Well, I updated my journal last week with the story of a personal experience that had an impact on my life and I figured - why not make a habit of it? It's certainly good practice from a writing point of view. I remember at school, my teachers always gave me the old chestnut 'write from personal experience'. I didn't agree back then as I've always been someone who likes to make things up. With old age, however, has come a better understanding of what exactly adding personal experience to one's work means - it's not necessarily recounting verbatim real life events; it's using those events as a loose basis for the stories you tell - kind of making them the bones that the meat of your story is built upon. Even if you do write escapist fantasy/horror/whatever as I do, your experiences make the work so much less one dimensional. With this in mind, I've decided to actually explore some of the life experiences I've had. Perhaps they will make for good reading; perhaps they won't. Either way, it would be interesting to know if I am able to follow my old teachers' advice literally. So here goes - another chapter in the sometimes average, sometimes not, life of me.
The last story I told in my journal -
[link] - had a bit of a supernatural flavour to it. I'm going to stick with that theme this week - largely because I like the genre.
I was about 7 years old and I had always had a wild imagination - who would've thought that I might one day make a living from it? While imagination is by no means a bad thing, it does lend itself to quite a few circumstances that are not always comforting - like my fear of the dark as a child. Everyday shapes, shadows and objects became demonic creatures waiting to devour me when the lights went off. I remember the darkness having a kind of suffocating quality when I was that age - a stifling hotness even on a cold night.
I've always struggled to get to sleep. I still do today. As a child, when I slept over at a friend's house, I would always end up lying there, listening to my friend breathing the heavy breaths of slumber while I hoped that the Sandman might sprinkle some grit in my eyes soon. It was the same when I was alone in my room. My parents would go to bed way after my bedtime and I would lie in the dark waiting for my eyes to close. This was a night like most others in that respect. I could hear my father snoring, which was a strange comfort to me because it meant that he was there. The dark was making its ghostly, ghoulish shapes as it always did and I was trying very hard, both to be brave and to get to sleep. There was something more intense about the darkness that night. The shapes in the cupboard seemed to loom larger and I felt even more vulnerable alone in my little wooden single bed, protected by nothing but a duvet and thin summer pyjamas - I think they had aeroplanes on them if I recall correctly.
I closed my eyes tight, shivering a little from the usual irrational fear that something might come out of the darkness and swallow me whole. If sleep would not bring itself to me, perhaps I could force it to come. I found myself slowly drifting off sometime late that night. My father had already been snoring for an hour or two and the relief and triumph I felt at my imminent slumber was like Christmas morning. Sadly, it was short lived. I felt a sudden tightness around my legs as if something were wrapped around them. I opened my eyes and gingerly pulled back the covers. I could not believe what I saw - there, as plain as day, wrapping itself around me was what could only be described as a plasticine serpent - at least it looked like plasticine. It was olive green and smooth all over with no scales or any discerning marks at all. It had no head or face that I could see and it coiled it's thick, smooth body slowly further and further up my body. I tried for several seconds to scream but nothing came out. When I eventually did get my vocal chords working, my mother came rushing into the room and switched the light on. The plasticine serpent had disappeared and she comforted me, trying to convince me that there had never been anything there.
I don't remember what happened after that. I must have slept somehow - perhaps I knew that it was over. I do know that for a good few years after this incident, I had to sleep with a light on and would often call my mother or father in the middle of the night, terrified of what might be waiting for me in the dark.
This may well have been something I dreamt or even something my imagination somehow made real in my mind - which was quite young at the time. I don't know if it was real. Recounting the tale now, it sounds quite ridiculous. I do know how real it felt to me and even though this happened about 25 years ago, I remember the details of it vividly, almost photographically.
So for my teachers who were always on my case about personal experience, there you have it. Real or imagined, it was personal and very real at the time. Perhaps this is what is at the root of my fascination with the darker side of storytelling. If that's the case, I'm grateful to the plasticine serpent for showing up, though I do hope I never see it again.
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Wow!
Distracted
