About Lisa
I’ve always loved writing stories. Instead of revising for my GCSEs, I spent study leave writing a terrible play about a girl who turned into a seal (fairy tale or body horror?). Being the first in my family to go to university and lacking sensible guidance, I decided to study what I was interested in rather than anything practical. So I graduated with a degree in English Literature and Psychology (and an elective in History – I like learning) with no idea what to do with it.
Needing to earn a living, I took a sequence of jobs in retail, ad sales and data management, but got bored. I decided to retrain as a TEFL teacher, naively thinking I’d have both more time and money and could therefore dedicate more time to writing, and maybe even travel. Warning: teaching does not bring you more time and money. But I turned out to be good at it and I started teaching English and Psychology.
Freshly addicted to learning, I trained in script reading at The Script Factory where I learned more about storytelling and applied it to my own work. After spending some time doing freelance script reading, I saw a job ad for ‘picture story’ writers and applied. This led to five years working as a comic script writer for DC Thomson’s Wendy magazine. I wrote over a hundred comic scripts about a girl and her horse.
In 2012, I was a finalist at the Stratford-upon-Avon Fringe, where my play, The Confetti Job, was performed at the Attic Theatre and I won a cute little trophy. I had several projects that died, including the best short screenplay I ever wrote – mostly filmed, but never finished – and an audio play (my first paid commission) that was never released.
Eventually, I was commissioned to write my first super low budget horror feature – Siren Song. It was an exciting collaboration and looked like it was going ahead. But then the original producers had a ‘producer divorce’ and the whole thing was off. And then – plot twist – new producers came on board with more money and even more ideas. I couldn’t collaborate anymore because I was heading into hospital for some super serious surgery, so I wished them well and said goodbye. On the first day of production, I was going under anaesthetic.
After hospital, I didn’t feel like watching or writing anything horror-related for a long time. I even went back to university to do a post grad in technical communication and ended up working on software user guides. A recommendation led to another horror feature commission and I threw myself into it. But by this point I found myself drawn more to educational writing and multimedia learning, which fortunately still involves a lot of storytelling. I now write and edit both traditional and multimedia educational materials.