creativity
66 CalmMoment.com
M
y daughter is learning to write. She’s
known how to map out the curves in her
name for a while now, but her un-self-
conscious enchantment as she learns to decode
the written world around her has been a joy to
behold. Of course, there are frustrations, too. Today
she’s unhappy with how her S’s come out – taller
and more adventurous than the other characters
on the page. As we sit at the kitchen table drawing
loops and lines together, I recall the weekly
handwriting lessons I had as a girl. ‘Cursive’,
I’ve since come to learn it is called, but at the time
it was just ‘joined up writing’, the next step along
from those wavy lines we scribbled in play.
Most of us can recall tracing dotted shapes on
worksheets, writing line after line of perfectly
formed F’s, C’s and N’s. But my letter F’s never
seemed to conform. In the textbook they were
a pause of a letter – gliding out from the preceding
character but then triggering a break. They were
clear and strong and beautifully legible – but they
seemed such a waste of a tiny micro movement,
and my busy brain was having none of it.
Mine were a looping, swooping, fluid affair. They
dived beneath the line, curled around themselves
only to surge back up and carry momentum into
the next letter, the rest of the word, the following
sentence. For all I tried to brace my wrist and force
my brain to follow the instructions I was given,
those swirling F’s prevailed. And each time, my
teacher would circle them in red pen, telling me to
adhere to the textbook more closely. I was deviating
from the agreed and expected standard, and it was
going to hold me back in life.
In the end I was sent to the headmaster. I wasn’t
in trouble – my teacher just didn’t know if she was
allowed to let me go so far off piste. ‘Ask him if it’s
ok to do your F’s like that. If he says you have
permission, I’ll stop marking you down.’
My headteacher, Mr Clegg, was a kind and
approachable man. I found him in a corridor, away
from the formality of his office, and gained the
necessary permission. ‘Of course!’ he said, mostBreaking the rules
Are you doing it ‘wrong’? Or do you simply have
your own unique ways of doing things?
Words: Sara Tasker / Illustration: Esther Curtislikely baffled to be asked such a small and senseless
question. ‘Your writing looks lovely to me.’
I think of this encounter as time zooms back to
the present, to my daughter sat beside me with
a half-written page, and a half-written mind. I must
have scrawled thousands of F’s in my life since
then, uniquely and joyfully my own. In the first draft
of my book, on my wedding invitations, in the cards
and letters I send to my friends. And always, in the
back of my mind, I remember I’m doing it wrong. It’s
a tiny act of rebellion, a little break from the rules.
We all carry so many of these rules with us in
life, forgetting that often they were set by imperfect
people for imperfect reasons. After all, what works
for one person might not work for the next. My
friend Helen, an illustrator, talks of her time at art
school, and how they were never taught how to use
chalks or oil paints or watercolour. The whole
point, she tells me, was to figure it out for yourself.
Many of us were never given this freedom – but we
can choose to give it to ourselves, now.
There’s an old adage, sometimes attributed to
Pablo Picasso, that says: ‘Learn the rules like a pro,
so you can break them like an artist’. If you’re
holding on to restrictive guidelines; if it bubbles
in the back of your mind when you sit to create; if
it sometimes comes for the ride on the soaring loop
of a letter F that refuses to play by the rules,
I encourage you to just notice it. To gently sit with
it and remind yourself that you’re free to be creative
in any way you like. That actually, it is only in doing
the thing that nobody else tried that we can really
come to make work that is truly our own.Sarah Tasker is a photographer,
writer and creative coach who
goes by the name Me & Orla
(@me_and_orla). Her first book,
Hashtag Authentic (White Lion
Publishing, £ 1 6. 99 ), is out now.