Prize-fighter
~ Unprompted, a friend recently said to me about my creative writing: "There are beautiful resonances in your work". It's the loveliest thing anyone has ever said about my writing. It struck me that I've been writing for so long to hear it ~
I didn't win the English class prize at school. Penny Claw won the English class prize at school.
In my teenage years I was at my peak condition for the English class prize. I was literally spilling out with hormones all over the place, obsessive about my own mortality and I loved writing.
Forget this blog, tweets, my unpublished short stories on email and my hugely successful imaginary band: my 15th to 17th years were where it was at if you wanted to see me at my written top.
Now this gets a little meta - me writing about my writing.
I was not the cleverest at tests or the most popular and I wasn't going to set new records in sports. I was medium at best at drawing. However, with writing I could shape something which was mine and, importantly for an introvert, have a controlled broadcast out to the world.
A world which was very compact. A biosphere. The world either dropped away at the edges of school-life or was contained in a glass bulb.
Despite showing early promise with a winners certificate in Scots poetry recital, I had not been awarded with any other academic prize. Not that I sought commendations. Although I was no trouble maker, I was not the best school pupil. I had no real ambition to be voted as a school prefect [preferring not to be seen as working for 'The Man']. I was relatively happy with the niche I had carved myself. As the best creative writer in school.
I was not - and remain not - extensively well read. I had an anthology of works by Edgar Allan Poe, a collected tales of Kafka [both pre-dog-eared from charity shops] and several novels and short stories by Vonnegut. Considering the timing of this blog, it would be remise and inaccurate of me to omit Prattchet, who was very much an influence. I also give John Wyndham and Alistair MacLean special mention.
Of course, I poured over my weekly copy of The Weekly World News too, to keep me informed on the international events which the main broadsheets simply ignored.
So, perhaps, with these literary influences it is not difficult to imagine teenage Greville's creative mind.
I've always written. It is something which is a part of me. When it came to writing, writing anything really, I had been hooked by the medium from a much earlier age: choosing the words to chisel the phrases to imbue a rhythm to create the pace of something which was, ostensibly, a static thing on an unmoving page. To make people feel what I feel through it: what a gift!
I was quickly accruing good level marks and praise and I began to realise that I might have a talent for writing. However that can ever be quantified.
By the time I was 15 I yearned to be cool. So I did the only thing I knew. I tried to write myself cool. I wanted to be Edgar Allan Poe and a Brit-pop star, and I was readily able to tap into my conflicting, raging emotions. Goodness knows what I would have made of Twitter! [probably much the same as now!]
I think this passion for creating something I saw inside and out as an art form combined with my minimal but less than rote reading matter enthused me to realise I could be unique in my peer group. I figured no one else in class, or even the school, was thinking how I was thinking; approaching creative writing as I was approaching it; daring it as I was daring it; slaving over it as I slaved over it.
Often the class creative writing exercise was designed to help with the structure and creative process. I had little trouble creating imagery at a time in my life where I was so open eyed and open minded, and my influences taught me the structure could be malleable and, at times, broken down entirely. I would take these class exercises and either play with their form, marginalise them or do away with them completely. I didn't need no structure. I was my own grammar.
I was so very confident in what I was doing was both far an ahead of every other piece of work being submitted by classmates that I was happy to follow my own strange, creative path as it grew stranger. I didn't care what anyone was presenting or submitting. Nothing compared to was what I was doing in the class. I knew it.
By 16 I was outwardly happy and unassuming and a monster of ego in my head.
My jotters soon filled with creative pieces, half-worked at thoughts and turns of phrase to be uncorked from the tube later. I craved to break down structures and produce almost works of light beams in those grey, narrow lined jotters.
I wrote dense. Often the meaning of something real to me I cloaked in coded imagery and kept it half-hidden still in my mind. I enjoyed breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader directly.
I wrote of unrequited love. As all boys should. I told odd tales. I wrote dark dioramas. I also added violence and monsters and a lot of gore.
My school was a rough sort. Poets were extinct. I certainly couldn't get away with declaring myself a writer of "feelings". I had a sexuality and gender role to adhere to. Yeah, I am writing about worshipping a girl, but - hold up - in the next paragraph an assassin gets garrotted by an evil manifestation.
When I got a PC and printer for home by age 17 it was [remember, the world is a small glass bulb] as significant in my mind as when the Beatles decided to stop performing live and concentrate in the studio. Screw the black biro! Now I could add colours and experiment with fonts. Now I wasn't writing single tales in jotters with their errors torn like scars between notes on American plays and word games, now I was making compendiums, albums, of perfect short stories.
