I have been writing stories, on and off, since I was about fifteen years old. I have a lot of half finished and barely started stuff, and a couple of short stories that appeared finished at the time, albeit a little unpolished. I also had four 'novels' that I have been working on one since 1974, Trudy's story, two from 1977, 'Flat Share' and 'A Place in Life', and one from 1987, Breaking Point.
I used to show some of my efforts to people where I worked (I was a booking clerk on the railway at the time.) and almost always got favorable comments, despite the slightly unusual nature of the stories, but I never had the confidence in my own ability to submit anything for publication.
During my period of unemployment I didn't really have much desire to write until I found out about a scheme called 'Creating Spaces', a community based arts initiative which I heard about through the community drama group1 that I belonged to at the time. One of the strands of the initiative was 'Creative Writing', which would be a group of people from the community and a qualified teacher exploring writing and the written word
The first 'assignment', so to speak, was to write a short story or story extract which reflected how we sometimes use different 'faces' in different situations. This lead me to write 'A Friend in Need'.
I also dabbled (rather badly) with Haiku, the ancient poetic form of seventeen syllables in the pattern five, seven, five.
Then we examined play writing by putting together a one-act play. We also examined character 'voice', as ably demonstrated by Alan Bennett's' 'Talking Heads' stories. Which inspired another piece, 'With apologies to Alan Bennett'.
I have written a couple of Mini-Sagas, based on the premise of a story in exactly fifty words, with up to another thirteen words for the title. The only one I might include here though is Eclipsed.
I have dabbled in ordinary poetry and the results of this dabbling can be read here.
Another little exercise we did was to try to write the start of a story, and to present it in two different ways, so that different moods could be conveyed. This was sub-titled 'Beginnings'.
I joined the class at its outset in February 1999 and upon starting work, in February 2001, I had to drop out, which left me looking for an outlet. A chance happening on a short on a story archive led me to send off a chapter of my longer works, Breaking Point, to one of the authors there, Elaine, who sent back my chapter with suggested improvements and variations. As I had not really touched the story since 1987, when I first wrote it, it came as a welcome breath of fresh air to see someone else's input. Since then I have continued with the re-write and things progress slowly, but well, with Elaine continuing to act a proof reader, critic and prompter (That is to say my editor)
I worked on another story, with Elaine acting as my editor, which has been published on an Adult website, but I also include it here for those of a nervous disposition, It's called 'Still Life'.
I have other, older, stuff, pieces that I wrote, or started to write, up to twenty five years ago, which I am re-examining in the light of my new outlook. Hopefully I will get to finish one of them sometime soon.
Please do feel free to comment if you should read any of my work!
1Subsiquently disbanded.
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