Have you ever watched Danny DeVito's 1996 film, Matilda? No? Well, in that case, stop what you're doing, go find a copy of it online, and watch the first ten minutes of it. After you've done that, meet me back here.
Welcome back! So, you've just watched the opening of Matilda, which is an adaptation of Roald Dahl's book. Matilda is a precocious young girl who loves books – specifically the stories within them – because they provide a means of escape for her into another world. As the ending credits rolled on that film, my 4-year-old self turned to my father and asked him if I could have my very own book. My father replied,
'I'll get you a book when you learn to read.'
It had really ignited a passion in me for stories. A while back, I'd found an old nursery report that recorded that I loved having stories read to me, and that I loved telling stories too.
Once I started making sense of letters and words, I couldn’t be stopped from escaping into a book and living vicariously through the pages in front of me. My Nana took me to the local library and got me set up with a library card too. That little card opened a world of reading adventures. I danced with the mice living under Brambly Hedge, watched George give his granny his marvellous medicine, eventually becoming a sky pirate with Twig in the Edge Chronicles. I eventually started branching out into more adventures; fun non-fiction like Horrible Histories and through beautiful Japanese comics – manga – like Sailor Moon, where I read about a group of teenage girls fighting to save the earth from evil. My father could often be found nose-deep in a book, and sometimes he read so intently that I think he escaped into books the way I do. We even read some of the same books and would talk about them together, which made me even more determined to read as much as possible.
I also started writing down my own stories. I made up newspaper articles on the latest development in the Pokémon cartoon I’d been watching. When I was around 11, I wrote a mermaid story that I read out to my neighbour’s children. It was full of all the magical stuff that children can think of, and they kept coming back to my house, asking my mother if I would read the story to them again. I was used to disappearing into other worlds, but it was the first time I brought people into my own world.
It’ll be no surprise to you to find out that what I really wanted to do when I grew up was to be a writer – a storyteller. When my youngest brother was a toddler, I started writing stories about woodland animals to read to him, and I started showing things I was writing in my own time to my English teachers. I will always appreciate that those teachers took the time to read my stories and critique them for me – especially now I’m an adult with more understanding of exactly how much teachers do for their students! I was also drawing comics at this point – another form of storytelling that I still love, and my friends would read each new "chapter" of twenty pages each month.
Storytelling, whether you’re reading or listening to someone else’s story, or writing your own, is something that we do every day of our lives. It’s a privilege, both to share and to learn from others. It’s a perpetual adventure into new worlds, one that I mean to keep exploring. Thank you for coming on this little trip with me, and maybe one day we’ll meet again, on another adventure in another book.