Once upon a time

 Once upon a time ....

As a kid, about seven years old I used to tell and write stories all the time. I remember one time going around to my grandparents with my mum and reading them a story I had written ... it was an adventure like Jules Verne to the centre of the earth. A few years later at primary school my teacher took one of my stories to the headmistress  - there was someone from a project about children's story writing in the school and my teacher thought that person should see my story.  The headmiustress dismissed my story and said that I couldn't have written it and said that I must have copied it. My teacher tried again at anothre time with another sone of my stories and for the some reason the headmistress dismissed it again saying that I must have copied it. Talk about being slapped down by the education system ... I wonder how things would have turned out if the headmistress had passed my stories on. I can remember being miffed about this - especially that she thought I had copied them ... but I also remember thinking that they must be pretty good if she thought I had copied them from some published story.

My writing becamse absorbed by school work ... the only writing I did was in english classes but again .. rather than being supported and developed to progress I found the opposite. I ended up in the middle band at a secondary modern school and I remember my English teacher three time going to the head of English and asking for me to be moved into the higher band and three times I was denied - the head said my gramnmer and spelling were not good enough. I also remember having a bit of an arguement about a phrase I used in one of my stories ... I can't remember what the story was about but I used the phrase "history of the future" ... the English teacher ridiculed this idea saying telling me not to be so stupid as you you can't have a history of the future. Lol .. when I think of the future that was written where now we have such famous film titles as "Days Of Future Past" and of course there are the Asimov foundation books that I later came across where the history of the future was written as a series of predictions by a mathematician.

I didn't write or try to write anything for myself until I finished University a good decade after I last wrote anythng for myself. My whole approach had changed .. its as if I had been corrupted by the education system ... I was thinking of becoming a successful author and went about planned what I was going to write before starting to write. Bookshops were full of Harold Robbins books and I set about trying to write like this. I made a start but didn;t get very far - I think I only wrote about 10 pages. It was hard work, especially on a manual typewriter where any change was a mahor hassle - this was before PCs and you could word process your writing.

I had another go at writing a few years after starting work but by this time I had been corrupted by digital tech and its way of doing things. I had heard about some authors planning out their entire book before writing it .. some had a wall wit post-it noted with character profiles, timelines and things like that. I went about planning my story and using a sort of project management methodology. This whole approach sucked the life out of the process I spent all the time going through the process and not catually writing anything - I even worked out how to set up the sequel .. the main character would often mention in the story how he loved the seculsion of a scertain cotich loch and when he disappeared the reader would guess that rather than having died or been killed that he might be found near that Scottish loch .. the sequel. This "project management" process killed my creative spirit and I never tried to write again - it was too much hard work. However,  there was another reason that stopped me writing this story at the time. The story was titled "Brain Drain" ... it was about a secret military research base that took young babies and implanted chips into their heads with the intetion of plugging them in as humans in the machine loop to control airplanes and weapons ... physical controls were too slow ... they had to find a way to speed up control. My wife and I had just had our first child - she was about 6 months old and I found I just couldn't write this story - imagining babies having chips impalnted into their braiuns was just too horrid.

My last attempt at story telling was altogether different - when my children were around 3 and 6 years old instead of reading them a story from a book I thought I would tell them one of my own ... so I made something up on the spot and made it up as I went along. The story went on for about a week just a little at a time - about 10 minutes. It was full of the oral tradition, like sitting around a campfire I made gestures and sounds and spoke in the way people do when telling a story to children. I was aware of some of the techniques used in children's stories and made sure I had adventure, jeopardy, good vs bad and repetition. The story was called "The Owl Story" - it was about a family of hungry Owl's who flew out into the woods at night searching for soup of all things. I was also aware of the importance of stopping while the going is good so that people want more but I was also a believer in te moment so decided not to write it down or tell it again - it was what it was at the time. It gave me great pleasure that my children would keep asking for "The Owl Store" for years and years and it gives me great pleasure that they remember it today.

Now I am retired - I know its a cliché that many people start writing when they retire and when they have time but it isn't like that. For a few years I had been "consuming music and literature" - havign tiem to catch up on reading and listening that I didn't have during my working life. I had no intention of writing stories again.

But

I was talking with my daughter about a bookbench I had seen in Bromley Library with the words "Reading can be an amazing adventure" I was thinking that writing should also be an amazing adventure. The thought of project managing and planning out a story just seemed like too much work ... there must be another way and if there was then maybe I could write something again .......