you draw inspiration from? Why?

I’ve mentioned a couple already, but some of the other books I’ve read recently, and that inspired me, are Strong Female Character by Fern Brady, where she talks about her experiences as an autistic person who was diagnosed later in life. I also enjoyed The Zanzibar Chest by Adrian Hartley, where he writes about his experiences covering conflict and the feelings that came out of that. I love Martha Gellhorn’s reporting on conflict as well. AA Gill’s Pour Me a Life is where I got some of the confidence that I have now to talk about dyslexia.

Another good book is Richard Pryor’s memoir, Pryor Convictions, which felt brutally honest, funny, and raw. I also enjoyed Nadiya Hussain’s memoir, Finding My Voice. Beyond books, I find so much inspiration from song lyrics by people like Billie Holiday, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits. I love listening to instrumental and classical music when I’m writing, like Sidney Bechet or Brahms. These things all feed the imagination and soul.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

It’s perhaps ironic, given that we’re talking about writing, but I would say encouraging people to draw and paint is important. I think the process of drawing and painting can liberate so much anguish inside of us. It replaces those feelings with joy. It’s such a beautiful process. I think if everybody gave themselves more time to sit and sketch, or to just move colour around on paper or canvas, the world would be a bit more harmonious. It makes people more tolerant and requires a level of observation that builds respect for the things around you. Maybe if people painted more, they would give a bit less time to more destructive pursuits.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I generally keep quite a low profile, but besides the book itself, Instagram would be a good place to start. I’ll be posting updates about events and publications there, and you’ll also find links to my websites: @patrickdshepherd (there’s a letter ‘d’ between Patrick and Shepherd).

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspiring!