On Writing

All my life I have wanted nothing more than to write. While other children my age were out on their bikes, playing Donkey Kong or on their Sinclair Spectrum or fighting with their siblings I was in my bedroom, sprawled on the floor with a notepad and a pen, creating stories in my head and scribbling them down on paper. I was a pony mad youngster and made my daydreams come alive on the ruled pad before me. I visualised my perfect pony and formed him into something solid beneath my pen. From his flowing black mane to the tips of his polished ebony hooves he was as real as I was. I was there as he galloped across wild Scottish moors, I felt the spray as we passed the white water of rivers leaping with salmon. The memory of that pony is as clear in mind as if I had seen hundreds of photos. Yet he never really existed. I could immerse myself so completely in worlds of my own creation, far more vividly than watching anything on television. 


These short stories became longer, more elaborate and increasingly ambitious as in my created world I was winning at Hickstead or the Horse of The Year Show before typing the words 'The End'. At the age of 13 I submitted my first 'novel' to a publisher. I spent weeks poring over my dads antiquated typewriter; you remember, the ones with the ink tape and fiddly roll of correction tape?  I laboriously typed away, copying from my handwritten scrawl in double line spacing. The publishers sent me a lovely letter, my first rejection but it was very kindly worded, saying how much they had enjoyed my 'story' and that I shouldn't give up on writing. I suppose I took that message to heart. 


The old typewriter eventually gave out on me; overworked by my dogged determination to complete my second novel. I could just about type with two hands by this stage, although in my rush to hammer out the overflowing words of my teenage imagination the final copy was riddled with errors. More correction fluid, more paper. I kept entire forests in circulation over those years. 


Finally my dad invested in a small word processor - positively archaic by today's standards but a sheer delight to me. It had a screen I could edit on and the ability to save to a floppy disk before printing. By novel three, the subject matter was changing, horses and ponies taking a back seat to boys, unrequited love and darkness. Over one hundred A4 pages of teen angst are still in a box under my bed to this day. The writing is appalling, yet I am proud of my tenacity to complete another novel. It has a start, a middle and an end, characterisation and a plot. And to be fair I have read a number of published works that don't!


As I got into my later teens, exams arrived as did boys, parties and alcohol. The influx of words and thoughts never stopped but for a while my inclination to put them down on paper did.  The only writing I did during this time was the religious detailing of my innermost thoughts in my diaries - mostly shamefully embarrassing confessions and hormonal mood swings. 


Over the years since then I have collected half stories, passages, synopsis' for novels either on disk, hard drive or scrawled on backs of envelopes. I have completed three more novels in a variety of genre. I have nurtured and thrown my heart and soul into these stories only to send off the first three chapters and a synopsis in a soulless manilla envelope, knowing they will land on an agents desk along with 20,000 others. I would trawl the Writers Handbook, looking for an agent who sounded open to new authors. Each time a rejection letter would come back I would feel the bitter disappointment. Utter rejection, for there is no other word for it. I swore I would keep going until I had enough rejection letters to wallpaper the toilet in my first house. I think I nearly got there too. 


Despite abject disappointment the words, phrases, ideas and thoughts have never stopped coming. When I am out walking anything can spark a thought, which leads to an idea which charts an entire story. Something as inconsequential as the shape of a tree on the horizon can spark a 'what if' in my mind. When I smell something beautiful like honeysuckle on a warm summer evening I think of how I would convert the smell into words. How I would describe the residual taste of toothpaste or the feel of a grazed knee. For a long time I would carry a notebook with me everywhere to get these words committed to paper before I forgot, or the influx of new words took over. 


Part of me wants to keep going, to keep trying to get published. Part of me thinks enough is enough. For now, this blogging seems to be providing me with an outlet for some of the words. Anything else? We'll see.