What’s that Neruda line – “It was at that age poetry arrived”? Quot­ing Neruda’s a bit of a cliché. Except that every­one likes Neruda. Except those who don’t.

I feel like he said some­thing really basic but mean­ing­ful in that tiny excerpt, though. About that par­tic­u­lar point when words star­ted fall­ing out of your fin­ger­tips as well as your lips.

I was this – hmm, not neces­sar­ily quiet child. But, for that, I often didn’t say a lot. (This doesn’t mean quiet, per se.)

There was a lot I couldn’t say. And a lot of vocab­u­lary I lacked to be able to put thoughts into words. No words for the sen­sa­tions you are exper­i­en­cing is rather like being alone in a for­eign coun­try when you don’t speak the lan­guage and there’s some­thing you need to communicate.

I star­ted get­ting myself drunk on adult words when I was seven or so. I talked Enid Blyton between skip­ping games in the play­ground with my friends. Under my stealth duvet (I was a seven year old insom­niac. And I used to do my home­work at 2am. But that’s another story), I devoured my mother’s Fay Wel­dons and Lynne Reid Banks.

And here’s what happened:

There was a lot I needed to say, and a lot I didn’t dare to say. Adult books mirrored emo­tions I had exper­i­enced and was exper­i­en­cing. Con­fus­ing: I was only a child. Reas­sur­ing: they seemed to under­stand me in a man­ner for which my peers at that age had no scope.

And then the words, reformed, star­ted pour­ing back out of my fin­gers. You inhale, you exhale, right?

I mostly kept the over­de­veloped vocab­u­lary a secret. There are all sorts of things you are not going to say when you are eight, ten, twelve years old. There were all sorts of stor­ies I wasn’t going to tell. All sorts of things lodging in my throat.

Whilst I kept my speak­ing voice on demi-mute, I basked in the white glow of note­book pages. Whilst I failed to tell any­body any­thing that really mattered in my speak­ing voice, I let my fin­ger­tips speak for me. I escaped between pages of read­ing. I cata­pul­ted myself into the pages I was writing.

Aged eleven, our end of primary school assign­ment was to write a ‘book’. So I … ‘wrote a book’. Or, at least, the longest story I have ever writ­ten. The teacher and the class blinked “Roberta’s writ­ten a … book’. It got passed around every year. No-one had real­ised that all the words I was stock­pil­ing inside myself had to go some­where. My fin­gers were frantic whilst I mostly kept my mouth shut.

There’s always that danger of sound­ing pre­ten­tious when say­ing things like this – but I can live with that. So many writers seem to say they don’t ‘choose’ to write — they ‘have’ to write. Writ­ing chooses them. Owns them. How­ever it goes.

When my writ­ing dries up, I worry that some­thing has died inside myself. I pos­sibly excel at melo­drama, yet I mean that. Without a cre­at­ive out­let, I feel like I’m made of wood. Without some belief that I can expel words that are twis­ted up, words that could throw someone just a little, make them feel they are being told some­thing for the first time — without these things, I worry that I’ll start dress­ing in beige. That I’ll start shop­ping at IKEA. I worry that I’ll homo­gen­ise. Stop cre­at­ing. Some­thing like that.

I can draw a thou­sand pic­tures, string nine hun­dred neck­laces, but here is how it goes: the words come first. If I don’t let them back out, I worry that they’ll choke me. Speak­ing aloud, some­times I word-stumble. Lose my lexis. ‘Um’ and ‘ah’. Just the usual. It hap­pens. But you put words to page and you can pre­tend to own them. Play with them, shape them, make them per­fect as you like. Who doesn’t want to par­take in that game?

I value silence. And I value speech. Some­times I for­get to bal­ance the two as well as I could. I soak in stor­ies a lot. I get told a happy spill of secrets with reas­sur­ing reg­u­lar­ity. Some days, I’d have to armour each one of my fin­ger­tips with thimbles to stop them writ­ing. And that would be ungainly.

Roberta Lawson keeps thimbles off her fin­ger­tips just long enough to word-splurge at PIFFLE and Atmo­spheres of Per­fect Silence. The lat­ter con­tains link-ups to a couple of weird and won­der­ful exper­i­mental zines where her work has appeared or is forthcoming.