The Bicycle Man

Enrolling on a Creative writing course has been a rich and rewarding experience. It is all very well being able to write a blog from week to week and have your parents tell you that they enjoyed reading it, but having complete strangers sit and listen appreciably of your made-up mini tales of fiction is a completely different feeling.

Confidence is a great thing and I guess that's what I have been looking for. But it can also be very dangerous. With the little confidence boost that I've recently acquired I've taken on the challenge of writing something a little more substantial.

I'm not going to come out and say "I am writing a book" as that isn't quite what it is. I was out on a family day out at Riverside Country Park a few months ago and after we had made our way out to the evocatively names "Horrid Hill", we came across an old man, sitting on a bench, watching the world go by. Next to him was a bicycle, parked carefully just in front of him.

I thought to myself at the time, about the effort that it took for us to get here and how it must have been ten times worse for him with his bike. Why then was he there, it must be some place of importance perhaps, what is it that he thinks about looking out all the way down river?

I had the camera with me that day and took a candid photograph which whenever I look at it, the same questions arise. Why then my own interest in a random stranger? I really cannot answer that. From time to time, you see a person on that street that is a little out of the ordinary and wonder what story it is that they would tell - I just decided to have a go at telling it.

So I sat down and started to write, about the man, who I named James talking to his deceased wife, Annie and how she offers him comfort knowing that she was there, at the place they met as children. About how he still wonders about Pete, his childhood friend that disappeared and how it was stopping him from dying. He didn't want to die without ever knowing what happened, despite knowing that he'll have all the answers when he reunites with his wife in heaven.

And then I stopped, read it back and had a whole load of new and unanswered questions. Who is Pete, what happened to him? Does James find out the answers to the mystery? What are the answers? So I've carried on writing, not with any real plan at the moment, but instead guided by a selection of A3 pieces of paper, names written on them with questions. Is he Dead? How did he die? Is he part of the mystery? What is the big mystery? Ages, timeliness and personality traits, relationship status and other vital bits of imaginary information.

The point is, I have something tangible to write about and the importance of confidence to do it. I just need to keep the momentum going and see what comes of it. I'm not going to say that I'm writing a book, because I'm not. I'm trying to tell the fictional story of a man I never met. I may not finish it, I may waver and get distracted, real life will almost certainly intervene but all the time that I have that photo, the possibility exists that a story will come of it. Whether or not it's good enough for publication, well let's cross that bridge if we get that far.