The Little Writer

The memory is a little fuzzy around the edges, but some bits of it are sharp.

I am sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a jumble of boots, shoes, sandals, trainers and slippers. Hunched forward over the pale plastic wellie-boot cradled in my lap. My pudgy fingers gripping my stolen treasure - a blue biro. I huff my fringe out of my eyes to better see my craft and avoid smudging the blue ink.

I make another little circle next to the previous one, and follow it with a vertical line, and then another circle. Every so often, I make a squiggly horizontal line, and then return to my marching script of lines and circles. My face is a rictus of concentration, my tongue-tip peeking pinkly.

The story flowed - probably more easily than it does now. That could be rose-tinted glasses, but I don't think so. I know lots of people think children are nothing more than a pain in the bottom, but surely kids have got the jump on us when it comes to wild imagination. While our executive function waxes, the raw magic our little brains fizzed with wanes. We try in vain to re-capture it, but so much of it slips away. Like foam on our fingertips, or mist in the morning. Burnt away by the glare of what's Real and much of what's left squashed by the heavy drudge of Responsibilities.

My story marches on. Something about a little girl who lived with her mother in the forest - but to the uninitiated eye it just looks like a jumble of ones and zeroes. She doesn't have much to eat, but she's got lots of animal friends. The forest is green and soft, the path easy - a child forest, idyllic, bereft of things that sting and scratch.

I can see the story unfold on the inside of my skull as clearly as if it were in front of my eyes. I am fascinated by it, as fascinated as by a wild creature. I want to hold it, keep it, stop it escaping so that I can look at it from all angles and see what it does next.

What I "wrote" on the little boot wasn't a code. Each line didn't correspond to a sound or idea. In my mind, it was the process of making squiggling lines while the story happened - that was the important bit. That's what grown ups do.

I have a vague awareness that this - this magic I am doing with the pen, this is writing.

Making shapes and lines and squiggles - that was the spell that could pin down the story before it escaped, beating its fragile wings against the confines of my roiling imagination and trying to flutter away.

That was the trick that could alter the world to make it more agreeable. Or, more specifically create a new one. One for me to slot into with total ease. Where I fit better and more easily than I did in this one, the one you might call real - the one that was bogged down with boring grown ups and pesky reality. Where there would always be wasps at the picnic, always nettles on the path. Where forest creature aren't curious and gentle and apt to be petted, but instead run fast, and are made of nervousness and teeth.

Big rough hands snatch the boot and the pen from my hands, much to my indignation.

I will never know how that story ended - I was a pantser, not a plotter. But then, I was only three.

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Thank you for reading!

If you'd like to read some of the stuff from my childhood, have a look at this one or this one. They're not from quite that far back, and they are mostly re-writes, but I've done my best to keep the main elements.