How I came to love language

I've sometimes been asked what prompted me to become a novelist. Well, I was a writer long before I became a novelist. I was a published short story writer, but also a poetry writer, a compulsive letter writer, a diarist, and, well, I just always loved writing, from earliest childhood. And I think it’s always been the words themselves, and a love of language for its own sake, that’s driven me, more than the urge to tell stories.

I don't write literary fiction, and I've never wanted to, so it might sound odd, but my fascination with language was probably influenced a lot, when I was young, by studying Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets which were on my A-level English course when I was at school. I can still quote great chunks of both (we had to learn loads of text off by heart in order to pass literature exams in those days).

I still have both of these favourites on my bookshelf

I particularly love Shakespeare’s tragedies because of the poetic nature of some of the language; who could listen to a great Othello actor speaking these lines to Desdemona before killing her in a fit of terrible jealousy, and not be moved?

‘O thou weed, who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet that the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!’ 

(I wish the AI on my blog wouldn't interfere, as it's done above, when I'm quoting Shakespeare! But I can't seem to turn the damned thing off!!)

I’m also blown away by the simple wisdom of some of Shakespeare’s words, like this famous line of Prospero’s from The Tempest:

‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’

Quite apart from adding 1700 words to the English language, so many lines of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets have become treasured parts of the our heritage. Imagine any author today being able to claim such an amazing feat!

Of the Metaphysical poets, I love John Donne's opening lines of ‘The Sun Rising’ in which he tells the sun off for rising, waking him and his lover up and bringing their night of passion to an end:

Busy old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows and through curtaines call on us?

It’s great when even the most prosaic emotions can be written in poetic form!

Another of the metaphysical poets, Andrew Marvell, wrote in his poem ‘To his Coy Mistress’ a couple of lines which, as I get older, often come back to haunt me!

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged Charriot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lye

Desarts of vast Eternity.

It’s not that the theme of the poem is particularly noble, though. Mr Marvell wrote it to try to encourage ‘his coy mistress’ to sleep with him, on the grounds that we should enjoy ourselves as much as possible before we die!

To be honest, I have to admit that I didn’t much enjoy my grammar school days, although I made good friends there who are still good friends to this day. But the one part I really enjoyed was the sixth form, because then I only had to study the subjects I liked and was good at: English and French, along with a secretarial course which gave me a living and has proved invaluable for my writing life. And I credit those two years of hard study, with giving me my overwhelming love of language.

Obviously I know I’ll never be able to write a phrase as beautiful and perfect as some of Shakespeare’s! Nor will I ever write anything anywhere near as clever and witty as some of the lines of those metaphysical poems. But I guess I should have thanked my English teachers for passing on their love of the English language. And I probably should have apologised for sometimes giving them a hard time when I was a rather bolshie student!

Me at seventeen.