Would you like to learn the craft of writing?

Loving what you do for a living is one of life’s greatest gifts. Before I took up writing professionally I worked in a plethora of corporate jobs, many of which sapped my soul and made me wonder whether life was worth the effort.  

Fortunately I never felt like that when I was employed by non-profit organisations, mainly because the work I was doing made sense. 

Whether I was training a teenage football team, looking after a gentle professor with terminal Alzheimer's or facing the challenge of helping a severely autistic boy, I rarely felt that my efforts had been wasted. At worst, I’d earned a crust and done no harm. Sometimes I might even have made a positive contribution to other peoples’ lives.
 
In all those jobs I felt like a visitor in someone else’s world. Yet sitting here at my keyboard in a typically ungainly position, with my ankles badly twisted underneath my desk, I feel completely comfortable.
 
Some of you already know what I’m on about. If you love your work then you know how lucky I feel. Of course sometimes, just like anything one has to do, it can be a pain in the derrière. 

Occasionally my ideas become as blocked up as an 8 year-old’s nose, or I’ve got the ‘flu and can barely sit upright, let alone make my deadline. But somehow I always make that deadline, because I’ve got the best gig in the world and I won’t waste it.
 
From the age of 15 I wrote every single day, keeping a diary until the age of 21 that contained as much fiction as fact. As a precocious teenager I thought it might be interesting for an ‘older me’ to look back and see what I was like in adolescence.
 
In truth the 6 volumes constitute a terrifying journey into petulance, paranoia and sexual fantasy, but their making instilled within me the discipline of a lifetime: to sit and write each day.
 
Since then I’ve completed 4 novels, had over a million words published in Ireland and the UK, and had 3 plays performed. A few months after I arrived in Galway my one-woman show Aileen Stays In won Punchbag Theatre’s Month of Sundays competition.
 
As well as this colyoom, I had a column in the Irish Examiner for over two years and several features published in the Irish Times, Irish Post and other media.
 
So why am I telling you all this? Have I become such a pathetic praise junkie that I need to brag at you from your newspaper?
 
Far from it. The reason I’m sharing my credentials is that I’m excited and delighted to announce that I’ll be leading a residential weekend writing course in the historic and beautiful village of Killala.
 
So if you ever wanted to be a writer and you fancy a Spring weekend break in an unspoiled fishing village, you can combine the two this April, by enrolling in The Craft of Writing Weekend.
 

The Old Deanery Cottages

Staying in a 4-star holiday cottage on the site of the Old Deanery overlooking the harbour, you’ll participate in 9 lessons over a fascinating weekend, after which you will know how to use the essential tools of writing craft.
 
Before you can paint a portrait in oils, you have to learn how to draw a straight line. Writing is just like every other art form. There is a craft, which can be learned by anyone. There is no mystery to this craft. It’s abc, 123. Some of you will have talent, which cannot be taught, but talent is useless without craft.
 
I have dedicated my life to learning this craft. Having to some extent now mastered the rules, I can break them, because I know how they work. But I’m still learning, and hopefully will always learn, because clearly you never know it all. 

 The Old Deanery

Over the course of a fun and fascinating weekend, you will learn how to free yourself from fear, write a first draft, develop characters, structure, plot and voice. You’ll discover how to use shape, tense and dialogue to enhance your particular style, while becoming expert in the vital business of editing. I’ll also give advice about how to sell your writing.
 
Arriving on Friday April 19th, you’ll find a turf fire lit in your 4-star holiday cottage, which you’ll share with other participants on the course. Each cottage has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, so privacy is no problem, while the village of Killala offers lively pubs, welcoming smiles and great craic. 

Should you wish to explore, a local guide (my very excellent friend Denis Quinn) offers walks in the stunning surrounding countryside, which is laden with virgin white sand beaches, stone circles, ogham stones and the world-famous Ceide Fields.
                                   

 Ross Beach, Killala

The Craft of Writing Weekend starts at 6pm on April 19th, with refreshments served before the introductory lesson at 7pm, after which everyone can relax together in one of the local pubs.
 
