Archive Stories - Just some more insight on the Storm Writers

Jean-Nicol Chelmiah

Summer 2008, I went to see a film at the Renoir, it was Julian Schnabel's live recording of Lou Reed performing the album 'Berlin' from start to finish: the follow up to his most famous and successful solo album 'Transformer' and released somewhere around 1974. It got panned by critics and punters alike. A huge disaster, so much so he vowed never to perform any tracks off it again, a promise he kept until 2008, by which time the world had caught up with the genius of that album and now revered it as a masterpiece. I originally heard it when I was thirteen and loved it. It was, and still is, one of the biggest and most important records I own for so many reasons.

Halfway through the last song, and after re-falling in love with Lou Reeds lyrics, I whispered to myself 'I need to write.' The words that fell from my lips were a complete shock to me and I had no idea what I wanted to write, whether it be poems, prose or the greetings you get in cheap  birthday cards. I had never even thought about writing before that moment, but pretty much since then it has taken over my life. Hindsight tells me that the epiphany was actually a long time in the making. I had got to an age where I seen a lot, done a lot, learnt perhaps a little and I had something to say. I was bored of working in the music industry, something I had done well at for fifteen years or so. I knew I had a couple years grace with royalties from record sales so I decided to become a writer. Here I am x

--------------------------------

Hi my name is Phil Ryan.

I started writing when I was nine. I wrote short stories. And I used to read them to my friends. Like any kid I was influenced by books I liked, things I saw on television. I loved Star Trek and Lost in Space. Bright American fantasies. But my favourite two books back then were Stig of the Dump and The Chronicles of Narnia. Escapist books you could call them I suppose. My childhood was great but life in my family home wasn’t so good. So I escaped into words. I found emotions in these other worlds. And it saved me. Even now, so many books, plays, poems and short stories later I think back to my little room. Me at my small table. My biro scratching out adventures and ghost stories. The world a million miles away. And it started a fire inside me. A love of words. Of stories. Of other places. Places here in the world. Adventures. Mysteries. And the fire still burns brightly. Read me. My words come alive then. Thank you.

-------------------------------

Luke Brady

Right. I’ve got no fancy metaphors to use or some amazing back story to tell, just the simple story of my childhood. Reading and writing have always interested me greatly, ever since I was a little kid at school. I used to write my own short stories, and often in English lessons, when we were asked to do a project or something similar, my first choice was to write a story.

 I’ve always been told that I have an incredible imagination and to be honest it’s true. Anyway, when I reached my teens, I sort of lost my way a little bit. I was more interested in video games, TV and hanging out with my friends than reading or writing. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just forget it completely, but at that time I thought I had better things to do. When I turned 16, I had an important choice to make regarding the future. Initially, I went to college but left after two days because I hated it so much. I guess cooking just wasn’t for me. That was when I realised exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write.

I wanted to give people the opportunity to lose themselves in a created world which can’t possibly exits, much like I had done as a child through Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. I promised myself that I would make a successful career as a writer one way or another, and I wouldn’t give up. Three years later, I’m still trying, and I have no intentions of giving in just yet.

The way I see it, I’m very similar to, say, a singer. They say that they’ve been singing all their life and when they get to the right age, they decide that they want to break into the music business. That’s exactly the same for me, but writing instead of singing. Does that count as a fancy metaphor? Ahh man. Bad times.

----------------------------------

My name is Marva Longmore

I started writing when I was twelve, songs mainly. I’d dance and sing into a comb in front of the mirror, and then it progressed into poetry. As a child I was curious about everything in life. My passions were Movies, Music, Sports and Writing. I’d lose myself in movies all the time, even when my parents pulled the plug, and told me to go to bed, I’d sneak back into the living room to watch movies until the early hours. The library was my second home. I’d get thrown out for staying after closing time.  My favourite books are: Flowers and Shadows and The Famished Road by Ben Okri. Favourite quote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy. Writing is a God given gift, for which I’m eternally grateful. It came out of a need to express myself about the world. I love the written word and the challenges it presents. Writing for me is a way of life. I’m hooked.

Thank you.

---------------------------------

I started to write because I love to read.

By the same token, I started to play music because I loved to listen to it. If my particular set of aptitudes had been slightly different, I’d have gotten more seriously into photography and painting and drawing because I like to look at pictures – and I did indeed draw quite enthusiastically in my childhood – but it was the music and the words which won. It was, I suppose, therefore inevitable that I’d end up spending the majority of my professional life combining the two loves by writing about music.

In the words of Steve Martin, ‘Some people just have a way with words and others ... uhhh ... not have way.’ You have twenty-six letters, ten numbers, a bunch of symbols and punctuation marks and ... uhhh ... that’s IT. With those at your disposal, you can encapsulate all human knowledge and every thought which has ever occurred to any human being who has ever lived – not to mention the thoughts and knowledge which are unique to you – and you can do so in a form which is instantly comprehensible to any literate English-speaking person.

