I’ve been reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, after several Insomnia creators recommended it on the forums, and it got me thinking about what inspired me to write and when.
Certainly books such as Day of the Triffids and Dune, films such as Alien and The Shining, and shows such as Buffy and Doctor Who, have all had an influence, but the desire to tell stories I think runs much deeper in all of us.
Alongside exposure to these different mediums, as kids we all play make believe games. Create and enact our own stories to understand the world and our place within it. Most of these games hinge around one simple question, ‘what if I…’
After the playground the next step taken is in the classroom, learning to tell stories with either words or pictures, and sometimes both. Luckily, at school, my writing was very much encouraged by my teachers. One story that stands out from my early scribbles in Junior school was about two Civil War Royalists fleeing a battlefield, who hid out in a barn haunted by a poltergeist. It was awful, but I was still exploring ‘what if…’ questions.
As we get older books, films, television, etc, take on this important role, letting us explore a variety of ‘what if…’ and more complex questions, expanding it beyond the self, and enabling us to explore our emotions, beliefs and values.
Roleplaying games, such as Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu, enabled me to continue the story and myth making activities of childhood into my teens and beyond. It is a bit like improvisation in the theatre, but within parameters setup by and played out in the imagination of the participants. It sated my desire to not only experience ‘what if…’ stories vicariously, like at the cinema, but also to create and express them myself.
Then I stopped. Real life took over and the ‘what if…’ questions ceased to be ideas to be explored and became instead decisions needing to be made. I still consumed books, films and shows but didn’t create my own stories, apart from the very occasional roleplaying session for old time’s sake.
Something was missing and I realised it was something I very much enjoyed.
Over the last few years, I’ve returned to creating stories, hopefully richer in ideas and material for having made a few decisions, both good and bad in the intervening years. Not that I now profess to know the answers to the big ‘what if…’ questions, but hopefully I’ve at least gained a greater perspective with which to entertain and engage others, while exploring those questions anew.