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 that would follow.
That patience and persistence 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. 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.
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.
Find Ian’s books on Amazon here.
