This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Trisha Ashley has written many contemporary romantic comedies, including Wish Upon a Star, which was her fifth consecutive Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller. Trisha's latest novel, Every Woman for Herself, is out now. Here, she tells Novelicious why The Golden Pathway series of children's books opened her eyes to the world at a very young age.
I’m afraid this is going to have to be books, rather than book, because I’ve chosen the eight excitingly illustrated and lushly celestial-blue cloth bound volumes that make up a children’s series called The Golden Pathway. I must have been about two when they arrived in the house and my mother began reading bedtime stories from them.
Once I could read (and I was a very early reader), I worked my way right through them, then reread my favourites over and over. The volumes were cunningly designed to lead you on a journey of discovery and delight that would fire the imagination, show the reader in no uncertain terms that actions have consequences (which is, after all, what the central premise of a novel consists of), and open their mind to the world outside their own small sphere.
Volume one began with simple nursery rhymes and poetry, Aesop’s fables and legends; then onwards and deeper into classic stories, scarily dark Grimm’s tales, legends of mermaids and sealmen trading their fishy immortality for love of a human, exploration, nature study and much, much more. It’s all tightly woven into my subconscious, but if I had to pick out one strand that has influenced me more than anything else, it would be Charles Kingsley’s story The Water Babies. Perhaps now it might appear a very moral Victorian tale, but do-as-you-would-be-done-by still seems to me a very good star to steer by.