Mike Murphy's writing diary: September 2014

Friday, 19 September 2014

I am a writer

When I was eighteen, which happens to have been more than half a century ago, I wrote a poem titled "Shall all my tears" which asked "Shall I be a writer?" and said "writers have a meaning, what meaning have I?". Borrowing from Omar Khayam, I concluded by wondering whether me tears would wash out every word.
Looking back I believe now I missed the point. Writers don't need any deep meaning, they just have an idea and the inner drive to shape words around it. More than that, they have the inner drive to write better, to work at their words to give that idea life.
The reason I am writing this today is that I have been thinking a lot lately about how I want my life to be in the fifteen or so years I probably have left of my life, and the one constant is that I want to be somewhere I can write. To that extent I can answer myself of 1959 that I have indeed become a writer. Not a published novelist, which I would have liked. Certainly a published short story writer, although none of my stories is likely to be studied in literature classes. I write. It's who I am. It's as simple as that and it's nothing to cry about.

Personality types

I Googled personality types and found a web site which sets out 16 different personality types according to the Myers Briggs code. I have no idea whether they are realistic, although I understand they are used by many companies to vet staff and allocated them to positions etc. For me, as a writer, they provide outlines for characters I can use. For example, one of my characters, Will, is a thinker, ex military analyst. One of the types outlines has just such a personality - always studies things carefully before making a decision etc. I can use these traits in my character to (a) differentiate him from other characters and (b) make him consistent throughout the novel. When I came to Debby, my main character, I could not find a type that matched, which possibly means I have created a character who does not fit any norm. I can't see anything wrong with that, so I have selected traits from a number of the personality types and used those to create my personality outline for Debby.The reason I needed to do this was that I wasn't sure that I was making her consistent. She was changing as she reacted to different situations I created instead of staying consistent in the way she reacted to them. Now I have an useful tool to check if I have her acting consistently or not.

Authors I like

Anna Jacobs

A mentor in my early writing days and still one of my favourite authors. Her sagas about family life in Lancashire are among my favourites but she is a prolific writer and it's all good.

Michael Robotham

Michael urged me to keep writing when I was in a depressed period after another publisher's knock-back. He is basically why I kept writing and turned to self-publishing. I've read all his books and I'm always waiting eagerly for the next one.

Dave Warner

I only recently discovered Dave as a writer after having had his Dave Warner and The Suburbs album since it was on vinyl. It's interesting having another writer who sets his stories in Western Australia.

Dick Francis

I've read all his books at least twice and sometime more often. He's the writer I always return to when I need to feel totally in my comfort zone. Good stories, tight plots, easy writing style. I'd love to know if it really was his wife Mary who wrote them. His son Felix is doing a great job of keeping the family business going.

Leslie Thomas

Ever since Virgin Soldiers I've been hooked on Leslie Thomas and his Dangerous Davies series are among my all-time favourites.

I am because I write

I come across a lot of people who would like to be writers and I often wonder why. For me there has been no question. Since a very young age I have been a writer. Certainly not a famous or even successful one but while other people were doctors or teachers or sportspeople, the thing I did best and was most comfortable doing was writing. For some reason I had a natural flair for it and that raw talent was honed when I became a journalist and learned that what bubbled out of my head was not what was needed. I had to to be able to write to order. One of my earliest lessons came from Bob Duffield, a reporter who took the story of the closure of Perth's Roe Street brothels and wrote different versions of it for convervative, sensationalist, religious and sociological publications. I learned that writing was a craft to be learned, and I have spent many years learning not only the craft of writing, but of story-telling, which is an art in itself. Whether it's a poem, a short story, a novel, my family history, one of my blogs or web sites, I will always be writing something. It's simply who I am and what I do.