The Earliest Stories
My Writing Journey Vol. 1
The title of the post may be misleading but hey, we’ll see. This Writing Journey series may be a long one in order to get up the date, to really get down on paper (on screen?), the depth of what I could share. There have been many stops on this journey already, and I haven’t even entered the world of traditional publishing yet (here’s hoping!). For a few broad strokes, see my about page or first post.
But for this post here? Let’s go back to the beginning…
Or nearly the beginning, anyway. The earliest stories I remember witnessing the creation of may well be the stories my father told me before bed, set in the universe of what I suppose was my favourite movie at the time - The Lion King. We had a few figures of the characters and each night they’d go on new improvised stories. I also have fond memories of making a fake trench in the gap between my parent’s bed and the wall with a duvet over the top and writing a ‘trench diary’.
I was lucky in a way to be partially home-schooled when I was 9-10. It gave me chance to learn different things at home and on trips to historic sites; I think it also gave me more time out in nature learning about that magical world. We also made home movies - a James Bond Parody, a version of Jurassic Park with my Imaginext dinosaurs and socks for the human characters, and even a rough stop motion story played out with Gogos, not to mention countless comedy sketches.
Through this time - in fact I think the story lasted maybe four years - I was playing out a massive multi-season story with a variety of toys at home, mostly teddy bears at first. I think that was beginning of me taking the structure and themes of TV I was watching and implementing that into my own storytelling. The story, missions and villains, would change after a certain arc had been completed, and the world would keep expanding. The story came to an end of sorts when we moved - all the locations had to change - but I even turned being stuffed in boxes into a story event. I think I revived it a bit later, then the ‘show’ featured a different ensemble cast of main characters (mostly Lego minifigures), after one of the main teddy bears died fighting the robot queen after we’d moved in…
This may be way too much information. This is meant to be about writing, but to my mind at least, all storytelling is the same joyful process. And this is how I began letting my imagination really take hold.
Which brings us back around to school, where I’m pretty sure I found the learning objectives and what we had to write about in ‘creative writing’ too prescriptive. It was only when the prompt was broad, and I was that 9-10 age, that I actually think I started enjoying writing. I’d have stories to finish from school, and in the days at home I’d get to expand on the ideas, come up with new ones, and have something I was proud of to take into school the next week - one example being a story where a father and son go to science convention-type-thing, where they have some sort of memory-time-machine and the son lives through important moments of his father’s life. (And I’m giving out that idea for free!).
Writing was also a way of making my dad proud, of connecting with him. I think the fact that I was home more meant I got to see his creative process fully, not so much the writing but the creating of his hand-made books. He’d write poetry or poetic prose, sometimes inspired by our latest family holiday, and then work out how to format it to print it and fold the pages himself and using staples, adding in black and white photography, and hand-painting covers with watercolours. Each was numbered and signed, and I think a real treasure. This was certainly the case with:
The Cave was inspired by a visit to a recreation of the French cave Lascaux that sadly I don’t even remember. But the images on his book covers, and the themes he explored inside those pages (though I’m pretty sure I never read it until last year when we went back to Lascaux), must’ve entered my subconscious as I’d include cave art in later stories, at age 10 or 20 - there’ll no doubt be more on that in the future. Something about the magic of that site and prehistoric art struck us both, I suppose. But it was so cool to walk into our local library with a few of these copies for them to have - and each cover was different too, using a range of different stencils and spray-paint colours, and even using my child hand as a negative handprint.
My father would no doubt help me writing my stories for school as well (don’t tell my old primary school teachers). It was his support and inspiration that led to us both committing to a project that would come to be known as Children of Shadows - though I don’t remember the moment of titling it.
That’s a story for next Wednesday’s post. Subscribe so you don’t miss it…
I don’t think I’ve shared this stuff with anyone before, so thanks for reading. I hope this was in some way illuminating/entertaining and not just an excuse for me to relive happy childhood memories.
Harvey - 008H