Ask the Author: “Why do you write?”

Every last week of the month, I’m answering readers’ questions.

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“Why do you write?”

The year is 1987. A little girl just pinched several sheets of typewriter paper from her parents’ study, folded them and stapled them together. Now she is filling the blank pages of her makeshift book with words and drawings. Her heroic Blue Lego astronauts are just battling the evil Black Spacemen, when they are drawn down a wormhole and into the clutches of the monster that roams the world on the other side…

It is safe to say that I began writing stories when I first learned to write full sentences. In school, we had a special workbook for that purpose. Only our teacher ever read these stick figure equivalents of storytelling, but that was enough to get me into trouble. Because I wrote about monsters, robots, fights, drama, and a host of other things that shouldn’t be on the radar of the average 6-year-old.

At 10, the girl has glued several workbooks together and drew a cover for the story she wrote inside. A story about a cursed playground, and a dragon who carried off and killed every child who played on the swings. Writing that death scene from the dying character’s point of view was actually quite cool!

I loved weird tales when I was young, and since I had always been a fan of visualisation, I adore the French graphic novels of the ‘70s and ‘80s to this day. Werewolves, mysteries, magic and ghosts fascinated me to no end!

Unfortunately, what I liked was not sanctioned for children’s books. Even fairy tales will sad endings were censored to show only enforced happiness. So I made up my own stories. Most stayed in my head, but some I penned down.

Then my parent bought an old Laser computer, which ran WordPerfect 5.1. And indeed, it was perfect!

Typing is so much faster than writing longhand! At last her hands can keep up with the speed of the film she sees in her mind. She is 13 now, and she types like the wind. No class, no instructions. She learned by spending endless hours at the keyboard, listening to the clicks of the keys as she writes about her favourite adventurous archaeologist. If Hollywood wasn’t going to make any more Indiana Jones film, she would have to write her own.

For twenty years, I wrote fanfiction – stories based on existing films, games and books. Short stories, longer stories, complete novels. At first I was not very good at transcribing the films I saw in my mind, but writing is a skill that can be honed with practice.

Nevertheless, I think that I gave up writing at least a dozen times. These frustrated spells never lasted more than a month, and before I knew it I was back at the keyboard, rattling away on some fic that was more often than not surrealistic, full of psychological drama, or both.

These were the stories that I wanted to read myself, but couldn’t find – or never enough, of them, anyway.

Even so, it took me the better part of two decades to trust that if I wanted to read the stories I wrote, other people might be looking for them, too.

So I write to create stories I can relate to.

I write so others who relate to those stories can read them, too.

I write because, in some twisted way, I must.

And I write for the clicking of the keys when I type. Such a lovely sound that is!

Until next time