NOT A PROMISING START 

Because I promised I'd blog on some aspect of writing on a monthly basis, today seems as good a time as any to begin.

One of my most frequently asked question is, "Can anyone be taught to write? My answer is, "If you have a sensitivity to words you can be helped to write better and to avoid some of the obstacles witrh which those of us who have gone before have had to struggle.

I would love to say that I was a literary child prodigy who read and wrote veraciously, but I wasn't. I have hazy recollections of picture and pop up-books being read to me by my mother. I loved Enid Blyton and adored boarding school books about girls with posh names and with titles such as "Felicity of the Fifth', even though I would have died if I'd been sent to one. My mother's reading matter was limited to the popular classics such as Little Women etc; What Katie did etc; Anne of Greengables and the like, which she read over and over. She never got round to Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre, so neither did I. My father's reading was even more limited. On the small table by the side of his armchair was a book entitled "Rommel, The Desert Fox", which I can never recall him touching. On the other hand, he did pretty well devour the Evening Star every evening and the News of the World (which I wasn't allowed to read) and the Pictorial every Sunday.

What I did possess was the ability to scatter adjectives throughout my stories. which, in those days earned me good marks at school. For example, "The fat, ugly, hairy, friendly  dog .... merited four ticks for the number of adjectives and a 'Well done' in the margin. Nowadays I'm sure the adjectives would be circled and there would be a note somewhere suggesting that instead of adjectives, I use a strong, or stronger verbs and nouns. For example, The dog, froth slathering from its jowels, waddled ...

As I approached my mid teens my reading diminished and I only read the books set for my Royal Society of Arts exams, one of which I remember being called 'Cycle of the North - A Story of the Tundra", which put me off reading for a good few years. Thus by the age of twenty-one I had stopped reading anything other than things I had to such as instructions and bus timetables. As for writing, the occasional letter had to suffice.