I Write (Legacy)

The very first time I recall writing anything I think I was seven, although that seems unreasonably old compared to what kids do at seven these days. I have a memory of a classroom, glass windows along the left wall framing the day. A battered desk with a lid. I think I was about seven because until then we’d been in Infants where we sat on the floor or at low desks with no lid.

Not the original

My first writing at the desk with a lid was precluded by a teacher handing out thin books of lined paper and a sharp pencil with a rubber at the end. There was a sharpener too. That’s what I remember. Our first job was to write about ourselves and to say how old we were and when our birthday was, which proved to be a lot harder than we thought because hardly any of us knew when our birthday was. At least to speak out a day, month and year.

Once we got past eleven we were trusted with ink and I remember being given my first BIC pen, although not the context of the classroom or what I was expected to write. Between the age of eleven and sixteen I read a LOT, but I wrote very little. Occasionally during those years I managed to translate some of what went on in my head to the written page. Not often though. Mostly I loved art.

When I was sixteen my baffling fascination with the possibilities afforded by calculator buttons, lead me to my first computer. This was back when nobody knew what computers were. I bought it from Boots and haven’t stopped writing since. At first I wrote computer programs by copying them from magazines. This progressed to writing them from my head. It became my job.

By the time I was twenty-one I was writing programs using SmartWare, which was a office suite with arguably better integration in 1992 than Microsoft Office has in 2012. I also found myself spending a lot of time writing user documentation for the programs I was writing. I have very fond memories of this time.

Windows circa 1994

Windows became pervasive and I worked increasingly with Word in writing my documentation. I disliked Word from the very beginning. It’s far too contrived and still carries many of its flaws twenty years later.

When I was thirty-four I found myself working in the Middle-East and Asia. It was a very emotional time having accepted a job there to escape the collapse of my first marriage. It was a time when I first saw the world outside of one nation’s perspective. I was constantly awash with ideas and thoughts. With some notion of recording these I bought a small red notepad and a pen, because my laptop then wasn't anything you'd ever consider using on your lap. I imagined writing my experiences into that notepad, while on planes between Hong Kong and Singapore, or on the bus back to the Gold Coast. I recently found it and while much of what I wrote brings back vivid memories, it seems I spent more time daydreaming and not so much writing it all down.

After two Boeing 737s flew into two towers in 2001, I found myself briefly in Kuwait and then for a year in Yorkshire. The post-graduates I worked with in Harrogate were very excited about the forthcoming release of the LOTR Special Edition DVD. I got caught up in the excitement. It was the creativity poured into making the films that changed everything for me. It lit something inside of me that has burned bright every day since. At that time I decided to write a book Peter Jackson would make into a movie. I’ve never been short of fanciful ideas.

My first story of Jedi like medieval warriors brought to me the realisation I didn’t have the world knowledge or words to create the kind of stories I wanted to write. I started by studying human history and hunting down god. I also wrote a blog about everything and anything I did in the day to day. I wrote directly into DreamWeaver, which was the web editing software I used to create the blog website.

In 2004 I turned thirty-seven and joined a website called Great Writing. Submitting any kind of writing via the website was traumatic, so I started looking for something I could write in before posting. I discovered OpenOffice, which has a word processor called Writer. This displayed the page on the screen as if it was a sheet of paper. It didn’t try to second guess or do anything that took me away from writing. Writer has been my writing companion ever since.

In 2006 I first heard a character’s voice in my head and created my first cohesive short story narrative. I wrote it in Writer and copied it to both Great Writing and my blog.  By 2007 I had a production line of short stories and the idea for my first novel, which I started in 2008 after six months of daydreaming. I used Writer to create a template and used that to create each new chapter. When Chasing Innocence was finished in 2009 I used Writer to bring all the chapters together and edit the story. In preparing the book for the printers I exported from Writer to Word and away it went.

In 2012 I was forty-five and two decades of using Microsoft products came to a long overdue end when I bought an iPad - well, the iPad was the beginning of the end. It looked like my writing future would be Apple in design. Except, for a lot of  small and different reasons, migrating from a Netbook to a MacBook meant leaving behind my beloved OpenOffice Writer. Such was my determination to switch I changed everything about my day to day writing. It has been like learning to write with my left hand. It also feels like something worth doing. I'll let you know how I get on.

Other posts in the I Write series:
I Write (Interface)
I Write (Finding time)