Words and Me

I've loved reading for longer than I can remember. It's in my top three things: Reading, Family and Doctor Who. But writing, I'm told, has long been a struggle. An awkward thing for an aspiring author, I know, but here we are.

Of course, I love writing now. I'm doing it near constantly, whether it's poetry, working on my novel or my fanfictions or just for my degree. But my teachers used to struggle to even get me to hold a pen, let alone form letters, when I was at the start of my school career.

Then there's my issue with transferring thoughts and ideas to the page - or the computer screen, as is now more often the case. I'd say I'm a slow writer, but really I'm more of a slow everything. Regardless, there was in fact a reason I started writing this.

When my nursery (or kindergarten, depending where you live) teachers did manage to get me to pick up a pen or pencil, it was still a struggle to get me writing. It wasn't lack of ideas or thoughts worthy of writing - no, I've never had an issue with finding an idea. My issue, so far as I can recall, has always been chasing the ideas down and holding them in my mind for long enough for them to start to form in the physical world. It's something that it's taken me many years to combat.

Then of course, I have the unfortunate addition of pedantry that I get from my dad so, once I had picked up a pen and found an idea worth writing, I would write each letter on top of the first one in what became a scribble of thought, which I would insist that I most definitely could read. Hmmm. Not so sure about that, Alexa.

My issue with the speed at which I write is something I've only been able to combat more successfully in recent years, as right the way through primary school - and most of secondary school too - I have had teachers constantly asking me to speed up my writing. There have been a few interesting ideas on what could help me, over the years, too.

I remember my year 1 teacher's method most fondly. In year 1, we wrote near exclusively in pencil but we had a drawer of special pens that were for our best work. In this drawer were two pens with stickers on that the rest of my year group of 30 pupils had to leave alone. These were my special pens. My year 1 teacher had stuck the stickers on the pens when she first noticed how slowly I wrote and had told me that they were magical stickers that would help me write quicker.

I'm not sure anymore whether this was actually true, or whether it made me feel like I was writing quicker because they were my special pens. Who knows. But I loved - and still love - the sentiment that came with the idea. Plus, what 5 or 6 year-old doesn't love stickers?

The sticker pens moved with me into year 2, where we started to use pens a little more often. Then, in years 3 and 4, my teachers simply waited to move on until it looked like I was nearly done. This is quite a typical response - and one that was echoed in the majority of my time at secondary school.

Year 5 brought a new teacher and another new approach. This one I saw only once - mainly because all it did was make me laugh. We were working on our weekly writing projects for our neat books and I was far behind the rest of the class - nothing new there. My teacher was coming around the room to check how everyone was doing. When she saw how behind I was, she joked that she would have to get a crank-handle to wind me up, so that I would write quicker. She then mimed the action behind me, probably hoping I would at the very least play along. The problem? It made me laugh, which meant I lost my train of thought, which in turn meant I took even longer to finish the task. Hence this being a one-time approach. Sorry, miss.

None of this has been helped by my being left-handed. I used to be terrified that I'd get ink smudges on my hands - which was unavoidable, really, but didn't help with my writing speed any.

I was given extra time in time for my GCSE exams almost 5 years ago now, which of course helped the situation a little. When your issue is with processing and working out what you want to write down, being told to hurry up and write something down is potentially the most useless attempt to help in the world. Not that I'm attacking anyone. My teachers throughout school were all genuinely trying very hard to help me.

What sparked my love of fiction, however, came in year 6 - the end of primary school. It wasn't even our main creative writing project of the year, which was based on this old tudor-style countryhouse, where we were supposed to write different styles of creative pieces along a theme - and we were all ghostbusters! No, this was one of our weekly creative pieces before that started.

We were supposed to write a blog-style story. What I mean by this is that our teacher had written the first part, which involves the first-person narrator approaching a creepy abandoned house and thinking back to how they came to be in that situation, with the part ending in 'click here', which we were supposed to put at the end of each section, as if it were leading through a series of blog entries that continued the story.

And suddenly my mind just... It exploded into life. It was the first project where my teacher didn't have to tell me to speed up and I was so excited by the oppportunities that had blossomed in my mind. It was like a door had been opened and I was seeing the world through an additional prism of light.

It was the prompt that started me not only writing for that project, but in my free time. I went from constantly having a book or my DS (throwback time lol) with me, to always having a notebook and pen. In the car, for long journeys (or short journeys). On the beach. On the bus, on my way to secondary school. In bed. In pubs and restaurants. My eyes had been opened and I wanted to make sure I would always be able to jot down new inspirations and ideas.

It was about this time that the fanfiction started. There should be no surprise from anyone who knows me when I say that my first piece of fanfiction was for Doctor Who. I've been obsessed since the relaunch in 2005 which, coincidentally, is longer ago than I can remember.