Can I place the blame for my dislike of writing on an 8th grade teacher? (In South Africa, high school starts with grade 8 and lasts 5 years if one doesn't drop out or have to repeat a grade.) Gordon "Billy" Bauer was an English and Latin teacher - a good teacher, if a little eccentric. Something he made us do for English class was to keep a diary. We were supposed to write an entry every day. I hated that, partly because I am lazy and partly because I didn't have anything to write about. Days were pretty much like this: Woke up. Ate breakfast. Cycled to school. Sat in class. Played soccer at recess. Sat in class some more. Played rugby after class. Cycled home. Ate dinner. Avoided doing homework. Went to bed. (If you note an absence of "Watched TV" that's because South Africa didn't have TV at that stage. It would be several years before the government realized what a wonderful propaganda tool state-controlled TV is.) Billy tried to get us to write about our thoughts, rather than just facts. But I don't have any imagination, so didn't have any thoughts worth noting.
Later that year, on Sunday, September 1, 1968, Port Elizabeth was hit by one of the few big natural disasters ever to strike South Africa. In just a few hours our city had as much rain as it usually receives in a year, resulting in extensive flooding, major damage and loss of several lives. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1leO6N2YJs There was no school on the Monday because at the time the first Monday in September was a holiday - Settlers' Day. So Tuesday was the first day of school after the flooding. Naturally Bill Bauer made us write about our experiences in the floods. That was all very well, except that our family had been many miles away (and underground for much of the day). For the long weekend we had gone to visit my maternal grandmother in Knysna, a coastal resort about 165 miles to the west. We had spent much of the Sunday in the Cango Caves, near the inland town of Oudtshoorn, a further 90 or so miles away. A classmate, Jeremy Clampett, had spent the weekend with us. (As I recall, he was staying with us for a few weeks while his parents were on an overseas trip.) Jeremy and I had missed the "excitement" of the floods and our house and neighborhood were relatively unscathed, so we hadn't even seen much damage. What could we write about? We ended up jointly composing a poem.
Our school, Grey High School, http://www.greyhighschool.com/ was founded in 1856 and named after the governor of the Cape Colony at the time, Sir George Grey. It is a public school, in the American meaning of the term, rather than the British (for whom "public school" means private school), though it was/is modeled on British public schools such as Eton. It is exclusively for boys -- in those days deep in the Apartheid era, exclusively white boys. Billy Bauer composed a campfire song about the school called "Grey will give us culture" with refrain "Grey will give us culture; Grey will give us culture; Culture with a capital K." That song must have gone the way of the dodo though it hasn't even left fossilized traces of its existence on the interwebs.
I don't recall whether it was Billy Bauer or some other teacher of about the same era who arranged for each of us to be pen-pals with kids in a school somewhere in Germany. I corresponded with my pen-pal a couple of times before succumbing to my usual laziness and hatred of letter writing. (BTW, I haven't forgotten about the gift you sent me for my birthday 3 years ago. I am going to send a thank-you note real soon now, just as soon as I find a pen and some decent stationery.)
My dislike of writing continued through high school and college (and beyond). As far as possible I avoided classes that involved writing (or any kind of hard work). For essay questions in exams I was concise and to the point, especially when I found that in doing so my grade was no worse than that of classmates who wrote many times as much. At college level I stuck mostly to math classes, apart from a couple of years of Economics where I had to sweat blood to come away with a passing grade.
When did I discover that I no longer hated writing quite so much? Perhaps it was when I began running longer distances on my own. That gave me time to think my own little thoughts and compose poems or articles in my head as I ran. Most of those didn't ever get committed to paper (or electrons). Maybe there was more of an incentive once I thought I had an audience, real or imagined - whether readers of a running club newsletter, a running listserv or, much later, Facebook. Another factor may have been that I was writing because I wanted to, not because I had to either for class or for work.
I've never made any money out of writing and have no ambition to do so. I was once given an award. I didn't "win" the award because there wasn't any competition. It was more along the lines of "Thanks for being the sucker who was willing to produce the running club's newsletter on a (somewhat) regular basis." (The award is rather shiny and I couldn't find a way to take a photo without having a reflection of me holding my cell phone.)
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