National Writing Day

 National Writing Day. 

For some of us, writing is the ultimate release, that opportune moment to express yourself on the written page. When the clouds of depression and anxiety threatened to overwhelm you, there was an irresistible compulsion to let yourself go, to hit the keyboard and just open up on who you are, your position in the grander scheme of things, the position you occupy in relation to the rest of the world. 

When life became too overwhelming for you in 2012, you found the most reliable outlet for your emotions, a way of dealing with the all consuming complications that had now threatened to leave you helpless and despairing. Writing became your answer to the seemingly insoluble problems, a potential remedy for your psychological difficulties, and the way forwards rather than backwards. 

You'd always written for as long as you could remember. You left school without any academic qualifications but knew that the love for writing was still as passionate as ever. You used to write rambling, discursive, long winded, wordy and verbose English essays that seemed to make sense to you but, in hindsight, may have been incomprehensible to the trained eye.

The chances were that you were trying to impress your teachers with your immaculate command of the English language but then realised that these verbal banalities were just surplus to requirements. So, after leaving school and heading rapidly down into a dark hole that just seemed to swallow you up, writing was still on your subconscious, on the surface of your feelings but never properly within your reach. There was a sense here that you just wanted to write for a living even though you were still only 16 and nobody would take you that seriously. 

So you immersed yourself in the reading of the classics such as Dickens, Orwell, the wondrous Thomas Hardy, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Conrad, Henry James, Proust and Tolstoy, quite an impressive literary line up. You found yourself challenging yourself to read as much as you could but you had no idea why. And then towards the end of the 1980s, you became a tentative scribbler, jotting down notes at first before going back to writing with pen the first paragraphs of football match reports. The bug had bitten you. 

For some inexplicable reason, you would watch the highlights of Match of the Day and the Big Match, two of the most informative football magazine TV programmes. During the 1970s, something prompted you to pick up the pen yet again after pouring out your thoughts onto the written paper during a family holiday in Spain. It was the morning after Scotland had beaten England in 1977 which had resulted in broken crossbars, posts and destructive pitch invasions at the old Wembley. Scotland beat England but that somehow seemed irrelevant.

But now was the time. From somewhere you grabbed a piece of paper and just wrote and wrote. It was all very ordered and structured. Without any knowledge of house style or journalistic flair, you simply painted a picture of what had happened in this notorious battle between the Tartans and Sassenachs. Memory may not serve you correctly but as a first attempt at sports journalism, it wasn't that bad. It was factually correct, thought provoking perhaps but probably quite amateurish.

So you reflected on the masterful works of George Orwell and remembered his reflections on writing both essays and novels. Orwell had captured the popular imagination with his experience as a down and out tramp traipsing the streets of the East End and then his influences. You began to think that here was a man who had something very plausible, serious and fascinating to say. He told us all about his political standpoints, the internal divisions between those who had and those who couldn't afford the basic necessities. He openly criticised the Tories and the Labour party and then spoke in front of a BBC microphone during the Second World War, the perfect medium for everything that was controversial and contentious about the man.  

You though had a completely different canvas to work from. You had never been to Eton or any public school and never had Orwell's aptitude for the written word. So you imagined the scenario of a man with forthright opinions, rousing rhetoric, and detailed descriptions of society, poverty and middle class poshness and affluence. In many ways, Orwell despised the stinking rich and detested pretentiousness, snobbery, outrageous condescension, noses in the air and admitted to a general disapproval of the bourgeoisie, the upper classes.

Now you discovered Thomas Hardy, a writer of such poetic prose and magical, lyrical descriptions of Hardy's countryside that you could hardly believe what you were reading. The whole landscape and topography of rural Wessex and Dorset was brought vividly to life. It was a colourful and vibrant canvas of colours, richly imaginative scene setting where the plot and characterisation took pride of place in Hardy's mind. 

In quick succession, you found Joseph Conrad, Polish- English writer whose sea faring epics were both exhilarating, rewarding to the eye and utterly compelling. There was Henry James, full of grandiose and monumental portrayals of American high society and the amusing gossip that underpinned most of James novels. There was Franz Kafka, full of graphic accounts of his own childhood and tales of court trials while always remaining a beacon of harsh truths and accurate observations. Marcel Proust gave us three volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, a 3,000 page novel that seemed to go on for ever but did eventually stop when presumably Proust was emotionally exhausted. 

But writing is something that you've always done for as long as you can remember. It may have been happened by accident rather than design. You were never quite sure where your writing style would take but then it didn't really matter. You found yourself deep in the heart of subjects that were always open to interpretation. In a sense you were creating your world as opposed to a one written by somebody else. 

And yet we've always written, whether it be in the days of hieroglyphics, poetry, romantic and science fiction. We can often go back to the days when cavemen started carving inscriptions until the 16th and 17th centuries when the writers of the age cultivated a highly stylistic and formal approach to the world of the written word. Samuel Richardson wrote huge quantities of love letters before Tobias Smollett and Sir Walter Scott combined both bawdy and racy language and in the case of Scott's very lively accounts of people and relationships. 

So it's National Writing Day and it's time to blow your own personal trumpet about your very unique literary contributions. Firstly, in 2014, you wrote your personal life story, the development of your character and identity and your first experiences of life from a childhood perspective. You found yourself digging deep to find the reasons for your Autism and  some very reassuring answers because, although you didn't know it at the time, it was your way of coping with a condition that had remained so mysterious for such a long time. 

And then there was No Joe Bloggs, my story about me and there could hardly have been anything more appropriate or relevant to the way you were feeling at the time. You thought it was both moving, nostalgic and full of very honest description. Then there was Joe's Jolly Japes, my take on social commentary, your first children's book Ollie and His Friends and finally my current book of football poetry Football's Poetic Licence. Here you waxed lyrical about the FA Cup, Premier League, Champions League, my late and wonderful mum and dad, there was eulogy to my lovely dad, my grandpa Jack who cut the hair of those noble 1966 World Cup winning heroes Bobby Moore, Sir Martin Peters, Sir Geoff Hurst, Boris Johnson, Thomas Hardy, the World Cup, England, USA, Euro 2020, Europa League, the Carabao Cup, football grounds and Ilford FC, my local team growing up. 

It's National Writing Day folks so feel free to take out your laptop or even the good, old fashioned notebook and just tell us about whatever may be on your mind. Writers can be both private and reclusive, solitary or just busily diligent in their library researches or family archives. You never know in which direction those first words on the page will take you. So if you're thinking about it right now, just go for it. It could be a very special journey.