It began on a day like any other. It was a cold, blustery walk to school not long after my 18th birthday when an idea struck me like a bolt from the blue. Up to this point I had spent the best part of two years scribbling short stories in my school notebooks, but then one day it all suddenly changed: I had an idea that stuck.
Days of contemplation and note taking followed as I gradually began to piece together ideas into something that vaguely looked like a plot. It was then I started to type.
Now here’s the strange thing. Up to the age of about 18 I had never really sat down and written anything longer than perhaps a side or two for English projects at school. This though, this was something different. If I’m honest, it completely consumed me. Before I knew it I had 5,000 words. A little while later, I had 25,000.
It’s a strange thing, writing a book, or at least, deciding you’re going to write a book. I certainly never planned to do it. If anything, I was set on going to university to study business. My biggest struggle educationally-speaking has always been my ability to be good at a lot of things. Every school has them – you know, the straight A’s type that doesn’t seem to have to try very hard to do well. Annoyingly, I’m one of them. I say annoyingly, because while to most people such a life might seem a walk in a park. Trust me, it’s not. People look at you differently at school if you’re different in some way, and as we all know, there’s nothing worse than jealousy.
It was at this point in life that things really started to get to me. I got depressed, I got ill; I lost all motivation and I lost all my confidence. I didn’t know who I was, or what I was, and I most certainly didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. When the world is your oyster, and you enjoy doing many different things, what are you supposed to do?
Family certainly didn’t help, and my situation at home wasn’t great. To this day my parents don’t really know or appreciate what I do, but then I guess that’s a matter for the therapist, and not an article about writing!
What I’m trying to get to here, in my oh-so-very-ineloquent way, is that writing saved me. It was, and to a certain extent, still is, my salvation – my small shred of comfort in this strange and scary world.
Being a writer is a strange and very lonely task at times – something I will no-doubt expand upon in later articles, but for me, it became my whole life.
Now I don’t pretend for one minute to have written the next Lord of the Rings, or the (quite incredible) Paradise Lost, but the books that I wrote in those early years were not only an important part of my development as a writer, but they were also an incredibly important part of my development as a person. Writing nigh on a quarter of a million words over 4 years taught me an awful lot, both about myself, and about the world around me, and while I don’t think ‘teen fantasy’ is necessarily my strongest style, there are parts of those books that to this day still fill me with pride.
Why? You ask. Why: because I did it. Because I poured my heart and my soul into those books and without them I don’t know quite where I’d be in this world.
As a tribute to those early days, and my debt to Callum, Kiera, Aaron and Lena, I decided to self-publish my books earlier this year. While my self-publishing adventures certainly require an article or two of their own to explain in full, I do not regret it for a moment.
To find out more about my adventures in writing, why not check out my website. Alternatively, post a comment below.
Thanks for listening,
Mike
