Writing And Its Pleasures
Monday, February 6th, 2012I retired at the relatively early age of 59 on the eve of my 60th birthday. I retired because I did not like what work had become but I had assiduously applied myself to the task and had a modicum of success and vowed my next few years were for Helen and myself. I was reasonably young and had most of my faculties intact but I was obviously needing something to do and I naturally knew what it was. I wanted to write, not rubbish, but something with a little quality attached either in phrasing or ideas or both.
So after a period of thought and preparation I set about writing the memoir of my life, not a great life but one with some interest even to the casual reader, let alone my children for whom the tome was originally prescribed. I started it in the winter of 2006 and quickly found out that I could write more easily at night time when it was quiet and there was no distraction. So with a little planning and preparation I set to. I was amazed; the words tumbled out of my mind onto the page almost quicker than I could write. In those days and even today with some scripts, I had to put pen to paper first before transferring them onto the typed page.
So as England was trounced by Australia in five Ashes test matches over that deep dark winter, I crafted 130,000 words of my own to describe myself and my forebears. I wrote it in about four weeks and then asked Helen, my devoted wife of 39 years, to type it out, because her earlier training, before she started on me, was in that direction. She knocked out about 60 pages in quick time before she tired of the task, or possibly of me, who stood at her shoulder and glowed as she committed my words to the screen and she told me that I would have to finish the job myself.
For me the size of the imposition was gargantuan, never having used a keyboard previously but in true surveyor’s style, I split the work into sections and vowed to complete 20 pages per day, in double line spacing, about 6000 words per session. I had it done in a little over three weeks and I was a proud man until I started reading and editing which then took me the best part of the next three years before I was happy enough to let others read it. It was received well by some and not by others. I could not help being critical of some stages and some characters in my life. I was brutal but probably factual in parts but I knew I was not quite there yet.
Sometime between 2009 and 2011 my painfully typed memoir disappeared off my computer screen, why or how, I do not know but into the ether it went. I had made a typed copy but for tinkering purposes I missed it. I was always adding words or subtracting sentences and it was lovely to play with it. I am no expert in computers and it probably is in there somewhere that the intrepid expert will easily extricate. One day I might give the task to some familial great in the field to find but I have kind of resigned myself to retyping and not without a little pleasure at the thought, because in retrospect some sections need revisiting and rewriting from a different angle. However that is a promised duty for when I run out of steam and not now when I am so busy with other ideas.
So come the winter of 2009 I was in a writing desert, wanting to write but trying to find a medium, finding a way for others to read my thoughts. The urge to write is an amazing need in one so struck. You are impelled by some intangible force to get words on paper, not particularly to earn money, though that would be nice, but that others could benefit from or be critical of your fine turn of phrase and laugh or at least smirk at the humour of your thoughts.
It was then I was struck by an idea mooted by my son-in-law, although he was referring to it in a business sense. Blogging and how it could help people in business. I signed myself up as a non-paying customer of a symposium he was about to give on the subject and after 10 hours of education, I realised this idea was for me. It also taught me a few insider tricks in how to make the blog more available to others.
Within a couple of days my daughter and husband had set me up with a vehicle to put my words on and after a very shy and tentative start I was into my stride very quickly, helped by the antics of the Catholic Church and the publication of the Ryan Report into clerical abuse in Dublin, which gave me an ocean to trawl through for ideas from the very start.
I realised quickly the subjects to steer clear of. My scrapbook was full of poison pen letters and anonymous phone calls and threats of all descriptions, including three from the local rag here in Boyle, who were considering suing me for defamation. Funnily enough I also received a threat from a bumbling priest in Manchester who was going to sue me for “deformation”. My mind has boggled ever since. Certainly the parish pump is a no go area if you want a quiet life, especially in small town Ireland. There are still people seething from stuff I wrote regarding the local scene two years ago, it does not matter that it was the truth but for them to be confronted with it, was not quite on.
So my mind and blogging moved to the international arena and away from the small minds stadium. I wrote about anything and everything, little ideas wormed their way into my head as I lay, a supine insomniac, in my bed at night and the next day these thoughts displayed themselves onto my screen as I nodded off for want of sleep.
What cheered me and what drove me on was the choice of subjects, especially the Catholic church and its works and pomps for which I had a particular dislike, but the real driver was the feedback. Over the last 27 months I have met thousands of people through this medium with readers from all over the world e-mailing me and posting comments on the site. So far people from over 150 countries have contacted me to give me their point of view on a particular subject. That is the real power of the blog, the fact that there are no boundaries, the whole world is your stage. Once you have written your piece it is there forever, like an over-abundant fruit tree with a never ending crop waiting to be picked off 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by anybody who chances along. In that time of 27 months, I have written 177 blog postings containing about 300,000 words with hundreds of thousands of people reading what I have to say. A tool called Google Analytics tells you exactly how many people read my printed words and how much of it they actually read. Really useful when you are looking for popular topics to write about, not that that bothers me because I write about things that jar my mind and if others agree or even disagree that is where my pleasure lies.
In all that time two people stand out as really influencing my thought process and making me think seriously about my topics but at the same time distracting me in the nicest possible way from my task of delivering words, having to construct and answer a daily crop of e-mails to them. However their thoughts, ideas, cajolements and humour have turned me into a far better person.
One of this duo contacted me first out of a need to share his experiences with me after a piece I had written. This single contact turned into an avalanche of daily e-mails, full of wit, innuendo and downright truth about the revelations coming out of the Catholic Church which certainly attracted the main butt of our humour at that time. His constant hammering on my computer screen made our main construct into a viable cause and hopefully we will be friends for ever, even after this rash of clerical crap is over.
The main problem with my writing is my lack of subtlety. My scripts are a blunt force, which makes the point to easily. I needed assuagement, like a car engine needs lubricating oil. My problem was that I did not understand the power of the blog. I did not realise that you could not just tell it as it was but as the blog became popular I knew that this bluntness could not last because I might be over-stepping that thin, hazy, grey line they call legality.
I was eager to learn because my wealth, however small it might be, was destined for Arthur Guinness’ pockets and not some sidewinding litigant hoping to line his breeches with my hard earned. A person made herself available, a person with more than a little knowledge of the legal code, a person, who at first, had me cowed with the fineness of her mind, she volunteered to turn my rough Longsight ideas and words into things of beauty and awe. Her deftness of phrasing was a pleasure to read, her subject easily wrought but it was her humour I craved. In the midst of all this horror and talk of what legal bods could do to you if you only slightly overstepped this indeterminable line, there was a humour so unlike anything from her ilk, that I had to listen to and take in everything she said.
Eventually her tuition turned me into a far better man and a far more circumspect writer and hopefully I taught her a little of the northern spirit she claimed she had in her genes ( her family having moved from a semi-detached mud hut in Jarrow to a twee bijou residence close to Buck House in the 14th century). So, having been edited and tutored to distraction, I write now with ease, splaying silken sentences onto a sensuous screen. I am no longer the man I was but I thank both my amanuenses for turning me from the guttersnipe I obviously was to a person you could take anywhere.