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What made me think, 'I'll write a jolly old book then!'? I shall tell you....
November 2004 - the inciting incident
November 2004 - the inciting incident
The day I found the inspiration for my first book (and indeed inspiration to start writing!) is a very well-remembered event for me. It was something of an 'in-the-moment' conscious decision to be honest.
In November 2004, I was in my second to last year of my schooling. I was pacing up and down, at home, bored. (I’m a natural pacer. It helps me think.) My inner dialogue was basically having an argument about how to cure the boredom.
I'm naturally quite creative and I'm very good at art - fine art, that is. ...You know, paints and pencils and drawing etc. And this time I wanted something creative to do but I was getting sick of art.
But at that stage in my life - one year away from leaving school - the more pressing issue in my life, was not boredom. It was deciding on what to do for a career when I get out of school. At that point, I didn't have any plans, but I knew I would very soon be needing a plan. No one was talking to me about getting a job either, or 'what do you want to be when you grow up', so I really had no direction in this matter. But it was a big over-arching worry nagging at me in the back of my mind. I really didn't want to pay attention to it, but I had to. So did I?
Well, briefly. Somehow, the issue of solving my boredom problem crossed paths with career thinking. The result was something that I'm not sure was very good for one of those things, but certainly was good for the other.
Going from: 'I want to do something creative, but not art,' I somehow went into the filing cabinets in my head searching for things that inspire me.
Ah, I found King Arthur. Xena: Warrior Princess. Power Rangers. Lord of the Rings.
Translation: Warriors are cool. Knights and medieval stuff. Heroes. I like heroes. Characters on horse-back journeys. Yeah, these are cool things.
So... I found the inspiration but I didn't know what to do with it. I briefly entertained the idea of starting up horse-riding or sword-fighting. But in my reality at that time, those things were not really realistic options for me.
And the nagging at the back of my mind kept surfacing: "What are you thinking about King Arthur and fun stuff for? You should be thinking about your career!"
Ah, so my thoughts conveniently turned to: 'Ooh, be a historian or archaeologist, since you seem to like history - or at least the medieval stuff.'
Yay, the career planning thoughts were starting to find a grip! Something to work with! And... almost just as soon as that, I shut those thoughts down with, "Well, get a normal job, actually. Because you’re not going to be digging up any medieval knights in South Africa dumb dumb." (Arguably the best and worst advice I ever gave to myself.) And besides that, I acknowledged that historians and archaeologists need degrees - which was just something that was not going to be on my cards, unfortunately.
So the "career thoughts" swiftly dropped off. (And I was secretly glad because thinking about career thoughts is far more dull and boring than thinking about a hobby to cure boredom.)
So, next thing you know - bless my problem-solving brain: it suddenly reared back up with: "You know what. I'll write about it. Writing is simple enough. It's a free hobby. And I've dabbled before.
And the thoughts went:
> Write what?
> A story. A medieval one.
...
And that seemed like a good half-way solution to everything, really! Or at least I tried to convince myself that it would be. I rationalised that writing a story may not earn me a degree in a subject that interests me, but, what it will do is satisfy my interest in the topic at least on a surface level. Right? It should be fun. Boredom cured! While the other part of me (career! think of a career!) tried to rationalise that it's fine, I could allow myself to do this mere, paltry, unfitting, 'writing' hobby, as then I would presumably in the process of learning about what I write about, learn enough to become an academic on the subject. Like... I thought I could eventually learn enough - through my hobby - to write an encyclopedia on knights, or something.
Boy. Yeah, at this point I really needed someone to scoff at me and say, 'Yeah, sure, you just keep telling yourself whatever makes you happy, lady.'
Truth was, throughout that WHOLE thought process, career thinking me never had a chance. It was doomed to be side-lined from the get go, because my secret agenda against myself that whole time was: 'I just want to have FUN.'
So, behold, smiling inside that I had let myself get away with making the decision I had made, I wasted no time to crack open my imagination in a way that I can only describe as like splitting open the shell of a nut to see what was inside.
And what was inside, played out in my mind in what I suppose many of us writers describe as 'in movie format'. It was vague, and at the start it was almost like putting scenes together in stop-motion, until ther were enough of them to just roll on like a film. It was a scene of some kind of rider on a horse – a knight – galloping across a field. And he was bleeding or wounded in some way. And with every stop, my imagination threw up questions, why? what? As if it was asking me for more directions on where to go. Why was the knight riding? To where? I supposed that he seemed to have been riding away from something – battle maybe? Why? …In desperation to reach… a castle. Maybe? Why? To warn the people in the castle of the battle? ...Why? ...Where to next?
***
And here I am, over 20 years later. Still happily writing about that 'knight who was riding away from a battle', but I can't say much about my career, lol.
I guess you could say my imagination just... WENT.
So one day I went from:
‘I’m bored.’
To:
‘Future me shaking my head because I’ve unwittingly entered myself into a blood oath contract with myself that I shall for the next 500 years, be writing eight medieval fantasy books.’
And to think it was the thought process of a teenager - who was one year away from finishing school and didn’t yet have any other foreseeable direction mapped out for her after that - that started it all. What the heck, right? Start a new hobby and whatever else may come, let the rest of your life fall into place around it. (You don’t know how many times I’ve looked back, to be honest.)
Needless to say, that actual initiating scene? Do you think it actually made it into the final books? Hahaha. You’ll have to find out when the books come out.
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