My first ever job was as a writer. There used to be a children’s radio show called That’s The Story, which held a short story competition each month for under eighteens. The third time I won it, the producer called my English teacher and asked if I wanted a job. I was twelve years old.
That’s The Story was a one-man production. I don’t remember that man’s name now. Of the details which do remain, I don’t know how to sunder the real from the figments of my memory.
None of this may be true: I remember he was Irish. I remember his big, curly, red hair. I remember he lived near Western Springs, in an art deco house with an overgrown garden which smothered his studio out the back. I remember him giving me my first (and only) invoice book and teaching me how to write invoices.
I do know he paid me $150 for every short story. The suggested length was just 300 words. I didn’t realise how good I had it. Fifty cents per word remains my best writing rate. At the time, I was just embarrassed the programme aired on Classic Hits.
The next year, I started at Northcote College. Two teachers there organised a writing group. At first, it was just me and my friends. We would get half a day off to do writing exercises and eat the teacher’s brownies in the library. When classmates asked where we’d been, we would say ‘rugby club’. We were a bunch of nerdy kids who often wagged PE. In our final year of high school, they turned our writing into a journal called Line Out.
By then, my job for radio had ended; ‘adult themes’ had begun to emerge in my stories. I put more effort into being an artist than a writer. I went to Elam, though I did an English degree on the side. I was cocky when I enrolled in the stage three prose paper. I thought I knew it all: cut your adverbs, no dialogue as exposition, load up on sensory details. I almost considered skipping the seminars altogether and only going to the workshops. They were, I believed, the ‘important part’. I turned up for the first seminar, but I didn’t take out paper or a pen. Within seconds of the tutor opening her mouth, I was scrambling inside my bag for refill and a biro. It was a class on point of view, and everything she said was new to me.
This course, more than anything, taught me that writing is a craft anyone can learn. I’ve been teaching creative writing for eight years now. Point of view is my favourite topic to cover. It was my focus for a masterclass with Northcote College’s writing group. That group is popular now; the rugby club joke fell flat. I live ten minutes from Western Springs, too. Sometimes I feel that if I walked down that Irish man’s street, I could still point out his house.
Start to Write: Fiction
with Ruby Porter
ONLINE/AUCKLAND
7 – 21 May 2024