A few days ago a renowned French writer Charles Dantzig was the guest of author-ambassador Daniel Rondeau in a series of conferences held by the French Embassy and the Alliance Française de Malte. For Dantzig reading is as natural as walking. He further believes that books are not written for readers and neither for authors. They are not written for anyone. So how authors write should not interest anyone. Yet Marie Benoît managed to provoke quite a number of writers into jotting down their thoughts on how they write – and I must admit they have provided enjoyable reading even though it’s none of the readers’ business!

I believe that all readers could be authors. The art of the raconteur is also natural. In days gone by when readers were scarce one person could read the contents of a novel to the neighbours whenever the few pages of the faxxiklu reached their home once a week – this before the time of the soaps. Historians are among the best writers in the world – they dig up so many stories from various archives that reporting their findings makes them good storytellers.

My schooling, compared to that of my siblings, started late. I was six years old when I first put pencil to paper in an infants’ class. This seemed to have given me an extra impetus, a bigger dose of love, towards the art of writing. Most probably it is because I was old enough to start getting excited about new things.

As a boy, after school hours, I used to sit on the doorstep of our house and fascinate my peers on the street with stories that had to meet with a mysterious quick end because it was getting dark. The next day, my bunch of faithful listeners, would beg me to finish off the tale. Buoyed by this popular demand I used to extend the yarn into another episode using the same characters. New stories would usually start on Mondays and would last for a week. In those days we did not have TV so most of my characters came from the Sunday morning matinées that we used to see in black and white at the Chateau Lonz parish cinema in Sta Venera and the Italian screen dramas showing at the Radio City Opera House in Hamrun to which I used to accompany my parents on Sunday nights. I can clearly remember that this creative streak used to enthuse me a lot and maybe that is why my stories equally thrilled my young audiences.

My teenage years in the 1960s magnetized me to the media. I was writing poetry, editing and publishing the first youth magazine in Malta (called Malteen) and finally starting a journalistic stint with The Times (then of Malta). My very early 20s landed me on TV, writing scripts for my own programmes. I also wrote a couple of self-help books on sex education.

A sense of immediacy crept into my life. There has to be a utilitarian motive why I write. The media produces immediate results and immediate feedback and thus today, influenced by the common art of TV, when I write I need to have an instant scope, hence my scripts and contributions to the papers. The media also killed my reading fiction. The creation of false reality in the world news is enough as a daily measure.

I still write the occasional poem and have at least two collections of unusual short stories but I am keeping them in waiting for when I retire. On my pressing agenda I have a researched study on the media in connection with an event in Malta’s history. That will see the light of day before other more leisurely reads.

But how do I write? How do singers sing, performers play instruments and artists paint? It happens when it has to happen – over the years I noticed that heartaches not only help you get rid of extra fat but also inspire passionate peculiar pieces of prose. For me, a rare rainfall in the Mediterranean is also an inspiration. I sit down and write only after a period of brooding on the theme, plot, lines or scenes. I mostly think in pictures – guess that’s another effect of TV. It does not matter if I scribble or type – dictating a story is my preferred style only when I find some volunteer friend, usually someone close.

So let’s hope my time on this planet allows me enough space to produce the books – electronic or otherwise – which are still knocking on my mind’s door. And when that happens, may someone, somewhere, enjoy reading them for no reason at all.