The entire cost of the weekend is only €250 per person, which includes The Craft of Writing Weekend course, cottage accommodation for 2 or 3 nights, a light lunch on both the Saturday and Sunday, as well as tea and coffee during well-earned lesson breaks. Hot breakfasts can be delivered to your cottage at very reasonable rates, while excellent dinners are available locally. 

 

                       Killala village                              

I have to confess that where Killala is concerned I am utterly biased. I lived there for nearly four years and loved both the people and the place. The village and surrounding area is truly the jewel in Co. Mayo’s crown. You’ll have a fabulous weekend in Ireland's beautiful best-kept secret, meet friendly and fascinating people and leave laden with all the tools you need to write well.
 
For bookings and more information please contact me by email at : cadley1@eircom.net
The Old Deanery: liz@olddeanerycottages.com
www.olddeanerycottages.com
Facebook: Old Deanery Cottages; Joe Keane Creative Centre.

Everything a writer does - except writing!

Back from a night in the countryside last week, I sat at this computer fully intending to do some work, but first made the mistake of checking my email.

The first message came from my Israeli friend and writing teacher, who wants me to do some research for her novel. I try to explain that I don't know any better than she does who her character might be hanging out with in London in 2004, because at that time I was living in a field by a river in Co. Mayo, writing about birds and donkeys for the Irish Examiner. I could not have had my finger further from the urban pulse, but I agree to help, because she is my teacher, my friend and in some bizarre way it's an honour to help out; a mitzvah, noch.

Another email awaits in my inbox, from a lifetime friend in London who has just started a blog which is feeling lost and unvisited. 'What should he do to encourage traffic?' he asks, so I try to concentrate on reading his material, while casting my eye to my mobile phone, which has just peeped after receiving a text.

Another friend, this one in Galway, has written some splendid poems over the years, and now he's texting me to ask if I would like to proof-read them when I have the time. I told him weeks ago that I'd love to, it'd be a privilege, but now I’m not sure when I can get round to it. Ah well, any time, really.

Another email awaits, this time from Ryan who works for Lonely Planet guide books. Two years ago he contacted me after finding this colyoom online, to say he was coming to Galway to work on the new Ireland edition. We had a great day out, divilment and debauchery aplenty while I showed him around Galway, and then I basked in the glow of all the newspaper reports that said Galway had received such good reviews in the new Lonely Planet Ireland book.

'All my own work!' I thought quietly to myself.

Sometimes I do just think quietly to myself. Hard to believe, but I’m not all blog and bluster.

Anyway, Ryan's email is letting me know he’s coming back to town and wants to hook up and see what's changed in Galway. I tell him I'll get back to him after sorting out my teacher's novel, my mate's blog, my friend's poems and - hang on, wasn't I meant to be doing some writing of my own?

I adore being a scribbler, and love helping others, but sometimes it becomes difficult to know when to draw the line. Ah Pooey McShooey, to be honest, there are no lines. There’s just humanity, and the old ‘what goes around comes around’ maxim. I am lucky that people come to me for advice, and know that when I need help, there will be somebody there for me.

Now, I think I’ll do some work. Ah sure well, first I need to pop into town to get some A4 white envelopes, and then...maybe tea and buns at me old mate Dalooney's...

Self-indulgent and bleedin' obvious.

The house is empty save for myself on the sofa. It’s Sunday afternoon and there’s Cup Final football live from Wembley on my tele and election results on the laptop. Whatever skewed confused cocktail it is that makes me up, this is about as good as it gets.

I pick up my phone and leave a reminder to myself to write about it; to write what this nerdy and essentially me moment felt like.

And then I stop and think and breathe a sigh of relief. 

One of my trite aspirations is to appreciate the good times as they happen. Bad times hit you over the head with a metal bar. There’s no missing them, but good times, be they moments or years, often pass without ever being consciously appreciated, only then to slip through the memory net so easily. That’s why you have to notice them, mentally snapshot them and of course, enjoy them as they happen. 

