The Suprising Birth of a Writer

I was behind at primary school.

I remember having extra lessons and support to help with my grades, but nothing really stuck. Maybe I wasn't the type to sit still? No doubt I was a daydreamer, someone who got lost in their own imagination. Maybe my brain needed something more stimulating to keep me present?

I don't know for sure. But drastic change was just around the corner.

Walking around the housing estate one afternoon, going nowhere in particular, I spotted a Game Boy lying beside the kerb. It brought me up short.

This thing looked like a brick, even then. If it were a dog, it would've been mangy, oily and flee-ridden. You certainly wouldn't have brough it home with you. A vet would've winced and said, "I'm sorry, lad, but I've done all I can. Best we put it down."

So, of course I brought the filthy device home with me.

Times were rough at no. 22 Buckingham Road. We were counting pennies and didn't have much in the way of electronics just yet. Reluctantly, my mum attempted to clean up the Game Boy and temper my expectations. After all, why would anyone leave a working Game Boy outside on the kerb for God knows how long?

But it did work!

I must have played Pokemon Red for hundreds of hours, day and night. What's amazing about that and relevant to copywriting?

You see, Game Boy had 8-bit (chiptune) audio, which was great at the time but terrible compared to today's standards. If you wanted to understand the story, you had to read through endless dialogue, calculate character stats and browse through all the menus. And I read a lot.

Second, in curating my own Pokemon team and going on an adventure, I was creating a story with its own hero: a rags to riches Pokemon master specialising in psychic and fire types. And I was reading and creating for hour upon hour.

Games should really get more credit as learning tools, shouldn't they?

Really, where would I be today without that 8-bit hunk of junk that played Pokemon Red?

But games come with restrainsts in the form their coding. Me and my best friend, we decided to start writing and drawing our own Pokemon comics. This meant complete freedom in storytelling!

And okay, it was as much about drawing colourful pictures as it was writing. But my imagination was set free, was now out of bounds. I could set my Pokemon adventure in Essex, England and populate it with the pocket monsters from the game. Life needn't be in the fictional Japanese region of Kanto inside the Game Boy screen.

The only thing stopping me from doing what I wanted was my own skills, and they improved every day. By the time I finished primary school, my grades had gone up and I was no longer what a teacher might call "a cause for concern".