Creativity & Reading Diversity with Doctor Who

Recently I have had the absolute pleasure of meeting Mark Wright, no, not the one from
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, the one that writes all things Doctor Who! Mark gave a talk at my University as a part of the Sound – Vision – Place event that was happening – I thought I’d pop along considering seeing his name on an email got me all excited about Doctor who.

I’ve been an avid Doctor Who fan since its second run started back in 2005, it was one of those shows that your parents sit you in front of because they used to watch it as a child. Naturally I’d grown fond of the TV show and soon started to label myself as a Whovian. As I started to grow up and notice more and more of this franchise surrounding me, I noticed there weren’t just the scripts for the TV show that encompassed the spirit of the mysterious Time Lord. There were also comics, audio books, novels, short stories, history books… So many different outlets for your Doctor Who creativity!

I decided early on in my life that I wanted to write for a living. Stories captivated me and Doctor Who was a part of that. Wright mentioned the fact that Doctor Who was the reason he became a writer, I wouldn’t go as far to say as that is the case for me, but the showcase of incredible stories happening week after week made me think that I want to create stories just like that.

One thing that this talk did leave me thinking about was the many ways in which we read things. When you think of reading you tend to think of sitting down with a novel or text book and reading it through, absorbing the character or knowledge that it’s offering. In fact there are many many different ways that an author’s writing is absorbed in to our systems. Wright himself has worked on the audio dramas, comics, history and companion novels to the Doctor Who TV show.

As an aspiring writer myself I found it so interesting that you can create stories from so many different mediums. Whereas I think reading a novel front to back will always be one of my favourite ways of reading, enjoying a graphic novel or a comic is coming up to be a close second recently.

Many of us don’t release that stories and creativity are all around us. Just because someone doesn’t read novels or big academic texts doesn’t mean they don’t read. Comic books and graphic novels and short stories and fanfiction and quote books and coffee table books are all parts of reading that should be celebrated!

We should be excited by text and by stories and creativity, we should be soaking up absolutely everything in a bookshop because as human beings we CAN! You never know what could inspire you to be or do something incredible, don’t limit yourself to just one kind of reading, broaden your horizons!