How I Got Here

In his younger days my brother Brendan was a professional dancer, and rather a good one I believe. He used to drive around London in a very enviable little sports car and he had a rather nice flat in an emerging part of the capital.

Once, when we were discussing the nature of success, he said to me, ‘When I was young I really wanted to be a dancer, to have my own flat and to drive around in a little MG. Now I’ve got that and I have keep stopping and reminding myself that I am the person I always wanted to be.’

A good point. So today as The Resurrection Fields, the final book in my fantasy trilogy, is published in the US, I am just pausing to remind myself of the same thing

Good Writing

I am half way through the First Draft of my next novel. I know this because the story already exists very clearly in my head. I’m not a writer who explores the story on paper, at least not these days. I explore the story in my head for ages before I set to work. Then I write an outline, merely to remind myself of everything I want to include, since it’s quite easy to forget great chunks.

Working in this way leaves me with the opportunity to work on the writing itself, rather than trying to devise a story and write it in the best possible way at the same time, which strikes me as a bit like cycling down the road carrying a parcel.

When I say that I want to work on the writing I mean that I want to get it as good as I can by my own standards. Everybody has different ideas about this but for me good writing should be almost invisible, like the glass in a shop window, so that the reader only sees the goods on display. I’m not interested in writing that calls attention to itself all the time like some leather clad rock star standing in the spotlight producing endless guitar solos.

As a children’s writer I naturally visit schools now and again. In more than one primary school I’ve had the experience of the teacher saying something like, ‘Now then everyone, I’m sure that Mr Keaney is going to show us how to write using lots of lovely describing words.’ That sort of attitude makes me want to scream, ‘No Mr Keaney is going to do no such thing!’ This is no way to teach our children but of course it comes from the rigidity of the National Curriculum.

Recently, a secondary school asked me to visit and I expressed a certain reluctance because on a previous visit some of the pupils had seemed to have no idea who I was or what I was doing there. I only want to come if you do some preparation for the visit, I said. The teacher sent me back a reply stating that this wasn’t really possible because the curriculum determined what was taught in English lessons and there was no time to deviate from that. What was the point in me coming then, I wondered. Because the school was having a Book Week, she said. So my visit was effectively no more than a box-ticking exercise.

You can’t measure good writing by the number of adjectives used. Nor can you pretend that you are introducing children to literature by having an annual Book Week. These are both simply examples of tokenism. I believe this sort of thing has come about because of political interference in schools. In the UK politicians seem obsessed with micro-managing the curriculum so that it produces a series of statistics. And what is the purpose of these statistics? Purportedly, it is to provide parents with choice. But really it’s just so they can use the figures as part of their own miserable campaign of self-preservation.

Where Do You Belong?

Linda Grant was on the radio the other day discussing her novel, When I Lived In Modern Times. It’s a terrific book in my opinion. Set during the early days of the state of Israel, it describes the way that identities shift and re-form as people from the most diverse backgrounds are melded together by history.

When asked about her own identity, Ms Grant said, ‘I never really feel at home wherever I am’. Later in the interview she said that American Jews don’t really consider English Jews to be properly Jewish because they speak with ‘a la-di-da accent’. I don’t know whether this is true or just Ms Grant’s paranoia but it made me smile.

When I was at school in East London we would have football matches with the Irish against the English and, of course, I was in the Irish team. At secondary school I was once publicly rebuked by a teacher for pronouncing the word this as dis, ‘like an Irish tinker’.

However, when we went to Ireland each Summer for our holidays, I was always described as the English cousin. Indeed, in the village where my father lived I was once spat at in the street and called ‘Dirty English’ by a complete stranger. So, like Linda Grant, I felt at home nowhere.

I still feel like that to a great extent but a couple of things have happened in the last few years to make me feel that perhaps I belong somewhere after all.

The first was that someone who was visiting me from the north west of England wanted to know whether his car would be safe parked outside my house. I thought at first that he was joking but I soon saw from his manner that he was genuinely very nervous about leaving it there.

Then a writer who lives in the north east of England was coming to London to talk to me. I suggested meeting at the British Library near Kings Cross station. She sent me an email saying that she had heard bad things about Kings Cross and wondered whether it would be a safe place to meet.

