What Inspired Me To Become An Author: 011

What Inspired Me To Become An Author?

It Began With Film

I’ve always had a need to tell stories. Not in that way where i’m the centre of attention and entertaining a room (far from it) but in the way where I have endless narratives whirling around in my head and need a way to express them. Characters I need to explore and develop. Locations I want to describe and bring to life. Worlds I want to build.

It’s always been that way. I didn’t discover at forty that I suddenly harboured a need to write something, it’s been my life from my early teens. Rarely a day goes by when I’m not writing or working on some story.

To begin with these stories came in the format of scriptwriting, and remained so until around six years back when the world came to a standstill during covid. That’s when I finally, painstakingly, wrote my first book.

I’d been encouraged plenty beforehand by an Ex to give it a go. She was an avid reader and used to proofread my screenplays. She kept telling me my style of writing would work well in a novel, but I never gave it much thought at the time.

Film was my life, and I still harboured ambitions of being a Hollywood scriptwriter. Or at least a no budget Indie film maker. But as I slowly started to fall out of love with modern western cinema, and read more books, writing a novel sounded a lot more appealing.

Having Time To Write a Book (A Quick Recap of a Previous Post)

It always took me a lot of time to write a screenplay, but over the years that somewhat changed. I’d spend months (if not years) writing notes on an idea before I committed to a first draft. Sometimes, I would have hundreds of pages of notes.

The problem came when it was time to write the first draft. Despite the detailed notes, and everything normally going extremely well with the writing (except that one script) my mind simply wouldn’t switch off while I wrote. I’d get practically no sleep during the draft. It wasn’t healthy.

That was kind of okay when I was eighteen and working part-time, but not in my mid-twenties managing a shop and a relationship. And definitely not now in my forties with a growing number of health issues. I used to give myself ten days to write the first draft. Ten pages a day for a hundred page script. It worked like that for years, but was never going to be sustainable.

I got a little better as time went on. I wasn’t as intense with the process after the first few scripts, so I gave myself a month instead. Thirty days writing three to four pages a day. I managed to get some sleep during those months, but it still wasn’t ideal.

Writing a book that way back then would have been impossible.

Many years on from that, Covid happened. The world shut down and sleep no longer mattered. There was no work. I was single. And there was only so much Animal Crossing I could play (around two-hundred and fifty hours apparently) So, I had a choice… start a new screenplay (which I did have one ready to go) or, use this time no-one asked for to finally write my first book.

Being In Control Of Telling My Own Story

Time wasn’t the only factor in writing my first book, but it was the thing which gave me the opportunity. The bigger reason from a creative standpoint was most of what I was writing would never make it to film, at least not in the way I would want it too. If by some miracle I sold a screenplay (I did sell one but that was a cheap TV show) the time had passed where what ended up on screen would remotely represent my work (which is what happened with the cheap TV show)

I’d made my peace long ago with the screenplay being my final interpretation of the story, and whatever happened afterwards was out of my hands, but it finally began to sink in that it didn’t need to be that way. If I wrote a book, then learnt how to self-published it, the story (for better or worse) would be entirely mine.

Any compromises I had made, consciously or subconsciously, didn’t need to happen. I’d still need to obviously edit the book, consider pacing and structure, and all the rest, but things like violence, language, style, character decisions, and the ending could all be exactly what I wanted them to be.

Having written a few things I considered probably un-filmable at the time, this became an intriguing option. One which made me seriously think about taking the self publishing author route.

Deeper Into Everything

Reading a lot more also reaffirmed how much deeper I could go into everything within the format. From background details and character thoughts, to random side quests. These were things you can’t really do in a screenplay. Structurally, it didn’t work to go off on some character tangent mid-movies… unless you were Ang Lee.

In my screenplay notes I always wrote a ton of extra details and little antidotes about characters, places, and things in and around the story. They were there to make the story richer and give my characters more depth, but they would rarely be directly told within the screenplay. They’d be notes only I knew. My little secret.

In a book, if it made sense, I could share those details. Introduce the reader to a character and tell them a little something about them. Recall a situation and go into detail about what happened, rather than just mentioning it in passing dialogue. Hell, I could write a whole chapter completely unrelated to the main story as long as it was entertaining or informative. Doing that in a movie would often kill the pacing of the film and remove the audience from the experience.

So, with more time on my hands, a renewed love for books, and the creative freedom the format allowed, I was feeling a lot more inspired to chance my hand at becoming an author.

What Works Best

What it really came down to at the end of the day was a simple question: ‘What format works best for me and what I want to achieve?’

Telling stories is my priority. While I loved the idea of being able to do it within film, the truth of the matter was i’d be able to tell better stories, and actually have a chance for people to see them, if I told them in book format.

Looking back now with the power of hindsight it’s really something which should have happened long before it eventually did. The moment I put that first book together, which took nearly a year as I didn’t know what I was doing, and another further year to publish it, it felt right.

I knew this is what I should have been doing all along. Others had told me so, but i’d been to stubborn to listen… although, I’ll never regret my attempts at becoming a scriptwriter. It made me a better story teller and gave me a lot of discipline.

But, I’m able to express myself more in writing books than I ever was in writing screenplays. A lot more. A lot lot more. Reading books had always inspired me to write, but for whatever reason (my love of cinema) it never translated to me wanting to write an actual book… until I did.

Now that I’ve written a dozen books (within Extreme Horror) I haven’t written any screenplays. I started too, but then I thought, “you know what, this would make a better book.” Funny how these things work.

My days of writing Extreme Horror are over, but my days as an author have only really just began. I intend to do this for a long time, covering multiple genres, and telling the stories I’ve always wanted to tell.

Writing Over This Last Week

I finished another draft of Alice on the Air and think I’m getting closer to the book being ready now. I want to go through it one last time before I send it to the editor but it feels like everything is in place and I’m happy with how the story has developed.

Not a lot has changed from my initial notes but a few details have definitely expanded and enriched the story (in my opinion) while I’m also a lot happier with the ending. It’s the same ending, but with a stronger build than beforehand in order to get the maximum impact.

It’s been a lot of fun working on the Supernatural horror. It’s the first long-form horror book I’ve written which hasn’t been an Extreme Horror, or within that area (The Abby books are debatable) I’ve written a couple of science fiction books which aren’t quite ready yet, but this is my first horror without going into gory details.

That’s not to say it’s watered-down, it’s just I didn’t need to worry about the buckets of blood and gore, I could go about the story in a slightly quieter manner. At times it felt like an exercise in restraint, making me think how to write horror scenes without relying on aggressive writing.

I’ve also began the second draft of my Supernatural Western novelette (a different type of supernatural than Alice on the Air) This draft has been a little slow going but I’m building the story out well and again feel very happy with how it’s going.

It’s probably a good sign that I feel happy with both projects. I’ll never be the sort of person to believe my writing is anything special, or even above average (as that’s not how my brain works) but I am happy that I know my writing is getting better. That from a personal standpoint whatever anyone else thinks about the stories I’m happy to be improving at my craft.

I hope to finish the second draft this week and I think after that it will only need one more. I wrote a short story version of this novelette years ago so most of the story was already in place, it has just been a case of making it all it can be. It was never meant for four-thousand words, and suits a longer form much better.

I won’t bother going into detail about what else I’ve been up to this week as it’s been a quiet one (they usually are) but I have finished reading Cloud Atlas now and enjoyed it. At the opposite end of the artistic scale I’m off to watch Super Troopers 3 tonight. I like liking all kinds of genres.