For as long as I have been a sentient being, I was aware that I tended to live in my head. By that I mean that I can quite happily daydream (occasionally also night-dream) myself into all manner of places and situations, and also place other people and characters in those situations.
Like many people diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, I can, if I am motivated to do so, acquire enormous amounts of quite detailed information about subjects. (I do not have Aspergers, a psychological profiling that did in 2007 proved that. I might have one or two Aspergers traits, however).
Many years ago, after regaling some hapless individual with accumulated knowledge during the course of an evening, the individual in question ended our encounter with the comment “I have never met anybody who knows so much about so many subjects as you”. Then he paused. “Pity most of it is of no damned use”.
In practical terms, he was right. Most of my head knowledge is esoteric and not useful on a day-to-day living basis. However, when, as I am discovering, when it comes time to create a work of fiction, some of that knowledge and information suddenly becomes very useful. It allows me to weave into a narrative detail information that otherwise would be missing.
I grew up in a blue-collar (aka working-class) household in the UK, but not a normal household. On the negative side there were numerous dysfunctionalities that I only recognized when I became an adult. On the positive side (and it was a big positive), my parents were extremely motivated to make sure that I obtained a complete education. They were both of an age where their educations had been disrupted by World War II. They wanted me to have the start in life that they felt had been denied them for reasons outside of their control.
As a result, they encouraged me to read, and did not place too many restrictions on my movements, once I had demonstrated that if I left home, I returned on or close to my stated return time, in one piece. This was an era with no cell phones, so that ability to show reliability was an important element. So, in addition to riding a lot of places on my bicycle, I spent a lot of time in the local reference library.
Being a natural introvert, I found social encounters, especially in school, confusing and often distressingly negative. Part of this was discrimination, subtle but unmistakeable, based on my family background and perceived (low) position in the English class system. Part of this was simply that I did not know how to be socially assertive, partly because I was an introvert, but partly because I was very sensitive. The net result was that I stumbled through adolescence, not really learning social skills. Many detail social skills, I acquired much later in life.
So, instead of acting out wants and desires, like most developing humans, I limited my falling in with groups and crowds, because that never worked, and I engaged in solitary pursuits, most of which involved knowledge acquisition or outdoor activities like cycling, fishing and beach-combing. With a buzzing brain, this led to my imagination operating, at least some of the time, in lieu of actual experiences. It led to my sci-fi reading phase, where I read sci-fi and futuristic novels, and to my big reading phase after college.
A contributory factor to acquiring imagination was that there was no television in my household until I was 16 years of age. One of the more bizarre experiences that I went through as a result was listening to TV shows (you could hear them on the radio system we had, but we had no television) and trying to make sense of them without the visuals. Comedy shows not reliant on slapstick sort of worked. News and current affairs sort of worked. Most movie genres don’t work. I tried to make sense of Western TV series like “Gunsmoke” and modern urban series like “The Untouchables”. That was hard. Since my grandparents had a TV, I watched fragments of those shows, and that allowed me (in my mind) to fill in the gaps, at least some of the time. Without realizing it, I was learning to extrapolate and imagine.
The combination of having an over-active brain with a well-honed ability to store (largely useless) knowledge, being a natural introvert, and lacking visual inputs in my formative years, led to me being able to live in my head. It also left me with a lack of tethering to television and movies. We are all familiar with the person who spends hours and hours sitting on the couch watching television. I am not much of a sitter. I can take or leave television and streaming video, except for certain items like motor racing.
This deficient and sometimes dysfunctional formative period in my life is now an advantage in writing, because I can actually visualize entire places, people and situations in my brain in highly cinematic detail. When I hammered out the first Book of Loukas, two Summers ago, I was able to be very productive over a 4-5 week period, cranking out in excess of 60,000 words, because I was sitting with a movie of Books of Loukas playing inside my head. I really just wrote down the events in the movie scenes.
That led me to the realization that I can only be effective with detailed prose creation when I can visualize scenes. Absent any visualization, I cannot be very effective at hammering. I have tried it. The results were utterly mediocre.
I suspect that at this point in my life, I am really a frustrated movie director, along the lines of Joni Mitchell, who, asked about the cinematic lyrics in her 1976 LP Hejira, said that she felt like she was a frustrated movie director, trying to compress movies into songs.
As to what type of movies I would create, I can only say that based on where I am in my fiction writing, any resulting movie would not get a general release, because no certification body would pass it…