Recently I brought a file of very early writing back here from my parent’s house. Eventually all my belongings will be here in my flat in Morecambe. These pieces were written while at primary school up until my very early twenties when I worked in a restaurant and wrote a few little ‘somethings’ (don’t know what they were!) that I showed to someone I worked with.
My first memory of creative writing was a piece I wrote at primary school that, for a few moments, changed me from being an invisible nobody to one of the chosen few; reading out my piece in assembly, seeing it mounted on a wall.
It was a descriptive piece about a lion killing a wildebeest, something I witnessed frequently growing up in the West Midlands. I don’t seem to have this piece (still on that wall?) but I do have this one called ‘Fire!’ It’s about a barn being struck by lightening and then the fire being put out with buckets of water and beatings from ‘ladies in nightgowns’.
Again, I clearly got the idea from television, probably from a Western film. I remember quicksand and rattle snakes being very real dangers back then. I have to admit that television is still a big influence on me.
I plan to blog about more of these early writings in later posts, including the masterpiece, Five Have a Reunion, which is in the picture behind ‘Fire!’.
