ON WRITING: THE BAD, THE MAD AND THE WOBBLY TOP LIP.

A few days ago I was feeling pretty smug. I had written a couple of articles for my Masters’ assignments which had been very well received. Anne, the course leader had commended them and, all-in all, life felt pretty good; writing was easy, really. One of my short-term goals is to write a minimum of 500 words a day. Well, that’s nothing, is it, when you’re on a roll?
Then three things happened: first, I was handed back a travel article I had written. It had been severely (and quite fairly) criticised. It was a rant about crowded trains, people who use them, Network Rail, and anybody who chanced into my angry and vitriolic world on that particular day. At the time, I thought it was quite good, but I can now see that it was neither funny, focused nor entertaining. The problem was that I hadn’t bothered to read it back objectively; had I done so, I would have binned it. This is a lesson learned. There are times when even the likes of Clarkson, Gill or Catlin Moran have an off day. They very occasionally produce vacuous articles which look at odds with everything else they have written. So, the lesson is: when you are having an “off day” for whatever reason, it is important to be really hard on yourself and if you truly know that an article is substandard, rip it up and re-write it. Typewriters were a great help for this; if something didn’t feel right, the only course of action was to rip it out, screw it up and start all over again. No “darlings” retained there.
The second thing that happened was a case of writer’s block. I had been stuck on a scene in my novel “Who Needs Semtex?” (working title) which involves one of the main characters being abducted and then held in South Armagh by high-ranking republicans terrorists. Nothing funny there, is there? This is supposed to be a comic caper and I found myself in danger of losing my voice, the plot and the potential readership as they became confused and nervous of my narration. And then, in the middle of the night, I recalled something I had learned on an Arvon course: “the plot is like vapour trails which strong characters leave in their wake.” And thus, Mylo was born. Mylo is a chain-smoking, Jack Daniels drinking Filipino dwarf who wears a boiler suit, horn-rimmed glasses and what appears to be a Japanese Kamikaze helmet. How he arrived in Ireland is unknown; he was picked up by The Undertaker - the Provo 2nd in command of operations - who found him wandering around the lanes near Bessbrook carrying a semi-automatic Sterling rifle. He had shot his way out of the Royal Marine barracks, where he had been employed as a waiter in the officers’ mess, having slit the throats of a major and a captain who had made derogatory comments about his ancestry and appearance. Not hilarious, but it got me out of a hole and opened the door for where I wanted the scene to go.
And then yesterday in Writing and Editing class, we were instructed to write a piece entitled “My First Kitchen”. The class had been focused on memoir, and we were given twenty minutes to complete this assignment. At first my mind was a total blank, and then it was drawn back to an incident which happened when I was around five, and which, I think, was profoundly formative. I had crawled beneath the kitchen table into the dog’s basket and had been bitten on the face. Not savaged, but I can remember a lot of blood and pain. My mother took the side of the dog and castigated me for climbing into her basket. I was rebuked and received neither sympathy nor comfort. I wrote about this, and found myself in an emotional vortex; I had great difficulty in reading the short piece aloud and, to my acute embarrassment, had to leave the room when I had finished.
After the class, the tutor called me to one side.
‘Have you ever written anything like that before?’ she asked.
‘No’, I replied, wishing I hadn’t written it at all.
‘It was very brave of you’, she told me, ‘That’s a side of your writing we’ve not seen before. It was very poignant – you should persevere with it.’
On the way home, I reflected on this and realised that I had learned something valuable about how and why I write. I do not write for cathartic reasons, neither do I write to trawl through the past: I write because I enjoy writing and this morning had not been in the least enjoyable. I had found writing in a self-reflective autobiographical genre difficult and ultimately unproductive. No amount of self-analysis will alter one moment of an unhappy childhood, so it’s best left where it is.
At least Mylo puts a smile on my face and moves me to switch on my laptop.