“I started submitting stuff to the newsbiscuit writers’ room because having your jokes die horribly on the internet is much better than having it happen at a comedy club’s try-out night, where you can see everyone not laughing.

Then something cool happened. As I ploughed away, wondering if a wacky user name might make me sound funnier, complete strangers started leaving me stars, and even better, started chipping in (helpfully…) with ways to make the stories funnier. Then some of the ideas started working, and I learned that honest accounts of personal awkwardness and humiliation could get laughs if you pretended they were made up.

With help from the credits I had from newsbiscuit, i was able to get some jokes on BBC radio (the chat room’s a great spot to pick up on opportunities) and I got the chance to pitch in at a real life writers’ room for radio 4’s the now show. I even have an email from the BBC asking how to pronounce my surname for the credits. For a few minutes I sat and wondered if pronouncing it dor-ran made me sound more showbiz… at some point, I also realised that I’d written more than 40,000 words of ticker jokes and longer subs — half a book! So I sat down with a fresh word document, and a bit of confidence that I could churn out enough pages, to have a proper go at writing a full-blown romantic comedy novel. While the laptop’s cursor flashed blankly at me, I wondered for a few minutes whether changing my surname to d’oran would make me sound more authorly…” neal doran (@nealdoran)