Childhood Memories of Writing
When I was 6, I wrote a story and read it to an audience for the first time .
I have been writing stories literally almost for as long as I can remember.
In my first Substack post, I teased the story of my first story. So here is the true story behind the first bit of fiction that I ever wrote.
I was a pretty imaginative sort of kid, always playing, always making up games and characters.
I have always liked words too. Perhaps that started with my very first school teacher, a tall cheerful lady called Mrs Webber, who gave everyone in the class a little book to write down words we might encounter but not recognise. Later, she would come round to each of us, to see what we’d written in our Word Books, and write a definition next to the word.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before my very busy imagination and an interest in words collided and the results found their way onto a page.
I remember very vividly the day I left school at 3.30 as usual, with the express intention of writing a book when I got home. I was about 6 years old, so I wasn’t able to articulate precisely what I wanted to do.
All the way home, I sat in the back of my friends car, my mind whirring with ideas.
It was a bright, spring afternoon and the school holidays would soon be in sight.
Always, before mum cooked dinner, I was allowed to run off any excess energy still lingering from school and being driven home with my best friend.
I asked my mummy if she would staple some sheets of paper together for me. I told her I wanted it to be like a book, and a few minutes later I was handed some sheets of A4 paper, neatly stapled together all along the top of the page.
“No, mum. I want the paper stapled like a proper book”.
Even at that age, I had strong ideas about how I wanted my work to be presented!
“Oh,” my mum said, “I thought you wanted to make your own colouring book.”
I gave her back the paper and when Mum had unpicked the staples at the top, I was again handed the sheets, this time with the staples down the left hand-side of the page.
No sooner had the words “thank you, mummy” left my lips, than I began to write my first story. My first book.
It was an illustrated story called Roy and the Monster and it was about a little boy being chased by a monster. It was a brief story but I won’t spoiler the ending here because if things get really desperate one day there’s a chance you mind find it uploaded as an ebook!
I can’t remember how long it took to write Roy and the Monster, or how long it took to draw the illustrations. I have just vague memories of my little A4 book, written and illustrated in a clashing parade of felt tip.
I remember Mum was impressed and she had me show my story book to Dad later that day or the next morning before school. I was told I should take it to school with me as Mrs Webber would also be impressed.
Mrs Webber was very surprised and a little bit excited too. She had me read Roy and the Monster to the whole class. I got a round of applause from the class and then was then sent off to read my story to two other classrooms of children.
I remember that I enjoyed reading the story to the children of my class but feeling very strange sitting at the front of the class, next to somebody else’s teacher, reading to a row of unfamiliar faces.
When I got back to my own classroom, it was nearly home time. There was a group of children, I think mainly the ones I was friends with, who were sat around a table waiting for me to come back so they could read it again with me.
At the end of the week, Mrs Webber handed me a treat. A lunchbox-sized, individually wrapped chocolate Swiss role. I didn’t actually like chocolate Swiss role, so I think I swapped it or shared it with my friend on the way home.
If I were to pop on my ‘psychologist hat’ for a moment, I might be tempted to say my entire life has been an attempt to replicate the acclaim I garnered that day in school when I was six years old.
It’s quite sad that I no longer have those crudely stapled pages, bedecked in my colourful six year-old scrawl. Roy and the Monster was somehow pulped long ago. The picture used on this post is just for illustrative purposes, unfortunately (courtesy of Pintrest).
From Roy in the Monster, I wrote a lot of Doctor Who stories, mostly for my own amusement because nobody I knew at the time was into Doctor Who. It was Dad who suggested I turn those stories into audio books for myself.
In my teens I wrote Godson in Goblin Valley, and a follow-up tale titled Godson and Honson The Imp Slayers. Both were twisted, bloodthirsty affairs that made one of my uncles feel a bit queasy after he’d read it.
Being a sensitive teenager I began to dabble with poetry and teen romance stories. My romance stories, as you might imagine, got a little x-rated as I approached my middle-teens. In fact, my ‘erotic stories’ involving popstars and models and any other famous person known to get the pulse racing, were very, very popular among my friends. (I should add this was pre-internet. There is just no way my tame erotica could compete with the internet!).
I have never stopped writing, never stopped dreaming up stories and characters and situations. Subscribing to my substack not only tells me people enjoy my writing and spurs me on, but you help me get back some of those feels I got when I was six years old, a nervous kind of elation of finding an audience and having them enjoy what you do.
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How do you curate all of your own entertainment, and what happens when you do? Thoughts, updates and random musings on the view across my ‘independently curated entertainment landscape’ every two weeks in The View podcast.
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