I have a confession to make: I haven’t
always been a writer (like the title doesn’t give that away!). I realise this
may sound a little silly but telling myself this as I often do opens up a whole
semantic minefield. Like, ‘Dave, what do you mean by always? What do you mean when you say writer?’ For the purposes of this post, lets just say always means ‘not until after my teenage
years (like, wayyy after)’ and writer
means ‘writing fiction entirely of my own volition (and not what Teacher
instructed).’
So
why did it take so long for me to put finger to qwerty? Well, I’m a huge
believer that experience shapes the way we in which see the world and how we
try to make sense of it. We’re not pre-destined to live certain lives.
Experience makes the world go around for all of us. I also believe the paper
clips of experience needed to unpick the locks hiding whatever desires and/or
abilities lying dormant in our minds are not readily available. Looking back
through my childhood, I know if I had read more fiction – genre or otherwise –
that lock would have been unpicked long ago. As it happened, up until the age
of twenty-two, other than texts set by my English teachers, I struggle to remember
a single work of fiction I’d read.
It’s one of the biggest regrets I’m ever likely to carry to the grave, but
hey-ho!
In
March 2003, that lock was unpicked having been persuaded by an old workmate to
read Orwell’s 1984. Something clicked inside me. I felt an
exhilaration I never thought possible. I read it again (and again after that, I
think). Then I moved onto other dystopias: Brave
New World by Aldous Huxley and We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin spring to mind. Then I branched out into the wider sci-fi
genre, even some non-genre. About a year later I decided I wanted, no, needed to write. Something in my mind
was triggered and all I could think of were a flood of different ideas. I
procrastinated for a couple more years before I started writing my first novel,
which I gave up on two thirds of the way through owing to the fact it was
unmitigated shite…but necessary. I realised then I needed to learn the craft,
to listen to those who knew what they were doing.
And
it was around then when I came across that most horribly exclusivist of words:
‘innate’ – and we’re suddenly back to the whole pre-destination thing. According
to some of the ‘how-to’ authors, good writing is innate and cannot be learned.
That’s right, cannot, can-not,
c.a.n.n.o.t be learned. Sure, learning the craft could help, but this was
supplementary rather than integral. But writers are ultimately born with
ability; it’s just the way of the world. As you can imagine, I found this
greatly off-putting. I thought ‘Christ, Dave, why waste your time pursuing
something you didn’t give a shit about until you were in your twenties?’ Had I
missed that literary boat? I started visualising a circle of self-satisfied,
self-assured ‘writers’ looking down at me laughingly, poking me with their big
‘innate’ sticks. Compounding this insecurity, I lost count of the amount of
author interviews I’d read where he/she lovingly and nostalgically recalled how
they’d been writing from a very early age. *Another visual klaxon: kids just
out of nappies scrawling their first bestsellers using naught but crayons!* It
was all just so frickin’ depressing.
But…the urge to write never faded. The
dam around my mind had been burst. How the hell could I replace the concrete to
stem the tide? And anyway, I’m notoriously crap at DIY, so…
Since
joining the SSFFWG two years ago, my writing has come on leaps and bounds – no
exaggeration. More importantly, however, the group has convinced me once and
for all that the art of writing is something that can be learned. Life’s experiences are what you make of them.
No-one has an inherent gene that screams ‘WRITER’. If there is anything innate
about writing it is, in my most humble of opinion, the desire, the need, the urge to tell stories to the world. But
that innateness was hidden from view. I needed a trigger, an experience to take
away the blindfold. For me, reading 1984
was it.
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