By Christopher Harris, The Rights of Fans
17/6/2025 The First Blog in a Journey of Discovery. Challenging Poor Education and ADHD.
Each weekly diary will be posted on this link:
I am going to try and be a writer, Well I already am, sort of. What a former tabloid assistant editor friend of mine termed, a ‘citizen journalist.’ The blog below will simply explain my background and why writing is both difficult and easy for me.
Always encouraged to read a lot when I was young, I have always read the classics and books that I call thinking novels. Reading the Guardian daily since early teens, these were my formative years, the important years.
But my confidence in writing is poor. I went to a lousy private school that was allowed to get away with being lousy, as it was pre-regulators. Teachers didn’t engage, and if you had a wandering mind, what I now know to be mild adhd, you were written off. My grammar was and is still dreadful. Some schools historically de-emphasized grammar, especially in certain time periods (e.g., the 1970s–90s in the UK or US when I should have been soaking up giid teaching). There may be a little dyslexia.
In 1998, I had a nervous breakdown. I was at a vintage auction, my trade, and out of nowhere it felt like somebody had poured warm water through my brain. I spent three weeks recovering, and for another year, my brain felt like I was permanently attached to a drip with half a pint of beer in it, I felt a small disconnect from being normal, nothing bad, just tangible.
But I had lost the ability to read, Not read as in a letter or an article, but for ten years I couldn’t read a novel as my concentration and retention was so bad.
The slow process of healing eventually completed and I could read again.
Then in 2008, I started writing for a football fanzine with my friend Chris. You would have thought we would push the boundaries of repetition and tedium, focusing on a non-league football club, Lewes FC, but fortunately it was a football club with controversial ideas and I found I actually had a good imagination and a bit of flair and never lacked the ability to find interesting angles. I love the ability of the modern age of being able to carry out investigative work from a laptop.
My grammar and sentence structure, etc was dreadful, so my partner at the time and Chris had to do all of editing. By this point I had even wrote some articles for some non-league national publications.
2025 and the fanzine still thrives. Called the Rights of Fans, Thomas Paine lived in Lewes. We produced our last paper fanzine 17 months ago. 7 years ago Chris set up a blog for the fanzine. When we started the fanzine Chris was a 15 year old football enthusiast, had already written a book and blogged regularly. As should be the case, growing up and real life saw a natural departure as other interests and starting a family meant Chris is now on quite a long hiatus, or fully retired!
The blog has really gained traction and will hopefully this year register 20,000 reads, which according to artificial intelligence is 10 times what you would expect for a niche non-league football club. So I have done something right.
The most important thing that has happened to accelerate the success of the blog, which is entirely attributable to much better grammar, layout, and sentence structure, is down to artificial intelligence. Now, before you scream in horror, hear me out.
Successful blogging requires momentum and I simply couldn’t get any traction because everything I wrote, I had to run past my wife to get her to edit it. With ChatGPT, I now utilise this as I find Grammarly too difficult to work with. I will put a blog article into Chat GPT and ask it not to change the text at all, so I write the entire article, but I will instruct it to correct grammar, spelling and ask it to point out repetition and other basic errors of writing. Stressing it must not interfere with my style. This has fundamentally improved my output and my ability to be confident in expanding my writing portfolio, without impugning the integrity of the articles.
Artificial intelligence of course can be bad, and it can be a force for good. With me it has freed me up to be capable of producing well written blogs and now hopefully a new lifestyle. Had of course I have been given a decent education and didn’t have mild ADHD and possibly dyslexia I would of course 100% do it myself, so it is up to the reader to judge whether or not they want to read my pure thoughts which I’m only able really to put into words thanks to artificial intelligence. I mean you wouldn’t criticise someone with a dysfunctional leg from using crutches would you, to help them work properly?
I mentioned the crutches because that’s recently what I’ve been on and this is where my journey into escalating my writing begins.
My next blog will explain where I am in my life now, and how I’ve taken the decision to run my business on a more part-time basis and to expand my repertoire of subjects and platforms to post on. Basically see if I can become a proper part-time writer. I have also just begun a collection of short stories. I’m not sure at this point whether I’m going to publish this blog on my voyage of discovery, in a weekly diary form or a collection of thoughts, probably both. At the moment I am an amateur part-time bogger and I intend to see if I could become a bit more than that.
Coming soon: From Blogger to Part-Time Writer: The Unexpected Turning Point. The Exercise Bike Accident.
The Rights of Fans. 