DeScribe

I came to writing very late. My first proper short story (as opposed to the frankly awful Fantasy Novel Set In A Cleverly Disguised Post-Apocalyptic-Australia false starts that fizzled out after about three pages) was written to satisfy the entry requirements at Holmeglen in 2004. I was twenty-cough, which makes me thirty-cough now.

I didn't know the first damn thing about writing, other than it was hard and I wanted (needed?) to do it.

It's taken me four years to get any sort of system to my writing. I think the first thing you have to know before you start writing is yourself, and I've got full respect for writers who start in their teens and early twenties, because I certainly wasn't ready to then. I had a lecturer who gently steered me away from genre fiction and towards 'literature' (I'm not snobbing genre fiction, fanboys and girls) because he realised it was what I enjoyed to write, even if I didn't know that at the time. I'm still working on who I am as a writer.

If there's a point to be made here, it's don't close yourself off from any forms of writing - I've tried fiction, novel, script, poetry, creative non-fiction, hard news, (paid) corporate writing and writing for children. Some of it I hate, and some of it I love. I never, ever would have suspected I might like writing childrens' novels in 2004. I do now.

My thing with writing is I like to get up first thing in the morning, grab a coffee and go straight to the shed (yes, I write in our garage). If I leave it 'til later, chances are I'll put it off all day and wind up hating myself. That's what works for me. You might prefer to write at a nightclub at two in the morning.

If I can do 500 words, that's all I need. Often, I'll do more. Perhaps this year, I might raise my base wordcount to 750 a day. but even 500 words a day (and I don't do this every day - almost, but not always) is 160,000-odd words a year.

Of course, the majority of those words are feeble crap that should never see the light of day. But there's good words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and stories in there. It's like panning for gold. You gotta have dirt there to sift through first. So I never beat myself up if I reckon those 500 words are crap. I just bang them out and worry about what happens next another time.

It's like exercise; if you go too hard too fast, you'll hate it and give it up. But if you amble along at your own pace and enjoy what you're doing, most often you'll get better and better as time goes on. The same amount of effort will give bigger results. People don't expect to run marathons six months after taking up jogging, and I don't expect to do my best writing for years (decades) to come.

That's my take on things right now. 99.99% of writers aren't born geniuses, touchtyping an Underwood with one hand while the other rests on their future Booker. Instead, they're the kind of people who start small and slow and grow to love writing.

Writing writing? Not very long. I really only started writing about a year ago. And really only been working on my novel the past few months.

So I am a new and inexperienced writer. Quite frankly I'm not very good at all.

That said the novel I'm writing has been revised and developed over the past like eight years now, it’s a pretty big thing for me. But I am lucky in that respect that as a storyteller I've already got like a dozen complete stories in my head, novels, screenplays, musical theatre, comics and a couple of shorts. They all have titles and forms and characters, so I just need to learn how to write better. But everything I write revolves around these things. When I write, it's always a contribution. I can't just write about nothing. I just can't, I try and it reads as shit.

So yeah, but as for writing practice, it's any time I can make time. Personally I like rain, I like cold. Helps me think. I can only write with noise and people around me, the cliché' cafe is the ideal situation for me and I use my laptop, not pen. I had a place in Sydney before I moved, and every Thursday-Sunday afternoon, until my laptop would die I would write my novel. I also love writing on the train.

I realize that 21 is not a late to start, but it’s late for me. I was a drawing prodigy as a child, my parents went skits. And I got into comics and super heroes and all that boyish stuff and starting drawing that. And as I veered away from Batman and Wolverine, I was drawing my own characters. And then they started interconnecting, logos, weapons, brothers and parents and pets. My writing was interconnecting the stories, but all I knew how to do was draw. So I drew. And eventually I couldn't capture my worlds and imaginations.

So I just continued planning my novels and stories and then I had my two novel series all figured out, everything in two notebooks written down, every major event, characters completely broken down, place names and the works...

I lost them. I lost my years of work. It was depressive for me. It was November 2007.

December 2007 I finally became a writer, my transformation was complete. Now I have 28, 000 for my novel. Very unrefined crap really, but the story is supposably good. The few I have entrusted to read it all say the same two things, "What happens next?" "You're writing needs a lot of work."

So I'm a storyteller trying to make it as a writer. Also a business man and entrepreneur.

Sometimes I come up with a terrific idea when I can't sleep, usually when I can't afford to get up again and write because I have things on in the morning. So I'll grab a pen and something flat and write my idea all over it without turning on the light.
In the morning, I wake up and dash about to get ready for whatever it was, and I notice some scrap of paper with four lines all written directly on top of each other and completely unreadable. If I'm lucky, the act of Writing It Down has made a mental imprint.
But usually not.