Or anything at all to do with 50 Shades of Anything Vaguely Erotica… Read Thornspell<\/em> have you, or The Heir of Night<\/em>? ‘Nuff said then and moving right<\/em> along!<\/p>\n "Why YA"; via ChCh City Libraries<\/p><\/div>\n No, what this is about is a confession elicited from me in conversation immediately after my “Why YA”<\/strong> session at the Christchurch Writers’ Festival on Sunday. (My brief account of the session is here<\/a>; the fuller report of Christchurch City Libraries, here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Daffodil array; via my garden \ud83d\ude09<\/p><\/div>\n 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. <\/em>(And yes, I do still have it; but no, you won’t see it posted here—ever.)<\/p>\n 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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?”<\/p>\n I’ve talked about this impulse in two other posts here on “…Anything, Really.”<\/em>\u00a0 The first is titled “Influences on Story 3: Other Writing”<\/strong> <\/a>where I discuss the “What If” impulse generated by other writing in the context of Hilaire Belloc’s poem, Tarantella<\/em>, but also referring to The Lord of the Rings<\/em> and David Eddings’ Belgariad<\/em>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/WhyYA-150x112.jpg\" "\\"WhyYA\\"")
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