Why I write

I remember barely any of the fiction I wrote prior to about 2014. This may seem strange, given I did creative writing at university between 2009–2012, but my mind just goes blank when I try and remember anything I submitted for marking because I have no emotional connection to any of it. There are a few exceptions. I wrote a short sketch for a class that I ended up including in a YouTube video almost a decade later. It was a parody horror film called ‘The Scary Thing that Didn’t Matter’ — it’s a traditional slasher film in which the protagonist simply couldn’t care less that his flatmates keep being murdered one by one.

“Everybody went to spend the night at the abandoned sawmill. I couldn’t be bothered to go with them, so I went to bed.”

I can’t remember what the assignment was, but I read it out in class, and everyone laughed, and I did too.

Almost everything else I wrote during this time is painful to think about though. I remember just staring at a blank word document week after week screaming at the inside of my brain “THINK OF SOMETHING. ANYTHING!”

I was so sure I was supposed to be a writer. I’m not sure where the idea came from. I have hazy memories of sharing my writing in school when I was a lot younger and making people laugh and becoming addicted to that sound. Problem is that laughter isn’t enough to form an emotional connection with people. Its fine for a while, but then it stops and then I don’t know what to say next, so any friends I had just started drifting out of my life when they realised I had nothing else to say.

My final piece I submitted at university was about a student who gets possessed by an alien parasite that forces him to finish his assignments because it feeds off of human productivity. I can’t remember the mechanics of this parasitic relationship. Its blatantly obvious where the idea came from, but I really had to force myself to write it. I got a decent mark. I probably still have a copy of it somewhere but there is no way I am ever publishing it under any circumstances because its inextricably tied to who I was at the time, and I like to think the version of me from university is a bad dream.

After university, I didn’t write anything noteworthy for years. I spent most of this time finding and then getting used to full time work. I made review-based content on my YouTube channel, but this need in me to write fiction had basically dried up because it had been so difficult at university, and I couldn’t find any ideas that really spoke to me.

The creative bug didn’t hit me again until September 2014. I’d moved out the previous summer and now my parents were selling my childhood home, so I spent a few weekends clearing the house out of anything that belonged to me. By clearing out I mean I just cycled back and forth between the old house and my new house with rubbish bags full of stuff that stayed strewn across my living room floor for weeks on end until my girlfriend insisted I get rid of things that I didn’t want anymore. I couldn’t be bothered to do it myself, so she started sorting things into charity bags that she’d leave outside for collection each week, checking with me when I got home whether it was okay to give something away. In this sorting, she accidentally gave away a stuffed giraffe that her mother had given me for a birthday at some point because she couldn’t think of what else to get me and she knew I liked giraffes. I have this thing about stuffed toys where I can’t give them away because I imagine that Toy Story style, they come to life when I’m out of the room and are friends. I don’t know why I’ve carried this obvious delusion with me ever since childhood. Anyway, I felt sad about the stuffed toy and my childhood home, and that sadness carried on into the week when at work, our printer randomly died, and I was the one who had to throw it away.

Then suddenly, on a Thursday later that week, as I was walking up to the building, that sadness I was feeling about the previous incidents collided with the recent printer incident, and a story came out. Almost possessed, I entered the building, got to my desk, got some admin things out of the way, and immediately wrote a short story called ‘Be Brave, Printer, Old Friend’. It was set in a world where companies install artificial consciousness in their appliances to make customers feel bad if they don’t buy them.

“Please buy me! Or I’ll feel sad.”

The story is about a man who works at an office (an obvious self-insert character) who’s friends with a talking office printer. The office printer breaks and has to be thrown away and is protesting the entire time.

“Please don’t throw me out! What’s a printer like me supposed to do on the streets? I don’t even have legs! I can’t go anywhere!”

I had managed to channel this quiet devastation I felt at the donated stuffed toy, the loss of my childhood home and a broken printer into a story that actually made me feel proud of what I’d written for the first time, well, ever. This wasn’t just something that had made someone laugh once. I felt like I’d achieved something. My girlfriend giving away that stuffed giraffe turned out to be a pivotal moment in my life. I went on to make the story into a cartoon for my YouTube channel.

I didn’t know at the time if it was just going to be a one-off incident or not. I didn’t put pressure on myself to do anything else. I was proud of it, but I let it go until about three months later.

