Open Writing

From the time I first began to read, I wanted to be a writer. Enid Blyton populated my world with the most amazing friends and acquaintances, from Julian, Dick, George and Anne in The Famous Five to Moon-face, Silky and the Saucepan Man in The Faraway Tree trilogy. I remember learning by heart one of the poems fatty recited in The Mystery of the Strange Messages because it seemed to hold a key for creative composition. It went like this:
Oh, every time you want a rhyme
Just let your tongue go loose;
Don't hold it tight or try to bite,
It won't be any use.
Just let it go and words will flow
From off your eager tongue,
And rhymes and all will lightly fall
To make a little song!

I must have committed that to heart at about age eight or nine. It inspired a whole collection of poems which I decorated and kept in a homemade folder. Not long afterwards, at about age eleven, I began working on my first novel, a story about a horse who lived wild and free up in the mountains and was to have many adventures. Sadly, the book didn't get very far but my dream of becoming a novelist stayed intact.

When I became legally blind at age seventeen, I was more determined than ever to follow a career in writing because I saw it as a good way to work from home. I studied English Literature at university and did a couple of courses in creative writing. However, as I submitted story after story to women's magazines and tried to come up with a theme for a full-length book, the difficulty of my situation began to dawn on me. My life was too sheltered to afford material for action adventure and the world-class works of fiction I came across in my studies convinced me that I lacked the life experience to say anything worthwhile.

Nevertheless, visually-impaired writers had made it in the past. Homer, the Greek poet and composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey, was said to be completely blind. Of course, he composed in the oral tradition so he could rely on his memory rather than his eyes to recite his verse but there is no disputing that his imagination was more than adequate. Then there was John Milton, author of the classic Paradise Lost, who also suffered from poor vision and whose work was rich with insights about human nature and the quest for salvation. More recently, the British novelist and playwright Sue Townsend who penned the Adrian Mole series has been registered blind since 2001 as a result of diabetes.

So there is hope for someone like me - and not only because blind people have been published before. I am reminded that many authors without a broad life experience have succeeded in touching the hearts of their readers. Take the Bronte sisters, for example, and Jane Austen, whose stories focus on the fine details of relationships against the background of familiar country or town life. It was a novel by Joanna Trollop about intimate relationships among a group of women that finally persuaded me that I had what it took to contribute my view of the world to literature.

What was more, living for years in a small town, raising my children among women with very fixed ideas on marriage and family and then having all those stereotypes challenged when I moved to the city gave me the perspective I needed to tell a story with texture and a message. I sat down one day and literally began with just a central character and a house in mind. The story grew organically. I had so much to say that no sooner had I finished one book than I began working on another. That was five years ago and I am delighted to announce that my most recent effort is about to come to print through Create Space, the self-publishing arm of Amazon.com. It is an auspicious time for me because my eyesight has just undergone another major deterioration and this may be the last opportunity I have to actually see my own book in print.

As of next week, I will be serializing the first novel I wrote on Open Writing. Titled Roses Aren't Everything, it is the story of a woman who, after discovering a family secret, is forced to reach out in various directions for help and eventually chart a new course into the future. It is an exploration of change set against the changing face of South Africa with a heart-warming romance at its centre. If you enjoy domestic drama and want to populate your life with a few new friends, I invite you to follow this inspiring saga.