How I started to write

I started writing by accident, when I was seventeen.

I'd been placed by a course that was designed to help the government reduce unemployment figures for the under eighteens. I had dropped out of my media studies course at college with depression, I was living alone and I had to work out what I actually wanted to do. I know know that many people go through life not knowing what the hell they want to do and I even embrace that approach to some extent, but at the time I was happily taking what the system offered me to set me up on the path to a suitable career.

However, the British government kind of assumed that people from a working class background who have managed to misplace their parents before they are through college are, well, somewhat illiterate. They were mostly right, and so I was placed on a course that was not suitable to someone who had completed a scholarship-funded public school education. No big deal, I enjoyed it and they did help me to get the long term work placement that led to my first paid job.

Before I reached that blissful point of employment, however, I had to be kept busy on the government course by doing all the activities they had to offer:
Driving theory, so that people can become delivery personnel;
Food hygene, so that you could work in MacDonalds;
First aid, so you could become a home care helper;
Health and safety... well, I expect it is good for supermarket jobs;
Basic IT, so that you could become an office monkey.

The longest course was IT, but I was already proficient enough to whiz through the levels and become rather bored. That is when I started writing. I started to enjoy writing, too. I'd had no interest in English in school and I completed assignments with little thought or effort. I didn't think about the way the books I loved reading had been formed, what made them so good, and what could have been better. Once I started writing, it all changed. I payed attention, practised and learned and I realised that I was never as bad at it as I had thought. I realised that I was capable of getting better. Best of all, I realised that the process of getting better, of learning, was enjoyable.

So at seventeen, without quite realising it, I learned to write. Meanwhile, I spent my days in the belief that I was working my way towards a long career in electronics.


I'll write more on this topic, I'm sure.
So if you want more, read on.

Melody-Jane.