This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 11/04/26
Written Off...
(...or "Shredded Dreams")
I don't remember at this distance how old I was when I first thought I might be A Writer.
I do recall that, at the age of about eleven, I wrote a series of short tales - no more than vignettes - which all had the title Strange Happenings, and which all ended with my turning up at school in the morning to discover that said edifice had either a) been demolished, or b) had fallen down without any assistance, or c) been burned to the ground. I sense that there was a strong degree of wish fulfilment involved in these efforts.
I found writing essays for school difficult, because facts seemed to get in the way of what I wanted to say. I was much happier on those occasions when I was allowed to let my imagination loose. This, unfortunately, wasn't all that often, and I felt frustrated when the topic given to me was outside of my interests.
I do remember writing - under the influence of the football novels of Michael Hardcastle and Brian Glanville - an attempt at a schoolboy football story. It was - as one would expect - irredeemably shallow, but the effort had been made and that was enough for me.
I never showed any of this stuff to anyone, of course, nor did I even let on that I had written it; the scorn which I would have been shown would have been intensely dispiriting, coming on top of the contempt I was held in more generally.
For my mock English 'O'-level exam, with a given essay title of 'Journey Into The Unknown', I wrote what may variously be described as a 'homage', a 'parody' or - more realistically - a 'rip-off' of Kenny Everett's Captain Kremmen radio serial (in response to which, the comment of Arthur Shenton was, "Very entertaining, but I hope the examiner has a sense of humour").
History 'A'-level essays apart (which were even more torturous to write than my previous attempts in various subjects because I didn't really understand what was expected of me; and I was losing interest in academic pursuits anyway), my next desperate lunge after creative satisfaction came at the age of seventeen due to my re-discovery of science fiction.
I had first encountered the genre at the age of about ten, when the big heavy boxes of books which were delivered to our primary school every week by Denbighshire County Council's library department would contain the occasional volume of sci-fi or fantasy stories; The Hobbit was almost certainly one such, but elven epics didn't appeal to my somewhat Gradgrindian take on what a story should do. Far more appealing to me were short stories in which science - whether real or speculative - were front and centre. I well remember being enthralled by Brian Aldiss' 1965 short story But Who Can Replace A Man? and being more than slightly spooked by Ray Bradbury's The Shape Of Things (also known as Tomorrow's Child).
I had never attempted - or considered - writing in the genre until I fell under the influence of my new sixth-form friend Alex Greene (a fellow outsider in many ways). He introduced me to E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensmen series, lending me the seven novels in sequence. This was 'space opera' in the grand style, and Smith's vigorous, resounding prose proved so much to my tastes that I went out and bought the whole sequence.
(On that subject, I went back to the Lensmen about fifteen years ago and - taking into account their context both in terms of style and time - found them still enjoyable. Randall Garret's spoof of them in Backstage Lensman is similarly toothsome).
So captured was I that in due course I thought that I would try my hand at it. My first real attempt had the provisional title, The Earth Observers, and was intended to be a satirical view of Earth from the point of view of aliens orbiting the planet and, well, observing the things which were going on down here. I remember writing it with my first roller-ball pen - a divinely smooth impliment - not that the nature of the tool used was any guarantee that what came out of it was of any satisfactory standard at all. It doesn't work like that, I soon discovered; one may have a golden trowel with a handle encrusted with lapis lazuli, it doesn't make any difference if what you are spreading with it is horseshit. The Earth Observers crashed blind into the planetary ooze of my own inability to stick at anything (a tendency which was to recur with depressing regularity thereafter).
Not that I didn't have my successes at this time, I'll have you know. In the college Eisteddfod of March 1981, I won first prize in two categories; English short story and Welsh (second language) poem, although I have to admit that in the latter category I was the only entrant; the adjudicator - my Welsh tutor Bryan Martin Davies - did reassure me however that he wouldn't have given me the accolade had it not been of the required standard.
