To Create A World

I am a writer. An aspiring author. A potential scribe. I put this down to three fundemental things; the overactive and overdeveloped imagination of a lonely and isolated child, a keen, moderate and insightful intellect and a devoted mother who read all kinds of books to me from a very young age, from Enid Blyton to Tolkien.

From my earliest days of literacy I have written. At first there were new 'episodes' to my favourite childhood television programmes, Animals of Farthing Wood and Talespin. These were crude and amateur to the extreme, often comprising of two or three lines of dialogue and prose above and below a large, colourful picture. I was little more than a toddler at the time, but this was my first foray into the world of literature.

I got older and my work became more developed and complex. It was just as much about ripping off every cool movie and tv show I'd seen and been inspired by, but it was at least wrapped in the guise of something new and original. It was no longer an homage or extended universe from an already established work. Now it was all mine, at least in theory.
My characters were paper thin, without rhyme or reason to their behavoir and motivation. My dialogue was rifled with cliche and stilted, at once unrealistic and uninspired. My plots were unknowingly inspired by the mythic archetypes set forward by Joseph Campbell, although I had never heard of the man, nor Hero with a Thousand Faces. I was instead inspired by popular movies, by epic, swashbucklers, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure. My young mind was still forming into the adult I have thus become, and my early work is litered with, and sometimes wholesale stolen from the zietgeist of popular culture of my youth.

Slowly I became a true writer in that I allowed new ideas to form in my mind, rather than just telling the stories I had already experienced. Do not mistake this for an admision or brag of originality. My work is still inspired by the work of others and I'm sure the stories I will and wish to tell have been told before. My only hope is that I tell them in a fresh, interesting and profound way.

At the moment I have a project on the go. It is called The Ghosts of You and Me. It is the story of a man and a woman living in a modern city, living their normal, every day lives, their problems and triumphs for all to see. It is a love story, of sorts, with a metaphysical element. In my story, the internal, hidden fears and doubts that we all share are given an external, quasi-physical face and voice. The titular Ghosts berate and ridicule our heroes as they struggle against the everyday trials they suffer. And because the Ghosts seek to exploit their insecurities and strife, they see one another. He sees her and she sees him in their waking dreamscape.

Writing to me is sacred. It is spiritual. It is my life's blood. I will always be a writer. I may sometimes be lazy, sometimes suffer from writer's block, sometimes been uninspired and unmotivated, but it will always be a pure form of expression to me. It is a God like power. I am the sole, universal creator of a living, breathing world, a reality that I shape and create, populated and real and unique. It is limitless and unending. It is Relentless.