Yet with all the footie and political nonsense I could ever want at my fingertips, all I think about is writing. Through all the recent months of self doubt, it’s been there as it always is. I love the footie and I love the election count, but what I do is write. 

Sometimes it’s good just to be shown the bleedin’ obvious.

What's the shape of an unwritten word?

It’s not that I haven’t any material. 

This is not another tedious case of writer’s block or any other such deceit. 

Today I could write all manner of shite on a myriad of topics that might entertain, bemuse, annoy or even, possibly, inform or illuminate. 

Aaahze got tings to make yez laaarf and tings to make yez crahhhh.

Yet for some reason at present neither fully identified nor understood, I don’t want to. 

Save for the 4 years I lived in Amercia, I have published something every single week, from 1992 onwards. Sometimes I’ve written 3 in a week and sometimes barely one satisfactory word, but not right now.

Big whoops for the evidence that this is here. These words, stating that I’m not going to publish anything this week.

Words that by the intention of their own meaning do not exist.

Ooer missis. Getting a bit Zen.

There are no doubt souls out there who might believe that if a word is unread, it does not exist.

But what about a word that is unwritten?

Calling the Guru! Calling the Guru! Are you out there, my old friend? 

I can tell you what I’m not going to write about!

There have been times, thankfully few and very far between, when depression has hit me like a hammer to the knees. What’s going on at the moment is nothing like that; more like a bad head cold to pneumonia; half a shandy to a double whiskey.
‘Twould be strange not to show and feel some repercussions, having just buried my father and married my wife (simply wouldn’t do to marry somebody else’s), and I’m nothing if not tremendously human.
My dad’s death came at the end of an eleven year decline, during which time I lived increasingly on permanent stand-by to return to London. Dad’s many hospital emergencies necessitated frequent visits over there, which were inevitably announced by the ringing of the phone, and gradually I grew to fear the landline.
So now I’m eager, willing and ready to embrace my new life, support my beloved family and nurture and love my wife. I want to lose weight and walk miles and finish the bleedin’ novel and knock out tremendous colyooms for all you loyal and accidental types who are sucked into reading this.
But I can’t.
If you do not live with depression then it’s quite possible you imagine it comes in a singular way: the same dose each time.
Speaking personally, I know that I am at the moment displaying and presenting symptoms that I recognise as some of the ingredients of depression, but equally I’m able to function; not knocked out; not feeling alienated; not disoriented.
I was disoriented a few weeks ago, stumbling down Shop Street as if on the deck of a galleon sailing the high seas.
And now I’m not, and that’s it. That’s why I am not accepting that I’m depressed at the moment. I’m not a kid who wants to stay home from school. I don’t want to shrink away from life right now. I want to go out and live it and sit here and write it.
(Bravado pumps through me as, sitting here with held breath, I barely allow myself to put commas into these pompous and inconsequential pronouncements.)
But there are some things I cannot do.
I cannot stay awake very long, of an evening.
I cannot force or rush the grieving process, much as I would like to. My feelings of loss and sadness are seeping through, as marble in stone, and it’s irritating. I want to feel a rushing flooding gush of it, yet instead I have mini-blubbers, like when I found myself crying at a bloody re-run of Scrubs when JD’s dad died.
