True Confessions Of A Writer…
There–bet that title got you all interested!
And no, it’s nothing to do with posting anonymous comments deriding other writers and their work. (No matter the megrims of the writing life, it’s also way too short.)
Or anything at all to do with 50 Shades of Anything Vaguely Erotica… Read Thornspell have you, or The Heir of Night? ‘Nuff said then and moving right along!
No, what this is about is a confession elicited from me in conversation immediately after my “Why YA” session at the Christchurch Writers’ Festival on Sunday. (My brief account of the session is here; the fuller report of Christchurch City Libraries, here.)
It arose in conversation with an elderly gentleman who first assured me that he had not read any of my books. (Bless you, sir, thought I.) But was nonetheless curious to know at what age I had first caught the writing bug. Answer: around 8 years old. And following on from that, whether I thought reading had influenced my yen to write at all? To which I replied: indubitably (yup, spelled that right—checked; phew!) and undoubtedly—because what I first loved to read, I shortly longed to emulate.
As evidence of the same, I was obliged to confess that the very first piece of creative work I penned was fan fiction: my very own, eight-year-old’s riff on William Wordsworth’s The Daffodils. (And yes, I do still have it; but no, you won’t see it posted here—ever.)
Amusingly, I had not even seen a daffodil at that time, or not within conscious memory, as we were living in Singapore. So although I hold many wonderful recollections of the Lion City (including a fine National Library from which I withdrew many books) actual daffodils do not figure amongst them. So both my reading of William Wordsworth’s Daffodils and my unshamedly derivative response to the poem were both works of complete imagination—which I personally feel is quite a tribute to the original work.
So there’s the true confession, as an eight-year-old I penned poetic fan fiction, but the more serious point is that what we love we will often, if not always, seek to emulate. And that what may start as straightforward replication will quickly give rise to the desire to make it “more so” in some way or other, or “better”, or even “new”—or perhaps best of all, spark a whole raft of “what if’s?”
I’ve talked about this impulse in two other posts here on “…Anything, Really.”ย The first is titled “Influences on Story 3: Other Writing” where I discuss the “What If” impulse generated by other writing in the context of Hilaire Belloc’s poem, Tarantella, but also referring to The Lord of the Rings and David Eddings’ Belgariad.
The second post is titled “Writers Are Thieves—AKA Influences On Story” and it broadens the discussion to folklore and myth and probably just about everything, really!
So how about you—have any “true confessions” about your own creative starting point?
I caught the writing bug at about the same age. As far as I can remember, my first piece of non-schoolwork creative writing was a Black Beauty fan fiction. I remember stapling a pile of paper together, drawing a cover, writing a contents page listing 20 chapters, writing each ‘chapter’ on a single page with a facing illustration . . . and then getting upset when I found that I hadn’t stapled enough paper for 20 chapters ๐ Instead, my story had nine chapters.
I was 13 when I decided I wanted to write epic fantasy. It was all David Eddings’s fault. I spent the next 5 years drawing lots of maps and inventing lots of cultures, but doing very little actual writing. Sigh. The traps you can fall into . . .
That David Eddings clearly has a lot to answer for… ๐ I love the illustrations to go with the chapters though, I never managed that!
I’m not sure I have any confessions. Is writing endless amounts of roleplaying game turns a confession? ๐
I suspect it could be… ๐