Me as a writer.

Hi all.

Kat's not here tonight, and on her orders (I lost a bet to her) I'm going to write a slightly longer, more thoughtful piece tonight. It's about me as a writer, finding my voice, working through difficulties and where I feel I am now with things. I hope you enjoy.

Beginnings
I'm going to start off with something some of you may already know. I'm a writer who's also a dyslexic. In my case, the dyslexia affects my phonological awareness of letter and numbers - hindering my ability to read and write. Basically - anagrams are out of the question for me.

This would have put a lot of people off, but I was a stubborn so-and-so as a child. I said to a teacher one time that I wanted to be a writer to "prove people wrong", and they suggested I read poetry to give me an understanding of how words and sounds work together to form meaning. Out of her own money, she bought me a children's poetry book. I still have it - it's one of my prized possessions.

I won't go into the specifics, but I read that book a few dozen times, and it inspired me to start writing my own. I asked friends to read them and tell me what they think. They came back and said "yeah, really good mate" and went back to playing football. Eventually - I asked them to say bad things about it - I figured from the age of 14 or so that people who don't want to criticise will probably say the most useful things - and it changed the way I was writing completely.

When I felt confident, I got English teachers involved and said the same as I said to my friends - say bad things about it. Ignore the bits you like, I'll take whatever you don't say as you liking it. Having more experienced eyes look through my work helped me add depth, and pick out really anal bits of detail that go along way to improving a piece (use of commas was a BIG step for me).

Some teachers still couldn't resist saying nice things though. One teacher praised a Haiku I penned as being the best they'd ever read from a young person. Here it is:

Human consciousness
simply cannot comprehend
being, unconscious.

I mentioned in passing that uses of commas were a big step for me - one thing I learned was that you can put them in places they wouldn't make sense in prose, and it will add incalculable depth. That was one of my first try-outs of the theory, and easily one of my best.

Developing
As you're probably working out, I consider myself quite self-aware, and posess what I consider to be a unique ability to step back from what I'm doing and assess almost without bias. Of course bias will still be present, but I'm able to dilute it so much that I can critique myself in the same way someone else would. (Note: you sound like a pretentious arse here)

This stems back to the dyslexia. Part of the hard work came about from needing to detach myself from longer pieces of work in order to see them properly. A big issue that hindered my ability to write prose was, and still is on occasion, that long walls of text became solid black in my eyes. There were literally no words, only a wall of black ink. I had to cut out each paragraph and read them individually in order to read them. It was the same when I read books or online articles - I either had to cover up large sections, copy and paste bits out separately or scroll in such a way that my head could manage it.

Eventually, I became better at reading longer text - through sheer persistence. I would cut out less and less at a time until my mind felt strong enough to cope. It was like going to the gym - adding more and more weight until, eventually, I was at my optimum mental fitness. One help here was in reading backwards - by which I mean starting at the last word and working through to the start. Try it on this paragraph, and you'll see how I read forwards normally now. That ability to break up words mentally means I can now write longer text without just adding more bricks to the black wall, and establish meaning more clearly in what I write.

This is probably why I'm so good at puns - I don't read sentences as a whole, more as the sun of their parts. I can break down each individual component in order to rebuild it in a slightly funny way. This means I can layer meaning on top of another meaning more easily, and make people laugh.

I still have my moments, and my style means that I often get lost midway through writings - like here, for instance! I can't really join paragraphs very well, so sometimes my meaning gets lost, or things just never get said, because I can't articulate properly though formatting. This again, is where peer review comes into it. By the time this is posted Kat will have returned, and read this, so I know that it makes sense. She'll never tell me to change something, just that it makes sense. She will tell me if something's rubbish, though.

All of this isn't to say I'm done developing. I'm still training my mind to read better (I read everything I can to help with this) and I write in different formats at every opportunity. I've written so much now that words are formed from memory, rather than any inherent knowledge of how sounds make words - and I'll still write words that aren't spelt phonetically massively incorrectly. It's about building my strength, day by day.

Me as a writer
Why do I do it? Simple - for the attention. It's not, as my idealist young self defended "to prove people wrong", it's because I like praise, and I'm good at it. I like making people laugh, and I'm good at it. I like making people feel - I'm good at it.

It sounds silly, but I measure my worth as a writer in terms of the feedback I receive. I started posting fewer poems on here because they got less feedback than my mock-arrogant sarcastic pieces. I don't post as many personal things because people don't give a shit, but I post something discussion-y and I get responses. It's all for the attention. I firmly, firmly believe that every writer shares this to some degree - and if they don't then I applaud them as better people than I.

Writing to an audience helps me. It focuses my mind - adds a pressure in which I know my fuck-ups will be seen and sneered at. I know people won't actually sneer, but I see it that way. So, in a way, everyone who's ever read my getDare blog has helped me - and even more so if you're commented on it!

Recently I did something that saw all the hard work in my childhood/uni days pay off. I became a full time writer. Not like easy copy-writing either, this is hard writing. The kind that requires precision, accuracy, and ability. I was hired out of a pool of about 80 people, even with serious concern over my learning difficulty being raised in the interview.

I responded by saying that without my dyslexia I'd be half the writer I am today, if that. It focussed me, taught me to work hard, taught me that it isn't easy, showed me steps to take to improve, and gave me access to help I would have missed otherwise. I'm not saying everyone should be a dyslexic writer, but I've made the best I can of it, and I'm certainly not ready to end my development here. I want to learn more, achieve more, and become better.

So, that's what I'm doing.

In the future
I want to be published. I voluntarily write for some online sport blogs already, but finding the time to write more is tricky right now. I'm working on a novel, but I don't expect this one to be published, more to serve as practice for future, more serious attempts. I'm gearing up for NaNoWrMo this year, and want to see if I can achieve something through those 30 days.

I know people will continue to help me - people are great sometimes. My family will always support me, and hopefully Kat will continue to have my back and tell me when something's rubbish.

Hopefully, when I post more on here, you guys will continue to help me too.

Final thanks
There's one person I have never thanked for my development over the years - the Microsoft Word Red Squiggle. Without you almost everywhere throughout my text, proofreading would drive me mad. Some slip though your, and therefore our, net, but on the whole you're a lifesaver. Don't go changing. Unless it's for the better - then change.

Bye!