In the folder you see above, I keep some early writing attempts and English schoolwork. I can never throw any of this away as it’s too precious to me. It covers about ten years of work, from English assignments to poetry publishing letters. It begins from the age of 14, through to 1999. And I thought I would share some of these with you.
The first is a writing competition I entered. It was an open, short story competition, and I think that most of the entrants were adults. But I was commended for it and told that I had an ear for dialogue. I think being a telly addict at the time helped with that.
Next is my school English book for the 4th and 5th years (years 10 and 11).
We studied a lot of poetry for poetry appreciation. Among the poems are ‘5 Ways To Kill a Man’ and ‘Song of the Battery Hen’ by Edwin Brock, ‘Telephone Conversation’ by Wole Soyinka, and ‘The Dog Lovers’ by Spike Milligan. We also created parodies. Mine was based on ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
We also studied ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee, and Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’. My Macbeth assignment was far and away my best work.
There are lots of jotter and study notes that I’ve crammed in the book. Even the occasional doodle.
I’ve always enjoyed learning new words. When I used to read in the evening, I always kept a dictionary nearby so I could look up anything I didn’t know. The following photo shows a list of words that I found interesting.
The next surprised me as I had forgotten all about it.
It was a script I was working on. I must have been about 20 years old at this point. Quite ambitious really. If I remember correctly, I bought a book on script writing to learn the layout. I think that early commendation about having an ear for dialogue stuck with me. There are only a couple of pages of the script with a few handwritten notes.
I had bought an electric typewriter at this point and preferred it to a manual typewriter, which always hurt my fingers, especially if I missed a key and jammed my finger in between them.
Lastly is a bundle of acceptance letters from publishers for four poems and a piece of micro-fiction. I always felt that having my poems published was the pinnacle of my writing. These days I’m always trying to learn more to iron out my writing skill wrinkles.
In the back interior of the folder I had written this quote by Keats. I kept it there as a reminder of how I wanted to view and write poetry.
I hope you enjoyed this little foray into my early writing endeavours.
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Charlotte Clark 