Memoirs of a hack writer (or... The love that dares to speak its name)

The very first story I can remember writing was about a ninja. He went into hiding as a child and then didn’t come out until he was thirty, by which time he had become an incredible skilled fighter. I don’t quite remember how the rest went, but I assume he killed a lot of people.

The second story I remember writing was pretty much a rip-off of ET but with elements of Flight of the navigator thrown in. I can’t remember much of this one either, but there was a joke about humans looking like alien hat stands that was particularly not funny in hindsight.

I think I was about six or seven.

What followed were years of painfully awkward and derivative science fiction and fantasy stories. They’re all a blur now. But they all modelled themselves pretty much after the books that I read at the time. I think I read a lot of crap at the time.

The first serious book I ever got into was a little novel called To kill a mockingbird. That one simply blew me away. So much so that it inspired me to write what would be my first serious piece of writing. That was a short and overly idealistic ode to racial equality that I called A case of black and white. I flogged that one around for years, getting it published in several student publications. Around the same time was my first attempt at humour writing. That was another poem, called Ode to liquid paper. I flogged that one around too. As far as poetry goes, those two were the best I’ve ever written.

I peaked in Year 10.

In Year 12, I was served with three masterpieces of writing that would change the way I look at the English language forever.

The first was Hamlet. This taught me about isolation, angst and the internal monologue.

The second was Great expectations. This taught me about love and obsession.

The third, and most influential of all, was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. This taught me about rhetoric, irony and the absurd.

What would spawn out of this period of my life was a romantic trilogy called Three ways to fall in love with Sally. In three unrelated stories, three tragically clueless boys fall for three girls, each of them called Sally. And each of them end up heartbroken due to their own stupidity.

I still remember this one. And remember it fondly. They were juvenile stories and I wouldn’t want to read them now because I suspect that they were actually really badly written. I know I would cringe. But I like the ideas and maybe one day I will update them. Or maybe not.

There would be four other significant pieces of writing that I’ve done that would bring us up-to-date to the present.

The first was the screenplay called The finer subtleties of role-play, which would be my most polished piece of writing to date. Anita ended up filming it. Not to my satisfaction, but to my satisfaction that it was even filmed at all.

The second was my epic Asian-Australian soap opera Everything you want, which is both my greatest writing achievement and my greatest failure. It’s an overlong behemoth of a script with an approximate running time of 4.5 hours. It still haunts me to this day. It just won’t die! I’ll revisit this sometime too. I’ve tried a few times already. I still believe there’s a lot of good stuff to be salvaged from it.

The third would be my long-suffering and painfully unfinished serial Magic for beginners. I know at least three people who want me to finish this. And I will. I promise.

But I think the best thing I have ever written was a blog entry from 19 July 2002 called S is for Sleepwalker (or Falling in love on trains). I invite you to look it up in my archives if you’ve never read it or you haven’t read it since 2002.

I’ve probably read it over 200 times.

It’s my favourite because it’s probably the only time that I have ever come close to achieving complete clarity in what I was trying to say. I love it because it is so short and succinct, compared to my usual verbosity. That one piece said everything that I have ever wanted to say in a piece of creative writing.

In hindsight, that’s how my writing life unfolded to this moment. And this moment is the moment of clarity where I realise that I read my own writing. All the time. Revisit them again and again. Like old friends or family. Someone pointed this out to me tonight.

And you know what?

I do. I probably read my own blog more than anyone else’s. I love my own blog more than anyone else’s.

Even more than Wil Wheaton’s.

And that’s why I write. For the love of it. If other people love it, then great! I want everyone to read everything I write. Even the crap stuff. But if I wrote simply to get self-reinforcement, then I would have given up long ago.

I use this blog to the most of my abilities. I’ve done so much with it. I’ve experimented. I’ve written fake blogs. I’ve copied the styles of other bloggers to see what kinds of writing attract what kinds of comments or numbers of comments. And I do it all because I get a real kick out of it and I want to learn more and more.

Some people don’t understand. For example, when I wrote that Salem entry that spawned 22 comments, you should have seen me at the computer that night. My body had had so little sleep and was about to conk out. But I was on fire on the keyboard. There was so much I needed to get down before they’d dissipate into writers’ ether. I was like a man possessed. And not because the subject matter particularly mattered to me. It was because I had words formed into sentences and they danced around in my head when I was reading the other blogs. Just begging to be blogged. I got so carried away. Put everything down, then re-read it. Trimmed it. Or expanded, depending on what’s what. Sure it was cheap that I did at other people’s expense. But I was having fun. I was loving it. The adrenaline was pumping. Some people need to bungee. I just need a keyboard, some blog fodder and minimal sleep.

The Midnight disease. Like August Van Zorn. Like Kilgore Trout.

People can read what I write and question my talent or my commitment. I do that myself all the time. But I do know that the love is real. It’s the same as when I pick up the basketball or thrash six strings of steel. There are moments when I realise that I’m doing something purely for the love of it. Good or bad. And in these moments (not all the time), when I lose myself in these moments, that’s when I know I’m alive. And if you read this and you can’t understand what I’m saying or you think I’m being over the top, then I feel sincerely sorry for you. Because I think everyone should (and deserves to) feel like this about something in their lives.

And thus ends my most self-absorbed entry to date.

There’s probably only me and Sleepwalker here now. But if you’re still reading with us to this point (without skimming the rest, mind you), then you must really like my writing. Or you really like me. Or, hopefully, both.

But for now, to everyone and anyone who has ever visited this page since its conception...

Whether you’ve been here once or a hundred times...

Whether you’ve enjoyed, hated or been devoid of any opinion of what I write here...

I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Thank you for sharing the love.