Who I Am

I started this blog some time ago, but it was only today that I sat down and decided it needed a complete upgrade. So here I am, revamping it and opening up my thoughts on the crafting of fiction.
Writing is a part of my life -- so much a part of my life that I hardly have time to do it for thinking about it. But that is the lot of every writer, the dire dilemma each will always face. Creating a work of literature from the abstract is like building a skyscraper from a pile of random oddments. It's work, hard work, and it requires quiet meditation and the ability to dream.
'If you can dream, and not make dreams your master, if you can think and not make thoughts your aim; if you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same. . .' These were words of Rudyard Kipling, in his old, Victorian poem 'If',' and they sum up what writing is for me. It is a struggle, not only against the abstract but against the world and even, perhaps most of all, against my own mind.
I am a creator of worlds. I pursue the act of creation while fighting back an almost unquenchable terror of doing something wrong. It is not that I fear criticism (of all the things I find hard to get, criticism ranks highest), nor that I fear ruining my book. What I feel is an entirely inexplicable fear of making the opening break too mysteriously, the catalyst come too fast, the action move too slowly, the character disclose too suddenly, the plot arc too steeply, the climax happen too late, the denouement advance too tediously, the last page end too unsatisfactorily.  There are a thousand, no, a trillion ways in which a writer can go wrong, and I have a paranoia against all of them.
This is my journey, my tentative wandering along the paths of art. Take my hand, and join me.

I began writing when I was about ten years old, in the standard way ten-year-olds begin, by crafting a totally unbelievable character who behaved like a child and did grand things like a grown-up. If you have ever read anything about Biggles, you get a rather good idea of what I used to write.
I didn't get very serious about true art until I was thirteen or fourteen, when I began a Second World War spy-thriller about an actor who goes undercover. That was one of my minor projects that year, but it is the only one that has survived. Don't ask me why -- none of my attempts at analysis have come to any kind of fruition. Perhaps it was the character; I am not sure.
As a kiddo I was influenced by five books more than any others -- The Prisoner of Zenda, The Guns of Navarone, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Looking at my work today, you can still see the influence of all five. Take, for example, my current Work In Progress, the story I began at age fifteen and am still continuing to revise. Royal Opposition is in no genre that I can possibly place, although it borders on the action-adventure and the Ruritanian romance. In the true style of Anthony Hope, it revolves around a royal prince and the politics of his fictional country. Like Alistair MacLean and John Buchan, I have shown a marked taste for special agents and secret services throughout the plot. I have shown a definite preference for unlikely and elusive heroes, like Emuska Orczy. And there is a distinctly Verne-ian global flair to many of the characters and events. Other stories I am in the process of writing include that old spy-thriller, a definitely Ruritanian romance about an unexpected king, a science-fiction novel where the hero and the villain don't know which is which and, most recently, a young adult adventure about a boy who reads dreams. Of my finished works (two in total), one is a spy-thriller and the other is a dystopian YA adventure. Of these I have mentioned, three sprang directly from dreams and the others were greatly influenced by them. Wordless meditation and subconscious thought are two of the most important things in my writing life. Art comes from inside. Literature begins internally. I still struggle every time I sit down to write, but I know what I am struggling for -- uniqueness, creativity, beauty, music. I will share my ideas as I try to find the great secret to writing well, and welcome yours. Share my silent reverie.