Around December 2014, I’d recently a made a big error in a YouTube review I’d posted about Doctor Who, panicked, deleted the video, and made a promise to my viewers that I’d re-upload a fixed version and continue when I’d calmed down. I wasn’t used to getting attention for my online content. I’d spent years posting online content as just ‘something to do’, never expecting anyone watch it at all, let alone respond, and now I’d gained a small subscriber base and I had more scrutiny on my work, I felt embarrassed by it, especially when it came to some videos where I admittedly was a bit too forthright in my opinions. In some ways it felt like me life was ‘over’ because I’d made a bad YouTube video, even though it obviously wasn’t. Barely anyone was watching me. I still had a job. I had a roof over my head. The sky wasn’t falling in, but I felt like it was.

In my panicked state, I imagined a world where a robot follows you around quoting bits of your internet history at random moments in conversation, with the intention of letting everyone know how interesting you really are, but with the (again, obviously self-insert) character, the robot starts quoting some more uncomfortable forum-posts from the man’s teenage years in awkward situations like job interviews.

“P-please, come on; I’ve grown up a lot since I posted that! Honestly, who’s never posted something online that they regretted later?”

“Why on earth would you go ahead and do something if you’re going to regret it later?”

“Yes, that sounds ludicrous!”

The story was called ‘The Internet Always Remembers’. I also went on to make this as a cartoon on YouTube.

I wrote it around the time I was reading articles about young footballers having social media posts from years ago being exposed by journalists. Something stupid they said online when they were as 14 year old kids was supposed to represent who they were as 21 year old men. This is what we now refer to as ‘cancel culture’, something journalists are now typically against, when it was actually their industry that pioneered this tactic of taking something someone said years ago as representative of who they are in the present day.

I was observing the start of a trend that is unique to the social media era. If you said something stupid when you were 18 in 1976 and then grew up, learned from it, and cringed at what you used to be like on reflection, there was no evidence you were ever like that. Now, the internet records your past self for posterity. If you say something stupid, there’s no getting away from it.

I’d successfully channelled how I was feeling about my online content into fiction while commenting on a recent trend. This seemed to be the pattern to what I was doing.

It was about here at the dawn of 2015 where I hit the problem of when something works, I end up putting pressure on myself to repeat it, when that’s not a method that’s conducive to creativity. Ideas like these have to come directly from an experience or an emotion I’m feeling at the time. This was why I’d struggled for so long to write anything I’d consider meaningful, either to me or other people. I couldn’t write anything good at university because barely anything had happened to me at 21, or at least barely anything meaningful. I just made people laugh occasionally. States of high emotion get me writing. I’ve got to feel sad, scared or angry.

I published the printer story on a blog and the story was stolen and published by someone on Amazon. I contacted their customer services and got an automated response that said they weren’t going to take the listing down. I had to get my YouTube subscribers to post negative reviews until an actual human saw it and deleted the listing.

I ended up writing a story about this incident. It’s about a robot that works at a delivery company that can’t understand a complaint because it always assumes the system is always correct.

“I asked him for more information about his issue. He replied telling me that I was an incredibly fucking stupid machine if I couldn’t figure out what the words: “YOU SENT MY PARCEL TO THE WRONG HOUSE” meant.”

I kept really struggling to get ideas out over the next couple of years. I’d occasionally stumble across ideas but wouldn’t feel enthused to write them in the moment.

I had two ideas in 2016 where I wrote a couple of paragraphs and sat on them for a while.

One was about a truck driver who’d been made redundant since robots replaced human drivers. He had to hitchhike and ended up hitchhiking with a robot truck driver.

I didn’t have a way into this story until November that year when unexpectedly, Trump won the 2016 US presidential election and there were all these news pieces talking about the “economically left behind” — workers who had been made redundant, usually because of automation, but obviously the Republican machine was directing them towards immigrants. The shock of the Trump presidency and what I was reading at the time collided, and that caused me to finally finish the story where the truck driver ends up having a friendly conversation with the robot truck driver. I ended up getting it published in an anthology put out by a politically motivated anti-Trump small press. That was the first time I’d gotten my work out there through a means that wasn’t self-publishing.

You may have noticed that all of these stories are about robots. I wrote a whole book’s worth of stories like this at the time. It’s still sitting in my junk drawer somewhere. I might publish it at some stage, but I feel a bit disconnected from these stories now because the reason I felt compelled to write about robots was because I’d only just started full time work doing the same repetitive tasks day in, day out, and I ended up feeling like a robot. As my writing has matured and I’ve put more of my emotions into my work, I don’t really feel like a robot anymore.

