“Life is Gathering Material”

Friends of writers – or wanna-be writers – are perhaps the most vain people around. They’re supportive, so they read your stories. They smile and tell you it’s good. And then they ask – “is it based on me?” People have asked me that a lot and true some of my family members and friends have made their way into my stories and others haven’t – usually the one who ask.

When I was sixteen I wrote a story – which amounted to an extreme 390 pages in manuscript form – called Pied Piper. It was about a group of teenagers and their lives. Of course when my friends heard I as working on this project each wanted to know who they were and what was happening to their characters.

I think I take snippets of my life and put them into my writing, never entire people. I guess the reason for this is that the more experience you have the more rich your writing becomes. I posted the other day a trailer for a film called Being Flynn in which De Niro says “life is gathering material”, meaning that when you live you have material to write. Neil Gaiman said this in an interview, he said that he was talking to a writer who hadn’t experienced life and he told him to go and get his heart broken, go and travel, go and get food poisoning – anything to understand life a bit better.

Today’s blog is only a short one as I have to run out and buy food for tomorrow’s dinner, do some writing and go to a house party. However, my dear friends, tomorrow I shall be looking at a specific writer – with thoughts and opinions...

Until then!