UNITED KINGDOM, Jan 13 — Small wonder kids find it hard to find an outlet for their natural talents.
It was no different in my younger days.
At the age of ten I entered an essay competition open to schoolchildren across the continent of Europe and sponsored by the famous French newspaper “Le Soir”.
If you believe you can write, you can write; if you believe you can draw, you can draw; if you believe you can score music, you can score music
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mall wonder kids find it hard to find an outlet for their natural talents.
It was no different in my younger days.
At the age of ten I entered an essay competition open to schoolchildren across the continent of Europe and sponsored by the famous French newspaper “Le Soir”.
Months went by and one day the form master called me out to the front of the class. He announced to one and all that I had won top prize and then literally threw it at me. I opened the box to find a copy of the paper with my essay emblazoned across the front page; my first published work.
Also included was a huge bag of sweetmeats (scarce in wartime) and a year’s subscription to a leading comic paper of the era. I was the envy of my classmates but to my tutor I was a worthless idiot.
My modest achievement should have told him something of where my abilities lay but he couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge it.
Years later and just prior to my call-up for national service I visited a lachrymose careers advisor and placed my matriculation certificate before him. Its fruits all emanated from the right brain with nothing remotely connected with left brain thinking; no arithmetic, no algebra, no geometry.
He looked up at me and said, “Accountancy is a good career; you should put in for it when you are demobbed”
Fifty more years were to pass before I managed to break through as a writer; on my retirement from the workaday world.
In between times I built a successful advertising agency and wrote several pieces of award winning copy but all of that failed to satisfy. What I really craved was the opportunity to indulge in free reign creative writing.
Now in my 81st year I am still making money from my innate talent and I have 40+ traditionally published books to prove the point - including one title that has featured consistently in the best seller lists for the past fifteen years.
The bulk of my work is now on kindle and has started to sell all over again.
And so as I reflect on where it all began, I say to my silly old form master and the deranged careers advisor, sucks yaboo...
The moral of this true story is...
Never allow the uninitiated to tamper with your creativity.
If you believe you can write, you can write; if you believe you can draw, you can draw; if you believe you can score music, you can score music.
Always take your own counsel in matters relating to personal intellectual properties and ignore advice from well meaning but unqualified sources.
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My first novel was published on 19 March and is available at Waterstone’s, Barnes&Noble and all the Amazon sites. THE DESOLATE GARDEN; a spy murder mystery. I am a London Licensed Taxi Driver.
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It was no different in my younger days.
At the age of ten I entered an essay competition open to schoolchildren across the continent of Europe and sponsored by
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