Motivation. Inspiration

What inspired you to become writers?

I trained as an actor at Toi Whakaari and I…. after training for a couple of years I just felt that there wasn’t…. a lot of the things I found important weren’t being written about, and from my generation as well, and so that was one of the reasons. And I just thought I’ve got great ideas. Everyone will want to know what I think, and luckily for me they did. So it really came from that, just wanting to put things out there, and I thought it was working as an actor, but it just wasn’t. It actually came from the bigger ideas, and then gifting it to actors, but again people who are better at this than me. And then allowing them to voice these thoughts, so that’s where it came from for me.

I remember, umm…. maybe when I was at school and a school teacher…we had to hand in some stuff, poetry, or bits and pieces, and analyse other people things, and song lyrics. And I remember very well, just as Hone was speaking it reminded me, oh there’s a line in some song I wrote down, and its something like, “I see something happening and I have to write it down”. It’s in this song. I think it’s a David Bowie song to go way back. And the writer…rather the teacher scribbled on the side of it and handed it back to me (and always wonderful when teachers ever take the time to do these things), and it said “Every writer has to do that”, and it was just that notion that there is something really universal about wanting to communicate, and it does unleash something really wonderful. Why would you want to go through life and not write it down, or at least not express it to someone? And when you start doing it you’re suddenly…. it’s like any one of those things. You say how did I ever live without this?

What inspires me to write is people and everybody around me, and anybody I ever meet, or you know, all the relationships I’ve had in my life. But I can say what encouraged me, was when I was young at school, and I remember a teacher picking up one of my poems or a little short story I’d written when I was very young at primary school, and saying “Great!” And that got me fired up, that got me going.