Week 2 - Is there any place for the truth in writing?

I chiefly read and write in the interest of escapism. Hence why so much of the writing I consume and produce involves fantastic locales and larger-than-life characters. From an early age, I remember not being able to understand the appeal in something that echoes what the reader likely already sees every day. My opinion on the matter has grown a tad more complex in the years since, of course, as I now understand that a basis of truth can be required to spin a convincing fabrication.

George Orwell's description of the "beetle-like" men in Nineteen Eighty-Four was likely influenced by the author's experiences working in the Ministry of Information, among many other parts of the novel. Orwell started with his own experiences, his own truths, and used them as a seed from which to mould an extreme but not entirely implausible vision of a possible future. In a tragic twist, his prophecy may have become somewhat self-fulfilling. In this way, it could be said that a truth gave rise to a non-truth, which then ultimately helped create another truth.

Maybe that's the power of writing, though. I'd bet good money that half the world's astronomers and physicists spent their entire youth with their faces buried in Frank Herbert novels or pressed up against an image of William Shatner. A playful yet respectful attitude to the truth can indirectly affect other truths. So not only is there arguably a place for truth in writing, the effects of said writing on the truth should not be underestimated.

Week 1 - How is it I became a writer?

This question makes about as much sense as asking how it is a person became an adult; much as there is no discernible moment when you cease to be a child and are now fully-grown, surely there's no one instant where a switch is pulled and a non-writer becomes a writer? Short of being forced at gunpoint to pen a novel, it seems an unlikely scenario. It might be more fitting to ask about my history regrading writing in general.

In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Margaret Atwood refers to a Japanese novel in which a man copes with a dire situation by talking to himself in his head. This echoes deeply with me, as I recall wandering the playground, acting out scenes from my multitude of doomed novel attempts, all of which were quite suspiciously similar to various media products.

Like many children of the nineties, I was brought up with Roald Dahl books and the various film adaptations of them. The latter in particular I tortured my parents with endlessly. But it was as I approached teendom that I discovered K A Applegate's Animorphs series, chronicling the adventures of shape-shifting adolescents who must battle both aliens and acne across approximately seven thousand books.

While all organisms may have to conform to their genes, I believe the experiences of life play the largest part in moulding our tastes and fears. I was raised on science fiction and videogames, and thus it should surprise nobody that my earliest recollections of writing involved flagrant clones of Pokemon and Stargate. Things just snowballed from there.