Shoutaboutmagazine.com is a site dedicated to encouraging children to make their own stories, illustrations and have them published on the site. Created by the Children’s Writers and Illustrators in South London (CWISL) the site also provides free stories and a section where Authors give an insight on how, where and why they write.
Here SI Martin shares his story.
I can’t remember the first books I read, but I can remember the first books I disliked.
Growing up in a small town the late 20th century was unimaginably boring. We didn’t have multiplex cinemas, galleries, museums, the internet and hundreds of television stations. There were only three television channels and they were all off by 11.30. Apart from a park and a swimming pool, the only place for restless young minds to go was the library. And so I read.
I read a lot, especially science fiction and historical novels. I also read the Bible, railway timetables, newspapers, telephone directories, instruction manuals, religious pamphlets and sweet wrappers. I read last thing every night. I read first thing in every morning. I read walking to school and back again. I read on the toilet. I read in the bath. Like I said, I was bored, so I read everything possible to keep boredom at bay.
Then I read books for children.
When I was a young reader there was no Anne Rice, no Catherine Johnson, no Malorie Blackman or Michael Morpurgo. There were no worlds of teenage vampires, Black children at boarding school or heroic animals with regional accents. In those days there were only stories about comfortably-off children living in the countryside, making camps, building sledges, yachts and go-karts, or having midnight feasts in boarding school dormitories. There was nothing about my life as a Black child in a small town. I couldn’t stand these books. No one looked, thought or spoke as they did in my hometown. Nobody seemed entirely real.
As I read these books, it occurred to me that I could write better novels – not just because I wanted to, but because I needed to. I needed to write the novels I wanted to read. This is something I believe motivates most writers, and it certainly motivated me.
As I became a teenage reader, my reading expanded. I read writing from a host of Black writers (some of whom are still my favourites today) like James Baldwin, Octavia Butler and Chester Himes. I loved the worlds, real and imaginary they described, but they were never my worlds, never the places closest to me. All these worlds were born of an African-American experience.
My reading of history inevitably led me to the facts of the 500-year Black presence in London. The notion that this history was to some extent a set of stories about young people was a revelation. I wanted to know their stories, their writing, their experiences. The more I found out, the more there was to be revealed. It’s a set of stories I’ll spend the rest of my life uncovering. These are stories that have guided my life as a writer because the main lesson they have taught me is that ‘the world is all description’ and if we don’t describe ourselves, others will do so for us.
And this is why I write.
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