The Best Days Of My Life

Nowadays most of my books seem to have male protagonists but for a number of years I wrote books with teenage girls as the central characters. This used to puzzle people greatly. Whenever I was asked to speak at conferences, female librarians would frown and ask me, ‘How is it, Mr Keaney, that you are able to get inside the mind of a teenage girl so successfully?’ Quite often on these occasions there would be a female author on the same platform who might have written any number of books with teenage boys as the central characters but it never occurred to anyone to ask her how she managed this remarkable feat.

I would always reply that I found it easy to write from the point of view of an adolescent girl because I had two teenage daughters but this wasn’t the whole story. What I should really have said was, ‘It’s called using your imagination. It’s not so difficult because the fact is that we’re all human beings. Male or female, we all suffer pain, we all experience joy and we all long for love.

My daughter Kathleen, was our second child. That meant she was born with a playmate ready and waiting in the form of her older sister, Emily. And for years they spent hours of almost every day constructing elaborate dramas that involved Barbie and Cindy, teddy bears and other soft toys, Flower Fairies, Sylvanian Families and so on.

But, of course, it also meant that there came a point when Emily reached a certain age and put aside childish pleasures and Kathleen found herself without a companion. Unlike her sister, who had begun life as an only child, Kathleen was unprepared for playing by herself. And so she gazed up at me with sorrowful eyes as she told me that she had no-one to play with.

What could I do? I got down on the carpet with her and began to familiarise myself with the cast and the plot-lines of her ongoing narratives. And they were much more complex and multi-layered than I had imagined. I learned, for example, that there were boy Flower Fairies as well as girls, and that some of them were vain while others were shy. l discovered that Cindy was not as cool as Barbie, that some soft toys were bossy and that others had apparently been living together as married couples for years. It was a strange and often puzzling world but eventually I became very familiar with it. So that the when the time finally came for Kathleen to put aside childish things, I was the one left feeling utterly bereft.

But the memory of those days will never leave me. It inhabits everything I write and it has permanently stamped the person I have become. Whenever people ask me what were the best days of my life I do not hesitate. It was when I was a little girl, I tell them.

Fear And Loathing In South East London

I’ve been writing books for twenty five years and in that time I’ve written sixteen novels as well as a lot of non-fiction, so writing is pretty much a bread and butter activity to me. I don’t often get stuck when writing a first draft. I can get very frustrated trying to think up the story and seriously bogged down knocking the first draft into some shape; but I don’t generally begin the first draft without knowing where I’m going and I usually find that it is the most straightforward part of writing a book.

During the last fortnight however, I have been getting slower and slower until finally, a few days ago, I came to a complete standstill. There I was, sitting on the floor, surrounded by printed pages, with my head in my hands convinced that I was no good as a writer at all, never had been, never would be.

I was reminded of the time when I was at university and a friend of my flatmate came to stay with us. Let’s call him Malachy. He was an enormously likeable guy with a great sense of humour but he was seriously screwed up. He’d grown up in Northern Ireland and a bomb had gone off very close to him when he was little. Perhaps that had something to do with it, I don’t know, but the fact of the matter was that he was a nervous wreck. He was on anti-depressants from the doctor and he liberally self-medicated with alcohol and recreational drugs.

After he’d been with us a few weeks. it was clear that he was heading for some sort of crisis and right on cue it came. One night we came back to the flat from visiting friends and as soon as we opened the door of the apartment we saw slices of white bread lying in the hall. The further into the flat we went, the more bread we saw. Finally, we entered the living room and there was Malachy sitting on the floor in the middle of the room crying, and he was surrounded by bread. It looked as if there had been an explosion in a bakery.

‘What happened?’ we asked him. He shook his head, barely able to speak. Finally he whispered, ‘The loaf of bread attacked me.’ And that was all we could get out of him. He went away again not long after this. I have no idea what he’s doing now.

