Looking back, I'd forgotten how voraciously my small group of friends wrote every week, churning out 'ficlets' (our mini-versions of novellas) like others churned out last minute homework assignments.
I perfected - or so I thought - the art of the page-long short story. A friend and I even embarked upon what we considered to be a literary masterpiece named: Love Can Give You Wings. A forty page love story starring one of our best friends, it took weeks of preparation and to this day remains one of the best birthday presents I've ever produced.
Nevertheless, however rose-tinted my reminiscings, one can't help but be bemused by delightfully cheesy passages such as:
As well
as having a bar, Ali soon found out, Haru’s club had a broom cupboard.
From
the other side of the locked door, she heard Haru and Sarah both dispute this
fact loudly; Haru in particular seemed almost insulted at the thought of a
broom cupboard in one of his clubs – it was, he claimed, a closet. But they were wrong, Ali had decided, it was
far too big to be a closet, and was therefore a broom cupboard. Besides, it had a broom in it.
It also
had a Tyson in it.
It makes me wonder, though, where all that youthful enthusiasm went. Off I went to university and I spent more time writing about Shakespeare (not that I don't approve of academic essays - I'm a massive Shakespeare geek) than being creative. It took the revival of an old friendship and regular visits to The Poetry Cafe's Poetry Unplugged night in Covent Garden nearly a year after graduation before I started to write again.
It seems ironic, and more than a little exciting that now - seven years after I left sixth form college - I'm finally matching that pinnacle of past writing fervor. Long may it last.
No comments:
Post a Comment