Surely I can do better than that? Please god.
The germane and most immediate thing that I found myself unable to do was to decide upon a topic for this week’s colyoom.
Over the last 16 years I have naturally developed several fail-safe mechanisms that guarantee you the chance of reading something vaguely cohesive and very occasionally, maybe perceptive or witty.
I have my notes, and clippings. I have my life and each week presents the chance encounter that might and probably will happen with somebody on a Galway street that’ll set my mental cabbage soup to simmer.
And then, like so many of us, I have my working ritual: my pre-colyoom Sunday morning walk on the Prom , the leisurely breakfast and finally, the moment which has delivered more colyooms than any other device: the last visit to the bathroom before sitting down to work.
Week after week, despite having no clear idea of how I am going to produce these 1,000 words, for some reason I feel very calm, both physically and spiritually, and while I brush my teeth, sloosh the mouthwash and have a final peeper, a thought dribbles into my brain and nudges a nerve-ending.
And by the time I am sitting here a few short seconds later, it’s all coming together and I’m off.
But today, it wasn’t like that at all.
Today, Mr. I Am Not Depressed could not for some reason prioritise what he wanted to say.
And an hour later, (YIKES!) he started writing in the Third Person.
So evidently for me, depression comes in many ways. Although I become tired, I do still have energy that would be completely lacking during those rare dark times.
But while my black dog is not sitting hard and heavy on my chest, he is still out there, prowling the perimeter fence.
Even though I am able to function fairly well as a human being, the simple truth that I cannot decide what to write about is, for a columnist, at best an inconvenience, at worst, some might feel, something of a drawback.
For the reader it’s nothing less than an imposition. You entered into this page in good faith, expecting a theme, a topic at least, noch!
And what do you get for your troubles? What kind of colyoom action are you having to accept as reward? Not a whiff of humour; not a single arrogant finger-pointing lecture mocking either you or your life-style; not even an outrageous piece of hyperbole by which you could have become instantly disgusted and appalled.
Given this massive deficiency on my side of the writer-reader pact, it seems only fair that I should offer something in return, for your troubles, as it were.
So after not very long and ill-considered reflection, I’ve decided that the very least I can do at this stage is tell you what I’m not going to write about.
Enter if you will the tremendously anti-climactic territory that is this scribbler’s brain. If you are condemned to read this colyoom week after week, there will doubtless have been many when, upon either finishing the entirety or giving up at some earlier point, you thought to yourself:
‘How the hell does he get away with this drivel?’
To you, I say, consider this: by revealing to you all what I was going to write about and yet decided against, you will realise that that ‘drivel’, madam, that ‘drivel’ was, at the particular moment of its writing, the very pinnacle of my own creativity.
When you see what pathetic and inconsequential musings might have made it onto the sacrosanct pages of this Noble Rag, I will have nowhere to run.
My craven lack of talent will be forever exposed.
Aw shucks, we’ve run out of room.
I’ll get back to you about all that drivel.

