savage intro

For this Website’s frontispiece I have been asked to write about how I write.
The short answer is ‘I dunno’, but I presume this will not suffice.
I am an analogue child, born in the middle of the last century when telephones were wired to the wall, radios were furniture and writing was done with a pen at home and with a typewriter and carbon paper at work. Back then, in school, we had a class called ‘composition’ which I liked much more than ‘sums’. My teacher asked her young class to write a report composition about our long weekend. My story was marked as a Fail and I cried. My teacher kindly explained she had asked for a report not a fantasy composition. My mother upon seeing my distress went in to the school and informed my teacher that we did live between a Bull family and a Horn family, their kids did look like I described, I had steered the tractor on a farm and I did shoot at rats that weekend. So I got re-marked to an A. Sort of like the current GCSE debate, but the confusion I had caused suppressed any budding desire for creative expression I may have harboured.
I left schooling early, took many jobs and ended up writing legal, admin and marketing stuff for Australia, Japan and the USA. I became a corporate manager and soon realised as I saw folk working away, that people everywhere doubt themselves. Many took on beliefs in invisible friends they trusted to solve their problems and set their rules. I had read some of the story books they said were true, I had also read many other story books. I had fantasy stories read to me as a child. I liked the stories but I didn’t believe any of them.
So I decided that as so much was wrong with the idea of invisible friends and so many wars and troubles caused by these invisible friend’s stories I’d best write my own story, aimed at people who needed invisible friends, or who doubted themselves, who lacked bravery. I sat and typed (on a computer) for an hour or more a day, sometimes much more, passionately producing tens of thousands of words of what, in review, is overwritten, sanctimonious bull. I loved it. I also wrote a long adventure story with a hero, sex, guns and everything. I loved that too. It was trite, flowery and unbelievable. I sometimes re-visit the first and re-write bits as I know there is great portent within the bull. But I am no longer passionate. I erased the failed adventure. I didn’t cry.
Then I discovered that there were some people, many people who liked to write just because they could. People who wanted to improve, to hear writing read out. People who perhaps dreamed of being published and famous or just being published. People who loved writing and secretly hoped they’d get discovered. People like me. One such group was this Leeds Savages and they introduced me to things called flash fiction and short story and five minute tasks and dialogue writing and humorous horror and 1000 word limits and, to be fair, another avenue for a social drink or three.
Oh yeah. So. How do I write? I continue to work in the world for fee and free, writing and communicating internationally, blogging and reviewing as required. Then, once a fortnight, I have the opportunity to sit and concentrate on a short Savage piece, about 1000 words, a scene, a character, a story, climax and conclusion. The task usually sits for an hour or a week, there’s no telling, in the mind, idling away being a small bother until my brain links an idea to the task. Inspiration! Delight! Consternation about how to capture the idea crisply. About half an hour bashing on the keyboard (I still hunt and pick two fingered) and the story sort of falls out, quicker the more often I do it. I have been doing it for a couple of years now. Every time I love my story. Every time it is great or crap. Doesn’t matter. I am hooked, can’t imagine a time when I won’t want to write a piece to a task. I even enter short story competitions, some I get recognition some I don’t. Anyway after I write a piece I leave it to sit. A day, a week, an hour, then I re-read it and change the bits that were fantastic, then change other bits, and then leave it. I return and re-do the whole review again. Then I leave it and read it out on the next meeting, or get someone else to read it. It sounds so different. I take it home and change it. Sometimes though I get a task, I write it, I shuck it down to 1000 words and I leave it.
That’s how I write, some good, some crap. The more I read and listen to others the better I write, I think.
The shorter muse is the one that is swift to be satiated, a rewarding, enjoyable and fulfilling muse, an enticer, a seducer, a lovely welcome thing.
The novel, the book, the novella, the magnum opus, they are the muse of demand, a harsher mistress, a bench of flagellation and a task wearying for me. But. Let me say. About the shorter muse, well, …consider a novel, a book, the novella, the magnum opus, … they are but a collection of the shorter muse, arranged, linked, and caressed into form. I think I’ll go off now and have another look at my Stranger Philosophies manuscript.