A writer on writing – How I write

Posted on by Opher

How I write

I do not have a standard way of writing. Usually I write from an inspiration. Sometimes I plan meticulously. Often I write a stream of consciousness.

  • Torture – was thoroughly researched. I spent ages checking out the Quran, quotes, factions, terrorism and torture. A lot of that was not pleasant reading. I mapped out each chapter and wrote it slowly.
  • Anthropocene Apocalypse – was written in sections. It was a series of my personal observations and thoughts that stemmed from my life and travels around the world and personal witnessing of the destruction of the natural habitat around the world.
  • Sorting the Future – came from a dream. I was on board the Marco Polo and had a weird dream about aliens who came to Earth on a mission to save nature and intelligence, equipped with rejuvenating machine and advanced technology. It was a bit of wishful thinking. I wrote the first draft in five days in one long stream of consciousness. It just flowed. The rewrites took a lot longer but I tried to keep the light touch and flow and think I have been successful
  • New Eden – was mapped out very carefully with the plot sorted. I had the outline written out but did not write it for about twenty years. When I did it came out as one of my best Sci-Fi novels
  • In Search of Captain Beefheart – was a memoir of my life with Rock Music. It charts my love of Rock from my first singles, albums and gigs through to now. It straddles the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. I did not want it to be a boring chronological run through but I had this idea of a quest that brought it to life. It is my most popular book.
  • A Passion For Education – this was another memoir. I wanted to put my philosophy of education down in black and white but I did not want it to be a boring academic book. I had the idea of explaining why I believed in the various aspects of my reasoning through anecdotes and experiences that brought it to life. It tells the inside story of Headship. I have had many people not in education tell me how interesting they found it. That was good. I wrote it in sections. It was easy to do. The content provided the structure. I had to marry the anecdotes and stories to the theory.
  • Danny’s Story – is a story about a house I lived in in the early seventies. It was full of characters and incidents. I sat on it for forty years. I could not think how to write it in an interesting way. Then I read John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and it inspired me. I saw a way of doing it. I fictionalised myself and the characters so that they were removed from it. It flowed out ion one great stream of consciousness that worked for me. I am now going through and knocking the raw, rough descriptions and sentences into better shape.

As you can see – I tend to suddenly get an inspiration and that is it – I’m off. I write hard and fast until it is complete. I then hone. Sometimes I plan and map. Sometimes I research. But often it comes pouring out of my head in one long splurge. All I have to do is get an insight into how to structure it. It’s like pouring cement. When I get going my mind churns. I find myself waking in the night to head off to the computer to write another section that has materialised in my sleep. I have been known to write through the night for twenty four hours without a break. I enjoy writing more than reading. It’s like solving some huge jigsaw puzzle, a massive suduko or crossword. There’s nothing quite like it. It gives me a reason to get up!

I have written 100 books.

My Sci-Fi books I write under the name Ron Forsythe, the rest are Opher Goodwin.

Why I Write!

Posted on by Opher

Why I write

 

I need a dumptruck mama to unload my head

 

I think my passion for writing began at a very early age. In Primary School Friday afternoon was purely for writing. I think our teacher wanted to end the week on a bit of a skive. We wrote for the whole two hours and I loved it. It was my favourite time of the week.

Back then we wrote with old nibbed pens with ink in inkwells. My thumb and two fingers were stained with ink, my work was full of blots and my writing was an indecipherable scrawl, but it felt like freedom. My mind gelled into stories, words and sentences. I came alive.

Because of my great untidiness I am certain that my teachers in Secondary school did not see or develop my writing skills but I remained an avid reader and my head was full of ideas. I wrote poems.

At the age of twenty one I decided I wanted to be a writer. I had this concept for a book that was a fragmentary collage of prose, poetry, cartoons and philosophy. It started with a sperm and egg and ended in death. I was utterly absorbed in it and it consumed my days for the next couple of years. It took around 2000 hours of typing. I called it Reality Dreams and sent it away to publishers to await instant acclaim. It was utterly, and rightly, rejected.

Undeterred I set about writing a more conventional Sci-fi novel. I enjoyed the writing so much, waking up in the night to jot down ideas, avidly typing as the thoughts flowed, trying to keep up. One book followed another. The ideas kept flowing, the passion soared and the rejection slips filled a drawer.

