Knowing Your Writerly Self

Personal essays: does the writing or the structure come first?

I should start this newsletter by saying, I’ve never been particularly good at writing essays. I was the kid at school who bunked off more than she attended. I loved writing, but only really wrote freestyle, ridiculously long stories that turned into novels, and much scrawling in many diaries. The moment anyone uttered the word structure, you’d find me loitering by the bike sheds, fag in hand.

But my love affair with writing pulled me through life’s challenges. When I was lonely at university, or breaking up from another relationship, trying to build a life from my bedsit, I had my pad and pen and my imagination and my words. I also had confidence that writing would help me through the tangle of life. We had a relationship that was based on trust. I turned to it when I was in need and it always delivered. It would help release stuff. It gave me a different perspective. It was a way of finding and projecting my voice.