Well that was me a few days ago, except that it was my story that had attacked me and I couldn’t seem to fight back, no matter how hard I tried. Fortunately, Rosie came back from work and decided to take matters in hand. We went through the story together and she identified two chapters that simply had to go, suggested a couple of incidents that could be developed and pointed out that one of the central characters had no real story of his own. He was, in effect, merely a kind of accessory for the protagonist. Finally, she showed me that I needed to develop the logic of the world I was describing in greater detail. Suddenly I saw how simple it could be.

So now I’m a recovering narrative-phobic. The first draft is back on track and hopefully there will be no further episodes of despair and self-pity. That’s the thing about writing. It’s a solitary business. Ninety percent of the time you just need to be left alone to get on with it but every now and then, you need someone to point out the blindingly obvious. Otherwise you can’t see the loaf for the bread.

Words Are Deeds

While the 44th president of the United States was being sworn in, I was cleaning the kitchen sink and while he was making his first speech in office, I was making bread. To me these do not seem inappropriate tasks, for one of the strongest themes of his speech was the need to clear up the mess left behind by those who went before him, and to provide a wholesome future for those who will come after.

Like so many others, I have been deeply moved by Barak Obama’s campaign and by his glorious speech-making. It is such a delight to have an incumbent in the White House who is sensitive to language. Not everyone seems to agree with me, however. Immediately after the speech, cynical emails were arriving in the BBC newsroom, maintaining that words are easy to produce, but deeds are what count. Speaking as a writer, I would like to call into question this old cliché, for the truth is that words are deeds.

When in 2001, President Bush called for a ‘crusade’ in response to the destruction of the New York World Trade Centre, oblivious to the associations this word had for the muslim world, that was undoubtedly a deed, and an incredibly stupid one, for in showing such a lack of sensitivity to another culture he gave ammunition to America’s enemies and alienated some who might otherwise have been won over to moderation.

When seven years later, Barak Obama summed up the essence of his message in that now familiar three word slogan, ‘Yes we can’, that too was a deed, for it articulated the buried hope, not just of the United States of America but of people of goodwill all over the world.

The business of politics, like the art of fiction is conducted through words but, unlike an author, an inarticulate politician has the power to ruin lives. Thank goodness, therefore, that the man who has produced so many bad lines for the last nine years has finally departed . And three cheers for the new wordsmith. He’s got a difficult narrative to construct but if anyone can do it, I believe he can.

Pacing about and lying on the floor

For me, there are two elements to fiction: storytelling and writing. A lot of literary fiction, places more emphasis on the quality of the writing than on the storytelling; a lot of genre fiction places more emphasis on the storytelling than the writing. I believe you have to get both right.

Just at the moment I’m working on the storytelling part of my new novel. This means that I am trying to get to the point where I can relate the story to my wife, Rosie, from start to finish in some detail and hold her attention. Once I’ve reached that point I can concentrate on writing it as well as I am able. In the process the story I have taken such pains to fashion may change. Nevertheless, I need to have a proper narrative before I start.

I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t do some preliminary sketching. Usually I write three or four experimental chapters to help me imagine the world of the novel, the voice I might use and the pace at which the story might progress. But this is not the novel proper; it is just a rough guide to the sort of thing I would like to produce. Some of it may end up in the final product or none of it may.

Having just got to the end of another year working as a mentor on the Apprenticeships In Fiction scheme, I am more convinced than ever that where most first-time authors go wrong is that they launch into the writing too soon. They get seduced by the pleasure of discovering that they have a voice and so set out to write a novel while they’re still very uncertain about the world they want to describe, the characters who inhabit it and the narrative arc. They feel confident that they will discover all this as they write. But what they end up producing is too often muddled. Parts are really good but usually there are far too many different strands and the whole things fails to cohere.

Surprisingly, some of those who aspire to be novelists, seem to look down on this process of planning, devising, story-building or whatever you want to call it, precisely because of the widespread belief that the quality of the writing is the most important thing and the story is only secondary. But a novel is like a house. If you don’t start with a decent plan, you are going to end up with a ramshackle building that no one will want to inhabit.

