GCE O Level Paper 1 Reading Comprehension – Direct Questions

Writing My Book

Then one day, after we had been at Carneddi for about ten years, it suddenly occurred to me that there was a story in our life on the farm, a story which I readily knew because I was part of it. It was one which I might be able to write. Of course, I told myself, it was unlikely to become a proper book but it could be kept as a sort of family record. I decided to write it in book form.

Enquiry disclosed that there were between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand words in an average book and this was very daunting. I could never write a proper book, I thought, if so many words were needed. I resigned myself to the idea of writing down everything I could think of, let it come as it would, and if the flow ended at a mere forty or fifty thousand words, well, that would just have to be the end. This decision was comforting but the difficulty was to get the flow of words started at all.

I bought a school exercise book with a blue cover and sat one evening with it open at the blank first page. I twiddled my biro; nothing came. I thought: how on earth does one begin to write a book? Any skill that I had ever had with words seemed to have rusted away after ten years of farming. I thought: you must begin somehow, put anything, and you can come back to it later. The first part is sure to be the most difficult. Later I found this was true, but on that very first evening it was only with the greatest difficulty that I began at all and then everything I wrote seemed very silly. By the end of the evening there was only three-quarters of a page of closely written much corrected scrawl but, though it seemed ungrammatical and very simple, I found I had a keenness for writing. I went to bed that night with a feeling of special happiness and thoughts of more to be done the next day.

In spite of my inclination towards the book, it progressed only very slowly. I did not regard it as more than a hobby or relaxation and wrote only at night or a sentence or two after meals. Sometimes, when work on the farm was pressing or I felt particularly weary, I did not touch it for days or weeks on end. At first, I practiced paper economy for it seemed a pity to expend too many pages on the book; but soon the blue exercise book began to become nearly illegible with crossings out and corrections and I resorted to double spacing.

Finally, the blue book was full and only the preliminary chapters were complete. Then I searched out an old loose-leaf book and bought some paper for it. Thus started my journey of writing.