I was describing these reactions to a friend, who said, ‘Yes but they only seem silly to you because you’re such a Londoner.’ And I suppose she was right. I’m not scared because this is my territory.

At the end of the interview Linda Grant admitted, a little sadly, that one of the few languages her work had not been translated into was Hebrew. I immediately thought of the same friend who had confidently assured me that I was a Londoner. Though English-born, her mother had been Irish and she had spent long periods in Ireland as a child but had been living in London for many years. Recently she sent me an email in which she just had to tell me that she had been described by a newspaper as an ‘Irish writer’. I think that if she had sold the film rights to her novel she could not have been more pleased.

West Of Ireland Writing Tip Number Two

The first evening back at the family home in Leitrim I found a task awaiting me that could not be postponed. The sinks were not draining properly. Upon investigation, the problem turned out to be a blocked gully. The only way to clear it was to put my hand down into the depths of the drain and start pulling out whatever debris I found there.

The culprit turned out to be many years’ accumulation of leaves. Indeed, I found so much decayed matter that it was like encountering a miniature peat bog in the bottom of the gully. I half expected to uncover the remains of a Neolithic settlement at the bottom of it.

I was reminded of my friend Teresita who told me how once when facing the same problem, she thrust her hand into several inches of scummy water and grasped something soft and wet which felt a bit like an old glove, or perhaps a woollen hat. Chuckling to herself, she drew her hand out of the water to find that she was clutching the bloated corpse of a dead rat.

Teresita is a strong and independent woman so I’ve no doubt that she handled the situation with grit and aplomb. Whereas I would probably have yelled, hurled the rat as far as possible and rushed for the shower.

I know I’m overdoing the writing metaphors at the moment. But I’ve just been looking at a manuscript by someone that ended so weakly, after promising so much that I couldn’t help another one coming on. So here it is, Brian’s West of Ireland Writing Tip Number Two: you’ll have much more impact if you end your novel with a swollen and grisly carcass than if you leave the reader with nothing more than a handful of wet leaves.

Panic In Leitrim

I’ve been in the West of Ireland for the last few days and what a pleasure it was. The fields and the hills were dressed in so many different shades of green, yellow, orange and brown. Ragged-winged crows hung in the air, riding the wind and obviously enjoying themselves enormously; flocks of fieldfares wheeled around the house, settling in the nearby forest and chattering noisily as evening descended.

One of the things I like most about the house where my parents lived is the silence and the darkness of night; though sometimes it can be too intense. I remember once several years ago waking in the middle of the night, wanting to visit the bathroom. It was so dark that I had no idea where the light switch might be. I blundered around hopelessly, stubbing my toe, bashing my shins against unidentifiable objects until I walked painfully into the wall.

I thought that if I simply felt my way around the room by following the wall I could not go wrong. But I must have started at a point very close to the light switch and begun travelling in the wrong direction. My sightless navigation seemed to take forever and I began to panic, wondering whether I might actually be dead and that life after death might consist of an eternity spent stumbling around in the dark. Then finally to my great relief I found the curtains and drew them back to gaze out on a night sky blazing with stars.

Afterwards it seemed to me that this was a perfect metaphor for writing – rousing oneself from a comfortable torpor to answer an urgent call, setting off in the wrong direction, causing oneself real pain by blundering into obstacles, beginning to doubt that one will ever achieve one’s objective, and then finally, more by accident than design, being granted a glimpse of real beauty.

I Have Measured Out My Life In Paracetamol

Everybody wants to be a writer nowadays. Absolutely everybody. I sometimes wonder why.

Since I’m a children’s writer I often visit schools to give readings and talks. It’s generally an extremely enjoyable experience but sometimes the questions aren’t what you expect. I’ve been asked what car I drive; what football team I support; whether I’m the new supply teacher; whether I’m ‘that bloke off the telly’; whether I’ve met Charles Dickens; whether, if I could get a robot that would write my books for me, I would get one.

But perhaps the most difficult question to answer was put by a shaven-headed, gum-chewing young man who seemed entirely unimpressed with my presentation. ‘So you mean all you do all day is write?’ he said. ‘That’s not much of a life, is it?’

