Local Author James Murphy

That is the view of James Murphy. And he knows what he is talking about considering he wrote a trilogy of cold war spy thrillers (“more like a treeology” he said considering they were called Cedar, Juniper and Ash).

He has also written the acclaimed The Murder of Julia Wallace, in which he tries to solve a 70-year old murder in his native Liverpool and Liverpool VCs on the lives and times of 23 Liverpudlians who were awarded the Victoria Cross.

He told Barrow Rotary Club members how he moved to Barrow in 1970 when he thought Barrow was one of the most vibrant towns in the country.

His desire to write led to him joining the Barrow Writers’ Circle “but it was more like a book club with members talking about works they had read”.

After five or six years in Barrow he went to teach abroad, came back to Barrow in 1980 but then went to work in the North Sea oil industry.

“I tried to be a writer,” he said, “and then I met someone from the Boston State University where they ran a creative writing course. But I thought about Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe, Orwell and my favourite writer Shakespeare. What courses had they been on?”

He said it is probably true that there is a story in all of us but it is a case of weedling it out “like tackling a periwinkle with a pin.”

“You cannot be taught to write. You start with nothing but create something.”

He told how he stepped in to help a writers’ course at the East Anglia University. “I asked to see the class’s work and they said while the course had been going for a month they had not got round to writing.

“I told them to write something – then collected their papers. The next time I saw them they were all anxious as to what I thought of their work. But I had to explain that it was not a test.

“I told them to write about the subject they had covered the week before but keep it down to 100 words. What they produced was nothing like what they had written the week before.

“Clearly creative writing cannot be taught but it must be encouraged. You need a narrative, a theme and a plot, just like Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo.”