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"I
woke up at five o'clock in the morning with a story in my head,"
says Alex Fox. "I couldn't stop until I'd written it down.
From then, I just carried on writing."
The writing bug struck this 46-year-old Northamptonshire grandmother
just six months ago.
That first story (about a fat woman who killed herself in the bathroom)
has just won the a London literary prize, the Momaya Competition.
Alex is very much an Internet writer. Once she realised she had
a talent for using words, she went onto the BBC's Get Writing website.
She now uses Alex Keegan's Boot Camp website where fellow authors
pull apart each other's work in the hope that severe criticism will
make them all better writers.
Pulling punches
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| Winner:
Alex Fox |
"Nobody
pulls any punches," says Alex, "it's completely honest.
It's about deconstructing everyone's stories and finding everything
that's wrong with them and learning from that."
Alex's
winning entry for the Write '04 competition, The Time Of Our Singing,
was written in just 75 minutes as part of an exercise on the boot
camp website: "I was given that title and had to write a story
in a short space of time.
"Exercises like that get your brain working in a different
way. You put your reaction down on paper rather than thinking about
it and plotting it."
Heartfelt
For such a moving, heartfelt piece of writing, you'd have expected
that it was autobiographical. But it was not. However, Alex drew
on other personal experiences: "It was not long since my mother
died and so I probably had death on my mind. My husband is ill,
so that probably came into it. I've got children so I see young
relationships starting and ending."
Read
The Time Of Our Singing
by Alex Fox
 Listen
to Alex Fox reading
The Time Of Our Singing
(Realplayer 56k, 3'46")
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Another
one of Alex's five entries to Write '04, Landing The Impossible,
was highly commended. This short story came directly from personal
experience.
"I've got a son who was a skateboarder. He was one of the skateboarders
who used to congregate on the library steps in Kettering. In the
story, a skateboarder is dumped outside the steps of a house in
a shopping trolley - and that actually happened to us - very high
on drink and drugs. I had to call an ambulance and think about whether
I dared give him artificial respiration or not."
Read
Landing The Impossible
by Alex Fox
Alex's
language is part-way between prose and poetry. "I get into
trouble for that all the time," she admits. "Some people
like very simple language and they go for the story. I tend to wrap
the story up in a lot of language. At the moment I'm trying to take
that apart and make sure that the story is as important as the language."
Tough
Despite success in an ever increasing number of writing competitions,
Alex is tough on herself. "Every single element of my work
needs a lot of improvement" she confides.
"It takes three years to get a degree. You can't expect to
be a good writer in anything less."
But
above all, writing is fun and Alex is revelling in her new hobby:
"I've discovered I've got something I can do that I never knew
I can do - something buried there I just didn't know existed. It's
amazing to find that other people want to read my work."
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