So in order to make sure that the foundations of my literary edifice are secure, I am spending a lot of time pacing around, talking to myself, then lying on the floor forcing my mind to go over and over the same incidents until it truly understands the essential elements of the story I am trying to relate. If I cannot convince myself and then my wife, how can I hope to convince anyone else?

I hate this part of the job because it can take so long and it doesn’t look much like you’re doing anything, even to yourself. You just seem to be wasting time when you could be sitting at the keyboard hammering out words and I am itching to get started on the first draft. But hammering out words when you don’t really know what you want to say, is a mistake. It only leads to disillusionment. So for now I must put up with the itch for a little bit longer and Rosie must put up with me.

It's The Sub-Text, Your Majesty

The news in the UK recently has been full of two stories about members of the royal family. In a video diary which he made himself while serving in the army Prince Harry is heard to call one of his fellow officers, ‘our little Paki friend’. It has also been revealed that Prince Charles calls an Asian man with whom he plays polo by the nickname, ‘Sooty’. Both princes have been accused of racism.

Actually I don’t believe that either of them is really guilty of racism. They are just guilty of being insensitive, patronising, and totally oblivious to the historical and social context in which so-called friendly banter like this takes place.

Writers for children couldn’t get away with such behaviour. We have to be acutely aware of the messages that our writing conveys because we have a responsibility to our readers. That is why authors like Enid Blyton, whose books feature evil golliwogs, tend to be shied away from in schools these days. Nobody is saying that Enid Blyton was a racist; it’s just that we no longer feel comfortable with such images. They were a product of a time when attitudes in Britain towards black people were quite different to those which prevail nowadays.

It’s a simple point, really, a matter of politeness as much as anything else. As someone of Irish descent, I am angered when people make jokes predicated upon the notion that Irish people are somehow more stupid than people from other countries. Fortunately, such jokes are dying out nowadays. You don’t hear them on the tv or radio like you used to. But I can recall how frequent they once were and I can recall how much offence they gave to my mother and father – hard-working, decent, honest people who quite reasonably resented such a slur.

When defending such humour, people are fond of pointing out that it's universal. Over in Ireland they make similar jokes about people from Kerry, they argue. That may be true but it’s neither here nor there. You cannot justify your bad behaviour by pointing at someone else’s. My parents came from a culture that had been oppressed for hundreds of years. They knew, as I did, that Irish jokes began as a justification for such oppression since if you think people are inferior to you in intelligence or culture, then it’s easier to justify taking over their country, making them all speak your language and forcing them to do what you tell them.

A similar set of historical associations come into play when nicknames are used by members of the mainstream white population for black people. When I was growing up it was not uncommon for gangs of white youths to go out on the streets paki-bashing. Indeed, Asian people were killed in such attacks. It’s no good, therefore, Prince Harry saying that his comment was only meant in jest. The use of such a term evokes the memory of those atrocities.

The defenders of such royal crassness will say that this is just another example of political correctness gone mad but it isn’t; it’s sensitivity to language. I regularly get sent manuscripts to read in which would-be children’s authors display the same lack of awareness as the Princes Harry and Charles. Not long ago, I recall someone sending me a manuscript in which a group of children who were having a series of adventures on an island frequently referred to the inhabitants of that island as ‘abos’ (short for aborigines). I pointed out, in my reply, that, though I certainly wasn’t accusing the author of racism, he ought to be aware that ‘abos’ had been regularly used as a term of abuse for black people in the past. He responded with a furious tirade in which he fulminated against me for calling him a racist when he was nothing of the kind.

If a black boy or girl walked into the room you are in now, would you want to be gratuitously rude to them? Of course not. Would the writer of the book about the children and the ‘abos’ want to be rude to them? Of course not. Would Prince Charles or Prince Harry? Of course not. So, it’s quite simple really. People whose words will inevitably be repeated need to think about what they say. That goes for writers and princes in equal measure.

