From Feet to Fiction!
I've always been a stubborn
person, which my wife will happily agree with, so when I was about 14 years old
and my English teacher said that I could never compose complete sentences I
made a point of proving him wrong. I remember sitting in my bedroom writing the
greatest piece of descriptive work I possibly could about a tree. The Thesaurus
had never been used so much! But the important thing was that I went back over
the 500 word piece of writing and edited it several times joining the short
sentences together to improve it.
So you could say that my writing
started at that point, purely out of stubbornness. But I also learnt that my
writing couldn’t keep up with the speed of my brain. If I wrote everything I
thought of it was important to go back and edit to improve the structure and
flow of my work.
The next piece I wrote at school was
a fantasy story that ended up being a lot longer than was required. After I had
handed it in (together with an artistically drawn front cover. I think it was
called The Citadel) the aforementioned English teacher stopped me in the
corridor as I was going for my lunch break and asked if I had really written 'The
Citadel.' He then gave me the highest mark possible for it and from then on we
seemed to have a reasonable appreciation of each other.
So here's to you Jed for making
me want to prove you wrong!
It was quite a while after when I
went back to fantasy novels. I gained an honours degree in Podiatry and followed
the sensible career path, wrote a couple of medical books, but let's be honest,
they are pretty boring. For my own pleasure I had continued to write many
different things including an Agatha Christie style whodunit, as well as a
rather depressing story about a guy with cancer which was supposed to be a love
story, but many of them still sit unfinished in a folder. One of the reasons I
think I got bored with them was because they were restricting in many ways for
me as the writer.
Things changed for me one morning
in the bathroom. My son, who enjoys sharing the only peaceful time I get to
truly be on my own, randomly asked me to tell him a story. James has a great
imagination so I knew that only a wild and exciting story would amuse him (plus
there had to be some form of death and destruction in it.) So I randomly said,
'Have you heard the one about the Moon Stealers?' and the seed of imagination
started. During our time in the bathroom, we threw loads of ideas at each other
and concocted a sort of story for the Moon Stealers. I decided to start writing
it down, not really knowing where it was going, but as I started to write I
found that the ideas seemed to organically grow by themselves. James went
through every chapter with his pencil as I wrote them, telling me where I had
made errors (as he has done with this piece!)
Writing a book for young people
provides a lot more freedom for ideas and possibilities than an adult one. They
are much more likely to accept things that an adult's methodical and scientific
brain would be closed to. With children there is no 'that’s not possible,' or
'he wouldn’t do that,' or 'because of the erratic nature of ion's it would not be
physically possible for teleportation to occur when it rains.' In short, to a
child anything is possible. And, as a writer, that's exciting. It's like taking
a child to a toy shop and saying: 'play with whatever you want, however you
want…. Oh yes, you can take it all home with you too if you want.'
Writing is inspiring. Children are refreshing. Freedom
to write what you want is liberating. Sentences are sometimes short. Fiction is
more interesting that feet.
