Double Vision
Learn how to use the tools of the craft of writing
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
It was the most bizarre coincidence. The acclaimed Israeli writer Iris Leal had somehow found her way into my flat. Walking into the living room, where I was hammering away at a typewriter, she asked “what are you doing?”
“I’m writing a novel!” I declared excitedly, wondering who on earth this stranger was, standing with her hands on her hips, red corkscrew curls swishing around an impatient face.
That was 1985, when after sofa surfing around London aeons before the term was invented, I’d finally found a home. The year before I’d left a lucrative career in marketing to travel the world on a shoestring, all the while scribbling into a notebook the first draft of my first novel.
Despite earning wads of green folding in marketing, I’d felt empty. Life seemed pointless, days wasted.
All I wanted to do was to write.
By the time Iris entered my life, I was well into the second draft of that novel, blissfully unaware that I had no idea what I was doing.
Her second question seemed reasonable enough, but it immediately exposed the screwed-up state of my book.
“What is it about?”
“Well, there’s this bloke and this girl but they’ve split up and she’s pregnant and he’s a cocaine addict and they’re in the Bahamas and she goes to Washington DC to fight for women’s rights and he gets into drug smuggling and then there’s a sub-plot with the CIA and some incompetent Russians, but really it’s about female empowerment and she ends up in a refuge and he ends up a pop star, but it all goes wrong and at the end there’s a third bit that’s written completely differently and, well, look here…” I said, grabbing a pen and paper and frantically drawing interconnecting circles like Venn diagrams, with arrows flying all over the place, as I tried to explain the structure of my novel.
The memory of it is still embarrassing!
Since then I’ve increasingly come to appreciate what Iris did for me in the ensuing two years. As our friendship has grown, I also realise how unlikely it was that she’d take on such an ignorant and arrogant pupil.
At the time our relationship wasn’t pretty. She was as fiery a mentor as I was a resistant student. Each day I’d leave home clutching freshly-typed sheets, stomp along the back streets of Golders Green, stand in her kitchen and shout.
On some points we still disagree. She belongs in the world of high Literature, with a capital ‘L’, while my aspiration is to use language to be understood. She wanted to be Dostoevsky and I wanted to be Stephen King, or Woody Guthrie, depending on the day of the week. However, even then, I understood that as a writer I had to learn the skills and master the tools of the trade.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The crowds that flocked into the centre of Dublin last weekend provided the clearest indication yet that, thank God, a cure had been found for Covid.
The masses dancing and hugging on the streets was vindication that all of the self-isolation had been well worth it, when you could now congregate as close as you like to each other, to your little heart’s content.
Or so you’d think.
One weekend of slightly relaxed licencing laws was all it took, and in the blink of an eye thousands of revellers were up and at it like this was Paris in 1945 after it was freed from the Germans.
The newly-imposed regulations for relaxation would suggest that all of these bouncy people at least had the benefit of a nine-euro meal inside them – how else could they get served?
So, we’d better brace ourselves for when they go out on an empty stomach.
Much has already been made of the fact that pub life will never be the same again – and that might well be the case.
Social distancing is bad news for the publicans, limiting their ability to wedge the entire student population of NUIG and GMIT into the equivalent of a phone box.
But it’s great news for curmudgeons – particularly for those whose capacity for imbibing alcohol is shot.
Advancing middle age has seen the tolerance of the early twenties reduced from the equivalent of a sizeable plastic bucket to an amount that once wouldn’t have even pass the standard definition of being out.
Three pints? That’s what you’d order when they rang the bell at closing time.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Double Vision with Charlie Adley
More than any other time of the year, when we sit around our dinner tables on Christmas Day, we are aware of who is there and who is not. At the age of 17, having performed impressive acrobatics with my Yamaha 250, a saloon car, a ditch and a barbed wire fence, I spent six weeks in hospital over Christmas and New Year.
My femur was snapped in two, which is no mean feat with thighs like mine, and my tibia had a crack or two as well.
Bed-bound, with my leg in traction, I developed a bronchial chest infection after an emergency operation.
Every two seconds for six weeks I coughed in hacking spasms, thus shaking my smashed leg, which was hung in a sling, supported by a metal pole they had driven through me, just below the knee.
Suffice to say I came to terms with pain.
In our part of the ward, there were four beds and three bikers with broken bones.
There was Kev, who had fallen off his sleek and mean Suzuki GT750 (a two stroke 3-into-1, since you ask), and opposite us two was brick shithouse Yorkshireman Gary, ex-SAS, and mighty embarrassed, having survived several covert tours of duty in Northern Ireland, to have to admit to falling off a Honda 125.
Compared to the other patients in the hospital the three of us were well off.
We were not sick. We’d had our operations, and apart from antibiotics for wounds, and pain killers for broken bones, we needed very little medical attention.
We were young, male, bored, and allowed to drink beer. Naturally, we tried to attract the attention of the student nurses as much as possible, and equally, they were happy to have a bit of a laugh with lads who were not ill, physically, at least!
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
Saying “I love newspapers!” feels these days like buying a ticket for the next David Bowie gig, but I do: I love them. When I read a newspaper, I’m not a slave to the algorithm. Were I ten years younger, I’d read all my news online, on apps that I’ve set to my personal preferences.
Even when I visit media sites I’ve never been to before, there are cookies and bots and gordknowswot working away to offer me more of what the algorithms think I want.
Every link off each page is tailored to please me, but that’s no good.
I don’t want to be fed things that only fit into my areas of interest and opinion.
Sitting at my living room table, mug of tea and two slices of toast (peanut butter, since you ask), and a paper – any paper – open in front of me, I can see the full wonder and horror of the world, as interpreted by The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Irish Times or Daily Mirror.
As I browse into the heart of the paper, far from major news items, I let my eyesight fall all over the place, because each page is full of varied items, and, here on page 14, I’ll find the big story that’s being buried: the story they have to report, but are under instruction to dampen down.
Also here are stories that no algorithm-driven link would ever lead me to. Quirky little tales, able to dissolve an adult brain in seconds.
When driven sufficiently doolally by what I’m reading, I tear that particular piece of madness out of the newspaper, placing it on top of the wobbly towering stack of other torn madnesses by my desk.
There are dark torn madnesses and fearsome ones, but today I’m in the mood to prowl the ones that force me to furrow my brow, gasp for breath, pout my lips and grunt “What the -?” at the universe.
Notes are seeds, from which every writer will grow different fruit. When that writer is working for the Daily Mail, the fruit need bear only minuscule relation to the seed.
To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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