I CAN ONLY BE ME—NO LABELS PLEASE.

 Why do I write?    

Good question?  Or irrelevant?

Haven`t made my mind up yet but here we go having a think about it by asking another question.

Who am I?

This?

Tom Murray was born in the village of Chapelhall which is a couple of miles from Airdrie, and fifteen or so from Glasgow. He worked in the Textile industry for a number of years in East Lothian and then in the Scottish Borders. After many years living in in the Scottish Borders recently moved to Dumfries.  He is married with two sons.

 

Or maybe

Tom Murray is a playwright, poet and fiction writer. His recent plays have been widely performed, his stories and poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies in Scotland and further afield.  He was co-editor of the Eildon Tree magazine from 2000-2011

I might be?

Tom Murray likes football and tennis (watching, the days of playing long since passed).  Coffee and cake.  He loves reading, and a good murder mystery featuring a disgruntled detective with a disastrous home life, especially if teamed with an enthusiastic rookie who is everything they were before turning cynical.

That last part about the detective I`m exaggerating but the truth is sometimes I do like those programmes and sometimes they annoy me.

To summarise I`m male, working class Scottish from the west coast,  worked in a factory for number of years while writing all the time, and since 1999 have been a professional full time writer. 

Sorted?  Do you know me now? Can you see all of me, or the above in my writings?  

Is the above the all of me? 

No it isn’t and I recognize some of me in the above.  Truth is still discovering who me, is!

How to do that through the writing?

Write what you know?  

Never sure of that as writing credo.  I understand the basis of it to write about your direct experience adding a dose of imagination and storytelling editing to distance it from straight memoir.

If I don`t know all of me how do I know what I know? 

This is why I don`t believe that memoir, autobiography or biography strictly exist in the space advertised.  No such thing as a ‘true’ story but a version from a particular angle still edited like any story told. Memoir to me is a question not an answer. 

Not saying the facts aren’t correct but there is always interpretation and that interpretation comes from emotion as well as intellect, and of course always after the fact, and with all the other history since the time of the facts described.

So I would rather write to discover what I haven`t discovered I know yet! And then question that knowledge.  Use my imagination to create a character who is complex and whose actual reality is shifting all the time even if they don`t acknowledge it. Characters are not me but built from my knowledge drawn from direct experience, vicariously through others, films, TV, books, in fact everything I have ever seen, heard or felt.

My plays and stories may not be about me but they come from me, and not any outside or spiritual mystical process.

Place:  I do not believe in place.  Reading about Brion Gysin at the moment and he is described as a foreigner in every land.  I feel that and am fine with it. 

I write in many ways to escape place, to disappear as an artist into the art, as Joyce`s description of the artist in Portrait of an Artist. To me that means disappearing from the potted biography of yourself.  To escape a singular defined identity free to explore the multitudes that is lived life.

I used to live in a house with a spectacular view.  Visitors commented on it all the time, and if they knew I was a writer assumed it would be a point of inspiration for me.

When I was alone I pulled the curtains so I didn`t see the view.  The landscape I needed was inside my head and consisted of all the landscapes I had witnessed and processed via walks, and visits, and holidays, through reading, movies and TV and other folk`s descriptions.

If I do have a preference it is for industrial landscapes rather than hills and glens.  It might have come from the fact that my father worked, and then owned a factory, and then I worked for many years in one.  I look for stories and find them where people are, and still are in their absence in a forgotten and desolate industrial complex. I don`t look for defined beauty but where the stories are to me.  If part of me inhabits these places as an emotional memory that is fine.  Like the example of the TV detective comment above, some days I`m drawn to this emotional memory other days I`m not.

My imaginative emotional landscape shifts and grows all the time.  That`s one of the reasons I write—to explore truthfully and without judgment that shifting landscape.

I believe this type of landscape is where people truly live daily but it is difficult to pin down.  I don`t need to pin it down.  I love the ebb and flow of it.  I appreciate the places I have lived, and where I was born and brought up, but they are each only a changing part of me. 

Does the need for an identifiable place in fiction come with age? Is that why it is assumed that fantasy and science fiction are the preserve mainly of the young?  We have no actual home only thoughts but in the end the need to believe we have is emotionally strong especially as the actual end comes into view.

Subject for a play I think? 

Magritte`s painting This is not a Pipe.

It is not a pipe; it is a painting of a pipe.

One of my poems My Father.

It is not my father it is a poem about a father. 

To summarise I`m male, working class Scottish from the west coast,  worked in a factory for number of years while writing all the time, and since 1999 have been a professional full time writer.

I am male but a lot of my characters are female because I write from emotions and everyone feels the same emotions of fear, anger, and joy.

I am working class but I write from the emotions everyone feels the same emotions of fear, anger, and joy.

I am Scottish but I write…

I want to go on and discover what I know, which I`ll never do because every day more is added. I`m fine with that.

Labels:  Male, Working Class, Scottish, husband, father, son, brother, cousin and on and on.

My writing can contain them all and none of them.   I can write realistic stories with a father the main character one day, a mother the next, or surreal stories of falling into your own head or waking up as a shadow.  I can write both types of story one after the other. 

No labels please, I can only be me.  Whoever that is.