Birth of the Author (How to finish a novel after forty years after numerous attempts Part 4)

 

The Return of the Author which followed after my initial run of stories as the Author was far from great, but the planning that went into for a 18 year old was quite a bit and I did say if I had gone to a proper creative writing glass or if the world was like it was back then, I don’t dare say it could well have being a very different draft of a novel than it turned out.

It’s hard to imagine a world without the internet or laptop / pc / macs and whatever nowadays but when I first started this attempted book – I was on a Y.T.S Scheme – Youth Training Scheme for those who like to research things better on Computers and all we used was BBC Basic Computers which were far from okay for typing up long novels, so my first version of the Return of the Author was hand wrote, all twenty thousand words of it on now very yellow ish paper.

I would often call in in the local library after finishing from the Youth Training Scheme I was at and to put it frankly was having a horrible time at completely isolated and only really coming alive when I was writing. In the world nowadays, I don’t dare say I would have gone to university at 19, and studied writing them instead of going at 28 which was what I did but I look back at those papers, an extract of which I will share next time of I simply wasn’t ready not with what was going on in my life. I simply needed the space to grow into the book and everything.

I met a young lady, who for the sake of this post I’ll call Tammy at a party when I was at this age who I think was around the same age as me who loved this original draft, and I full well remember stopping me trying to kill myself when I was 19 and in a terrible state who stopped me from trying to jump down twenty flights of stairs in the middle of a party in a flat telling me point blank ‘What would your character say if he saw you like this?’

‘He would tell me to hurry up and get on with it’ I remember answering.

‘No he wouldn’t’ She said to me ‘He would tell you to finish this book’

She was right of course. I didn’t realise it as I binned the original manscript only for her to pull it back out at the time but it took me three years to realise that by which point I was resitting my English Language GCSEthen English Literature, then eventually university where I did a joint degree in Creative Writing / Theatre Studies by which point I was aware of computers and the internet and managed to move my writing on slowly to the point where I am at now.

I have no idea where Tammy is now but I owe her one for this forthcoming book and making me look back at those months in my local library nowadays after college until 7.45pm two days every week scribbling all kinds of ideas. I am still not sure even now, if I would have carried on with it if it wasn’t for that now, even after I started properly writing poetry when I hit 30

and I like to think I was ready for starting this novel properly.

Of course this was far from the case.