Putting Pen To Paper

About how I became a writer.

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To paraphrase a line from a gangster film I saw once, ever since I can remember I wanted to be… a writer. To me, being a writer was better than being the heavyweight champion of the world, better than playing football for England or for Manchester United, better than winning the World Cup, or the Super Bowl or World Series. 

During school holidays, on those grey rainy days, when the weather was too bad to be tearing around on my bike, or off climbing trees, I would be inside reading a book, or writing a story of my own, in notebooks. I would write my stories the way other kids used colouring-in books, spending hours pencil and crayon in hand, scribbling away. 

My local library was a special place too. I would spend hours wandering the corridors, looking for just the right book that would fire my imagination for the next week or so. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t reading classic literature, it was the kid’s books of the time. Roald Dahl was my absolute favourite. These books fuelled my imagination. I immersed myself in fictional worlds.

I was also obsessed with vampire fiction and films. All of my stories at the time featured pale vampires and gothic castles. Even now, I am tempted to write another vampire story. Maybe I’ll get round to it one of these days. A real throw-back to my childhood, like visiting my old neighbourhood.One afternoon, a local children’s author called in to our school to speak to us, to promote and read from his new book. While the other kids looked on, bored stiff, I was transfixed. This guy was a writer, an actual writer, the school library stocked his books and everything. This guy was like a super-hero. I was transfixed. I hung on every word in the hope that some of the magic would rub off.

In English classes, when we were given homework to write a story, my class-mates would groan. It never felt like homework to me, never did. I wrote for fun. I’d be writing my stories anyway.

After leaving high school, I went on to college. I studied English Language at A Level. To my delight a decent part of the course involved creative writing. I wrote a piece of course-work on detective fiction, comparing Agatha Christie’s stately home, rather grand style, to the hardboiled punchy prose of Raymond Chandler. I also wrote a short story in the style of Chandler, the Noir private detective. My teacher asked if she could keep the story to show her students in the future how to write genre fiction. Of course, I was delighted. 

After leaving college, I drifted away from writing stories. The next few years seemed to go by in a blur. I was growing up, and started work in an office. I met new people and had a busy social life with lots of different groups of friends. The way a child leaves behind an imaginary friend, or the hobbies of their youth, the comic-books and cartoons, I left the story writing behind me.

Or so I thought.

In Summer 2004, work was dead, a lot of my customers were on shut-down for most of August, and the heat-wave was in full force. I would report to work every day, but there was absolutely nothing to do. My mood wasn’t helped by the soaring heat. Nobody was sleeping at night, it was just too hot. At bedtime people would head to their sweltering bedrooms and just lie in the darkness, trying to sleep. 

I had nothing to do all day at the office, and at night I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t seeing my girlfriend every evening either. It was still early days so we’d meet up a couple of times a week. By this point, my friends were all seriously coupled up and settling down. I had nothing to do and nobody to do it with. It was unbearable. It felt like I was losing my mind. An idea popped in my head.

Why don’t you write a story?

The voice seemed to call out from my childhood. Like hearing a song you haven’t heard for years, It takes you right back to that place. Yes, I should write a story. That would focus my attention and occupy my frazzled mind. What would I write about? What could I write about? A story idea occurred to me. I decided to blend my office nine-to-five with the gangland action I’d been watching on TV. 

My story would be about an office robbery, it was like my dull desk job, meets Quentin Tarantino and Jack Reacher. They say write what you know. To this day, I try and but a Northern, Salford/Mancunian twist on my stories. I’ve mentioned vampires. If I did write a vampire story, my vampires wouldn’t live in a castle in Transylvania, they would hide out in a disused warehouse in an industrial estate in Trafford Park.

Once the summer ended, work picked back up, and I was suddenly busy, both at the office and at home. I always seemed to be doing something. After work there would barely be time to get showered and changed before nights out, parties, get-togethers, and a lot of lovely Indian meals. Sadly a lot of these great little restaurants have long since closed. 

With everything that was going on, the story-writing once again slipped out of my mind, as life in general cranked up a gear. 

A few weeks later, I found the story that I’d written in the dog-days of summer. I read it through and to my surprise it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t awful. It had a beginning, a middle and an end, and some dialogue that read well, even if it did sound like something from a recent gangster film I’d seen. The story was generic and derivative but it wasn’t complete rubbish. Considering I’d written the story to give me something to concentrate on, it really was okay. 

Something else struck me.  It occurred to me that it would be a shame if I didn’t carry on, if I didn’t write another story. It would be a waste if this was the only story I wrote. I had written that tale to keep me busy, but I should write another story, for the actual fun of it. This time I would make a conscious decision to write a story, rather than something that popped in my bored, sleep-deprived brain.

And that was it. I wrote another story, in a similar vein to the first. And then another, and another. 

One evening, my then-girlfriend called over. This was years before we were married. She spotted my sheets of scribbled notes. I hurriedly stashed them away in a drawer, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

‘What is all that?’ She asked. I was busted.

‘Nothing.’ I shrugged.

I could see her imagination was running away with her, imagining all the things I could be hiding from her. I would have to come clean.

‘Fine.’ I said reaching for the pages. 

As my cheeks burned red with embarrassment, and ready for the ridicule that would no doubt follow, I explained.

‘I write short stories. It’s something that I used to do and I’ve started writing again.’

I handed her the paper. She beamed in delight, flicking through the pages.

You’re a writer, how wonderful!’ She said. 

I’ve been writing stories ever since. I found that the more I wrote, the more the ideas came for other stories. To quote John Steinbeck, ideas breed like rabbits. ‘You have a couple and pretty soon, you’ve got a dozen.’

I’ve written hundreds of stories over the last twenty years or so. I still write long-hand in notebooks, and then type up and tweak as I go. I post my completed stories on websites. That’s as technical as this technophobe gets.

A member of my extended family always asks me, at every Christmas get-together, are you still writing your stories? She doesn’t ask football fans if they still follow the game, or ask my parents if they still play the ukulele. It’s only my writing that is deemed to be a flash in the pan, a passing fad.

I manage to smile politely and say, yes, I’m still writing.

‘One of my friends has done a creative writing course.’ she adds, ‘Have you done a course?’

‘Erm, no, I haven’t.’ I admit.

She gives me a disapproving look.

I bite my tongue and smile politely. I have avoided things like writing courses, and how-to books. I write my stories and enjoy doing it. 

Writing is my passion, my hobby. It’s the thing I enjoy. I worry that if I started over-thinking, over analysing, if I started focusing on something other than just writing for fun, and letting the story flow, then I might lose whatever magic is in the story. They say the Beatles couldn’t read music, that they played everything by ear. I’m not comparing myself to those musical geniuses but maybe if they’d have stopped to take formal lessons, then they may have lost some of that raw energy that was part of their success.

When my friends and family see me on my mobile phone, they know I’m not texting or scrolling on social media, they know the score. I’ll be jotting down another idea for another story.

What’s that, Platty? Another story idea? 

I glance up from my mobile phone, tapping away, I nod and smile. 

Like rabbits, Steinbeck was so right about that.

By Chris Platt

From: United Kingdom