Today I’m inclined to agree with him because I have a terrible headache and every time I hit the keyboard a little lance of pain darts through my brain. But I refuse to give up. If I were to turn the computer off every time I got a headache I’d never get anything done.

I’ve suffered from headaches all my life. Many of them descend upon me for no obvious reason. Perhaps the god of headaches decides he needs to fill his quota for that month. But now and again I clearly deserve what I get. I throw caution to the wind and more or less get down on my knees and beg for a headache.

One such occasion was the night I proposed to my wife. I’d been wanting to ask her for ages but I was not at all certain that she would accept my offer. Finally I made up my mind that tonight would be the night. First of all we were going to a party and, conscious that what I was about to say would determine my future happiness, I decided to have a drink or two to give me courage.

I’ve never been any good at alcohol. Even a small amount goes straight to my head. Over the course of that evening I drank half a bottle of Spanish brandy that someone had brought to the party and abandoned. Nobody else was touching it. They thought it looked cheap and nasty.

So when I finally got round to popping the question Rosie simply said that she wasn’t prepared to talk about this with me in the state that I was in and that the best thing to do was go home and discuss it in the morning.

I was gutted, I can tell you. My pride was severely dented. But it was to suffer an even bigger dent when the driver of the taxi that we hailed as we left the party, took one look at me and shook his head. ‘I don’t mind taking you, love,’ he told Rosie, ‘but I’m not having him in my cab. He’s liable to be sick all over it.’

I protested bitterly at this slur upon my reputation but to no avail. Fortunately, Rosie’s charm won him over.

I don’t remember much about the rest of the night but I do remember the pain I experienced when I opened my eyes the next morning. I felt like my neck was gripped in an iron vice; there was a great big metal ball inside my skull that rolled about from side to side every time I moved; and somebody had rubbed hot sand in my eyes. It turned out to be one of the worst headaches I have ever suffered and it took me considerably more than twenty four hours to recover.

A couple of years ago my doctor referred me to a special headache clinic. The consultant, an elderly man with a bored expression, asked me all sorts of questions about my lifestyle. But when he found out that I was a writer his attitude changed completely. He suddenly became enormously enthusiastic and began asking the most detailed questions about my working methods.

He interrogated me about the level of planning I did, the number of words I turned out each day, the amount of re-writing that was necessary, the interaction between me and my editor. ‘Do you really think all this is likely to affect my headaches?’ I asked. He looked a bit sheepish. Not really, he admitted. It’s just that he was planning to write a book himself one day. On the history of the headache.

Time

There’s a Tom Waits song that goes,"I wish I had all the money that we used to spend on dope. I'd buy me a used car lot and I wouldn't sell any of ‘em. I'd just drive a different car every day, depending on how I feel.’ It’s called Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis.

I feel the same way about time. I wish I could get back all the time I wasted when I was younger. Especially when I was a student. I just used to watch the days passing, like a child watching an ant crawling along a leaf.

For a while I really believed I could slow time down or speed it up just by the way I looked at it. I thought that time spent walking in the park was different from time spent writing an essay, or working in a factory. And time spent when you were in love didn’t count at all. It was just a little bit stolen from eternity.

But you can’t speed time up or slow it down. All that happens is that you speed up or slow down with it. And people in love get older in exactly the same way as everybody else.

Nowadays I feel like I am trying to empty a great lake of narrative with a spoon while the devil himself clings to my spine like something that grew there. ‘You’re never going to get it all done,’ he whispers over and over again.

I had a friend who did nothing but write from the time he left school. He married a woman who took care of all the domestic stuff. He got tradesmen in to do the simplest tasks. He saw himself solely as a writer and in time he became a very successful journalist. For a paper that I wouldn’t read.

He once said to me, ‘The one thing I envy about you Brian is that you went to university. I often think I should have done that. Did you have a really good time there?’

‘I had the time of my life,’ I told him.

Now I want it back.

On Fire

The following conversation, which apparently took place in the middle of the night, was reported to me by my wife, Rosie, this morning.

Me: Are you awake?
Rosie: What? Well, yes I am now? What is it?
Me: What the hell is happening with the top of my head?
Rosie: I don’t know. What do you think is happening with the top of your head?
Me: I thought there was a flame on it.
Rosie: Oh God, you’re not even really awake. Go back to sleep!

