Where? What? How?

I am from Bournemouth and grew up with three sisters and a brother. As the middle child, I wasn’t overlooked as the saying goes. We grew up as a tight-knit family, always doing things together and sharing experiences, such as reading. Mum is a prolific reader, and she is the reason why we all read in the first place. Dad is quite the opposite in this endeavour (the last book he started to read over two years ago was On The Origin of Species and yet I think he still hasn’t got past the contents page).

Of course we grew up with Rowling, Pullman, Paolini and the rest of them. Vampirates and standard teenage fiction took up most of our time and yet we were never without a book to read. As I got older, mum introduced me to Lee Child and James Clavell (Shogun is still my favourite book of all time) and I’m hooked on these sorts of things now. With the freedom to choose my own books to read, I can appreciate what I like and can subsequently draw from if I’m immersed into that world enough.

The Inheritance Cycle was one of the greatest reads for me, as was Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and because I’ve enjoyed them so much, I find that I draw on ideas and gain inspiration from them. As with Dickinson, she is ‘the force driving the act of the poem’ even if it inspires other people to do something of a similar nature.

Metaphormosis

In Emily Dickinson's poem 251, she talks about strawberries over a fence and how she would like to climb that fence in order to get to the red fruit. In class it was suggested that this was a metaphor for growing into a woman due to the connotations of the colour red. I found it difficult to accept this as a version of what Dickinson was implying because that suggests she had to climb the fence, as if there was a certain amount of discretion involved in growing up when this is a natural change. Why, then, would she also mention this He character expressing that same desire to climb the fence in order to relish in the red? Boys don't go through the same changes as women do, and yet if we are going by this metaphor, then they obviously do. I'm not saying that this is wrong, but I just don't see it myself. There are many things a metaphor could possibly be, and I think it is quite short-minded to set on one explanation.

By that same token, here is a metaphor that I devised based upon an explicit event in my life which is undoubtedly a flash-bulb memory:

Like ships sailing away

Straining with their load.

You know how it is - 

Returning, you find the

Ships sailing, always too

Soon, too imminent.

Nothing but a spectator,

Yet painful to witness.

Despite what you may or may not get from this metaphor, what it's really about is when I came home from sixth form to find that our German Shepherd, Kelly, had to be put down. I had grown up with Kelly and she was getting on, and yet you never want it to get to this point. It's always too soon.

How did I become a writer?

I found that I started to write because I was stimulated by what I was into growing up. A lot of my ideas and interests have stemmed from games and films. I took a particular delight in the fantasy that presented itself to me. From Disney films to the Final Fantasy franchise and Star Wars, I always picked my favourite character to be and enact elaborate scenes of my own devising. My imagination was hooked on who I could possibly be the next time; of course I couldn’t just be plain old me.

When I got to the age of fifteen, I just had a sudden urge to write something down. I pulled myself away from the vast world of Final Fantasy XII and used a bunch of already established characters to make a story of my own. Their world, their characters, but my story and my understanding of what they were like. I poured weeks into this endeavour before I realised I wasn’t even writing about my favourite Final Fantasy game, so I started another story based on Final Fantasy VII. I spent more time on this story, adding in characters I created and places that weren’t seen in the games.

I always pestered my nan to read my scribbles and she kept asking if I were to get it published or if I could write something unique. So I did. I used these stepping stones to realise I could do all what they’ve done by myself.