Monday 10 May 2010

Looking back 1# A life more interesting??

Cheating a little, I know, but I thought would be fun now and then to look back at some of the posts I've written for ABBA awfully big blog adventure  
This is the very first post I ever wrote for a blog - written in July 2008 a could of months before SPIDER came out. 

A LIFE MORE INTERESTING?? - Linda Strachan

I SO wish I had spent my youth doing daring deeds like skydiving, bungee jumping or even had a gap year deep sea diving in the Philippines.I wish I’d had a quirky job, been a grape peeler for an emperor or excavated tombs in Egypt for a famous archaeologist - I would love to have been a blacksmith and been able to make elegant but deadly swords, but with my luck I would probably have been offered the job of sticking feathers onto arrows!

Why, you may ask, am I so consumed with having had a fascinating life? It’s not that I want to do anything other than write, I love it, but I am trying to write a short biography for my upcoming, first teenage novel, Spider, and I am suddenly overcome with a sense of my own boringness!
My previous attempts to make my past life sound interesting might have been fun and jolly for the young cuddly readers of my Hamish McHaggis stories, but I really want something with a little more street cred for this book and most of my previous life seems just too ordinary.

Now if I’d had a few exciting or weird jobs it would be so much easier to write a pithy and amusing little biography- like the ones I read in other writer’s books! They all seem to have done such interesting things
A friend said - 'you’re a writer, make it up!'

So I sit and scribble and score out and try again, but for some reason I can think of all sorts of exciting things for my characters to do but none of them seem right for me. I keep worrying that someone will ask me technical details about how to catch a fire-eating dragon, or extract a marble from an angry camel’s nose.

So, if you see me doing something really bizarre it may not be because I am tremendously brave or quirky… just looking to do something that I can put in my bio!

2 comments:

  1. I often think I have not done anything really interesting either and that my life is 'boring' but then other people ask what I have been doing and tell me their lives are boring compared with mine. Yours would probably be fascinating to someone in 'darkest Peru' or the 'jungles of Borneo'! Remember "The diary of a nobody" and have you ever looked at A B Facey's "A fortunate life" or Winifred Foley's "A child in the forest"? They probably thought their lives were boring too -until they sat down to write about it!

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  2. Will have a look at these, Cat, thanks! Yes it is all about perception, isn't it?

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