How and when did I become a writer ? At the age of four, when I created superheroes and scenarios in my mind ? At twelve, when I started writing poetry ? At twenty, when I finally mastered the art of the waffling essay ?

Not really. Any imaginative child creates fantasy characters. Most of us were poets during adolescence. And hanging around with arts students, one can hardly avoid picking up their gift of expressing a bare minumum of ideas over a maximum of paper.

The beginning of serious writing, for me, was on August 2nd, 1986 at 7 in the morning. Mentally indulging in my then favourite daydream, a curious thought struck. Why not write it down, just to see how it would look on paper. After twenty plus drafts and several months, the result was an unpublishable 10,000 word ramble.
I worked on several other projects at the same time. Story number two became an equally unpublishable 8,000 word ramble, an implausible Victorian costume drama with heavy sexual undertones. Then came the novel. Starting with an outline at the end of August 86, I wrote and over-rewrote chunks of it for three years before finally dumping it, half-finished and never to be completed.

During those three years, I wrote two more half-finished novels. Along the way, I wrote short stories as a sideline then, after early 1989, as a mainline.
- Andrew, 29 July 1991

Want to read more ?

Back to Home