To introduce myself, here’s a touch of fun. This introduction is made up of 29 opening lines from fiction, altered to explain why I'm here. Can you identify their origins?
***
It is a truth universally acknowledged that every forum, in possession of a new member, must be in want of an introduction.
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other post.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I lurked before here, and what life was like before my Creative Writing degree, and how I was stuck reading Dickens before I joined, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, and I rather feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
You see, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded writer.
Call me tojeem.
I am an Australian, Perth born—Perth, that humble city—and go at things as I have been taught, highly styled, and will make the record in my learned way: first to write, first read; sometimes an innocent passage, sometimes not so innocent.
Fiction—light of my life, fire of my heart.
I am a young man who writes alone in a room in Western Australia and I have gone sixty-one days now without taking a break.
But it wasn’t love at first write.
In in my younger and more vulnerable years Tolstoy gave me some advice (more or less) that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Happy writers are all alike; every unhappy writer is unhappy in his own way.”
They say when trouble comes, write, and so I did.
My prose was dead, to begin with.
And the first time I wrote fiction, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the play to the floor.
My failures left me sad and gloomy.
It was somewhere around midday on the edge of a twelfth-grade school day when the realisation began to take hold.
The final dying sounds of the performance of my work left my tired classmates with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of a packed classroom.
The teacher was spiteful.
But you will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of the performance which I have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Because I was beginning to get very tired of sitting by my classmates, and of having nothing to do: once or twice I had peeped into my play, but it had no themes or convincing characterisation in it, “and what is the use of fiction,” I thought, “without themes or convincing characterisation?”
"Fiction won't be fiction without any depth," I grumbled, lying on the grass.
An inspiration came across the sky:
Fiction is a foreign country, they do things differently there.
And you must be a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, writing, not thinking.
My shyness died that day.
I said, "if this writer can’t do it, then f*** it, it can’t be done."
It was the day my enthusiasm exploded.
Years later, I sat in the classroom of my Creative Writing major and waited for justice; vengeance on the immaturity that had so cruelly hurt my prose, that had tried to stop me writing.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my favourite writing, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, my efforts must show.
***
It is a truth universally acknowledged that every forum, in possession of a new member, must be in want of an introduction.
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other post.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I lurked before here, and what life was like before my Creative Writing degree, and how I was stuck reading Dickens before I joined, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, and I rather feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
You see, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded writer.
Call me tojeem.
I am an Australian, Perth born—Perth, that humble city—and go at things as I have been taught, highly styled, and will make the record in my learned way: first to write, first read; sometimes an innocent passage, sometimes not so innocent.
Fiction—light of my life, fire of my heart.
I am a young man who writes alone in a room in Western Australia and I have gone sixty-one days now without taking a break.
But it wasn’t love at first write.
In in my younger and more vulnerable years Tolstoy gave me some advice (more or less) that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Happy writers are all alike; every unhappy writer is unhappy in his own way.”
They say when trouble comes, write, and so I did.
My prose was dead, to begin with.
And the first time I wrote fiction, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the play to the floor.
My failures left me sad and gloomy.
It was somewhere around midday on the edge of a twelfth-grade school day when the realisation began to take hold.
The final dying sounds of the performance of my work left my tired classmates with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of a packed classroom.
The teacher was spiteful.
But you will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of the performance which I have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Because I was beginning to get very tired of sitting by my classmates, and of having nothing to do: once or twice I had peeped into my play, but it had no themes or convincing characterisation in it, “and what is the use of fiction,” I thought, “without themes or convincing characterisation?”
"Fiction won't be fiction without any depth," I grumbled, lying on the grass.
An inspiration came across the sky:
Fiction is a foreign country, they do things differently there.
And you must be a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, writing, not thinking.
My shyness died that day.
I said, "if this writer can’t do it, then f*** it, it can’t be done."
It was the day my enthusiasm exploded.
Years later, I sat in the classroom of my Creative Writing major and waited for justice; vengeance on the immaturity that had so cruelly hurt my prose, that had tried to stop me writing.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my favourite writing, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, my efforts must show.
