Asked to write an autobiography for my screenwriting course, I crafted this piece of nonsense. I edited the part about my brother taking pleasure in torturing me by suffocating me with a pillow - it's an autobiography, not a confessional. Yes, in this movie, I am put upon protagonist and my brother the evil antagonist. I still have to find a part for the cat...
I was born in Southport, England and grew up there. In its heyday it was a Victorian seaside retreat, but now it’s rare to actually see the tide come in, let alone Victorian bathers. Growing up involved events such as learning to sail with Dad in the marina lake and doomed fishing trips to the Lake District National Park. Adventures in the cubs and then the scouts - though scouts deteriorated into knot-tying club. Skateboards, grifter bikes, football in the park in the summer and air rifle competitions in the back garden, blasting lemonade bottles and paper targets printed with sillouetted terrorists. I enjoyed a sibling rivalry, an acquired truce with my sister through a mutual enemy; an on-going war with my brother.
Never being particularly academically inclined in my junior years, it was a while before I experienced the thrill of inventing something on paper. My imagination had always been active, and my day dreaming legendary. My mother was once called into school by my teacher who was concerned about my concentration levels; that I could be a distraction to other children - in junior school, a stranger walking past the window or suddenly a fly in the room could be a distraction for the rest of the day. ‘He’s a dreamer,’ the teacher said. ‘Well, so was Joseph, and he turned out ok,’ replied my mother, as legend has it. It was a church school though I assume she was referring to the technicolor stageplay.
Whilst I never had a yearning to draw and paint, I was always quite visual, which perhaps is related to my excessive daydreaming - I never thought of it as wasted time, just time spent doing and being something else. I did enjoy technical drawing, perhaps simply because I was good at it, and maybe because it showed how things work in a visual way. Another reason perhaps why I finally settled on screenwriting as the form that I most enjoyed and identified with in my writing. A friend once told me that I had a very visual way of writing after reading a few short stories. Writers talk of finding your voice - I think I’ve always had a fairly clear idea of my voice (though not necessarily a clear idea of what to say!), but I needed pointing in the direction of the medium to deliver it.
Design college was easy, which sounds a little arrogant, but that’s not me - I just found the work easy, then unchallenging, and then we got to develop an idea for an introduction to a TV show, a storyboard, on an extension to the graphic design course. I obviously did something right because bizarrely like a scene from a Hitchcock film, the tutor tried convince me to switch to his film course in a train carriage when I was going back home. It’s one of the moments you occasionally wonder about - red pill or the blue pill?
I now work as a graphic designer for a publishing company, designing children’s library books. It’s a creative job, which I occasionally like and occasionally loathe - like any other job. I enjoy writing for myself, pleasing an audience of one first and foremost. I’ve written short stories, poetry, the obligatory half finished novel, and a critically acclaimed sitcom - the production company acclaimed it, but said no one would buy it. Still, it was the glimmer of success that I cling too every now or then. I aim to learn a lot from this class, but the thing I hope it will do the most is inspire me to get on with it.
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