I have been to my mountain and discovered that people are still good!

It is past midnight in the small East Sierra town of Bishop, California, and I'm standing in the middle of a side road, grabbing lung-fulls of mountain air, taking in the fact that I have made it victoriously through my long list of destinations.
So far, the trip could not have gone better.
Upon my arrival, it was splendid to sit on my mate Andrew's deck, looking from the Berkeley hills out over the entirety of San Francisco Bay.
The next day he drove me over the Bay Bridge into the city, where I enjoyed a perfect morning researching for one of my novel's characters.
Andrew offered to cut off work early to drive me home, and I didn't fight him. Even though I had a difficult time living in Northern California, I was aware that it was a magnificent place.
While my day in North Beach was successful, returning to a place wherein so much love energy and emotion had been invested and spent was never going to be easy.
So it was good to head back to the East Bay, and admire one of the world's most beautiful cities from over the water.
Each night the combination of jetlag and emotional nonsense conspired to allow sleep only until 4am, whereupon my head would greet wakefulness as a herd of a thousand bison at full charge.
Early my second morning I rented a small tank, and headed inland, toward the Sierra Nevada.
With many mountain passes closed, I drove over the top of the range at Lake Tahoe, spending my first night just over the Nevada border. The drive had been long, and it had been tough driving up over and down mountains without a gear stick.
Over four days I drove 1300 miles, traversing 6 ranges over 7,000 feet, and never did the tank once feel good taking a corner.
The road to my mountain was tight, and as my tyres kicked rubble over the edge of a 6,000 foot sheer drop, I started shouting like a mad bastard, cursing my fictional character, telling him he bloody owed me for getting dumped out here in the middle of bloody nowhere.
And then I was there.
I stood on a desert plain that stretched for maybe 40 miles in a circular pan, rimmed by snowy breathtaking mountains, .
But while the view was stunning, the reason that I had to be there hit me like a sledgehammer on the head. Even though I had fairly well envisioned what it might be like for my character to be dumped there, I could never have imagined the power of that silence.
All this vast landscape, and not a single sound.
I have heard deafening silence and the silence of the absence of human sound, but there, surrounded by so much planet, this silence was vast.
I whispered as if in a cathedral
Fuuuu ..... kinnngggggg ............. heeeelllll!
The pinging of my tank's cooling engine sounded like artillery fire.
Exhausted and elated, I headed back to my motel room, to flop and enjoy the completion of my pilgrimage.
I had dealt with the details of my female character and her life in North Beach; dealt with my feelings and personal shite; driven to my mountain and done the deed, good and proper; but I had not reckoned for the good people of Bishop.
Unlike many small American towns, which consist of shops, restaurants and businesses spread out over two or three miles, Bishop has a real main street that you can walk along. The mountains parade their snowy loads behind the buildings, and there is a feeling of vitality and acceptance in the air.
Within an hour of arriving at Bishop, I popped into Spellbinder Books to buy a present. The lass behind the counter smiled and asked me what had brought me to Bishop, so I told her, explaining that as it happened, I was hoping to ask a few of the locals some questions about the place, and what it might be like the live there.
Americans are generally incredibly warm and friendly people, and she kindly chatted with me for a good while.
A few hours later I was killing time, and found myself walking into a bar.
There were only two customers in there, and one of them was the lass from the bookstore, the other her partner.
She spotted me, told the barmaid what I was doing in town, at which there appeared on the bar a bottle of obscure Irish Whiskey, and a lively and fascinating conversation ensued.
That was last night, and that's how I got to be here, tonight, standing in the middle of this Bishop side road at midnight.
All the houses are silent and dark, save for one over there, where lights are on; whence comes the sound of laughter, whooping and yahooing, floating sensual and fast to my ears on a strong current of humanity and whimsy.
That is the house where I spent this evening. Thanks to my new friends, I returned from the drive to my mountain earlier today armed with the knowledge that I was expected at a barbecue poker party that evening.
After two hugely enjoyable nights in Bishop and two very exciting, enlightening and draining days, I leave now able to finish my novel; with a welcome promise of a place to stay; with an invitation to do a reading and a signing at Bishop's Spellbinder Books; with new friends.
Best of all, once again I found out what years on the road taught me as a younger man: that people are good. We are a kind, generous and great species, and we must never allow the fear merchants to rob us of that knowledge.
The next day I drive south, along the edge of the Death Valley and the Mojave Desert, watching the brown mountains slowly lose their snow.
The long and many hours slide by in a mesmerising race for home. Finally I hit US 5, the two-lane straight line that shoots you from Southern to Northern California, and 24 hours later I have dropped the tank off, and returned to Andrew's, shaking with relief, trembling at my achievement, and buzzing with adrenaline.
My mobile phone rings. My dad is in Intensive Care. I must return to England.
Yes, I am, as I hoped, feeling very much alive. But in the midst of life we are in death.

It's my last chance to visit the Last Chance Mountains!

