Why I Write
Thoughts on Creative Writing
When I was a child my head was full of stories. Not simply day dreams but actual descriptive language in fully formed sentences. I remember that while I was doing any activity or task I would simultaneously be composing in my head an interesting way to describe what I was doing.
I would often write short stories - essays really - based on our English Language homework where the expectation was to produce just two or three sides of a lined exercise book (I wonder whether any of these are still tucked away in my childhood home somewhere…?)
When homework for the week was assigned I longed for an essay on a subject of our own choosing so that I could just take one of my stories “off-the-spike” as I thought of it and just copy it out into my English book. My dad worked as a shift supervisor in a chemical plant and on the night shift had the free run of the corporate stationary cupboard so brought home company branded foolscap notebooks with stiff cardboard covers that I filled with my own scrawled writing.
I didn’t really consider writing long stories until much later in life, those two or three pages (about a thousand words) seemed enough to me. What did I write? I can recall a few common subjects. I liked to read Science Fiction so inevitably a lot of my stories were SF, although almost all bad and almost all unfinished. I think I learned that this is quite a difficult genre to do well - “hard SF” both in the sense that it should be grounded in (mostly) established science but also that it is hard to write. I just don’t think that I had the background in either science or fiction to anything other than rather derivative juvenalia.
My English teacher Mr. Stanliforth was particularly impressed by one of my efforts. I don’t recall the theme or title but I I do know that it involved someone waking up with a really bad hangover. I my youthful naivety this was the result of drinking “three whiskies” the previous night, I was very unsure what the plural of “whisky” was… Our unfortunate hero had been reading about parallel universes and been rather disturbed by the possibilities. His familiar rented bedsit in the half darkness seems strange to him. Opening his eyes an unexpected bed appears where none should be and it contains a terrifying figure! Has he inadvertently opened a portal to another dimension? Is this apparition here to take over his earthly life?! With thudding heart he flicks on the bedside lamp to reveal his room with an open doorway, left ajar as he stumbled home in his “drunken” state the previous night and a large mirror on the wall of the landing reflecting back at him.
Okay, so it’s hardly “The Picture of Dorian Gray” but I was only about 13 years old…
My teacher was so impressed by my literary efforts that he put me in for my English Language ‘O’ level (like today’s GCSEs) a year early. I had always found the multi-choice comprehension almost trivially easy, consistently getting 100% on the test papers (I’m not intending to boast here, it just seems to be how my brain is wired) so quite quickly I moved on to the creative writing exercise.
Again, I don’t recall the title or the theme that we were given but I completely ignored the frequent advice to “write about what you know” and set my tale in small town America.
It is the first snowfall of winter and unexpectedly heavy. Our hero has the contract to clear snow from the roads with a plow attached to the front of his tow-truck. Diligently he sets off through the worsening conditions to start clearing the main routes through the centre of town. He’s distracted as well, knowing his wife is out in her own car and hoping that she gets home safely.
A call comes in over the radio instructing him to abandon the main highways and come to the back of City Hall to clear a path around the mayor’s white Cadillac so he can get to some important event. An argument ensues about priorities but the mayor himself comes on the air threatening to take away the clearance contract if he doesn’t do what he is told.
Seething, our man sets off, muttering to himself, annoyed and worried and with the visibility getting worse. Eventually he realises that he’s approaching City Hall, pulls himself together and says “‘should be just about here…?” and digs the plow deeply into the back of the now buried Cadillac!
A bit derivative I admit - both the Cadillac and the mayoral persona are straight rip-offs of “Boss Hogg” from the ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ (essential Saturday evening viewing) and the denouement changed in the course of writing (for the better, it was originally going to be his wife’s car that took the beating, but the worry about here and the unpleasant argument all gave valid grounds for his distraction).
This got me an ‘A’ grade and a pass from having to pay attention in any more English lessons for the final year.
After that the writing faded away, especially the head-canon composition. This may have been due to the lack of an outlet (no more English essays) but also due to widening reading horizons. In my early teens my “bookshelf” held a score of books all of which I had read multiple times in an endless sequence, with occasional trips to the big library in town. Later, with more mobility of my own, and more pocket money I was able to read more books and I think that my head filled more with other people’s stories than my own, crowding out everything else out.
Once I started work my jobs usually involved “creative writing” in its broadest sense - although on paper I was a hardware and software development engineer, and moved into project management and consulting I found that a large part of each job was communication, typically in the form of written reports or documentation, which I enjoyed doing and felt that I was rather good at (I always put it down as a strength on my CV!)
Nevertheless, sometime in the early 1990s I determined to write a novel! This time I did stick with familiar territory and decided to write a fictionalised account of a young man’s experience at a provincial university during the 1980s. I even did some preliminary world building - designing the layout of the university, with the Hall of Residence mapped in detail and a rough 3 year timeline of events created. All this was done on 14” by 11” fanfold paper as I recall…
That done, one sunny morning when I was not at work and alone at home (I don’t know either of those things had occurred) I took a freshly purchased exercise book and a sharp pencil and wrote “Richard never actually planned to go to university, it just seemed to be something that happened to him.”
Quite a few exercise books later I had taken our hero through his first year and begun his second, having written perhaps 30,000 words, when other things came along and I had yet another abandoned project on my hands.
Over the following twenty years I’ve transcribed the pencilled scribblings into a variety of word processed formats and do sometimes tinker with it but it still remains unfinished. As I write this, in the long hot summer of 2026 I’m back to trying out short stories - I have completed a few bits of ‘Culture” fan fiction (see some of the other blog posts) and have written (and enjoyed writing) many thousands of words for this website. I might even pick up the novel again, perhaps I’ll call it “The Long Haul” or something…
I’ve also been regularly journalling for a couple of years now and have filled several A4 lined and ring-bound books. These are not intended for publication, or even re-reading by me but I do use them as brain-training / dementia avoidance. I write long hand, and in full sentences, not bullet points and try to compose interesting descriptive narrative whilst staying honest to my feelings and happenings. Having a collection of fine fountain pens to write with really enhances the experience.
So I’m still writing, thinking about writing and wanting to do more. Watch, as they say, this space.