What Made Me A Writer by Morton S. Gray

One of the blog questions I often ask my guests to answer is “What made you a writer?” and I’ve been thinking about this myself whilst I’ve been working on a new project.

I was an only child until I was seven when my sister came along. I had seven years of the devoted attention of my parents. My mother loved to read and to read to me. With writing, I now think Mom must have been a little dyslexic, as she had to check every word she wrote in a dictionary. She passed on her love of reading to me. We used to visit the library as a family every Saturday morning. I could read before I went to school at age five.

My reading as a child was typical of a girl of my era – Enid Blyton mainly, although I progressed onto Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. I can never remember a time when I haven’t had a book, and now a kindle, by my bedside to read, or a notepad to hand to scribble story ideas.

I can see myself sitting in the attic room at home, surrounded by books and writing poems in a little notebook – I must have been aged eleven. I wrote my first novel when I was fourteen and gave it to a friend at school to read. I keep meaning to get this novel out of the memory box where it is stored. I know it featured a pirate with a tall sailing ship The Sidanion and a girl who falls in love with him.

Another factor in my love of stories was my mother’s mother. My grandma used to visit us every Sunday for lunch and afterwards she would always read to my sister and I. She often fell asleep mid story, but that didn’t seem to matter.

Before she suffered with dementia, my mother wrote her memoirs. I’m actually amazed at how much she wrote given what I said above about her heavy use of a dictionary when she wrote anything. I find that my own thoughts are turning to recording the story of my life at the moment, as I think we should maybe explain to our children the tales behind some of the many photographs that we will leave behind.

So, to answer the question “What made me a writer?” I think it is a mix of my nature and the way I was nurtured as a child. I think I will always write, be that for publication or just for my own interest.

To conclude, I would say that writing is in my blood and I will always write in one form or another, be that poems, short stories, novels, family history or my own memoirs.

This is the blog for Morton S. Gray, a writer of romance with a mystery to solve The Secrets of Borteen Bay Series set in the fictional seaside town of Borteen for Choc Lit Publishing an imprint of Joffe Books. 

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