If You Have To Ask Why...

"Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture, but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals."

Please understand, I'd never wanted to be a writer. It wasn't something that called to me. When I was a child I wanted to be a bus driver like my dad, then a fighter pilot, then a rock star. My primary school English teacher used to make me stand and read my poetry in class, but I was far more proud of the fact that I could recite my seven times table faster than any of my peers. I didn't like to sit and write. I liked running and playing football. I was a physical child back then. I was a happy child.

I couldn't pinpoint the time when all that changed. Not exactly. My parents broke up when I was six, divorced when I was twelve. Neither seemed especially relevant. I rarely saw my father anyway. Nothing really changed.

Again, I come back to his death. I don't like to obsess over that one fact, but everything I've seen and done since that day has been a little different. It was a shift in perception, in the way I catalogue and prioritise, in the way I look at the world around me. On the weekend of 22-23 January 1994, I finished reading 1984, I wrote the first serious poem of my life, and my father died.

In terms of destiny, I guess you could say it was a key couple of days.

I stopped being a physical child. I became very introverted. I started to enjoy my own company more than that of my friends. I buried myself in music and films and literature. As a person, I changed almost totally.

I was still four years away from wanting to write, though. That didn't happen until February of 1998 when - fully involved in the Socialist Party at my university - I took part in a 24-hour occupation of the library to protest the introduction of tuition fees. The occupation itself was an exercise in boredom, but what happened later that night changed my life. Four of us slipped away through a back window to where we'd been told there was a quarry that had long since become a lake and...well...I've fictionalised this before. Let me share that.

I ended up slipping away from the party with an Irish girl, Mary, and a German poet called Thomas. Though it was February, Thomas had suggested we go skinny dipping in a nearby lake that had once been a quarry. Mary and Thomas and me, we staggered through bushes and trees, fell over barbed wire fences, teased each other mercilessly about the possible presence of guard dogs. We found our way to the banks of the lake and Mary sat down, eyes shining and cheeks flushed as she watched Thomas and I undress. I was fearless then. No shame in my nudity. Thomas and me, we waded out until we were knee deep in water that was so black that the light of the moon was repelled, dancing across the rippling surface, throwing wraiths of shimmering luminescence across our naked bodies.

I admired Thomas, though I never knew him well. He did university for the freedom. He played pool and drank all day and invented powerful lyrics that he never wrote down. I saw him perform once, at a poetry evening full of pale young men and women that read from notebooks in quavering voices and smiled nervously when they were finished. Then Thomas, striding onto the stage, dressed without thought for the occasion, stamping back and forth, his voice soaring to screams and falling to whispers, every line a thing of beauty. He lost his voice that night and there was no applause when he finished. When his voice cracked and then trailed off into silence, his monstrous composition unfinished, the only sound was of forty or fifty people trying to get their breath back.

But Thomas didn’t go into the lake that night. As my legs turned numb and my mouth began trembling uncontrollably, I heard him giving up and floundering back to the bank and the warmth of clothes and Mary. I shut them both out, though I could hear laughter from somewhere behind me. This was the top diving board again. This was Malta in 1991. The words that came to me, from something I was reading at the time and can’t remember now, were: "Last time pays for all."

I came so close. Then I jumped.

That was when I seriously decided to be a writer, although I have never found the words to describe what I felt that night. The water stole all sensation from my body. Physically numbed, I had only my thoughts and my feelings. I was swimming in a cliché, the moon and the dark water and the distant horizon beginning to show dawn, shading the sky a subtle mixture of blue and scarlet that bled between the bare branches of the trees. Elation is the only word that describes the emotion that swept through me, though it isn’t strong enough. I stopped swimming. I let myself be held by the freezing water and screamed at the birth of a sunrise. It is still the loudest sound I have ever made.

That's not the best piece of fiction I've ever written, but it's probably the most personal and the most important. Walking home from the quarry that night, I felt incredible. I felt like a different person. It was the stuff of epiphany or revelation, and I wanted to scream it from the rooftops. As time went by, though, I realised that it wasn't something I was going to forget and that talking about it hadn't shaken those sensations. I felt heavy with this experience, sick with it. I needed to get it out somehow.

So I wrote it, first as a screenplay called Good Intentions, then as part of my first full-length story, Scenes From An Unexamined Life. Neither of these projects will probably ever see the light of day, even if I do get published, but a reasonable percentage of my readership has encountered Scenes... in some form or another.

I've heard quite a few creative writers of one kind or another describe the process as being a kind of mental vomiting, and I suppose that's true to an extent. Sometimes an idea just grabs you and refuses to be shaken off until you give it detail, until it becomes a story or a poem or just a loose collection of words. The necessity for me is always definition, the journey from a dream or a feeling to a piece that captures that raw emotion and gives it coherency in such a way that it can be expressed to others.

Honestly, though, that's rare. The vast majority of the time it's a case of thinking, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool/funny/tragic if this happened" and then trying to make something of it. Some days it comes easy, others it doesn't come at all. In a way, it's like blogging, only less selfish.

My current project is called Welcome To Forever. It's going to be a book of short stories linked by a theme, or a novel in which every chapter features different characters and scenarios, depending on your perspective. It's struggling out of the blocks at the moment, what with the current state of my personal life. But once I get settled, I hope to bury myself in it and have some kind of first draft by the end of the year. What I'd like to do, over the weeks and months to come, is share a little of the creative process with the people that read this blog. I usually e-mail drafts and chapters of things I'm working on to friends, and I'd like to take that a step further by posting things as I write them. I don't intend to post the whole novel, but it'll be an interesting experience for me to get thoughts and feelings on a work in progress.