My author origin story

I didn't grow up wanting to be an author.

I liked reading, and I quite liked writing stories when I had to for school, but never that much. I fancied the idea of making computer games, and in my late teens created a sci-fi world to set one in, but I quickly realised it would take too long to learn to code to the necessary level. I was more interested in the fun creative bits like doodling space ships.

Truth is, I was probably too lazy.

Now I spend chunks of my free time every day working on my writing. And anyone who tells you writing a novel is easy is a filthy liar.

So, what changed?

I watched The Matrix.

Back in 1999, when The Matrix was released, I wasn't a big film fan. Looking back, I didn't find most of the movies I saw engaging enough. This isn't to say they were all bad. I only ever went to the cinema with my family growing up, watching the likes of "Ghostbusters", "The Goonies", "Beverley Hills Cop", "Back to the Future", "Three Men and a Baby", "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids", "Independence Day", "Home Alone", "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", and "Speed".

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have recognised the last two in that list starred Keanu Reeves. Had I therefore gone to see The Matrix because I was a fan?

No.

I was vaguely aware of the marketing campaign which centred around the question "What is The Matrix?", but it didn't entice me to my local cinema. I can't honestly remember if I ever saw a full trailer.

Sometime after its release, my dad was lent the movie on DVD, and my dad, my mum, and I gathered in his home office to watch it on his PC. This would be the first film any of us had seen on DVD, and we were aware of the positive word of mouth around it, so there was a frisson of excitement.

I was, of course, blown away. It wasn't just the action or how incredibly cool it was. The film had what I'd not realised I'd been missing: substance behind the style.

Critics will claim The Matrix isn't as deep as its made out to be, but that isn't really the point. That it made any effort at all to bake philosophy into the story of a Hollywood action movie was rarer than James Bond saying, "No, I've got a headache". And the philosophy was fully baked in, clearly an integral part of the whole piece. It didn't just throw in a couple of references to give the illusion of depth.

With hindsight, I realise this was one of those true fork-in-the-road moments.

Suddenly, I was interested in movies. I bought myself a PC with a DVD drive, then bought lots of DVDs to play on it. And I started going to the cinema more often. I was educated and entertained by "The Godfather" trilogy, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", "Taxi Driver", "Memento", "The Shawshank Redemption", "Donnie Darko", "The Sixth Sense", "Good Will Hunting", "Heat", "Vanilla Sky", "Lost in Translation", "American Psycho", "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", "Fight Club", "Pulp Fiction", "Saw", "Brick", "Minority Report", "Seven", "American Beauty", "Sneakers", "Schindler's List", and more.

For several years I fed my creativity without having an outlet for it.

One day, I was on my way home from work, trying to work out how to dissuade all bullies from ever bullying again. I don't think there'd been a particular incident that day; it was something I thought about from time to time. I knew how bullying had impacted me and I didn't want others to have the same thing happen to them.

I was less than a mile from home when the idea hit me: kidnap bullies and make them confess to the press! I didn't entertain actually carrying out the idea myself for even a second, but just as quickly, the idea to make that into a film seemed like a perfect way to reach an even wider audience of bullies.

I read books on how to write a movie, bought screenplay writing software, and began work.

It wasn't that simple, of course.

My first attempt was abandoned part way through because I knew it was awful. Aware I wasn't yet skilled enough to do the idea justice, I decided to write something else I was less invested in, as practice, the details of which I won't share because I may write a variation on it someday. I know I didn't execute it well, but it was the first thing I completed, and it gave me new confidence to attack my original idea, with a new twist I'd since come up with.

My second attempt was better; still not great, but I finished it. I knew it wasn't likely to ever be made into a movie. I'd known that all along, really, but had enjoyed the process. And, it was so personal to me that I didn't want to release creative control.

I had this work that I wanted to share and show people, but who reads amateur screenplays? I wanted people to be able to read it.

Around that time, I heard that Stephen King's Dark Tower series was going to be put on screen. I had never read any of his books, but the idea of having multiple different novels all set in the same universe, whether there was any story link between them or not, struck a chord with me.

I had plenty of ideas for stories, including one that would span many years, possibly decades. And I'd always liked the idea of worldbuilding, right back to my early attempts to design a sci-fi game. What if I linked them all together?

That's when The Spike was born.

I won't go into my whole writing process for that first book here, partly because it'd take too long, and partly because it's evolved since. Suffice to say it took me a long time and several drafts to get it to a place I was happy with. And, reading it back through now, I'm still happy with it.

The same way I knew my film script would never get made, I knew publishers would want me to make changes to my novel, and I wasn't prepared to let that happen. Perhaps their editing and marketing would have made it more commercially successful, but I'd told the story exactly the way I wanted to tell it, and that was the most important thing to me.

I put on my mask and cape, became "author L R Fletcher", and self-published my first book, plus three short stories (two in an online magazine that no longer exists).

Writing isn't the easiest of hobbies, and I don't make it easy for myself with what I write and the way I write it (more on that in a future post), but I don't have any inclination to stop until the arc of The Spike is complete.

There's much more to come. I'm excited for you to see what's next.