stories about running away

The most frequent feeling I get when signing into Blogger is one of mild panic. Something about that page and my impatience, I always start typing in my username before it's all fully loaded and, invariably, the last few letters of my password always show up when the cursor flicks back to the beginning of the username box. Today, if I was typing slower than normal or what, I glanced up to see that I'd typed my entire password into the username box.

It's an odd feeling, the one series of letters and numbers you don't ever expect to see staring back at you from the computer screen. Too weird, too exposed, I start looking over my shoulder.

This picture, from Postsecret, made me feel a bit like that. A bit like, oh, that's a point.

I started writing a story when I was 15, in an English mock exam. I was in classroom D16, if I remember right, sat in my usual spot by the window on the right, second row back, writing in my blue exercise book. I'd remembered the story about JRR Tolkien writing the first sentence of The Hobbit in the margin of an exam paper, and was trying to think of my own epic line. Says something about how cocky I was at 15 that that's how I spent my mock exams, but there we are.

I have changed my name to Barony and I am running away.

I don't exactly know where it came from, but I can guess. Barony is the name of a village in Orkney that I'd visited the summer before; running away was my obsession of the season. I never did it, never tried, never really wanted to. But I'd just read Junk by Melvin Burgess and my head was so full of junkies and anarchists, suddenly running away was the most glamorous start to a book that I could think of. And so it was born.

I wrote sporadically at first, wasting time through my GCSEs and the summer that followed, then obsessively when I reached 6th form. Free periods for me were up in the study centre, headphones in, scribbling away. I had all the inspiration I could ever want, and time to blow, but still... What I needed was to sit down with it and do it right, to start from the beginning and work it through, what I needed was to figure out where it was going.

That was the rub. I could never figure out what I wanted it to be. I wanted to write a big idea, to say something meaningful, but I could never put it into words. When I look back through it now it's just snippets, little escapist snippets of some idea I never really understood myself.

I called it 'stories about running away' because that's exactly what it was. People who left, changed their names, tried to figure out something about the world before they got eaten up by it. I'd say I got bored, or lost interest, or something, but it wouldn't be true.

The truth would be I see things differently now. When I was writing that, every place I saw was a scene in my head, every song was a soundtrack, every stranger on the train was someone I wanted to put down in fiction the minute I got home. I don't know how I see things now, but I know I don't see that. Places are just places, people are just people and songs... songs aren't soundtracks anymore.

I never finished my stories about running away, I started telling stories about myself instead. I miss it. Not so much writing stories about the world, you understand, more just seeing them there to be written.