During this time, I was also writing a fair amount of verse. Much of it was in effect song lyrics for tunes I had made up in my head (although I suspect unwitting plagiarism infected at least some of those). But there were 'poems' on a variety of subjects, such as my reactions to hearing the neighbourhood cats yowling priapically of a spring night; or musings upon my feelings of being an alien in a strange world; or an ode to a spider I saw in the angle of a brick wall. Don't worry: inadequate as it was, at least it wasn't remotely Vogon.
This pattern continued - fitfully - through my university years, almost entirely in English (my increasing fluency in Welsh was not matched by any similar confidence in versifying in the language; the expected standard for it to be considered anything more than doggerel was significantly higher than it was in English).
I did revisit longer form fiction during the latter half of the decade, but my attempts - despite the effort I put into them - were to be no more belaurelled than my earlier attempt. There was Where The River Runs, which was about a man being inadvertently transmitted into a future where what it pleases the moderns to call 'civilisation' had devolved into materially primitive tribes...
...And here I confess to perpetrating a cardinal sin of SF writing; the protagonist was supposed to be visiting his past as a form of vacation, but ended up going in the opposite direction. I explained this as the result of...and I truly cringe in shame at this..."reversing the polarity of the generator". No, really. I showed the early chapters of the story to Alex, who - with, I thought, rather more glee than was strictly necessary - pointed out the absurdly high CQ (Cliché Quotient) I had invoked. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...
...Anyway, there was The Ring And The Stone, a sort of mediaeval-style quest story set against a similar backdrop as ...River..., but without the technological involvement; Tales Of The Blue Knight, which mixed the standard royal court intrigue story with what might now have been taken as a precursor to Oglaf; and The Four Books Of Kenry, in which the titular hero moves from being a tavern pot-boy to a page to a knight and in due course to an embittered hermit.
There were others, but none of those got any further than the first few pages; the ones I've named above did at least reach Chapter Three, Four or beyond (and this was all longhand biro work, because I couldn't get a replacement ribbon for my typewriter).
Once I had started gainful (for certain uses of the word) employ at the beginning of the 1990s, I no longer had the time, energy or inclination to continue, and the same fate befell my contributions to the local community newspaper for that same reason.
I had in any case finally forced myself to accept that my attempts to write fiction were doomed to failure, realising that, a) I couldn't plot, b) I couldn't create credible characters, c) I couldn't describe, and d) I couldn't do dialogue without it being stilted or by resorting to clichés. Even in these decadent times, I realised, the prospects of success were minuscule.
So it was that - little squibs like my stories of Spelcheckia apart - I shunned all attempts at creative writing until I set up this site in June 2003.
But because I am a compulsive keeper of things (I seem to have spent far more time and energy on archiving my life rather than on actually living it), I still had all this stuff - along with other archaeological ruins of my past, such as my school and college reports (another stratum of my past I have no desire to re-excavate) - lying in a cupboard in the back bedroom. I finally resolved last autumn that it all had to go. This was going to be psychologically torturous, but the effort had to be made, if only to avoid the detritus of my ambitions being left behind for others to sneer at. So I set to it at Cringe Factor 9, trying to fight off the melancholy which threatened to overwhelm me at the disposal of things which I had thought so important at the time, but which now were no more than the petrified foetuses of my own still-born ambitions.
Into the black sack, therefore, went Markon and Trentor the alien observers. Bound for the same fate were Neil Morton, the inadvertent traveller to the future; as was Dihan son of Mizash, whose seeking of both the Ring and the Stone was doomed from the outset; Knight Drushak the Blue and Kenry followed them in the general direction of the shredder.
All that effort - such as inventing an entire language and writing system for the characters in ...Ring... (which illustrated my infinite facility for distracting myself from the actual job in hand with trivia) - all destined to be slept on by hamsters, or to re-emerge from the recycling process as something fit only for people to wipe there arses on (which is probably the most sincere form of literary criticism). The characters, the landscapes, the ideas, the very words themselves, to be now forever at one with Nineveh and Tyre.
I have managed to salvage some items from the wreck of my ambitions, however, and hope to post them under the general heading of 'Juvenilia' in the weeks ahead. After all, I don't seem to be able to write anything else very much nowadays.