Murder Your Darlings

I was fifty-five yesterday. It was a very enjoyable birthday (apart from a trip to the supermarket in the morning, which is always grim). I spent the afternoon in the company of my daughters feeling like Mr Bennett from Pride and Prejudice being indulged by Jane and Elizabeth and the evening sitting in front of a fire, watching DVDs and eating halva (my favourite sweet. I have occasionally been asked if I will ever retire from writing. Only if I’m made redundant, I reply. But it does happen.

Once, about ten years ago, I was sitting on a train with a group of other writers, going to a conference on writing for young people. Suddenly the woman sitting opposite, to whom I’d been introduced only half an hour earlier and who was about the age I am now, burst into tears, and fled the carriage. I looked in dismay at my colleagues. ‘Was it something I said?’ They shook their heads. ‘She’s been writing children’s books for fifteen years,’ one of them told me, ‘and her publisher has just dropped her. She doesn’t think she’s ever going to get published again.’

I don’t know whether she ever did get published again because I’m afraid I can’t remember her name. However, it’s as clear an illustration as you could want of the old maxim that you are only as good as your last book. And, to be honest, I’m inclined to think that’s the way it should be. So often a writer produces one really good book and then each subsequent work is a little less inspired, but you, the reader, keep buying them in hope that he or she will strike gold again.

One of the most important qualities that any writer should possess, in my opinion, is the ability to change, to re-invent him or her self. As I’ve said before, I work with a lot of developing authors and the ability to take on board criticism, to reassess your own writing, and to throw away what isn’t working is what makes the difference between those who will grow into compelling and successful voices and those who will just go round and round in circles, recycling the same material endlessly.

Of course you always have to have your own vision. Otherwise what is the point in writing at all? But you also have to be ruthlessly self-critical. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, for a number of years I wrote theatre in education and community plays with a director whom I felt to be tyrannical, manipulative and utterly self-obsessed. (No doubt she felt the same about me.) However, she did teach me one thing. ‘You have to learn to murder your darlings, Brian,’ she would shriek, her voice always seeming to tremble on the edge of psychosis. ‘If it doesn’t work, rip it out!’ And credit where credit is due, she was right.

My Secret Vice

A man struggles along a dusty road towards a castle. It has taken him many months of travelling to get this far. He has come part of the way by boat, part on horseback, but most on his own two feet and he is weary now but in sight of his goal where his beloved waits for him. He must reach the castle gates before the stroke of noon or she will believe that he has forsaken her. It is now a quarter to twelve but there is still plenty of time. Time, indeed, to stop for a moment to admire the flowers growing by the roadside. 

But what’s this? He’s never seen one like this before. He must look more closely. Wait, here’s another unique specimen. And surely these beetles are quite different to any he has seen before. He carries in his knapsack a field guide to insects and flowers and he takes it now out to consult it. Ah yes, there are the beetles and sure enough, these are the flowers on which they regularly feed. He must make a note of this to tell his beloved for she is as interested in wildlife as he is himself. His beloved! Oh my goodness! He has forgotten the time. Hastily, he stuffs the book back in his knapsack and bolts towards the castle but it is too late. The castle bell has already begun to toll the hour and with a despairing shriek his beloved casts herself from the battlements into the depths of the moat below.

Why do we do it? Get everything set up for writing and then find ourselves distracted by something which is so immediately compelling that we are forced to while away precious time  attending to it. Every writer knows this syndrome. And we all have our own favourite displacement activities, whether they be making cups of coffee, smoking cigarettes, sharpening pencils, defragmenting the computer, rearranging files, answering emails, browsing the internet or blogging.

My favourite distraction is one that scarcely dares to speak its name, one that most men would be ashamed to admit, one that will win me nothing but scorn and derision, particularly from women who curl their upper lips in a snarl when they hear my confession, Nevertheless, I am coming out of the closet to admit that my secret passion is ironing.

