NOVELIST | SCREENWRITER

Nikki will tell you that her stories find her. That she never thinks about making up a story or characters and relates more to this idea of unearthing something waiting to be discovered or overhearing something whispered just out of earshot. It starts as an inkling. A sense something is hidden just out of reach. Glimpsed in the periphery. It feels like longing. To be consumed by a kind of feeling and the experience that would make it possible. Always it starts like that. With no sense of why. And if she resists it the story passes and she may not be able to find it again. 

Often the ending comes first. The feeling always. What would remain after the last word is read or written. Then comes clarity around who would need to be there for that feeling to be true. Then usually the beginning. Where does it all need to begin and why? Often when she writes she is just as surprised at what unfolds as her readers will be. It’s a delightful process though at times arduous and painful because no amount of forcing will bring a story about before its time. It’s always been this way for her. Since she was a child. So much so that she was able to create her first feature length film and the outline her first novel both before her first year of highschool was finished. Certainly, this gift did not come without a cost, and she would tell you that though her youth was filled with friends and joy it was also flavoured with loneliness and isolation as she often related more easily to stories dreamed up and characters discovered in her own imagination; and she found the books and movies she got deeply wrapped up in to be so much more exciting and fulfilling than her own life. 

Though many people told her she should be a writer, she never believed it was a real or possible career, and always saw herself as a scientist of some kind instead. It wasn’t until her first year of university, struggling with addiction and recovery, when she finished her first book, an autobiography titled The Lost and Found of a Teenage Drug Addict that she realized she’d found her place in the world. Over the next few years, she wrote three more books and the first drafts of five feature films, all part of processing the struggle, heartache and confusion she’d experienced in her late teens battling a dangerous addiction and a dark desire to lose herself completely. From the moment she completed that first book and the realization this was a gift that would not relent, she began to believe she could be a writer and for the next few years unrelentingly wrote and tried to build a career.

Yet, by the age of twenty-seven Nikki abandoned any hope or dream of being a writer. She’d tried for years to get noticed, to find an agent or publisher, to win contests, and to succeed but nothing came of any of it. It had never occurred to her at that young age that timing was a vital part of any endeavour or that she just wasn’t seasoned enough, or well practiced at all at developing anything beyond a first draft in a way that would impress anyone. Her failure devastated her and with this sense of a broken heart for not being a writer, what she’d been so certain she was meant to be, she walked away from her dream; absolutely broken. 

Her dream is to write. And so, she is living it. But she also longs through her stories to contribute to more representation showing up in tv, film and literature; something she didn’t always have or experience growing up. 

Nikki has found her voice sharing stories about people like herself; who are in search of identity and their place in the world. Her strength is in conveying the beautiful complexity of relationships through deep feeling character driven narratives, honest stories, and rich, relatable characters that translate to both the page and the screen. In this way she is much the same as she was many years ago, as a young woman dreaming up stories that were a safe place to land; and she hopes her stories will do the same for others as they make their way into the world.