It was always easier when the nun told you what to write. She was always the one with the good ideas: "A Day At The Beach"; "A Desert Island"; "What I Done (sic) On My Summer Holidays". "Begin," she would say and we would set about thinking hard like it was the most difficult thing in the whole world, rubbing our foreheads and inhaling deeply.
One by one, we would begin to scrape out words with blunt pencils, our cheeks horizontal to the desk and our tongues following every scrawly curve out the sides of our mouths. Silence descended and in this prayerful concentration, the nun seemed to relax. Maybe she was praying to the patron saint of wordsmiths, whoever he might be. Or maybe she was just glad of the break.
Compositions were handy enough. First of all, the subject matter had been already decreed and secondly, there was never that terrifying worry about how the thing would end (a worry, if you must know, that I am experiencing presently). All compositions in those days would be concluded, simply and matter-of-factly, at the bottom of the page. If, however, your imagination had taken too strong a hold and you were heading for the frightening and unexplored territory of a second page, all you had to do was write the words - "and then I woke up". The terror would be over, the dangerous thrills of page two would have to wait for the big boys' school and things called essays.
If you finished your composition early you could defiantly slap down your pencil, fold your arms and announce that it had been a cinch. Better policy, however, would be to make it last as long as possible so you wouldn't be sent on a message or asked to tidy the bookstore. To pass the time we would illustrate our work with little scribbles around the margins - monsters, snakes, footballs, castles, planes - just like all the bored monks doing the colouring-in in the Book Of Kells. The nun was happy as long as we were busy. The Devil made work for idle hands, she would say, and she had no time for idlers - no matter how good that dashed-off composition might be. That particular judgment was for her alone to make. She would mark the page with a red tick and maybe write "Good". Mistakes would be underlined and misspelt words would have to be written out five times. And this would annoy you because, after all, you knew far better than her how to spell the names of Brazilian footballers. And what would nuns know about football anyway, you would ask yourself on the way home from school. What would the Sisters of Mercy know about Pelly?
In those days, writing words seemed like a perfectly normal activity. It was something you just did at school - like sums or saying your prayers. Nowadays, whenever I write, I have the odd crisis about the activity itself. When I see myself described as a "writer" at the bottom of this piece, I will feel insecure rather than confirmed. If only the nun would tell me what to write. If only everything you wrote could last just the one page, no matter what. If only it would be marked with a red tick and that would be that.
So I'm wondering why anybody would ever want to write something when they haven't been commanded to do so by a nun. It seems that people do write for many different reasons. Money can be one obvious spur. Celebrity and notoriety seem, in certain cases, to be others. Other possible motivations appear to be therapy, ego, the inability to perform any other function, sex appeal, revenge, the furthering of personal agendas and, at times, an irrefutable craziness. The preferred explanation is "self-expression", although H.L. Mencken had a grand theory on that. "An author," he wrote, "like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in.
"His overpowering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilised countries, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called selfexpression."
Certainly, writers can be a weird bunch. All you have to do is attend a literary festival or summer school and you'll discover the truth of that. You'll see the gangs, the cliques and the power-blocks. If you're lucky enough to fall under the proper influence, you will perhaps be schooled in the dark arts of literary politics, posturing, mutual back-scratching and selective iconoclasm. It will be indicated to you who and what your targets should be: you may also have your politics redefined, your dress code improved and your reading list amended. And if you really have that craving to be "in", you would be well advised to listen very carefully. On the other hand, you may meet a real writer - usually identified as being quiet, unobtrusive and well-mannered. The others will not like this writer at all. He or she will be discussed in confused, vicious and bitter tones over late pints and bags of salt and vinegar crisps.
And now that I am trying to write a book (a book with no ending) I'm trying to work out the reasons for inflicting such a tortuous egime regime on myself. In the confusion all I seem to hear is the Sage of Baltimore - "The impulse to create beauty is rare in literary men, and almost completely absent from the younger ones. If it shows itself at all, it comes as a sort of afterthought. Far ahead of it comes the yearning to make money. And after the yearning to make money comes the yearning to make a noise."
This writing lark is a strange carry-on. And very probably (no harm to the nun) it's nothing to be at. Pencils down.
John Kelly is a writer and broadcaster