E
very time I read about the history of another writer it seems that destiny drew them to a waiting page and placed a pencil in their hand from an early age. That’s not the same for me; in fact, my story couldn’t be further from it.
My earliest memories of writing stories go back to my junior school and being told to write a long story. I didn’t like writing at the age of seven, numbers were my thing and I recall gazing out of the window as my classmates scribbled away. It couldn’t have been a long exercise as we were only eight at the time, but the time seemed to drag. I finally produced something about a car breaking down and a long way to a petrol station. I struggled to turn the page and had failed abysmally to deliver the long story that had been requested. I hoped to hide my inadequacy at the back of the class but no such luck. Miss Bush our fearsome form teacher of the day called me to the front of the class to read my story. Aghast I trudged to her desk and mumbled for thirty seconds; when I’d finished, she thought I was pausing for effect. A firm slap across my backside told me she was not impressed. If there was a writer inside me, he retreated a bit further that day.
My writing prospects didn’t improve with my choice of employment; I started as a financial analyst and only later did I switch to a career in marketing, and even here I recall leaning heavily towards the numerical components of pricing and sales analysis. But somewhere around this time, I started to write product briefs, customer propositions and marketing blurb for coloured wipers. Believe me if you can make a wet wiper sound interesting you can write anything. From this unlikely beginning I started to enjoy words and creating unusual ideas and images with unfamiliar combinations of words and the idea that there was a book inside me began to grow.
I like to read thrillers and will write my own, While I like the escapist type of thriller where someone has 24 hours to save the world, but when it came to my own version, I wanted to aim for something more within the reach of the reader.My objective was to create a story where anyone could picture him or herself as Doug or Cathy and ask themselves; “what would I do if faced with that scenario?” Hence, I tried to combine the idea of a page turning thriller with a dose of everyday life. I feel that readers invest many hours in reading a book and therefore it’s incumbent on the author to repay that trust with an entertaining story but also one that makes the reader think. You might spend a Friday night slipping down to your local Odeon to watch a movie and want nothing more than two hours of escapist fun, and there is definitely a time and a place for that. But an author needs to work harder.
One of my passions is music; I regularly attend live music concerts, Boris permitting, and always have music playing in the background when I’m writing. Today’s musical accompaniment is Dire Straits third album Making Movies from 1980 and in particular the opening track Tunnel of Love a lyrical labyrinth of language on top of a Springsteenesque guitar. Joyous.
Kommentarer