Thursday 28 April 2011

Shakespeare I aint!

It's 1am, I'm not tired yet, I'm not long back in from Dunfermline, so I have nothing better to do until my sedative kicks in, than write something. This is something, so it will do!

Actually, as I was contemplating what I could write about, I had the idea to write about writing. This stems from a conversation I had with my friend Ian tonight, namely that every one has a book in them. We talked about scenarios which we thought would make good reading, or a good screenplay. Thinking more about it on the drive home, made me think about some of my abortive attempts at writing.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always had a strange fascination with the written word, in it's many forms.  I guess this all started not too long after I learned to read, I'd have been pretty young when my dad started doing something that I will eternally be grateful for.  Dad got paid every second Thursday, and every second Thursday he would stop on his way home from work and buy me a book.  Enid Blyton books formed a large part of my burgeoning library, I quickly became something of an expert on the minutiae of The Famous Five, and to a lesser extent, The Secret Seven (if I had to choose - no contest, the 5 triumphed every time!).  These were the books which got me hooked on reading, in my mind I wasn't a plain, ordinary kid in a plain, ordinary village, I could be transported to other places, places I knew weren't real, but that were given a sense of reality by my imagination. I became the incorporeal 6th member of The Famous Five, I accompanied them on their myriad adventures, I felt their peril, sensed their danger and enjoyed their triumph.

As I grew older and my reading material changed and developed, I started having ideas of my own, generally inspired by whatever genre of books I happened to have latched on to. I distinctly remember writing a singularly gruesome horror short story for an English assessment which I think disturbed the teacher! I loved that it did, it meant that what I wrote had some kind of power, and I liked that feeling. If you want to know the details, I can't remember all of them, but the assessment instructed me to write a short story themed around revenge, so I did. My story was about a rape victim who found and then tortured her attacker after he was acquitted on a technicality. I was reading a lot of Shaun Hutson at this point (possibly not the best idea for my 15 year old self!), so the story was pretty gruesome. I remember a key part of the story being the insertion of long pins into certain areas.

As I said, all I was looking for at that point was for my writing to have an effect, be that positive or negative, on the reader. Fortunately however, I outgrew that pretty quickly and then thought, well, if I can write gory crap and it has an effect, then maybe if I tried a bit harder and wrote something good, rather than just something horrific, maybe I can get more positive reactions. So, I started to write. Not all of it was prose, a large chunks of my creative output of the time was in the form of hidden poems. Why were they hidden? Well, they were cunningly disguised as song lyrics. Not being in a band or having any musical talent with which to accompany them was a minor drawback - I was the lyricist, the wordsmith, someone else could do the meaningless musical part! Needless to say, I have yet to have a song published with my lyrics as part!!  I wrote 'songs' about everything - the environment, war, love, random video games (my first ever attempt at a lyric was called 'Game Over' and fortunately, I don't recall anything of it other than the title!), politics, there was nothing I wouldn't have a go at.

At various points during my life, I've been gripped by the idea of writing a book. Sadly, a couple of things have continually conspired against me - a) my absolute lack of focus - I will start, get so far and then get sidetracked, and b) my absolute lack of talent for creative writing. Even short stories seem to be beyond me. I have ideas for them, but then when I go to write them, I never seem to be able to get all my ideas to link together. Allow me to present an example:

I was on a flight from London to Ottawa, and due to missing a plane in Heathrow (due to snow in Edinburgh delaying the first part of the flight) we wound up re-routing to Montreal and then getting a shuttle from MTL to Ottawa. As I was on the Dash-8 going toward Ottawa (remember - plane geek!) we were at a much lower altitude (around 20,000 feet) which meant I could watch the landscape whiz past me, I saw houses, towns, villages, cars driving along the interstate, and I got thinking - what would it be like if, as I was flying over, I could 'zoom in', and get a glimpse of the life of one of these strangers, either in their house, in their car, doing whatever. What if I had the ability to jump inside their head and 'read' their life. How interesting would that be. It was an idea which wouldn't go away. Until I started to try and write it down. As soon as I did that, my mind drained.

I still try my hand at the occasional poem, which I now admit are actual poems, rather than song lyrics! They are never particularly good poems, but then I'm not a particularly good poet!  I always seem to find myself conforming to the A-B-A-B 4 line stanzas with rhyming couplets. Who knows, maybe one day I'll write something good!!

So, what's the moral of this blog. I guess I could sum it up like this - the written word is a powerful thing, yet so often we fail to recognise it as such. The written word can inspire us, can make us laugh, make us cry, make us wonder. Written words can cause wars, can end wars, can change lives.  Reading is one of the great pleasures in my life, so dad, wherever your soul now resides, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for introducing me to literature (if indeed Enid Blyton etc can be called 'literature'!) at such a young age. I will always be grateful that you did. Had I been a father, I would have done exactly the same.

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