“Write it for fun!” Dagmar said, outside Tigh Neachtain - where else.
She’d asked me if I was writing, and I snuffled and blurbled a few imaginative excuses.
“Y’see, there’s this new nerve pain from a crushed vertebra high in my back...”
“Y’see when I was ill they put me on Disability and now I’m on a pension, and while I do need extra green folding most of the time, I’m loving the beach walks and staring into guilt-free space...”
“Y’see I’ve been rebooting the pre-online archive of Double Vision, as the online version nears a million hits...”
No, I wasn’t impressed either.
After 7 years of overwhelming, all-consuming misfortune, I was happy to be a human just being, so since moving in to my little house, I’ve avoided writing anything that requires a deadline.
I’d lived off my scribbling for 27 years, and I give thanks for that.
Wooh Yeh. Thank you so much!
I wrote whatever I wanted and newspapers paid me for it. Columns and features.
It doesn’t really get better for a vocational writer.
There’s this play I was writing. The Abbey Theatre were running a competition to submit an idea for a play, and if you won they’d work on it with you and make it happen. I think it’s become a permanent offer these days.
My play is called Townland, and I love it it, mostly because I haven’t written it yet. When it becomes words on paper I’ll love it a lot less. I’ll see only weaknesses and how it could be better, but it’s been in the file for a few years now.
Until, that is, I’m sitting on Galway’s Cross Street with Paul and Dagmar on a Thursday afternoon, and she says that:
“Why not write it for fun?"
Fun?
Don’t be writing it for the Abbey. Write it for fun.
How the hell had I forgotten Play, my core modus operandi?
I just finished teaching my first course since my illness, so for eight weeks I’ve been pummelling my poor pupils with the concept of Play, all the while ignoring my own rule; if it is a rule.
Play is my mindset; my canvas; my first draft; my everything. It’s the document I write in, the headspace I create in.
When you’re playing you can’t go wrong.
When I’m writing I feel as free as a child in a sandpit.
Dagmar couldn’t have known that I’d been avoiding Play, because I didn’t know either. Once in a while I should maybe listen to myself. And Dagmar.
For those colyoomistas who’ve spotted an absence of fresh DV content recently, here’s what’s been happening.
Back from Galway, I followed my instincts and trusted my experience. I fished out a bag filled with all the pics that have adorned the walls of my workspace, wherever I lived. They offered constancy in a life of many continents.
A postcard of an Utrillo street scene that evokes my teenage hitching years in France. A Modigliani woman that reminds me how strong simple strokes can be the most powerful and effective.
Photos of my two dead Jons, both with no ‘h’, who used to live a mile from each other in London. Ancient photos of my posse, the Class of ’77. We have shared our lives all our lives. Significant cartoons which either illustrated my work or my ideas.
I didn’t put them up when I moved in, because I didn’t want a workplace.
Play.
Fun.
Then I ordered an office chair online, because if I’m about to write then I deserve it. Then I endured a ridiculous Saturday afternoon failing to put it together, while trying not to trigger the nerve pain. When that mutha hits it can knock me off my feet. Like someone put my body into a microwave.
I’m sitting on that chair now, with my workplace pics up around me. Home.
No, I absolutely am not several thousand words into the play.
I’ve opened the folder called Townland Stuff, and made some fresh notes. I’m not writing because the Abbey may or may not want to see the play. I’m playing.
I thought it was a rejection letter they sent, but Conor 'Monty' Montague told me it wasn’t.
Monty pointed out that they’d asked to see it when it was written. I’d only seen the words they wrote about not making into their ‘Ideas’ process.
Monty is, by the way, the living breathing Patron Saint of Scribblers. Unsung, unlauded, altruistic, helping scores of writers for the love of writing, and a damn fine wordsmith himself, if you like gonzo madness, gore and ironic excitement. Who doesn’t?
When you’re a scribbler you gain a broad collection of rejections. They differ and dither between hope and damnation. When I lived in Connemara a friend close by insisted that I was a much better writer than him.
“You’ve a much better collection of rejections than I have, Charlie.”
Please take note, one Iris Leal. Back sometime in the 1980s you had just described my writing as ‘a cave painting’, and told me (or screamed wildly at me, if you’re English and not Israeli) that one day I would read a lot of books.
You were right.
Over the last six years I’ve read an absolute shitload of books, mostly modern fiction.
I’ve calmed the fuck down.
The Townland folder is open, and I’m a better writer than I was back when I hid it there, before all those books.
I’m on my spanky new office chair; my pics are up; I’ve written some notes, and realised today that English Tom’s voice needs to be more clipped.
Dagmar could not know how incredibly apt her advice was.
Then again, as an artist she recognises the importance of freedom, of creating for the love of it.
Thanks Dagmar!
©Charlie Adley
12.06.2026
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