I have a beautiful study with an enormous oak desk, an old oak chest against one wall, an antique French wardrobe in one corner, and a hideous metal ironing board in the centre. Every now and then, when the pressure of writing gets too great for me, I get up from my desk, turn on the iron and set to work.

I have all the accoutrements, including scented ironing water and instruments to remove lint and bobbles from clothing and there is nothing I will not iron: everything from tea towels to fitted sheets. Fitted sheets, I hear you gasp! But surely the whole point of fitted sheets is that they don’t need ironing. Yes, but I like them ironed.

I realise that I will have plummeted in the estimation of my readers after this admission but I cannot help that. Ironing helps me both to think and to suspend thinking when necessary. It is the punctuation in my writing day and at night, after a hard day’s work there is nothing more satisfying than to slip in between crisply ironed sheets of Egyptian cotton and sleep the sleep of the righteous.

Who Needs Pencils?

Over at An Awfully Big Blog Adventure they are waxing lyrical about pencils and the joy of writing in the old fashioned way. Well I disagree. When I was fourteen I cut my little finger so badly trying to sharpen a pencil with a pen knife that I had to have four stitches and there is still a scar to this day.

For me, a computer is the only way to write. I turn mine on at six thirty in the morning and turn it off just before I get into bed. It’s better than having a whole office full of people working for me. When I’m away from it for more than a day or two, I feel deprived, like a child in the playground whose best friend is at home sick.

Whenever I think about the likes of Charles Dickens or Balzac, writing all those weighty tomes with what was no more than a glorified feather, I am filled with admiration - not to mention relief that I was born into a more technologically advanced era.

I remember writing my first novel on a portable typewriter. What a pain that was! There were passages pasted over earlier versions, notes in the margin, mistakes in the pagination. I must have used several pints of correction fluid. When I was finished it looked like a dog’s breakfast. I had to get the whole thing retyped by a professional before I dared submit it to a publisher. If I’d had to do it with a pen or pencil, there might never have been a second book.

With a computer it’s all so much more pleasant. I can move text about at will, find and replace words and phrases, spell-check my work, keep a running word count and regularly update the table of contents. And if I want to do some research, the internet is the most extraordinary fount of information on every subject you could think of. Not always trustworthy of course, but nearly always inspiring. Try getting all that from a pencil.

The computer is the most elegant, sophisticated, and versatile writing tool that civilisation has ever produced, and also the most democratic. So let’s embrace what the modern world has to offer, not spend our time looking over our shoulders, pining for the good old days of graphite and ink, when books had leather jackets and authors had leather patches on their elbows and when writers were men of letters – even the women.

What The Barber Said

Whenever I go to get my hair cut the barber always asks the same question: ‘Not working today?’

‘I’m always working,’ I tell him, ‘even when I’m not’

He smiles and nods, because he knows what I mean. He can’t leave the shop even if he doesn’t have any customers. He has to remain hopeful. And it’s the same with writing. You have to keep at it even if your mind is a blank page. This is something that always hits me with particular force immediately after Christmas.

Getting back into a novel after a significant break is never easy. The world in which you believed so passionately has faded into sepia. You find it hard to understand how this tissue of implausibilities could have kept you awake at night, could have made you talk to yourself like a madman as you walked down the street, oblivious to the gaze of passers-by. Should you give the whole thing up and start again, you wonder? But maybe you won’t be able to start again. Maybe this is as good as it gets.

There’s a rhythm to the process of writing, a pattern of involvement and disengagement, a smaller cycle that take place during the day and a larger one that takes place over the course of weeks, months and years. Yet whenever you’re in one of these periods of disengagement it always feels like falling out of love, as if you are never going to be whole and happy again.

You stand almost naked before a wintry lake, ice clutching at its edges and force yourself to put a toe in the water. It’s bitterly cold and you withdraw again in alarm. But, stubbornly, you decide it’s got be worth another try. And this time the shock is not so great. In fact, it’s bracing. You take a deep breath and plunge in, flailing about clumsily at first midway between exhilaration and terror. But in time you regain your poise and begin to enjoy yourself. This is what you do, you remember. This is who you are.

