Becoming (Part 4): Reading

I read from an early age, and it’s fair to say that I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read.

I was always reading. It would become more important to me than all the computer games, imaginative play, films and TV put together.

Without reading, I would be a different person. That’s not to say those other pastimes could not have filled the gaps left by words, but they would not have filled them with the same breadth and depth.

When I was a young reader, it helped that I had already built up a storehouse of ideas and images from films, TV and computer games. I had seen what it meant to be sad and mad and beautiful: I’d seen what a tornado looked like, or a thirty-foot wave smashing into the deck of a ship, or a hard-boiled detective squinting through cigarette smoke. My mind played out inventive scenes on my bedroom floor or between the plants and dirt in the rockeries of our front garden. What I didn’t know I made up.

How could words strung one after another on a page compete with films, TV and computer games? Easy.

There’s no competition. Each story, however told, is a conduit into the same continuum. As a kid, I saw no distinction. Instead, my mind cross-fertilised each with the other and helped bring my inner worlds to life.

I was a frequent visitor to our local library and had worked my way through all the children’s oversized hardbacks. Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix the Gaul books and Usbourne’s All About Monsters, for example. The magic potion of Asterix, the menhirs carried by Obelix before he collected tottering piles of Roman legionnaire helmets. I remember a gory illustration of a knight in spiked armour fighting a coiled Würm, his spikes piercing and cutting the serpent as it attempted to surround and crush him.

I had begun to drift away from the printed word of the kids’ section and into the world of computer games. Comics and Stephen King pulled me back in.

We would visit my Nana every Saturday. When the Eagle comic relaunched, she bought me issue 1 along with Prog 257 of 2000AD. I loved them from those first issues. I collected comics and computer games now. Saturdays became my favourite day of the week: bus into town, do some shopping, and then head to Nana’s flat where my mum would have a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a chat, and I’d read my comics on the floor. I’d have read them both before my dad came to pick us up on his way home from work. People used to think that comics like Eagle and 2000AD were childish things for childish minds, but the writers and artists introduced a lot of adult themes over the years, and 2000AD in particular, became unsuitable for a younger audience. The stories in those comics, told in serialised form, have stayed with me. They have coloured my taste and fictional sensibilities ever since.

I had been reading comics for a couple of years when I went on a school trip to Switzerland. To sit close to a girl I liked, I asked to borrow the novel she was reading so I could pretend to read it and be close to her. I forgot to pretend and instead I became gripped by the story and by the time we made it to the ferry that would take us to continental Europe; I had read over half the book. The book was Christine by Stephen King.

Around the same time, Frank Miller and Alan Moore began creating comics directed at mature audiences. The stories dealt with adult themes, and the comics became known as Graphic Novels (to reduce the childish stigma of being stories told with pictures, I presume).

Back at the library, I graduated from the children’s section and thanks to Christine; I started reading books from the Genre Ghetto. The area of the library that grouped horror, science fiction and fantasy together on the same shelves. Stephen King became a firm favourite and soon I started exploring the worlds of James Herbert, Shaun Hutson, Robert R. McCammon, Guy Masterton and Dean Koontz. Horror fiction attracted me the most at first, and whether that was because of my experience with skimming glass shards or my love of horror movies, I don’t know. I’ve always liked the darker stories. Why the librarians allowed me to borrow those books, I’ll never know.

I read my dad’s old copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Thus began my journeys into fantastic lands with the likes of David Gemmel, David Eddings, Michael Moorcock, Robert Jordan, Raymond E. Feist and Stephen Donaldson.

I loved watching the black and white science fiction movies and serials and from there found Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert E. Howard and Ursula K. Le Guin to read.

Each mentioned author was a starting point for many more, but you get the idea.

Reading, for me, is impossible to consume without direct involvement. My imagination becomes an active participant. I do not skim and must take my time and read with careful deliberation. I savour it. Commit it to memory. I try to figure out what might happen, what could happen and what was going to happen.

When a work is well written, reading it subsumes me. I become part of the story. I love to be with and get to know the characters. They become my friends and sworn enemies. I am happy when they succeed and feel for them when they fail. My tears and fist pumps of joy are as compelling as anything I’ve felt in the “real” world.

Reading is the finest and best way I can transport myself to another world without creating one myself.

And this is where all this has been leading.

All these containers of story (books, computer games, films, television and imaginative play) have been, for me, a prerequisite and preparation for creating worlds and characters and stories.

To become a writer.