I did vaguely remember something about it when she reminded me. I think I imagined there was a blue flame, like the kind you see on gas cookers, coming out of the top of my head.

Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was because I am storming along with my First Draft.

Don’t you just love it when the writing is going well? When you can’t type quickly enough because it’s pouring out of you like you’re a tap that’s been turned on?

That’s when you know you’ve got it absolutely right. Because you’re not even writing it; it’s writing itself; you’re just hitting the keyboard.

A Love Hate Relationship

I’ve started on the First Draft of my latest novel. I had a couple of days off after finishing the Pre-Draft but I kept feeling like I’d lost something important. So I quickly realised that I had to get back to work.

My whole relationship to writing is love/hate. I don’t actually physically enjoy sitting down at the computer all day and cranking out the words. It’s tiring. And I’ve got a degree of repetitive strain injury in my right hand which is getting worse as I get older. But if I’m not writing, that feeling of loss grows into an existential pain.

I always find that beginning is the hardest thing. Beginning a draft, beginning a chapter, beginning the day’s writing. Over the years I’ve changed the way I go about it. At one time I used to approach a day’s writing like a man who falls down an elevator shaft. I’d plunge straight in without thinking. Then, at the end of the day, I’d go back and automatically delete the first two or three hundred words because they always turned out to be no more than a series of stretching exercises before the real physical confrontation,

Nowadays I try to do the warming up mentally rather than physically because I want to make the writing count from the very first word. But it means that I sit in front of the computer or pace about the room at the beginning of every new section as alternative sentences dance about inside my head, each one loudly insisting that it is the best, the only possible way to start.

Sometimes the problem is not vocabulary or phrasing, it’s sequencing. There are always so many different ways you can tell a story and even when you’ve gone to the trouble of writing a detailed Pre-Draft, each chapter can be organised in any number of ways, all of which have their implications for the rest of the story.

After a lot of delay and several cups of tea I finally make an instinctive choice and go with it. Once I’ve started, the words come very easily. The faster I go, the more exhilarating I find it. After a thousand words, I stop and read what I’ve written.

If it limps, the sense of worthlessness that haunted my adolescence immediately threatens to engulf me. I have to act quickly; my fingers move like lightning over the keys while I frantically try to put things right. But if the writing sings off the page at the first reading, I feel validated and I’m in love with being a writer all over again.

A Bad Man

I am a bad man at heart. And here’s an example of it.

Some twenty five years ago when I still had another job apart from writing, I was working as a teacher in a Catholic comprehensive school. After I had been there for a few years the school employed a nun in my department.

By chance it turned out that this nun was of the same order as the nuns who taught me in my primary school. I have made my opinion of the nuns in my primary school fairly clear in this blog before. See my post The Good Old Days.

When I think about the Head Teacher of my primary school I always remember one particular Assembly when the whole school were lined up after the Summer holiday. She stood foursquare on the stage and addressed us. No need for a microphone. Her voice was as sharp and clear as a bucket of water in your face on a winter’s day. ‘And are you all glad to be back at school?’ she asked.

‘Yes sister,’ we chorused. All except for a couple of brave souls at the back who replied, truthfully enough, ‘No sister.’

‘Who said no?’ she demanded sternly.

‘No one moved a muscle as she marched down the hall towards the back.

‘I said, who said no?’ she repeated.

A poor unfortunate fat boy in the back row who could never tell a lie to save his life, raised a trembling hand.

‘I will see you in my office after assembly,’ she told him.

He was caned, of course.

Anyhow, here I was in conversation with this elderly nun who, having found out that I had attended a primary school run by her order was delighted. I’d made her day. And what was the name of the Headmistress, she wanted to know?

I told her.

She clapped her hands with joy. 'Would you believe she’s still alive and going strong,’ she asked me. (I would as it happened.) ‘She’s living in our convent. Would you like to come and see her? I know she’d be delighted.’

I looked her in the eye and replied with the utmost gravity. ‘I couldn’t be certain I could keep my hands off her neck.’

The poor woman didn’t know what to do. She tried to smile but when I didn’t smile back her face fell and she mumbled something about how she supposed that schools were different in those days.

Like I say, I’m a bad man at heart.