“A university professor, a gay rights activist, a sewage farmer, a sailor, a pensioner, and a barmaid walk into a bar. This is not a joke.”
In Chapter 1 of Unphiltered (my writing life), I told you about my brilliant Fish-and-Chip-shop story and my woeful office blog.
Before we get onto ‘the wandering years’ (including Argentina, Mexico, Asia, and Spain), I’ll shed light on the origins of my creative writing.
Back in 2010, I’d decided to leave my advertising job and had cooked up a scheme to teach English abroad. Argentina seemed like an exotic destination — far away enough that I couldn’t turn back, and close enough in terms of ‘European’ culture. I took Spanish classes at an adult-ed center called City Lit (I still remember reciting the Spanish alphabet to myself again and again on the cycle ride home).
Then, after I could recite my Spanish ABCs, I took a creative writing course. There was no real trigger for this, but it felt good to learn again, so I signed up for Monday night writing sessions. When you break the cycle of 9-5 exhaustion, Netflix, and hangovers, you realise you can learn anything, even on a Monday night.
In a way, I think the best motivation for taking a writing course is ‘just to see’. I had no goals of publishing anything. I’ve always collected creative outlets: music, poetry, comedy videos [file missing], and passive-aggressive blogs.
The quote at the beginning of this post relates to the City Lit writing course I took in 2010.
It was run by a very patient feminist writer called Zoe Fairbairns. Each week, we studied some examples of poetry, fiction, descriptions, and so on, before sharing our own writing with the class.
I began to read a greater variety of writing. Short stories weren’t pointlessly brief stories anymore — they became puzzles to unravel. We learned to read twice (once for enjoyment, and once to ask ‘how?’). After 2 or 3 weeks, I began to see that the real story was the twelve disparate characters who attended the course with me. Not one of them came from a boring 9-5 background. They all led weird and wonderful lifestyles, which resulted in us sharing stories over stale machine coffee at 9pm every Monday night. Outside, the grey London drizzle fell, and I dreamed of Buenos Aires.
The result? I didn’t keep in touch with anyone, and I didn’t even start writing fiction for another 5 years!
But the people on the course stayed with me to the extent that I immortalized them in fiction when I did start to craft stories. In 2019, my humorous take on the course, ‘The Monday Night Club’, was shortlisted for a comedy writing competition. You can read it here.
Oh, and I changed the nice course leader, Zoe, into a pompous prick called Marcus.
Next time, I’ll tell you about Argentina. I promise.
#unphiltered