I would write ferociously too. I took high to my attic room and sat hammering down on the keys, as if trying to infuse my emotions into the words on the screen like a tattoo through every keystroke. Night after night, the battering winds, the heat of summer air, the landing snow and rat-at-tat of rain - I would have my little yellow-lit lamp switched on and try to type a masterpiece.
My writing was recognised at school. For the good and bad.
An English teacher once, in my absence, read something I wrote to the class. What I wrote wasn't any good, though he declared it was worthy of being read out, but warned anyone else of trying the same.
My English jotters were taken from me and passed round by schoolmates and flicked through to find the secret messages in the codes. Most found what they were looking for: a description of a girl which they identified as my latest covet. Yeah, well, I am writing 100's of words about how a girl makes me (or the character) feel, while you chalk out "Deek loves Jodie, IDT / INDT" * on a surface - we are doing the same thing, but I am being amazing at it, you dicks.
[*'If Destroyed, True' and then combined with the watertight, loop-hole closer: 'If Not Destroyed, True' - the old romantics]
Teachers would also take my work seriously. I had teachers asking about my mental health, I had teachers taking my work to show it to others and I had teachers encouraging me to keep writing. My only other review came from a teacher and was this: "Your writing is hard work, but always rewarding in unexpected ways".
Now those days are gone. What I thought was defining and inspired and demanding future study was likely nothing more than incoherent teenage ramblings with an utterly misplaced sense of self. These were not grand statements of prose. They would be borrowed ideas pushed together or plots so slight only the weight of the ink anchored them to the page.
Most of this assertion, I will be unable to confirm. My jotters were often taken, rarely returned. My Word processed opera sit quiet, locked in magnetic diskettes next to a sun-burned PC in an attic.
I do remember some snippets though. I remember describing the rain so heavy it sparked like fireworks in black puddles under orange street lamps. I remember describing a girl as making me long for winter just so I could feel her warmth more easily across the room. I remember a story so dark that it got a laugh from it's final word: "Filofax". I remember my English creative writing exam: "Using the title "Time Passes", write a story" and that I wrote a story explaining how time only passes for the living and for the character, dead, it mattered neither if it passed by him or not, which is what eternity truly is.
So... yep...
Which brings me back to me not winning the English class prize. I was quite disappointed at the time.
Soon after, when I found the edge of the world was in fact a step - the glass bulb was bigger at one end - I saw that I was less talented than I thought. There are lots of very clever and good writers out there and I was not special.
It was a valuable lesson: Take nothing I do as quite good enough. To write for my own peace. To deeply value kind words about anything I write. To have people enjoy reading what I write is the purest joy.
My teenage writing was what it was. I am not proud of it, but it was an important developmental level. It was Beta Greville, Puppy Tombs. Jumping past my 20's, I am an improved writer today. I am not changed in my themes and motivations but more sophisticated and knowing of them. Looking back, it certainly helps to explain Greville and The Tombstones. And I'll be forever grateful for that.
But I should have won the school award for English, you know! I honestly thought it had to be a given [there goes my ego again] [and I also hate that intervention reminding me of its existence, ugh]. I was at my peak, pushing all sorts of literary boundaries – I was creating spectral avant-garde god damn poetry god dammit! And who won? Penny Claw. The English teacher told me it was between my creativity and her steady level of work and apologised.
Penny Claw won because she produced a consistent level across the English curriculum and didn’t insist she was an 'enigmatic artist not for this age' when arguing over any "correction" to her prose. In fact she didn’t argue over corrections to her work at all, which makes you wonder if she even wanted it. And what is she now? An accountant. That doesn't even involve words. Well done, Mr. Principle English Teacher, you really saw her potential.
I spoke to another friend about this the other day. She assured me not to dwell: I was more interesting than any accountant, and more good looking than Penny. And she's right. Not maybe about being more interesting and better looking, but right that I have such riches in my life, like friends who want to make me feel better about not getting a prize decades before they ever knew me - riches worth more than the prize - that I don't need to dwell.
And I said:
"I am more interesting and better looking, as it happens. But that's not the point. I'm not bitter anymore. Penny Claw can have the English class prize because she’ll just sit there, not even thinking about it today, but now I have a lovely friend making me feel better today because of it. Is a friend making you feel better right now, Penny Claw??"
I have such cool friends, and that's a prize worth fighting for in my jotter.
