Ian Middleton’s writing career began, fittingly, outdoors. After completing the Magazine Journalism Course at NZ Writers’ College with distinction, Ian turned his passion for mountain biking and adventure sport into paid work, placing articles in New Zealand Mountain Biker, The Climber and Spoke magazine within his first year out of the course.
The first of those, in NZ Mountain Biker, actually began life as a course assignment idea Ian couldn’t let go of. He developed it in parallel with his official coursework, applying what he was learning on the course directly to this story. It paid off.
‘Selling that first article helped validate the choice I made at trying to build a writing career. It’s easy to write something and put it on a blog somewhere. But when someone wants to actually give you money in exchange for the words you’ve written, it bumps your confidence up a notch,’ says Ian.
Ian is candid about the harder parts of freelancing life: the enquiry emails that vanish into what feels like a void, the rejections that can sting more personally than expected, and the reality that even strong writing can be knocked back over something as simple as underwhelming accompanying photography. His fix was practical. He partnered with a photographer to split both the work and the payment, choosing to build a body of work first and trust the relationships with editors that would follow.
Since then, Ian had articles published in NZ Today, Say Yes to Adventure, Adventure Magazine (online edition) and UK Climbing Magazine.
‘All of my NZ magazine features were set in New Zealand, and were based on adventures we’d been on in the past that planted the seed for potential articles. It made for a good excuse to go on “research” trips,’ says Ian.
That patience and persistence as a freelance writer turned out to be excellent training for what came next. Ian has since moved from outdoor journalism into fiction, publishing as Ian J. Middleton, based in Christchurch, and has built a substantial catalogue of horror and dark fiction.
Ian explains, ‘When we had kids, my ability to get out and about rapidly diminished (outdoors-style articles are what interest me most). So I decided to switch to writing fiction as it was easier to fit around parenting. I went down the self-publishing route, writing horror and dark fiction. That’s what I enjoy writing and seem to be all right at it!’
His flash fiction and short story collection, ‘Ominous’, gathers twenty tales of brutal surgeons, tormented hitmen and sadistic trophy hunters, while his ‘No Escape’ series, a four-part novella sequence including ‘No Escape’, ‘The Search’, ‘The Hunt’ and ‘The Kill’, draws on the same unforgiving West Coast wilderness he once wrote about as a journalist, this time turned to unsettling effect.
‘My books are set in a variety of places, such as Kyoto, Japan, a particle collider research centre, and an abandoned ski field. However, most are set in New Zealand as there’s heaps of opportunity for creepy settings, and writing what you know is so much easier.’
Ian’s early advice to aspiring journalists holds just as true for the novelist he’s since become: always choose a strong verb over a weak verb and adverb combination, and remember that things take time.
‘While the writing may be different, there were skills I picked up from the journalism course that were transferable. I think the most important one was the mindset to get on with it. Whether it’s a magazine feature or a novel, it’s not going to write itself. I quickly realised that coming up with ideas is the easy part; then the work begins.’
Find Ian’s books on Amazon here.