They, by the same token, can immediately communicate anything they can think, feel or know to you.

Language is the first and best and most versatile tool which our species has ever created. I own it. So do you.

Charles Shaar Murray

------------------------------

Dave Ford

Why did I start to write? Computers and printers that needed using for something. I may have started sooner but for my inability to spell. The spell checker freed me from the fear of ridicule and the printed page made my erratic scrawl redundant.

I was a London Mini Cab driver. People would tell me things that amused me. I would amuse others both with my own tales and recalling those told to me. So many times it ended with the line: ‘You should write a book’.

The writing was however a substitute for my first love of song writing. Poets are songwriters who can’t think of a tune. I could put the tune to the words on a PC. Prose was somehow prosaic.

Add humour to the mix for maximum “memorability”. Once I could film my own comedy music videos the PC finally did all I could ask.

Mobile phones killed cabbing: banter replaced by dreary phone conversations. The customers gained nothing from the experience other than a change of location and all I got was paid. I had no material.  The story ended. Like Voltaire’s Candide or Radiohead: pretty house, pretty garden, no alarms and no surprises… silence.

--------------------------------

I wish I had one of those epiphany moments where the light bulb above my head lit up and that thought bubble appeared stating ‘I want to be a writer’. But it didn’t. To tell the truth I can’t pin point a moment when I wanted to write, I just always did. My lyric writing developed before my other creative writings. I learned guitar at fourteen and found writing songs (like writing in general) an emotional outlet. When I was having a mental block with melodies I would write poetry instead. I considered lyrics and poetry the same thing before I went to university. Doing a creative writing degree at Kingston University has really helped me to hone my skills. I consider myself better at shorter forms such as poetry or lyric writing but the degree has helped to expand into short stories and prose writing. I am still a very young writer and I am still learning a lot about writing and ‘finding my voice’ but I am devoted to this learning curve and I don’t want it to end.

Sheila Lord

-----------------------------------

Iqbal Chowdhury

Here’s the typical, average, but somewhat hypothetical sort of scenario that might inspire me to write: It’s the weekend and prime time to brainstorm. I have a bit of a lie in, mainly to try and grasp the last fragments of that dream, hoping that it might be brought to life. Good dreams have evaded me since I was a kid, and I am annoyed that this rarity is suddenly disturbed by sirens outside. At this point I realise that even the criminals have started work before me. I grab my laptop, and spend the next hour online, subconsciously feeding my subconscious so that it might permeate through to my conscious, and generate something. It’s not really working so I head out to Starbucks. On my way back I wonder if this daily mocha fix is driven by a more sinister ingredient. If Coca-Cola once put cocaine in their drinks, Starbucks sure as hell could. Then I bump into a dishevelled looking man. I buy his ‘Big Issue’ as I want him to enjoy a hot beverage in the freezing weather. As I walk home I start regretting not talking to him, and asking how his day was, or even how he ended up on the streets. So I decide to do the next best thing. That is, write up, all the ways that he might’ve ended up there.

There. You have it.

----------------------------------

Hi my name is Angela Kecojevic

I have always had an overactive imagination and trust me, its fun. I remember reading in the first Harry Potter book when the cat turns, very unexpectedly, into Professor McGonagall. That is exactly what a creative imagination should be like. It was about time someone brought back the magic into children’s fiction.  Reading the works of Dahl and Blyton was incredibly exciting and several years ago I decided it was time I stopped thinking about writing and actually got on with creating my own little piece of magic. I studied hard to learn the skills needed in the highly competitive market of children’s writing.  Once the first draft was complete I posted it onto a writer’s site and used the feedback, good and bad, to polish and shape my work. Writing has opened so many doors for me and it’s great getting paid for something I love. Favourite all time book has to be The Hobbit. Tolkien had a phenomenal imagination and was a true genius at his craft. The whole world of writing is fascinating and I’m so lucky to be a part of it.

-------------------------------------

 Many people after reading my work have asked me the question, why do I write? Well, the most honest no-nonsense response to that question would be because I am Alive and even more important than that, I simply feel compelled to do so......commanded and guided by unseen spirits and voices. Writing is my way of approaching this tremendous gap between how life should be, albeit from the writer’s point of view and the myriad ways that it does fall short of that great promise. As a sensitive and intelligent poet I am very keenly aware of what Life should be in an idealistic sense. Writing is simply a means to bridge that chasm that exists between what life in actuality is and what it should Be and so much more...In other words writing for me is a golden means to a possibly nobler end. 

S. Mondal

------------------------------------

My relationship with writing is like that of an old, bickering married couple. I fell madly in love with books and stories when I was very young, devouring the works of Roald Dahl, Michael Rosen, Lewis Carroll and others with a disturbing zest. My interests turned from reading to writing at the age of about sixteen when I attempted a couple of scripts and short stories, which were well received by schoolmates, giving me encouragement to study the discipline at university. These early efforts were lost in the great Hard Drive Fail of 2001 – which, in hindsight, is probably a good thing.

