START WRITING!

It might seem a little strange for a relatively new author to write his first blog encouraging others to write – rather than ‘sell’ himself – but I’m not in it for personal recognition; ‘it is a far, far better thing I do in laying down my pen for others’ (anybody recognise the literary misquote?)
Anyway, if you feel sometimes like the little bird in the picture above and you don’t know where to start or even whether you should start in the first place I would encourage you to think again.
There is always the established cliché to fall back on: ‘Everybody has a book in them’ but if you doubt that you might at least concede that everyone has a story to tell.
Why not tell yours?
If the blank piece of paper is a bother read Ted Hughes’ The Thought-Fox.
If the practical process of writing is a problem why not employ an amanuensis?
The word amanuensis comes from the Latin when Roman people of note asked their favoured slaves to write down their thoughts thus ‘adding value to their masters’ lives’. Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, John Milton, Samuel Johnson all made use of amanuenses, as did Coleridge (when he was high on laudanum) and James Joyce who engaged the services of Samuel Beckett (which must have made for some rich cross-fertilisation of literary exuberance and obscurity!)
Clearly, you would be in good company.
The following anecdote might help to inspire you ….
I was once asked to contribute to ‘An Aspirations Week’ for the Street Community so I hit upon the idea of ‘Creative Writing’.
Twenty-nine rough sleepers signed up!
I would help my new ‘students’ break free from the shackles of their hum-drum lives in order to soar into the creative world of the imagination.
But despite such lofty aspirations of my own, I was not prepared for what was to unfold.
I arrived early. I sat down on a bare, wooden chair in the room that had been set aside for ‘Creative Writing’ and waited for the class to arrive.
Nothing happened and the grey clock stared like a tombstone.
Finally, a bearded man in an army surplus jacket, looking like he had emerged from a rough river estuary, stumbled into the room.
“Have you brought twenty-eight friends with you?” I asked in a jocularly stupid voice.
“I haven’t got twenty-eight friends,” he rasped through his coughing.
I put down my notes and sat with the solitary Woody – for that was his name - as he talked, roughly, for an hour. For me, it was like scraping the grit from a shell, then pressing it tightly to my ear.
We spoke about his military past and his heavy drinking. He described his pitch where he sold The Big Issue : he stood at one end of the bridge that crossed the river flowing from east to west whilst the throng of humanity traversed the bridge from north to south. The dynamics of those directional movements were not lost on Woody. He was a poet, after all. He saw imagery and metaphors all around him. There was symbolism in his soul.
What he did not see was the irony of ironies: that he had signed up for the creative writing seminar yet he was illiterate; he really could not read or write. And so he donned his masks, to confront life, and he composed his poetry. It was all in his head, you see. He explained how he returned to his makeshift bed on the riverside below to join his girl-friend who would transcribe his words onto paper. She was his amanuensis. Nestling together under their large flaps of cardboard, speaking poetry, taking what comforts they could share, was not an image one could easily erase from one’s memory.
Woody recited one of his poems. It spoke of love and rough times. He wasn’t ‘some mute inglorious Milton’ but the poem had a raw simplicity that tugged at the heart long after Woody had gone.
He suddenly decided to leave and so he left abruptly.
That was the last time I saw Woody; he died some weeks later from kidney failure.
SO, COME ON, START WRITING!

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