To choose only three writers that have had, and continue to have, an influence on me, has been an interesting challenge. I decided, despite being in the main a playwright, not to choose any playwrights. It would be nigh on impossible to choose three playwrights as they all bring so much to the party. In terms not only of story and ideas but technical—the practical application of stage craft. Those elements fill a lot of my creative mind regarding writing plays.
So to take a step back from my day to day process and
three prose writers, all cracking storytellers, who continue to give clear
direction to my own writing. In the form
of ambition and a restless creativity,
Robert Louis Stevenson is my first choice. A restless man and storyteller, who worked
across what are now labelled genres, children’s; historical; travel books and
much more. I imagine he thought of them as
simply ways of telling a story. I love
all the classic tales: Treasure Island and Kidnapped but it is the short stories I constantly return to. To me
some of his best writing is to be found in such tales as The Beach of Falesa and Markheim. Two very different stories but a mark of how
Stevenson was not only a constant traveller but a constant creative explorer.
I only started reading Angela Carter a few years back
but from the off I felt a kinship to her writing and view of the world. A world rich in imagination and
monsters. Before the stories it was
probably the film of The Company of Wolves where I first
encountered her world. A way of looking
at the emotions of the world as far removed from what is termed realism as you
can imagine. I have always thought that
realism deals in the main with the surface of things, surrealism, the fairy
tale structure explored and expanded by Carter gets to the core of the human
condition. Book wise I started The Bloody Chamber. Not versions of fairy-tales but challenging
preconceptions about them including how women are represented in them.
From my first reading of J G Ballard I was
hooked. He explores a totally different
world from Angela Carter. He filters a recognizable
world and twists it into illuminating shapes uncovering desires, fears, the fluid
reality that lurks within. The Drowned World. was the first story I read and I go back to
it over and over again. It doesn`t flinch
in its telling.
DUMFRIES PLACE
I only moved to Dumfries in August last year, but The
River Nith in the Whitesands has very quickly became one of my favourite
places. I have written several poems
about that stretch of water but the inspiration is more to do with clarifying effect
it has on my creative mind. The
waterfall section is my favourite. I understand that the seagulls are not that
popular with some but they bring fascination to me as they, and other birds,
sit and play on the precipice of the waterfall.
They display no fear and maybe that is what draws me to this spot. To push on, explore, like the writers
mentioned above, like the water down the waterfall, go with power, flow and
energy of the narrative.
PANDEMIC COMMENT
I am lucky. I
have worked at home for over twenty years, mostly on my own, so I am used to life
indoors and my own company. I am used to
shutting things out and creating an internal landscape from which to work. Maybe that is why I don`t tweet, facebook or write directly the current
pandemic. It might in the course of
things emerge creatively further down the line.
Sometimes I feel the pressure to write about it but it would be false if
I did. I write what I write.
I am fascinated though by the writing produced whether
poetry, plays, or social media. Whatever
medium the writing takes these outpourings will be invaluable in years to
come. A million and more plague journals
all around the world. In the past there were
limited viewpoints about life lived during a plague or troubled
time, or any time really. As informative as these accounts often were they were
still limited in their perspective. So
much of the past is silent.
Now we have so many competing and contradictory at
times viewpoints, many a time from the same source. Maybe too much I don`t know
but better that silence I believe.