Happy Days Are Here Again

I was born in 1954, which seems a very long time ago now. When we were young my parents often used to share New Year’s Eve celebrations with a couple of other Irish families and I can remember on the last night of 1959 one of the older girls remarking that this was the end of the nineteen fifties. ‘When will they come back?’ I asked. I was surprised and greatly saddened to learn that they never would.

It still seems a shame to me that we can’t revisit some of the highlights of past years, except by way of memory, of course. But perhaps one day we will be able to do so in reality. So, in readiness for that time, I have drawn up a list of the ten days in the last fifty five years that I would most like to live again, though since I am doing this with the benefit of hindsight, in each case, I would like to make a few improvements to the occasion. Here is my selection.

1. The day Rosie agreed to marry me. (Not the Rosie who sometimes comments on my blog, by the way - it's just coincidence.) But I would like to have this day without the absolutely dreadful hangover I was suffering on account of having drunk half a bottle of cheap brandy the night before in order to help me pluck up the courage to pop the question, but which only had the effect of making me so drunk that she refused to take me seriously until the next morning.

2. My wedding day. I know I’m beginning to sound like a young woman being interviewed for Bride magazine but this was, and remains, the happiest day of my life. In retrospect, however, I would like to edit out the terrible moustache I was so proud of at the time. What with that and the flared trousers the wedding photos are a bit embarrassing.

3. The day our first daughter was born. The only thing I would change about this was our decision, after we got back from the hospital and Emily had been asleep for six hours without stirring, to wake her just to check that she was all right. (She didn’t sleep through the night again for the next four years.)

4. The day Rosie phoned me at work to say that Oxford University Press wanted to publish my first book. There is more than one thing I would like to amend about this day. Firstly, I would like the advance offered by OUP to have been about ten times what it was. (It still wouldn’t have been a lot). Secondly, I could have done without my Head of Department coming into the room about thirty seconds later to tell me that I’d messed up the stationery recquisition that had taken me all one afternoon to complete the previous week and that I would have to do the whole thing again. I do not, however, regret my decision to tell him exactly what he could do with his recquisition forms, despite the years of poverty that followed.

5. The day my second daughter was born, I would like to re-experience this day without having to hobble around the delivery room on crutches because I had broken my ankle a few weeks earlier when the car I was trying to fix fell off the jack onto my foot. It would also be quite nice if the occasion had not been presided over by a midwife with all the charm and sympathy of Joseph Stalin with a migraine.

6. The day I moved into the house I still live in more than twenty years later. But I would have preferred to purchase it without a leaking roof and severe subsidence to the front bay. It would also have been nice if the previous owner had told the whole truth about the central heating.

7. The day I saw a woman reading one of my books on a train. It would have been perfect if I’d resisted the temptation to go over and introduce myself. Then I would not have had to endure the withering look of a woman who believes she is on the receiving end of one of the most pathetic chat-up lines imaginable.

8. The day I learned that I had sold my fantasy trilogy to Random House in the US for (what is to me) a lot of money. However, I do wish I had learned this from my publishers rather than reading about it on The Bookseller web page. I also wish I hadn’t immediately phoned up my friends and told them about it excitedly within earshot of the plumber who was attempting to deal with the afore-mentioned central heating system and whose subsequent bill turned out to be considerably more than he originally led me to believe.

9. Any of the award ceremonies that I have been invited to, only I would like to actually win for once, instead of slapping the other guy on the back and smiling for the camera.

10. My elder daughter’s wedding day. It would have been great to have gone through this not in the throes of some horrendous virus and not discovering about an hour before the service that the shirt I intended to wear seemed to have been transported to another dimension by aliens.

I’m afraid it’s rather a domestic selection but that’s me. Given the choice between travelling half way round the world to some exotic destination or staying at home with a good book, I’d go for the latter almost every time. I’m more Jane Austen than Jack Kerouac and that’s the way it’s going to stay for 2009.

Happy New Year!