The storyteller's tale

If you've come to this blog via my author web-page, I thought it would be interesting to jot down a few thoughts and recollections about the whole business of writing and how I came to write these stories at all.

It seems obvious to me that politicians have an innate arrogance because, in a democracy, they implicitly think they know better than I do how to run my life. Creative writers have a similar arrogance because they are convinced they've got a story to tell that other people will want to read and indeed, pay to read. It's easy to dismiss that self-worth when thinking about great, established writers like Shakespeare, but how about Philip Howells aged 17 who thought that people might be interested in his reflections on the annual cycle of the meadow opposite his house? Not quite as many

Why do people choose to become authors? Even the term provokes controversy for the differences between that and writer or storyteller serve to illustrate the subtle range of definitions that can be applied to creative scribblers. One of my inspirations was an American journalist and storyteller, Paul Gallico. Perhaps influenced by his own career path, one of his early opinions was that writers should write about their own experiences. It’s not surprising that Gallico should have held that view, after all, he was a keen sportsman for much of his early life and in his quest for personal experience, sparred with Jack Dempsey so he could describe how it felt to be knocked out by a champion boxer. As a seventeen-year-old with only a fairly mundane upbringing to draw upon, I found Gallico’s view frustrating. Although I can’t recall actually developing the thought, I should have realised that other writers I admired, for example, Tolkien, Bradbury and Asimov obviously couldn’t have experienced the subjects about which they’d written so compellingly.

Anyway, as my salary-earning career in civil aviation led me into writing promotional pieces for my employer, my creative storytelling rather lapsed until, 19 years after joining the airline I started my own creative business, using the medium of audio-visual to tell my clients’ commercial stories. Although, like many similar undertakings, AV was a co-operative, team business, I always reserved for myself the task of script-writing. That led eventually but directly to creative storytelling in my later life.

My first writing output covered a wide range of subjects; many of my earliest efforts complied with Gallico’s opinion and were developed from my own experiences. Only rarely did I lapse into complete imagination. For example, my first novel sprang directly from my fulfilment of a long-held desire, to learn to fly.