Adventures come in all shapes and sizes. You might be heading off to a place you have never been to before, or deciding to face your fear, to stare that which challenges you most in the eye and speet in its face, or kiss its cheek.
There are adventures endowed with mystical quality: the quests, the pilgrimages, searches for holy grails.
Darker and deeper are adventures that take you back to places you lost: places which might dwell solely in the mind, or actually exist in the physical world.
The adventure upon which I'm about to embark may be short in length, but packed into it are all the above ingredients, and hopefully, at the end of it, I will enjoy a sense of achievement.
Best of all, I will know I am alive.
Our story starts in 1995, about a fortnight after I had moved from Connemara to San Francisco.
Lost in a new continent and culture, I began to write a short story. Inspired by the opening shot of Wim Wenders' extraordinary film, 'Paris, Texas', it started with a man walking in a desert.
The first page of this short story was written over and over again. I didn't know who this character was; only that he was obsessed by three photos he had of a woman. Not one of them looked like her, held in its image her essence or presence.
Three years later, living in a tiny Californian town further north, in the heart of the Redwood Empire, I was given some old National Geographic magazines by the quirky old dear who ran the minuscule local library. On top of the pile that she left on my doorstep, the cover of the January 1987 issue promised an article about "California's Desert, A Worldly Wilderness."
At that point of my life, drowning in a vile cocktail of rage and depression, I was completely unaware California even had a desert.
But on the article's map I spied the Last Chance Range, just at the north end of Death Valley, and I immediately knew that this was where my character had been wandering.
Sadly, for the first and please god the last time in my life, my spirit finally broke. Unrecognisable to myself, I went into meltdown, leaving my then wife and life behind to return to Ireland.
A year later, whilst lying early one morning in my bed in my room in the Claddagh, I had a vision. Yes, that's what I said, and no, I wasn't visited by the Virgin, Buddha or any pointy-headed Trogs from Earthworm Land.
Over by my window I saw, in the style of an aerial camera tracking shot, a massive breakers yard lying in a desert. Pinching myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming, I watched as acre after acre of baking hot sand and the rusted remains of hundreds of thousands of vehicles of every description ran past my eyes.
I could almost hear the metal going 'kerrkunnnnnnnnnnggggg' in the heat from the sun.
Inspired afresh, I revisited the short story, and worked on the assumption that my character had been rescued, and ended up working at this massive breakers yard in the desert.
But why a breakers yard in the desert?
Who knew?
I started to explore who my character was; what was his life like as a child?
Who was this woman he had been with?
Gradually over the next few years, whilst living alone in a farmhouse in North Mayo, the short story grew into a mosaical wordy mess of 30,000 inconsistent words.
Then I returned to Galway City and last May I quit my job, and finally took on the task of writing the novel my story had become.
Six months later I had turned that messy muddle of 30,000 words into a full first draft of 300 pages, crammed with more styles and voices than you could shake a schizoid stick at.
Writing fiction is the business of making things up. Even though I have never been an English lesbian living in San Francisco's North Beach back in 1969, I have spent enough time there to imagine, visualise and then create words that might make such a person believable.
I can imagine what the Californian desert and the Last Chance Range might be like, but I simply do not know what it really is like, and so I am going to my mountains.
Using and loving broadband to research the trip, I entered into communication with all sorts of people, and was told something most exciting and illuminating by a landscape photographer who knows the area well.
He was advising me about those wilderness roads.
"There's wrecks everywhere!" he said. "There's so many wrecks that they even hung three of 'em from the top of a signboard to warn folk!"
My eyes bulged with excitement.
"So so so it wouldn't be an impossible or unlikely thing to imagine a massive breakers yard down there? Like, errr, a vast breakers yard in the desert wouldn't be an impossible notion?"
"Hell no, man! Sounds like a good idea. Sure they'd need one."
And so, laden with my past, my pain, my heart soul and body; armed by my spirit and visions and creativity, I am off away on this adventure.
In one day in San Francisco I will try to reclaim the place in which I once lived, loved hard and lost much. It will be a tough day, a good day, releasing me from a long-redundant sense of loss, allowing myself to believe that yes, it did all happen.
At the same time, I will be looking at North Beach through the eyes of my female character, seeing the refuge to which she flees to build a life she loves, in a city that loves her back.
Then, having faced the adventures of mind and heart, I'll hit the road and head off on a thousand mile road trip to the Last Chance Range; to the heart of my story; to the one place I absolutely need to visit in order to be able to finish my book.
This adventure is more about arrival than departure; more about achievement than loss; more about loving life than living it in fear.
This adventure I will enjoy, and yes, I will feel alive.