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Monday 26 March 2012

A Century Of Stories . . . .


Yesterday we travelled across to Grimsby to celebrate my grandad's 100th birthday. He was in good form and listened carefully to my dad's speech about the tumultuous changes of his century. When my dad said that in 1912 the first shaky aeroplanes might have been seen in the skies, he shouted out "Zeppelins!" But he hasn't been bewildered by these powerful changes. Only the other day he asked my brother-in-law if he should get broadband. I suppose with that kind of forward-looking mentality and an open-mindedness to change, he's watched the many stories of his century (including two world wars) unfold and still wants to know what will happen next.

On the way home we drove into the setting sun on the M62 and I realised I'd grown up around storytellers; grandparents and parents and uncles and aunts who wanted to talk and make sense of the world through tales that were sometimes comic, sometimes slightly darker. My Nana had the ability to tell the same story - about the Sunday School teacher eating a sandwich into which a wasp had crawled - but in many different ways. My grandfather still remembers huge amounts of detail about his first job as a delivery boy in 1926, the year of the General Strike.

This is only one step away from writing fiction. The stories are mostly already present in the world when you come to write them. It's just a case of finding a way to make the break and set them down on paper or on screen, to reorganise them, to alter characters, mix stories together, change everything again until you arrive at something that works. My dad made that break, writing plays, novels and poetry on his typewriter in the front room after tea in the 1970s and 1980s. He still does it - like a compulsion to record what it feels like to be alive.

So when I'm asked where ideas come from, the answer is usually that for the most part they are already there. The only thing that separates a good joke or a long tale about an incident at work or a family saga told by your friend from a written story is the compulsion of the writer to set it down physically and work on it ( again and again ) until it does its job. I'm growing into the idea that writer's block is a myth. The ideas are always there. What might be lost though, is that compulsion to write and understand your own story.