My First Project

Following on from my post about starting to read my first book, I now want to blog about how my first writing project came to be. Strangely, the chronology of this wasn't that I'd been reading my whole life and then decided to start writing novels, instead of reading them. Strangely, I decided to throw myself into writing immediately.

There were a few contributing factors to this process.

Firstly, I have always had a good imagination and like creating worlds. I remember having toy wrestlers as a child. I think most children would have been entertained for hours simply just having Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker knocking lumps out of each other in a small scale-model wrestling ring, with the added satisfaction derived from having the autonomy to decide who wins. I enjoyed this too, but only for a very short timespan before it became boring.

My mind would wander and start devising ways of making this more stimulating for me. I needed to add more layers of complication and organisation. I would sort the wrestlers into factions, and those factions would compete to have better shows and attract more fans. I had a big tub of 500 or so small yellow plastic pellets. They became money. 

Imaginary fans would pay pellets to get into events and then those pellets would pay the wrestler's wages. Wrestlers would jump ship to other factions if they were willing to pay them more. Factions might ambush a rival factions star man in the locker room to injure him for a while meaning their shows ratings would sink like a stone. This would all be facilitated by me, the giant overseer that towered above them, controlling their every move.

Soon, the play would veer away even from wrestling. Running with the pellets as money idea, the ring would be tossed to one side and the wrestlers became business men, and would sell items from my room, paying other wrestlers to 'make' the stuff in their factories. The carpet of my bedroom became a fully-functioning mini-economy.

The play would morph again and I would pretend the wrestlers were people from school. I would decide which wrestler represented me. I could then replicate events that happened in school, or more importantly get to do stuff that I daren't do IRL as the kids say.

I could finally give the school bully his comeuppance. I could finally sit with the cool kids and get the girl that I would often just follow around, even if my class was in another direction, but would never actually muster up the courage to talk to.

I guess I've always created imaginative, alternative realities in my head and writing a novel would give me the chance to actually write them down and endow them with some meaning for once, and allow other people to see them. If the ideas could ever be monetised in some way then that would be a welcome bonus.

I'd thought about writing something of length many times from my teenage years right up to when I actually started my novel at 30. It just seemed like a huge mountain to climb though, and I only really had the time or desire to just take a little stroll around the block for some fresh air. That all changed during lockdown.

I sat in early lockdown, watching a lot of Netflix with my partner, and found myself saying "that ending was rubbish, I could have made a better ending than that" quite a lot. That's one of those things that people say though that's an exaggeration for comic effect. Like when your team's star striker blazes the ball over the bar from a few yards out and you think 'my nan could have scored that.' She couldn't, as she's in a care home and hasn't stood upright for the best of 3 years but it's a figure of speech. 

It's very similar to when you watch someone on a gameshow get easy questions wrong and you boast to your partner that you would have brought £250,000 home had you been sat in that chair. You probably wouldn't as it's a whole different proposition in the TV studio, under the heat of the lights and the gaze of hundreds of people in the audience. In the knowledge that if you say something stupid then it's going out on national TV and you could end up going viral for all the wrong reasons. It's very different to your partner just saying when you get a question wrong, 'Oh my God, I can't believe you thought Toronto was the capital of Canada, you dimwit!'

But as I was watching whatever it was on Netflix, I thought to myself that I really could have written a better ending than that. I then realised that I had all this free time and everything that isn't a supermarket is closed so I've nowhere better to be. It also dawned on me that a lot of my friends were moaning about the coronavirus and how 2020 was just going to be a waste of a year for them. I decided that when I looked back on it that I'd have made it count. So I started to come up with an idea, which I think stemmed from 'You' - A Netflix show which, for the record, I don't think for a second I could have written anywhere near as well.

A book where I wanted to the main character to be the antagonist and to create him in a way that he'd become likeable and you'd almost be okay with the bad things he does, or understand why he does them. I'm sometimes cast as arrogant and sanctimonious, which I think is just a derogatory term meaning 'better than the people saying it' and I wanted this to come out too. I like when a story has a moral and makes you think about something, rather than just being entertaining.

The first draft of the now-finished is currently with a beta reader and a few other people I know who don't have any literary qualifications, but then again neither will most people who read books so their views are very welcome. I'm looking forward to their responses and to see if I've managed to set out to do what I've achieved.

I'm hoping they'll say it made them question whether locking up criminals, or at least being disinclined to provide them with employment after their sentence has been served, is actually a good societal outcome, but to do this through the story of a ex-prisoner, now serial burglar, who finds his victims on a dating app posing as other people, leaves them stood up on dates, follows them home to get their addresses and then studies their daily routines. His victims are predominantly single-mothers and he only steals things from their daughter's bedrooms to put in the bedroom in his house for his imaginary daughter. He somehow ends up in relationship which forces him to clear out that room and forget about his child, as well as changing his criminal ways and the story progresses from there, with some twists and turns.

I'm hoping that with some feedback and help from my beta reader, I will be able to redraft it and make it even better, before one day hopefully being able to inflict it upon the world.

Thanks for reading,

Harrison