“So, you want to be a writer?”
I was in sixth grade when I had my dreams trampled upon by the words of my then English teacher. We were asked to write about what our hopes and dreams were for the future. In typical fashion, half nobly wrote the script that their parents had put in their heads, writing about their dreams of being doctors and lawyers, detailing how they wish to better humanity. The odd few made clear their political aspirations. I had to look at these as idealistic hopes, as my present day cynicism would only scoff at these ambitions. We were all young then, so such musings were admirable and (hopefully) were devoid of the inevitable lust for excessive material fulfilment and the trappings of corrupt power.
I remember perhaps one or two had hopes of success in sports. I can’t remember the particulars. We did not find these out of place, as I think they were pretty good at whatever they were into. I just can’t remember who they were in particular, only that we were not surprised with their ambitions. Perhaps they made it and I remain ignorant of the matter. If it was so, I humbly apologise for not keeping up to date with the history with my peers are concerned.
In any case, this leads to my story. I decided to talk about my dream of being a writer. Now, even then I knew then extent of my abilities. I was not expecting to be a high brow writer of modern literature. I just wanted to tell stories, be a novelist. This was a kid, who grew up fascinated reading the mystery novels, action adventure stories and the odd sci-fi/fantasy tale. (One day I will complete my Hardy Boy mystery series collection!). I went on to drone about how I liked to tell stories about people, events or for just for entertainments sake.
It wasn’t my best essay by any account, but I was pretty happy with my work. I always liked essay writing to any other form of testing. It was the only way to express an understanding and grasp of a subject as opposed to plain facts and figures. Yes, some people love to pad their writing heavily, with flowery words and the odd anecdote. But, that was allowable as long as there was a point to all of it. In elementary school, essays would be handwritten on a sheet of lined intermediate pad, with borders. Blue or black ball point pen, depending on what was available.
I happily hand over my finished work to my English teacher, satisfied on a well thought out piece of work. She took it, read through it quickly, looked up, smiled and said, “So you want to be a writer?,” loud enough for the class to hear. I smiled broadly, thinking that my writing may have shown her possibly my great imagination, fantastic prose and charming ingenuity. But it’s her next words quickly took the wind out of my sails.
“Are you sure? With YOUR handwriting?!? “
Cue laughter from my classmates.
Now, it was no secret amongst everyone just how poor my shorthand penmanship was and still is. It is terrible. In second grade we actually had penmanship lessons and I had to stay after class for make up work because mine looked like chicken scratching. Actually, that would be inaccurate. At least chickens could read the scratching. I would have usually taken things in good humour, but the English teacher’s remark pretty much left a very painful mark. After all, if my English teacher could not see past my penmanship and see the actual work for its own merit, what hope did I have for being a writer?
I shouldn’t have let the event affect me, but it did. So much so, that writing would take the back seat for a while. It was pretty easy to do as I was moving into high school and writing was not high on my priorities a fitting in. These were the growing years, when childhood and innocence to fade into memory and when we became our selfish self-absorbed selves. The writer in me would have to go on hiatus for several years before taking stage again.
