Mike Murphy's writing diary: A fitting end

Sunday 28 February 2021

A fitting end

I struggled over the ending of the final story for my anthology until yesterday, when I realised it had to finish with an inconclusive ending. The anthology is my life in short stories, a chronological account of stories I have written since my first when I was in my teens. Since my life is not over, it follows that the ending of the last story leaves the future open to speculation. Moreover, the last story is the most autobiographical, it tells of a elderly man travelling on coach tours, looking for something or someone as I have been doing in the past year.

After throwing out a few which I did not think were worth including, the anthology now consists of 27 stories totalling just short of 80,000 words. They range widely in subject matter and are not confined to any genre. I have no idea what readers will make of them, but my aim is simple - having written so many stories over the years I want to see them in print instead of gathering dust in a drawer. Hopefully my great grandsons, Noah and Cooper, and their descendants, will one day read them and have some idea what sort of person they are descended from. That's probably a vain hope, but it is one that gives me a good feeling.

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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.