Beginnings

When I was twelve I became obsessed with horror films. I remember going into town with my mother and buying a video copy of Scream, in fact the first DVD I bought, years later, was Scream 3 and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. And, as the years went by, more and more horror films entered my life - the classic slashers, The Exorcist, Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and so on - and yes, I was a rather peculiar child. When all the other boys were playing with army men and watching Dragon Ball Z I was watching 70s horror films and copying out sections of Roald Dahl to practice my writing.


You're probably wondering - what does this have to do with his blog about writing? Oh God has he not written on this blog for some time and now is writing about his life? No, I'm writing about this because I just finished watching the new trailer for Prometheus - Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien - and Fassbender's character said the words: "big things have small beginnings." 


That quote got me thinking about the beginning of things - where we are all start off, how it all begins, where we come from. But the ultimate question with a writer is - what makes them write that they write? What happened to them to make them write such grotesque scenes or why do they stay in the chick-lit section? The list of questions goes on. 


William Golding was said to write the horror of Lord of the Flies because he found that horror inside him. In a sense he knew he was capable of doing what the boys did - and what other characters did in his other books - and wrote it down to stop him from doing it. This idea made me think of a short story I began writing but never finished called The Constant Drinker about a writer who is tempted to take a drink and when he does he finds himself writing his darkest secrets and memories down on the page with no memory of doing it. Then he is forced to read what he has done...with a terrifying secret. I will go back to it but I turned it into a screenplay for my friend and never got round to the prose. I shall, I shall!


Well, today's blog is small and quick - mainly because it's mother's day and I still haven't got my mum a card yet! - but it's more me thinking about what happens to certain writers to make them the way they are, what do they do and see to make them write about what they write about?