WRITE AWAY: YOU HAVE IT IN YOU, SO GET STARTED ON THAT COMPOSITION

ANYBODY can write. I immediately hear the yowls of protest that “I can’t write”. This from people who dread the intimidating blank stare of the white sheet – the tabula rasa – that has driven many a sober person to drink.

Start by being a reader. What you are reading was written by somebody. They are saying original things which they hold in their heads until they cannot contain it anymore.

The main thing is: write it down, no matter how it comes out. If you don’t, it will go away. I have had the most stunning thoughts when there wasn’t a pencil handy. By the time I tried to write it down, the idea, like Elvis, had left the building.

There are two basic forms of writing: transactional and creative. The first conveys information, or knowledge, or necessary items like grocery lists. The second comes off the top of your head. In creative writing, horses can fly and trees can walk and talk. Statistically, transactional writing will occupy 70% of your conscious time. Creative, the remainder, asleep or awake.

The big mantra is: writing well is only 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. In other words, it’s hard work in the beginning. Charles Darwin, aged 17 years old, saw a river-leech attach itself to his leg while on an expedition to a South American river. He saw the thing swell as it gorged on his blood.

He realised it was a simple creature with a mouth and an anus, sucking his blood in order to stay alive. In that instant, he writes, he understood the entire theory of evolution. But, he adds, it took him the rest of his life to write it down, giving us that mighty work called The Origin of the Species, also referred to – inaccurately – as The Theory of Evolution.

If you read, you see how others do it. JK Rowling was delayed in a train travelling from Manchester to London’s King’s Cross in 1990. She wrote some ideas down on scraps of paper over the next five years.

The first book was published in 1997. The result? Harry Potter! Oddly, Alan Paton sat in a bare train carriage bound for Trondheim, Norway in 1948. He wrote down the idea for a novel set in South Africa. He spent time in various countries in Europe and added to the developing tale, giving us the immortal classic: Cry the Beloved Country.

And shortly after gambling joined the national sport of government stealing and graft, a lady in Woodstock felt she had to write about the evils of this pastime. The result, Rayda Jacobs’s seminal Confessions of a Gambler in 2003. Zoe Wicomb wrote short stories called You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. In fact, two centuries before that, the mighty Les Misrables tells the story of a boy who steals a loaf of bread in Paris.

The size or length of your work doesn’t matter. What matters is: Get it down. And to those who mentor writing of any sort, tell your wards where to look, but don’t tell them what to see. What they see is inside their heads, souls, experience, truths, ambitions and disappointments. Your job is to get them to write it down. But if you can talk, sing, shout or dream, you can write. If what you write is your own, you can never be wrong.

You can start by keeping a journal or a diary. Write descriptions of people you know, retell the dreams you have had. There is no end to the list.

Despite the dire warnings about the IVIR and AI (artificial intelligence), there will always be readers who want to hear a good story. The American linguist Noam Chomsky regarded language as a human biologically-based cognitive capacity. If you can speak, you can write. There is your challenge for the next few months.

Start composing before you start decomposing.