I Was Not a Writer, And I Loved Words

Simone Padur
Jul 17, 2023
3 min read

Updated: Aug 3, 2023

Writing bleh!

This was my basic point of view for most of my life. I hated it and didn't want to do it and I would wait until the last possible minute to do any writing assignment! Sitting and putting my thoughts down in a structured way, usually in essay format, was torture! But this is usually how we are taught and it almost killed the love of writing for me. However, I was one of the fortunate people who loved to read and I think that's what saved me. Because in the back of my mind lingered the question could I write like that?

It didn't make sense to me that we were not allowed to play with creative writing in school when so much of what we use writing for in the world is to tell stories in one form or another whether it's advertising, script writing or journalism, etc. And yet here we were stuck writing essay after essay...I mean, what kid reads essays for fun?! Ok, well maybe some do.

I longed to tell stories but in a way that worked for me....it was poetry that found me first.

The tragedy and the romance are found in the likes of The Lady of Shalott, The Wreck of the Hesperus, The Highwayman, and let's not forget the Bard himself. These appealed to my teenage soul as a vehicle for the melancholy that often afflicts those transitioning from childhood to adulthood.

It was the sounds of words that first seduced my pen.

They trickled into short lines of poetry and short prose. I eagerly scribbled them into notebooks in the early days. And when I moved on to college and university, I captured them on the paper flotsam and jetsam that I found in the bottom of my handbag.

The lines seemed to have a life of their own, and if I didn't snatch them out of the air, they were gone. They were the words caught in the steam of my tea, the hum of a bus engine as it pulled away from the curb, or the scent of summer on the wind.

Then, my Dad died, and I stopped my scribblings, and I forgot to read. I no longer heard the whispers that danced through the air. The world fell silent.

It was, of all things, a chicken carcass and a book by Yann Martel, The Life of Pi, which awoke the writer me again.

Yes, a chicken carcass...

I had to make a conceptual film art project. I wanted to compare the hull of a boat to a wasted rib cage....hence a chicken carcass suspended in a tub of water.

And that's when the poetry flooded back in and the stories began to speak. Every time I read a book or article ideas would begin to percolate. But when I began to write any more than a few lines, the sentences would scrabble and the whole idea would begin to fray and unravel. So I assumed that I would always be limited to the quick scribblings of a poet.

What I didn't know about writing at the time was this...

Let the writing breathe. It has to flow in whatever form it chooses. It might be backward, sideways, or, upside down but that doesn't matter It just needs to pour out into a puddle. Then come back to it. Then it needs to be left alone to ferment. I don't watch it or pick at it. I just do or write something else.
I make lists of all of my stories or writing projects and I look at them to see who pops for me that day. Strangely this makes writing so much easier.
Edit. I know this may seem elementary to many of you and you'd be surprised how many people think they hate writing but in actual fact they hate editing. So did I. Until I found nugget number one...let it breathe. When you let it breathe you become more objective about your work and it is easier to edit.
Essay writing... all those essays I wrote I discovered were not a waste of time but prep for organising my thoughts with a structure once I had let them breathe. Like an architect, I look at the mayhem and I make sense of it so that you can move from one place to another as a reader with ease.