My Ergo Writing post from 19 March 2007 explaining how I started on this ‘writing’ thingummy:
I started writing in high school when I still lived in England. I would tell teachers I’d lost my exercise books and pay them 25 pence to replace them, miraculously find the other exercise book, and then keep the replacement. I would hide it inside the book I was working in for that class and write story notes, and bits of ideas down in the hidden book while still doing my classwork.
Despite this deceit I was a Straight A student. My form room teacher Dr. Mace would read some of my work. Her husband was a published author who wrote science fiction primarily. She would always tell me my work had ‘potential’. I look back on some of that writing done while I was twelve to fifteen and think that she was being very polite, but then again, there’s also truth in it. A lot of what I wrote then was horribly, horribly cliched but there are some truly interesting nuggets which I retain in the hopes I can resurrect them into something decent and publishable.
At one point I went through my various bits and pieces of fiction and I had sixty stories. I threw a lot of those out, thankfully: the one about the two sisters with almost identical names who found an otter, the one about the triplets who went to an island where every other family had two children because of some strange inheritance of their parents, the girl who finds out she’s a telepathic princess…these things were trite, hideous, lacking three dimensional characters.
I’m down to about a dozen ideas now, some of which are more able to be developed than others at the moment, but I intend to persevere. I’ve participated in National Novel Writer’s Month each November for the past three years, and in 2006 I actually ‘won’ and achieved my goal, so I know the words are in me, it’s just pouring them out and forging them into something recognizable, rather than a blob of metal. I hope this will help me to do that.
I appreciate critiques, and beta readers, and general poking. Poke holes in what I write, make me explain things and force me to become better.
