Behind the Curtain - Writing Advice
| Subscribe to Dean Murray's Mailing List |
|
Joining the mailing list will let me keep you in the loop as new stories are released. Additionally, people on the mailing list will get neat extras from time to time. |
As you explore the various pieces of information I've posted here, most of you will no doubt be able to glean more about me than you ever wanted to know. On the off chance that there are a few who are curious about what drives a normally private person to post their views and thoughts where complete strangers can read them, I thought I'd include a short bit about how I got started writing.
I don't know that I can talk about how I came to love writing without first covering how I came to love reading.
I didn't always love to read, but I remember listening to my mom read bedtime stories to us long before I even knew the alphabet. That very well could have been the furthest my appreciation for storytelling went if not for the fact that even in kindergarten I was searching for a girlfriend.
Of course I wasn't looking in the same sense that a teenager is looking, but I didn't have the normal aversions to females that you usually see in little boys. At the time I had my heart set upon a little girl that was on my same bus route, but although I did get invited to one birthday party, she seemed much more interested in her neighbor.
I spent most of the next little while trying to come up with a way to convince her that I was much better match for her than he was. My efforts principally revolved around making sure that I was a faster runner runner than him, which served to impress her not at all.
That probably should have been the end of it, but in second grade the three of us shared the same class and my jealousy flared up a bit once again. Things came to a head (for me if no one else) when our teacher put up a paper tree on the bulletin board and announced that she would let us put a leaf up on it for every so many pages we read that year.
A day or two later my little rival pulled a fairly massive (for a second grader) book out of his backpack and told me that he was going to read it and have more leaves on the tree than anyone else. That statement sparked my competitive nature and I resolved right then and there that I wasn't going to 'read' him into the ground.
I read, and I read, and somewhere along the line I found that not only had I far surpassed him, and I think everyone else in the class, with regards to the number of leaves on the tree, I'd also developed a love of reading that has stayed with me since.
I loved the way that a book could instantly transport me to a different place, one where the characters, and by extension me, were accomplishing all kinds of amazing, oftentimes heroic, tasks. When I didn't have anything new to read I'd oftentimes create whole new worlds inside my head to pass the time until I had something else exciting to read.
Looking back at it now, I expect that it was inevitable that I'd come to love science fiction and fantasy, because there isn't anywhere else that you can have new world, after new world spread out before you waiting to delight you with its intricacies.
I had brief, and sometimes even extended periods where I played at being a kayaker, a cyclist, a runner, a rock climber, but there was no escaping the fact that at heart I'm a geek, and I like very few other things quite as much as I like a good story.
In an attempt to fill my voracious appetite for stories I eventually stumbled upon Shapcano's Shadowrun fan fiction site. With the heavy school schedule I was juggling at the time, Shapcano's work kept me busy for several weeks, which would have been nothing more than a brief footnote in my life except for the fact that he had an invitation at the end of at least one of his books.
It was something to the effect that, despite the fact he put up an incredible amount of words on his website, there wasn't any reason to be intimidated by the idea of writing. Furthermore, he suggested that we all give it a try because we'd probably find that it wasn't as difficult as we expected.
For whatever reason, that invitation stuck with me, and I spent the next sixth months putting together a 40k work novella, and I've been semi hooked ever since.
So there you have it, you now know how my over developed sense of competition led me to where I am today.