How I Wrote A Book In Prison

How I Wrote A Book in Prison

by

Adrian English

Hello, my name is Adrian English. Maybe you have heard of me. I draw “CGI/Chain-Gang Illustrated” for Top Shelf Comics 2.0, an online comics anthology. Or maybe, you have read a poem that I had published in some journal somewhere. Or maybe you saw me on “Hard-Time” on the National Geographic Channel. Or maybe, and even better, you read my debut novel, “Queen of Assassins”.

Wait a minute. You have not done any of that? Well, that's okay. I will not hold it against you. It does seem like I am a bit over-productive, doesn't it? It may even seem like I'm just some obscure nobody except for one thing—I'm in prison.

Prison, you say? Yes, prison. I mean like that place where they send monsters, felons, and wrongly-convicted folks. People who make mistakes. We tend to get looked up a lot on Google but what you find in the search results may not accurately capture what happened, so be careful when you do that.

Now, I understand that the prison writer is a bit of a cliché. You can probably go onto Amazon right now and find half a million prisoner writers. There are enough of us out there for us to be our own genre. I know more writers in prison than I know athletes. That is really saying something too. It seems that once you find your freedom taken from you and discover that you have a lot of free time on your hands that the easiest thing to do is write.

Well, not exactly.

This is the hands-down the most chaotic environment that I have ever had the displeasure of being in. Noisy. Violent. Anything can happen at any time. Trust me, I know this from personal experience. To write or to do anything else constructive takes great discipline and focus.

I wrote Queen of Assassins in 2007 from a cell in lockdown at Hays State Prison. Lockdown is a totally different atmosphere than general population. For the most part, it is quieter and less chaotic. Some people had a habit of locking themselves down just so they could get away from the madness and work on stuff. Back then, when you went to lockdown, they put you in a cell by yourself. In an environment like that, you could really get some work done, if you so chose to do so. Me? I had a cell to myself and for me that was a setting that was pretty conducive to writing.

I set myself a goal to write 2,000 words a day and I met it. I treated myself to ice cream from the store if I met that goal for seven straight days. In three months time, I had a rough draft—my first draft.

By now it was early 2008 and the National Geographic Channel was on the scene. Not only did they chronicle my life but they motivated me to create more. The book Queen of Assassins was finished and now it had to be typed up.

That led me to a roadblock. In Georgia prisons, inmates are not allowed to use computers or typewriters. But, inmates are also a supremely crafty lot who are capable of great things—good and bad—when allowed near electronic media. Thus, the state does all it can to frustrate our creative abilities.

I went through a total of three typists and one prison transfer in the journey to get my novel typed up. I also went through a horrible sexual assault, a suicide attempt, a fire, and the death of my mother. I'm not saying that to trivialize those things, but just to give you an idea of the hardships I endured while in prison. These incidents are all separate stories that I will tell some other time. When it comes to expressing creativity, people who are free have it a lot easier than those who are locked up. To an extent, you get to pick and choose your environment as well as the people around you. I do not have that freedom. There is little choice I have in anything I do. And yet still, I was determined to get that book published.

In the Spring of 2010, my Dad took the typed manuscript to a print-on-demand publisher named Xlibris and had the book self-published. It was not perfect and some typos did escape into the final copy but it was a learning experience and I'm glad I did it.

Now I am out of prison and it is my goal to build on that first book and hopefully have a successful career as a writer.