Until now

This blog has been somewhat random to date. Mainly compiling other people’s articles, blogs and websites of interest. And of course images found during my continuing search for the loneliest cabins. But there has been very little comment of my own. My aim is for that to change. What I intend to do is chart my progress as a writer. Part of my reluctance to engage myself in actually writing on the blog has come from a fear of putting too much into it and not enough into anything else. But I’ve come to realise that writing, in any form, will help overall.

In a southern American twang: “Well what we gat here? A ree-dah?” – Bill Hicks.

First then, the story till now. As a kid I read a lot. Unlike most kids I lived in some fairly remote places, including the Isle of Rum – population around 20. This definitely fuelled my interest (need) in books, music and computers. My father, Laughton, read many books to me (that I subsequently reread), and the ones that stick in the memory most are The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, a lot of Roald Dahl, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and the Wizard of Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin.

By the time I was seven I had written (and recorded on cassette) my first poems. One of them I remember a little of: “and the noise went beep beep beep all night long / Oh what a noise.” This was inspired by a stint in the Sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh.

The first time I remember turning my hand to fiction was soon after when I began a sequel to Lord of the Rings. The first scene involved the principal characters searching for Gimli’s axe in the rubble of Helm’s Deep. I bashed this out on one of the typewriters in the Nature Conservancy Council office on the island.

Over the years I kept a diary at various junctures, and wrote many letters to my siblings who all lived abroad at different points. The other memories I have of my writing came through school. At James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh I had a stereotypically larger than life English teacher, Mr Campbell, in the mould of Alasdair Gray. He sang at you in a theatrical voice and was prone to embellishment and great humour. He had the required physical characteristics: corduroy suits, a missing thumb, wiry grey hair that surrounded a bald dome like a bird’s nest, and a glass eye. On one of my old jotters my friend Gavin Sutherland and I had been writing the name of our band, Amorphous Head, in different styles. And below this Mr Campbell has written: So this is what goes on in the secret corner! He was inspiration in itself.

At Breadalbane Academy in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, another elderly English teacher gave me full marks for a piece of creative writing. No one else had had such a privilege for a long time, he said. But what marked it out for me was the content of the piece. It was a gritty, no holds barred (well, I thought it was for a fourteen year old’s English submission at school) piece about young folks going off the rails at a house party. I may be embellishing the story now, but I remember my classmates were shocked that such content was not just accepted, but prized.

Had there been an undergraduate creative writing course available back then I’m sure I would have applied. For as long as I can remember I’ve always imagined writing for a living. As it was I ended up studying Film & TV and Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. With the advent of email a lot of my writing became enmeshed with communication back to old friends in Edinburgh. Stories involving them as the principal characters and the like. I also got into journalism and became Sports Editor for the Glasgow University Guardian.

Studying Scottish Literature has had a profound effect on my writing. I learned what texts were important (from Barbour’s Bruce to Stevenson and Scott to House of the Green Shutters and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to MacDiarmid to Alexander Trocchi to Kelman and Gray to Spark and Lochhead to Banks to Welsh to Warner) and how they slotted into a Scottish psyche. All courtesy of an inspiring department led by the enigmatic Douglas Gifford.

With the emergence of the Creative Writing Masters at Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities I decided to apply. There was something appealing in the fact applications were approved based on a folio of writing, rather than previous studies and qualifications. So for the first time in a while I sat down to produce a few thousand words of fiction.

Once accepted I spread out the studies as thinly as possible. It didn’t seem worthwhile to complete the course in one academic year, unless one had produced that barnstorming novel. Instead I did the course part-time which seemed to make my studies much the same as those students who were full-time. I had the same amount of access to the staff. Could be present at just as many lectures and workshops. But I knew I would have another year of the same.

The first year for me was run by James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, two of the most famous Scottish writers, and I had studied them during my undergraduate years. I spent the majority of this year attempting to write a screenplay as my mind was fixed on being involved in film. I was also terribly caught up in the mechanics of producing two anthologies with funding from the course, and in coordinating and running a weekly reading night at the Scotia Bar. In hindsight I believe my priorities were all wrong, and I don’t think I took advantage of the staff and course nearly enough. Which is why I am glad I decided to take a year out (spreading the course out as much as possible).

When I returned the course was altogether different. Kelman and Gray had retired, and Willy Mayley had returned from a sabbatical. His positive energy altered the makeup of the department considerably. On a personal note, the time away had also fixed my mind on prioritising the writing over anything extracurricular. So it was that I devoted my time to writing for this academic year 2004-2005. I had a deadline of six months – between October and March – as I would be returning to California for a job. I finished my first novel, a landmark. Again though, with hindsight, I can now see that my need to complete the novel in that timeframe affected the quality of the prose I produced. There was little rewriting, redrafting or redressing. Instead I pushed on to finish the story. My study of Scottish Literature and time at Glasgow University (going on six years by this point) also affected my work and the appreciation of my peers’ work. I found the cosy scene claustrophobic and was turned off by writing that I found to be Scottish short-sighted navel-gazing. It was all too close to home

Ever since then I have been travelling and living abroad and waiting for life to get out the way so I can continue to write. Two years later I’m now realising life won’t do that for you. But I find it hard to slot in small stints of writing amongst other work pursuits. So far it has been all or nothing. I need a few months of dedicated time to write. In the past year I created that time to produce more prose in Thailand, and now in New Zealand I have the time to dedicate myself to it again. The outsider perspective of living abroad will, I hope, give me the necessary inspiration to dig a little deeper this time. There is no cosy scene to get lost in.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I’ve come to appreciate that any form of writing is a good thing. So I supplement the frustrating production of fiction with blogs, travel writing and various non-fiction stories for websites, newspapers and magazines in the hope that I can earn enough to write for a living.