When we had our family I would come home from school teaching, play with the kids and put them to bed, watch a bit of telly and then start writing at around ten or eleven. I would lose myself in it and have to force myself to stop at around three so that I could get some sleep because I knew what I’d feel like the next day. When writing a book I would manage on four hours sleep a night for three or four weeks. Days would be full of scribbled notes as ideas came into my head while I taught. I scrawled them down in every free moment. It consumed me.

I stopped sending my books off. I merely kept them in drawers. I no longer thought about publishing them. I just wrote them. By the time I came up to retirement I had around forty of them. So I decided that I would self-publish them and then at least I would have a copy for myself.

The ideas keep coming though. I keep writing new books. I think it’s about 59 books now.

My early ones are typed on an old typewriter and exist as paper copies so I’ve been typing them up, so that they are now digital, editing them and then publishing them. I’m still working my way through them.

Which brings me back to the reason why I write.

I write because I enjoy the process even more than reading.

I write because the ideas fill my head and I enjoy capturing them.

I write because I enjoy solving the problems of how to make it work.

I write to tell stories, to describe terrible things so that they might not happen, to educate and to share the wonder. I write to communicate the things inside my head.

I work at getting better through the process of writing, editing and rewriting, listening to criticism and trying to take that on board. It’s a hard long procedure. Progress is always hard.

Writing

Posted on by Opher

Writing

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I prefer writing to reading and I love reading! My head fills up with thoughts and ideas that I am driven to write down. As soon as I have committed them to paper I am free of them. I find the creativity essential to my mental well-being. I become elated when I write. I love making up stories.

My wife says I am obsessive. I would prefer to see myself as driven. Writing is a compulsion.

I have been writing books for forty four years. I doubt that I will ever stop.

I do not write in order to become ‘successful’. That is not the motivation. I know it will never make me rich and famous. I write in order to revel in the joy of communication. I write to attempt to capture the thoughts that are in my head, commit them to the tangible symbols of words and understand them better myself. I write because I am an idealist who wants to change the world for the better; who believes that we can make it better and who believes in the power of words. I write for the sheer joy of it.

I write for myself. I do not write for a market. Because of that I am totally unrestrained. My work is often shocking, extreme and pornographic. So be it. That is what comes out.

I know that writing for yourself is indulgent and does not achieve the stated aims of improving the world and communicating with others. This is a conundrum. I know that if I was hopelessly stranded on a desert island I would still write. Yet I also know that any creative person requires an audience. I need an audience in order for the process to be complete. To be completely satisfied I need to know that people are reading my books. That is why I have published fifteen of them so far.

Being in the luxurious position of being retired with a pension that enables me to live I can and am devoting myself to rewriting all those books that have come out of my type-writer over these last four and a half decades. I have the time, energy and inclination. I am enjoying myself.

Hopefully I will ruffle a few feathers, gain a few friends, shock a number of people, and have a great deal of fun in the process.

Sometimes I write graphically about torture, environmental degradation, exploitation and war. I write in the hopes that these things will improve. I want to shine a spotlight on them. I write because I am angry. I write so that they we can raise our awareness and sensibilities. I write in order that those things will not happen.

I write about sex because I think our culture is hung up about it. Sex is natural. It should not be taboo or embarrassing. We have made it so.

I write about the future as a warning.

I write to relieve the pressure cooker in my head and because I love doing it.

I hope you might enjoy being my audience.

My books are available on Amazon under Opher Goodwin. Why don’t you have a look and see what you think?

My belief – The Zeitgeist – we can change the world.

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I am a very happy, contented, positive character. (Contrary to what many of you may glean from some of my writing).

I am an eternal optimist.

I believe we can solve every problem and make the world perfect. We have the intelligence and problem solving capacity.

I believe in the zeitgeist.

I am not religious – I am an antitheist – I believe religions have created immense harm and are all manufactured by people. I do not believe in God or at least any force that you would recognise as god.

I am a scientist.

I am a scientist who believes that we are only at the beginning of understanding the universe and our own minds. We have much to learn.

I believe that somehow our mental processes produce as yet undiscovered emanations that affect everyone around us. It joins us together into an intermeshing network of minds; we swim in a mental pool created by us all. This is the zeitgeist of the moment.

I have lived through positive and negative zeitgeists. My belief is that we can change the world. If enough of us produce a positive vibe it will tilt the balance of the zeitgeist.

That may sound weird, wacky and naïve to you. It does to me as well. But that’s my hope for the future.

I write so that the nightmares we are creating don’t happen. I want to awaken everyone to what is going on and change the zeitgeist.

I am the eternal optimist but I see myself as a realist. It merely requires more of us! We can make a difference!