Echo

What most of you won’t know about me is that before I became a student at Bangor University studying Law, I started a creative writing course at Roehampton University in London.

I was determined I wanted to be an author. I still do!

Stupidly, I dropped out of Roehampton only three months after starting and followed my then boyfriend to his university instead 🙈. I know, how ridiculous, we didn’t even stay together but what can I say, I was 18, full of the joys of first love and very very naive.

Even though I made amazing friends and had the best time during my three years at Bangor, I’ve always regretted not completing my creative writing course.

In one of my first lectures at Roehampton, we were asked to bring along a plain empty notebook. The lecturer said this would be the most important notebook I would ever write in and boy was he right.

We were told to give our notebooks a name. I named mine Echo.

Echo isn’t just a notebook, said the wise old lecturer, It’s the voice inside your head that only you can hear and speak to. That safe place where no one knows what you’re really thinking.

In that lecture, we were told to open our notebooks and let that voice free all over the pages (for our eyes only). It was one of the best and most inspiring things I’ve ever done.

We were told not to take the pen off the page at all, not for one moment. For ten whole minutes we had to write every single thing that came into our head, no matter how personal, whether it made sense or not.

Later on, we were asked to take our notebooks to a coffee shop, sit in front of the window and write down everything we saw.

Time completely runs away with you, you see things you never normally notice and my writing was the best it’s ever been.

Echo isn’t just one notebook anymore. Over the years, It’s become every notebook I have, it’s every scrap piece of paper and it’s every receipt I’ve scribbled on the back of.

So, if I’m ever stuck on what to write about for my blog or even at work when I write my reports. I will genuinely just sit and write down the words in my head or I’ll write down everything that’s going on around me and I don’t for one second take my pen off the page until I have something good to write about.

To a large extent, my blog is an echo of my life, it echos my thoughts and feelings on topics I’m passionate about and it all stems from that first lecture I had at Roehampton University ten years ago.

Crazy isn’t it?

I’m thinking about starting a ‘Dear Echo’ section of my blog so you can have an insight into how I write when I get writers block. Let me know in the comments below if that’s something you’d be interested in seeing!

D x