I never set out to be a writer!

That is something VERY strange to admit, but it’s true! I never set out to be a writer!

Growing up I never once even entertained the thought of being a writer. A Soldier yes. A policeman yes. I even entertained the thought of getting a truck licence.

But a writer? “Just who the hell do you think you are?” I can still hear my parents say. To them writing wasn’t work, and it certainly wasn’t going to pay any bills!

But one thing I loved doing, even back then, was telling stories. I still do.

I can remember as a kid, every Saturday my sister and I would head off to the ‘Majestic’ the local picture house to watch the Saturday ‘matinee’ along with a series, either Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon and on the way home the imagination would start gearing up for an exciting week.

See, the whole of the next week I’d be working through the story and ‘improving it’ to the point where I usually stopped at the point where peace broke out and we ruled the Galaxy!

Okay, quick question here, have you ever done that, or am I the strange one?

Then along came Jaws!!

I think that was the first movie I sneaked in to, it had an ’18’ rating and I was only 14!

I can still remember the basic plot of the movie, it probably helps that I read the book not long afterwards, I tended to do that back then, find a good movie that I liked I’d go find the book as well and read that.

That was the one movie where I thought I couldn’t improve the ending, but that didn’t stop me trying!

Okay, so what got me started with writing then?

One day I just decided to have a go! See if I could come up with a reasonably credible story. I’d started reading a lot of history, but the books were mostly just boring dry facts with very little life in them, but when I read the stories, or rather found them in books it was as if they were begging me to release them from the prison of the history books.

The Knights Templar

I remember one piece that I wrote for a kid studying for an exam somewhere, he wanted a short history of the Knights Templar, I needed some money so I thought I’d have a go, did my research and wrote the piece, but when I was writing it, it was as if they sudden;y started tapping me on the shoulder and kept saying “Don’t give facts, tell our story!”

Let the story tell itself

There’s a maxim that a lot of writers use, I use it a lot myself, and that’s “Show, don’t tell!” but there’s times when you’ve just got to let the story tell itself, just let your fingers dance over the keyboards and let the story come out from there.

I mostly write Military style action-adventure stories, the kind with lots of action and more than a little mayhem as I go, but that’s the ‘letting the story tell itself’ side of things.

Here’s a bit of an example of what I mean

This one I only finished a few weeks ago, and it’s on sale on Amazon I’ll let you into a secret, If you want to get a free copy then all I ask is that you join the monthly newsletter I’m starting. You can do that by simply sending me your email address in the comments and I’ll add you to the list as well as send you a link where you can download the story.

If you don’t want to do that, but still want the story then go ahead and download it from Amazon, it’s priced at $1.99 (US)

When I started writing the story, my plan was for it to be about 20k words in length, short but good.

However once I got going, the story told itself and ended up at 50k words in length, but goes at a breakneck pace.

Anyway, I’ll sign off for now, and maybe in a week we’ll look at the idea of ‘Show don’t tell’ as opposed to ‘Let the story tell itself’ and see how the two work together.