The one lesson I’ve learned from life: Val McDermid says challenges can be opportunities

• Val McDermin has sold more than 16 million books and lives in Edinburgh
• She has learned to see a challenge not as a problem but as an opportunity
• The 64-year-old reveals she felt like an outsider when she was a teenager

Val McDermid, 64, has sold more than 16 million books and seen her work adapted into the long-running ITV series Wire In The Blood, starring Robson Green. She lives with her partner in Edinburgh. 

It sounds like a hippy-dippy platitude, but I’ve learned to see a challenge not as a problem but as an opportunity. The potential for failure is enormous but, on the other hand, the reward for success can be tremendous.

It goes back to when I went off to Oxford at the age of 17, the first Scottish state school pupil to go to St Hilda’s College. I look back now and think, ‘How did I find the nerve to do that?’

Val McDermid, 64, (pictured) lives in Edinburgh with her partner. She has sold more than 16 million books and seen her work adapted into the long-running ITV series Wire In The Blood

I spent most of my teens feeling like an outsider, and I thought that was because I was going to be a writer. 

I thought writers had to have detachment, that ‘splinter of ice in the heart’ as Graham Greene called it. I wanted to spread my wings.

I read the Chalet School books by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer and, when the girls at the Chalet School grew up, they went to the Kensington School of Needlework, Oxford or the Sorbonne, which I knew I wasn’t going to because my French wasn’t good enough! So that left Oxford.

My school didn’t even want me to apply. But I had one supportive teacher and parents who realised that education was the way to a better life.

My parents were both very bright people who never got the chance to make the most of their intelligence because their families couldn’t afford to send them to high school.

Not shying away from challenges has continued to lead to interesting opportunities: from going on Question Time to doing Have I Got News For You and reworking Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. 

A couple of years ago, I did a multimedia installation in Edinburgh at new year. I wrote a story that was split into 12 sections and projected on buildings round the city centre. It was called Message From The Skies.

Over the years, this kind of thing has come along and there have been times when I’ve thought, ‘I’m mad, why did I say yes?’ but, when I’ve actually done them, it’s been immensely satisfying. 

How the Dead Speak by Val McDermid (£8.99, Little Brown)is out now. 

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