The second idea I had around this time that took a while to fully gestate was a story called ‘End Credits’. I was watching a John Oliver segment where he comments on a news story which outlined about Trump’s agenda and a list of Trump’s policies scrolled up the screen, Oliver commented they were “sort of like the end credits of America”.

I then had an idea for a story where the end credits of all of humanity start randomly scrolling across the sky one day and everyone’s trying to figure out what’ll happen when the credits reach the end. It took me a while to figure out what it was trying to say. It wasn’t until the middle of 2017 when we were all coping with the experiences of 2016 that I understood the route into the story. My job was becoming more difficult because of Brexit uncertainties, the future was looking bleak, but life just moved on as normal. So in this world where the end credits scroll across the sky, obviously, given just how many humans have existed, they would take decades to finish scrolling. Everyone would have to carry on with their lives in such a bleak scenario where the end of human existence was just scrolling across the sky. I wrote it from the perspective of a family who have kids, the kids grow up, have kids of their own and a parent dies all in the time the end credits are scrolling. Its not a story about the credits themselves, it’s about the people. I also ended up making it into a cartoon on my YouTube channel. I’m proud of that one.

It was around here that I realised I wanted to start shifting my focus so my stories aren’t just high concepts anymore, they actually have people in them that feel real. The only problem was, how do I create characters that feel real to me?

I really struggled for ideas over the next few years, and I think that’s because while all these stories were rooted in channelling my emotions, there is a degree to which I was hiding from some real experiences I was carrying with me.

It took me until about 2019 when I started therapy to find there was nothing to be scared of in writing fiction based on real things that had happened to me. They didn’t have to be completely rooted in real things; it wasn’t as if I wanted to just write autobiographical pieces (like this piece you’re reading now). I could still use metaphorical scenarios, but if I started using emotional truths rooted in real things that had happened to me, I’d be more satisfied with what I was writing.

I’d had an idea a few years prior set in a world where Christmas and Easter have swapped places. Instead of wearing Santa hats, people wear plastic crowns of thorns and give each other Easter presents. It was just an image at first. I didn’t have a route in. It took until I released this need to avoid my past experiences to find a form for the story.

I based it on my memories of the last weekend I saw my Granddad before he died suddenly. I’m fairly sure it was around Easter. He died the weekend after we saw him.

I wrote the story from the perspective of a man reminiscing about the last weekend he saw his granddad, set in this world where Easter and Christmas have swapped places. The granddad has an unnamed terminal illness and the family perform a ritual where they crucify him by threading fairy lights through his stigmata. It had the bizarre and grotesque elements typical of my style, but it also had a basis in a real experience. Its probably my favourite thing I’ve ever written. I particularly like the line where they leave granddad outside to prepare for the ritual and shut the door. The kid asks why granddad can’t come inside, and his dad says this in response.

“Granddad lives outside now, son.”

Ever since this story I’ve always had characters saying strange things as if it’s completely normal. Again, its a cartoon on my channel. I released the cartoon on Easter Sunday 2020. Lockdown had happened about a couple of weeks beforehand and I spent the first week on furlough finishing it.

That last weekend with my granddad also spawned a more recent story I wrote in 2022. The last time I saw him, he was trying to get me to read a book about planes or something, and I said wasn’t interested (I was about 8 and it looked complicated). Then when he died, somehow my brain connected the two events and it felt like I was in some warped way responsible for his death because I’d shown no interest in that book.

I ended up writing a story called ‘The Advent Calendar’ about a kid who wakes up on the 1st of December and finds a mysterious advent calendar on the wall of his room, and every time he opens a door, something bad happens. It starts out small, he breaks a window, his bike gets stolen, but gets worse and worse leading up to Christmas Eve. I made this one as an episode of my storytelling podcast ‘Abnormal Stories’.

I seem to be moving away from prose at the moment. I’ve spent the last year and a half on my next short film. Its called ‘Got Your Nose’ and its about a man whose uncle stole his nose during a game of got your nose when he was very young, and now he’s grown up genuinely believing that he has no nose. It’s a stupid idea, but I’ve played it deadly serious. That seems to be my style. Take a silly idea but play it straight. I think its rooted in the fact I struggled for years to take my emotions seriously. I felt like a big joke, so if I take a joke seriously, it’s like I’m taking myself seriously.

Writing can be a form of therapy. I may not have made much money from it, but the main reason for doing it is it’s a great way of finding, understanding and taking care of an elusive part of myself that won’t typically come out in general conversation. That’s what separates all the shit I wrote at university from what I write now. I was so focused on wanting to write that I didn’t understand why I wanted to write.