Why I tell Stories as a dyslexic adult

Why I tell Stories?

What makes someone into a writer? From earliest childhood I’ve always wanted the answer. It’s a part of me and the question is why? Why are we here, why do we live and die, why is the universe so vast and unknowable?
This is why I write, Dyslexia makes it hard for me to write as I struggle with spelling and punctuation, but I have an the innate need to explore and express myself the world and my place in it. Spelling is hard but thinking is easy and as a child I loved to perform and amuse my parents, I think this feeling has never left me - the need to be heard. For me honesty is the key ingredient for any writer, both for me and my audience, after all if I am not honest with myself how can I express myself to others?

In primary school I was told God made the universe and that was all there was to it. In secondary school I was told that the world was created by this huge explosion, and creatures from time immemorial adapted and changed with it without meaning or purpose. Two very different explanations of the world around me - a story and a theory, but they did not gel and this troubled me for some reason (which didn’t seem too trouble my peers who were more interested in football sticker albums and chopper bikes). I read a lot of science fiction as a pre teen H G Wells, Philip K Dicks and Olaf Stapledon, these writers made me question every preconceived notion I held, and made still more questions for my developing mind. I knew there was a lot more out there to learn and felt an overwhelming urge towards adventure, to see what’s out there to understand the world. A bold undertaking but one I knew I must take to prevent me dying of boredom.

At young teen I started training in the martial arts for self-defence. I became interested in Eastern philosophy. As a school leaver I went backpacking around America and Canada and then to the Middle East and Australia. Travel broadened my mind, and made me look at my homeland with new eyes. I realized British culture was not pre-eminent but one of many ways of living around the world.

I returned home with no more money to travel, with which I'd fallen in love. Being far better than the limited job opportunities presented to a working-class boy in Thatcher's Britain. After all as a dyslexic adult where did I fit in, stacking shelves and cleaning seemed to be the answer or worst still being unemployed. My mother suggested travelling without moving, through reading travel books, I devoured Jack Kerouac, Bill Bryson and Jack London, and I learned much about the history of the world from these writers. This brought me back to an interest in spirituality which I viewed with suspicion throughout my teenage years, being so divorced from the everyday experience. It seems to me the proposition put forward by Krishnamurti held the most truth that “no school, institution or individual has a monopoly on the truth”. No one owns the truth it must be found for yourself in a world where school does not give you approval or the passport to a good job, I knew I must make my own path while still learning from the wise, rising to the challenge first to self educate and then converse, in the words of Nye Bevan “this is my truth now tell me yours”. I needed to find a life for myself.

I found a couple of authors who really spoke to me, these being the pragmatic 20th-century philosophers Alan Watts, Krishnamurti and Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell was a great storyteller, and his work explores the reasons and motivations for storytelling both culturally and individually. I found "Hero with a Thousand faces" a highly inspiring work; in fact I would go as far as to say is the best book I've ever read. Campbell had one central idea in this book - the monomyth, the idea that all stories are about sharing what it means to be alive. This holds great appeal to me as sharing stories around the camp fire as our ancestors did, makes one feel connected. With short stories and poetry it is in some way possible to connect and share ideas and feelings with someone you’ve never meet, which is invigorating.

As a child my grandfather was a great story teller and a strong man, he told me stories of life in the valleys playing rugby and judo and working down the mines and great stories of the war. He saw the effects of the Hishroshima bomb close up and his account of the city looking like the surface of the moon has always stuck with me. Writing helps me remember experiences of this transient life, like first love, first time seeing the ocean, standing on a surf board in the south of France so as not to lament like Roy Batty in Bladerunner “all those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain”. My Grandfather just passed away and I miss his great welsh wit, wisdom and stories; I just wish he had written them down, if anyone had a novel in him he did.

Poetry and mythology are for me very freeing forms of self expression being far removed from the prosaic they allow for layers of meaning and altered perspectives. The forms are both constant and in flux just like the nature of language it’s self. I am interested in the realm of ideas where the platonic meets the solid ground, where character meets intrigue. In the Upanishad the statement is made that Atman (the personal) is Brahman(the universal),that the wave and the particle are one and that everything has coherence even if it does not seem so, this idea for me is played out in all drama from the ancient Greek to the modern day, from Plato to Beckett. As Carl Sagan said “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself” and we know our selves through our stories.

In this world I must find something which is mine and only in writing short stories, poetry, articles and performing can I find this. Writing for me is way to deeper truth than a soap opera or episode of the x factor which are easily forgotten having no real depth. For me a story must have depth in all aspects of quality dramatic storytelling gives a person hope, to understand and be understood, to leave a mark when you are no longer here, to say I was, I thought, I dreamed, I demanded, I was Silent, I raged, I loved. To leave a statement in a world of bank accounts, mortgages, cancer and debt, a real world which is not perfect, but must be described and understood.