My Love of Words
A huge joy in the last few years has been rediscovering writing for enjoyment rather than work.
I can’t remember a time when I haven’t loved words. I was a voracious reader as a child. I think the first book I can remember being gifted was The Hobbit from my big brother. I then graduated to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the cover fell off; I’d read it so many times. I can remember a contestant on Mastermind whose specialist subject was LOTR, and I was watching, thinking I could give him a run for his money with the answers.
Other early influences were Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, helped by Dad being a fan. He once wrote a treatise on the frequency distribution of the first letters of characters’ surnames in books and matched it against the frequency in the London telephone directory!
Douglas Adams was a particular hero. I adored how much effort went into constructing the perfect sentence, finding the humour, playing with the sounds of words to create a rhythm. I’ve read all four books in the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy many times.
As a teenager, I tried my hand at writing some short stories - I still recall Murder at the Dolphin, and feeling clever, I’d constructed a plot whereby the killer could be found because of his height - a witness saw a figure in their dressing room mirror but couldn’t see their face as the killer’s head was above the top of the mirror.
I even turned my hand to an airport thriller, in the vein of Clive Cussler (I was a huge Dirk Pitt fan) and Tom Clancy. Although I later cooled on Clancy after discovering he was a pretty far-right Republican.
My thriller was set in London; the fact I lived in Darwin was a minor hindrance. I pored over photocopies of pages from the London A-Z to describe spy-thriller action on the real streets of London. Totally capitalising on Dad’s big boss role at the education department, I would sit in an office corner, bashing out pages on a spare IBM Selectric golf ball typewriter. I hung onto the ring binder of that book, with all its notes, research, and typed pages, for years, although it seems to have gone astray in more recent decades.
Sometimes I feel chagrin at not understanding that being a writer was a career I could have pursued - I’m not sure career counselling in the early 1980s was as detailed as today. My big brother was a career journalist before retiring and has turned his hand to a couple of books. There’s no question this has been an underlying inspiration to me over the years - even his emails are grammatically correct, something in short supply in today’s online social media world.
The root of my love of words is Mum and Dad. Both lifelong readers and fascinated with language and words. As kids, we were always surrounded by books - when Mum and Dad retired from Darwin down to the colder climes of Ballarat (Dad liked the golf course there), Mum’s big consideration was the endless running metres of bookcases that would need to be transported. The large shed in their garden was like a library; you literally could walk up and down the bookcase aisles because they didn’t all fit in the new house. Mum still always has a book on the go, always curious and interested in something new.
The first computer in our house, an Apple 2E, was so Dad could draft his speeches and, most importantly, maintain his list of quotations he’d found while reading that could be worked into those speeches.
After my one year at Monash Uni, I needed to find something to do, and I applied for a cadet role in the news team at Darwin’s commercial TV station. I still have all that correspondence, but the overriding memory is Dad sitting with me, working through multiple drafts of the application letter’s half-dozen paragraphs, because it was important to get it right. Such a contrast to the literally hundreds of form letters we receive online at our company when we advertise a role.
Many moons ago, I once wrote some marketing copy and was lambasted by the client for starting a couple of sentences with ‘And’. I was positive I was correct and enlisted Dad’s help, who emailed me a mini essay on how this was perfectly acceptable- indeed, the King James bible does! As with any writing, the context, style and form of writing can dictate what is acceptable. Plus, it’s difficult to argue with the word of God.
My friends know I do climb on my high horse over especially punctuation and most particularly apostrophes, say after me….apostrophes do not make words plural!! Well, except when pluralising a single lowercase letter, for example: mind your p’s and q’s.
A huge joy in the last few years has been rediscovering writing for enjoyment rather than work. I’ve churned out probably millions of words in business plans, strategies and reports over the years. Today that’s receded significantly. My Substack and other writing platforms, like LinkedIn, have allowed me to reconnect with a regular writing rhythm, and I could not be more grateful. It’s not an income earner by any stretch, but perhaps that spy thriller novel is still buried deep down inside.