By now I had identified comedy as my genre of choice, and realised fairly early into my university career that writing was pretty much the only feasible career that interested me. I tried to be interested in finance or IT, but it was clear fairly quickly that I had got writing pregnant and, as a result, I had no choice but to do the honourable thing and marry it – for better or for worse. I know it will never make me rich, and it often drives me to the verge of insanity, but it’s the only life for me.

Mark Hunter

----------------------------------------

I began writing stories as a child. I remember writing a war story when I was seven after seeing a film on the Second World War with my older brother. It involved exciting tank battles, loud, cumulative explosions and determined ranks of unflinching Tommies walking towards certain death.. I tried to put the thoughts and feelings created by the film into a narrative.

Later, I became obsessed with words. Words resonate with all aspects of life, emotional and intellectual. Words examine and create our relationship with the world as well as with each other.

But narrative is not a simple matter. Our world is structured by assumptions of cause and effect, of destiny, fate, of personality and character. We require things to carry meaning and sustain an illusion of wholeness. Narrative provides an accepted solidity to everyday experience. Stories, whether of a religious nature, or group myth and family myth, establish our individual worlds. As children we learn that everything, imaginary or real, is related to each other.

We behave in accordance with the narratives around us. TV Soaps shape our experience, as much as Shakespeare and War and Peace. Then again, Soaps also reshape the latter into a modern context.

It is wrong to believe the story. If we enjoy it then we have accepted a convention or a way of presenting the world. The familiarity of the words reinforces our experience.

So, that’s it then. Stories allow us to experience the world completely, so that our experiences are no longer contingent but assume value. Narratives make the world ‘real’. Our day to day interaction with the world becomes permanent or semi-permanent.

Stanley Wilkin

-------------------------------------------

I have always been a storyteller – I once told my son’s friends a ghost story for Halloween and one of them sleeps with the light on to this day. If I tell you that my son is thirty, perhaps you get the idea of how scary that story was! But mostly I stuck to the oral tradition. One day, though, on our way to visit the aforementioned son – who was once the subject of a Facebook group ‘Is Tali an elf?’ - at university we stopped for lunch at one of those out of town shopping malls. While I waited for my husband to bring the food, a beautiful couple walked by, pushing a totally hideous baby in a buggy. As if choreographed, from the other direction came a hideous couple, with a totally beautiful baby in a buggy. Cue the little old man dressed all in green, carrying a box under his arm and muttering; he just had to be a leprechaun with his stash of gold, surely. Looking across the open square, I saw an old lady talking to a pigeon. I mean, really talking to a pigeon, leaving gaps for replies and everything. By the time my husband got back with the sandwiches, I was already scribbling on a napkin and so the world of Pandemonium was born and it has never really left me since.

Carol Trow 

(Carol is under Maryanne Coleman on the site) 

---------------------------------------------

If I don't write, then the words mingle about in my head for a while like people in a shopping centre.  If I still don't write, then the amount of words increase, and they start colliding until soon there is a full blown riot going on inside of my head giving me a migraine.  So you see, writing is not a choice for me, it is a necessity.  I have been keeping diaries ever since I was thirteen. Perhaps this is why much of what I write now is conversational and intimate.   In fact the other day I stumbled across my old diaries and had them all scattered across the floor in my bedsit, with me sitting in the middle surrounded by a sea of my own words.  It is the strangest thing to read over something you wrote when you were just thirteen years old.  At that moment I realised that I was “The Diary Girl” and that everything I have ever written falls into one major big writing project!  So now, I am in the throes of re-drafting and compiling a series of blog-to-book projects as part of my new Diary Girl Series.  It’s a lot of fun, and my head is currently a nice empty space.

Zara Mohammed

-------------------------------------------------

I know that there is nothing I can say to convince you that the reasons as to why I write are in anyway different or shocking. Instead I will tell you quite calmly, and I hope that by the end of reading this you will understand that I have yet again forced my view of the world upon you.

I would be lying if I said that I was kept up all night , if I had daily existential crises that have turned me in on myself and left me with no human contact, and that my only friend, the pen, talks to me.

The reason why I tap at the keys left on my keyboard and scribble into various different notebooks in different handwriting each time is because I am filled with a stark jealousy and frustration. I am in awe of how the work of impeccable writers makes me feel. I want that ability for myself and I want to install that sense of encapsulation in people, the sense  that the world can be written and that truth can be told. Though am I getting anywhere near the truth or writing to fuel the endless fire of the ego? I once read: “Always remember that the thing you love is language, poetry... not yourself as a poet.” This is why I write, because there is a fine line between everything.

Jake Attree