First Virtual

  Photo: Andy Boag
Over the last year or so I’ve been slowly writing my Verse Autobiography, Talking Myself Home. Actually, I’ve almost stopped calling it my Verse Autobiography because people think I’m saying First Autobiography and they keep saying “When’s your second one coming out?” so I call it my Autobiography in Verse or my Verse Memoir. Whatever, it’s me and my times between hard covers.

It’s odd, sitting down and deciding to write your life in verse, and it took me a while to decide what shape the book should take; should it be one long poem, maybe rhyming all the way through? Should it be a series of sonnets of different kinds? I even, for about half an hour on a long train journey blighted by engineering works, thought about writing it as a series of limericks, but that idea bit the dust somewhere near Droitwich Spa, mainly because there aren’t that many rhymes for McMillan once you’ve got past Villain and Willin’ and Distillin’ and Thrillin’ and Spillin’ and Shillin’. Quite a few, but not enough for a book, really. In the end, it’s a collection of poems in different styles that tells you something about me and how I got here and what I think and what I do. There are poems about my parents, about my first gig with Barnsley’s (self-styled) leading 1970’s Folk/Rock band Oscar the Frog at a jumble sale at the local church hall, about getting my neck squeezed in a rugby scrum at school a few days after Jimi Hendrix died, and about the first punk gig I ever went to, at Oxford Polytechnic in 1976. Ooh, those Stranglers were scary!

For years and years in writing workshops I’ve been encouraging adults and young people to have a go at writing about their lives and I often get a similar response – “I’ve done nothing worth writing about” – and the thing is to convince them they have, because we all have. It’s interesting to explore the reasons why people think their lives aren’t interesting: is it because, for young people in particular, they’re surrounded by minor and major celebrities who appear to have fuller and more glittery existences? Is it because very young children simply don’t get the idea that their lives can be worth recording? Is it because, as adults, we view our life as a series of fragments and not the roadmap that we thought it would be when we started thinking about those things?

And yet, get any group of people together and they start talking about what they’ve been up to. What they did last night. What they did on their holidays. What they did at school (this applies to adults as well as children). One writing or talking exercise I get adults to do is to write a line about a teacher they had at school; I tell them in advance that they can’t be cruel but they can be colourful, and the most exciting work appears. One couplet that’s stayed with me for a long time: ‘Mr Head, he was the head. / Mrs French, she taught French.’ Simple, witty, true. It’s a kind of anecdote theatre, a sort of opera of the ordinary that often builds and builds in the telling until Saturday Night or Our Trip to the Park takes on an epic quality. It takes on a cultural dimension, too, if culture is the reflecting of a society back on itself. That basic need to make and listen to stories is the bedrock of culture, and narrative is the hothouse that helps all culture to gr ow; it’s a hothouse that’s at our fingertips, just waiting to be explored.

So our job as encouragers of writing by people who don’t see themselves as writers is to value the stories of their lives and get them to value them too. If we’re teachers, we should tell the young people we’re working with a couple of autobiographical tales so that they can see that we’re human, too, and that we consider our life to be worth telling. If ‘writing a life’ is too much then let’s write about Friday afternoon. Let’s write about The Worst Christmas. Let’s write about The Daftest Thing that Ever Happened on a Sunday.

Then the hard bit: let’s get the people we work with to see themselves as writers whose lives are just as valuable as the ones they see on the library shelf. Let’s imagine a utopia where we’re all reading and writing and publishing and creating and there’s no difference between writer and reader.

Start now: talk yourself home!