Have you ever wondered what drives a person to crime writing? One can always blame her parents for whatever it is that parents do when they create monsters from the dark side. There are next-door neighbours too that one can blame – how often have you looked at a twitching net curtain and asked yourself, what are they doing in there? And what guilt do librarians bear for doling out books as though they were placebos, when in fact they are pushing mind altering ideas onto impressionable young minds. People often gang up on television schedulers too for the damage they have caused society, but surely, loud-voiced parsons, reading saucy extracts from the first testament of the Bible, have twisted more minds than the complete works of Shakespeare ever did. Looking back, I guess it was the combined efforts of everybody around me which finally pressurised me into my first offence, a thriller called Toxic Love.
After all, when a friend phones my mother to tell her that Agatha Christie is on the television, or a fellow patient in the hospital scours the tv guides, every day, looking for a ‘good murder’ to watch, it leaves one punch drunk, wondering if it is they, or the rest of the world which has gone mad. All around me it seems that murder has become every day; normalised by middle-aged, female sleuths in tweeds skirts. Their repressed sexual urges, no doubt, lead to a morbid fascination with crime and gives them a twisted insight into the minds of the most hideous criminals imaginable. Such mild, inoffensive spinsters of the parish become nemeses of the most formidable kind who we watch, fascinated, as they bring yet another murder to justice. Being exposed to such programs daily, I believe, is as harmful to a person as being irradiated by the lies spread by Fox NEWS 24/7, or as dangerous to a person’s sanity as over exposure to Judge Judy. A mild dosage may be safe, but like food-additives, too many may cause unforeseen side-effects.
Take me, for example, a simple man, leading an innocent life until locked down during covid with a murder mystery fan. Like a teenager faced with a choice of dabbling in drugs or be rejected by their peers, I thought that I could control my world, that I would be unaffected while sitting alongside my mother in the sitting room and dabbling in mystery. Soon, like the teen who once sneered at others who had allowed drugs into their lives, I required stronger and stronger doses of the murder mystery drug to keep the pain of life at bay. Shame, of course, played a large part in my life, how can one openly admit to such a problem, and 12 step programs for crime fiction addicts are not as readily available as they should be. Soon the nightmares began.
I would see myself walking down a normal street, a drizzle of SUVs passing by. Then people alighted from the cars, mostly women, looking for all the world like librarians – not a botoxed-lip in sight. There was always an over-weight man too, one with food issues, who wore a misanthropic frown. Then, as happens in dreams, there was always a body lying on a carpet, a footpath, or ritualistically laid-out in a field. The body was invariably mine. And looking up to the ceiling, or the sky, as though I were an infant unable to turn over on its stomach and crawl away, I would find myself surrounded by gaggles and gaggles of would-be, amateur sleuths who viewed my murder as a cause for celebration, a mystery to be solved. I hated that all the fun of unravelling my murder mystery fell to them and that I was helpless to discover who had killed me. Although I should have known, you would think, who murdered me. The victim normally knows who has killed them. Maybe it was PTS which blocked out the memory of my own murder. Or maybe… But of course, I wasn’t really dead. This was my dream after all. And if you have not really been murdered, then remembering the killer’s face is rather difficult.
These nightmares shook me, stirred me, drove me to the edge of desperation. But worse was to come, a strange madness possessed me and the seeds of Toxic Love, my first crime novel, rooted themselves deep into my brain. No amount of systemic weedkiller could have prevented them from germinating and growing into the twisted tale that they became as the novel developed to full-term and bore me into the world of crime writing.
Though not a murder mystery, there is still a female lead. However, she is a sassy young woman, not a pitiable old bat. There is a sinister ex-boyfriend too, some rather eccentric old women and a man once convicted of murdering his wife. There is also a game afoot; a terrible, sinister, murderous plot; and our heroine is its intended victim. For all the gory details go to Amazon and search out Toxic Love. But first you might want to listen to me read the first chapter of the book on Spotify and so get a feel for where the book might be going.
As for me. My name is Jim and I am addicted to crime writing… The second instalment is already underway.
This is a strange one, a bonnie, bonnie strange one. Be warned, now is the time to avert your gaze, or plug up your ears. Be advised, we’re entering Joyce territory. God, but I’m going to feel really stupid reading this blog.
You see, Bloom’s Day is upon us, ‘Yes, Yes, Yes!’ Or maybe no, not for you. Perhaps you are one of those who refuse a breakfast of devilled kidneys, not because veganism is the latest short cut to enlightenment, but because you can imagine that the lingering taste of urine, hinted at by Joyce, haunts kidneys you might otherwise enjoy. Ulysses and urine, there is so much of the stuff one wonders if Myopic Jimmy is taking the piss. Allegedly, James Joyce’s masterpiece is full of humour, but ask yourself who these critics are before agreeing with them.
First, I must say that this blog is prompted by my mother’s reaction to RTE’s promotion of all things Bloom, no, not the annual flower show in the Phoenix Park, Bloom as in Ulysses. Our national broadcaster is obsessed by the work. The D4 crowd are so taken by it that they believe Molly’s famous potty-sex monologue is a perfect marmalade and toast accompaniment. Thankfully, the yes, yes, yesing in the background never seems to penetrate my morning mind-fug. The advertisements would go unnoticed, pass me by, as though they were news headlines, except that they wake up the critic in my mother. RTE’s harmless potty-sex fetish, no doubt a tonic to Joyce scholars everywhere, makes this one-hundred-year-old book, or its promotion, a problem for me. You see, just a snippet of the monologue can irritate my mother for hours on end. And she shares her irritations with me, which is why I’m writing this blog. This is a stress relief exercise on my part, one which should keep me sane until the 16th of June has passed.
“Doggerel,” is often my mother’s, pre-nine a.m. opening gambit. And she is not criticising me for a change. “I heard someone call that book poetry, but another critic said his poetry is pure doggerel. Not a poetic bone in his body. You can’t have it both ways.”
My mother likes the romantics, so I stay dumb by way of keeping my head attached to my shoulders. As the add rumble on she becomes even more annoyed.
“Nothing more than an alcoholic.” She tells me, “And as for that Nora Barnacle, her ignorance probably made him feel big about himself.”
“Would you prefer them to be promoting a reading of ‘Normal People’?” I ask by way of distraction. “They say she’s the new Joyce.”
In fairness my mother will not be distracted, so I get an extra ten minutes of criticism on Joyce.
Reflecting on her comments and sometimes comparing Ulysses, in my own head, to ‘Normal People,’ (yes I realise that this is a ridiculous activity,) I had a sudden, Eureka moment. You should never listen to critics; you will find life much more enjoyable without looking over your shoulder to see if they are watching before allowing yourself pick up an Agatha Christie. Having said that, here is something you might want to bring to Joyce’s masterpiece.
Joyce is nothing more than an intellectual Benny Hill, a man with a urine fixation, a purveyor of bum jokes disguised as literature. A man of his times in fact, a time when you had to make your own fun, when neighbours were for laughing at and bodily waste-fluids were stored under your bed at night. Stepping in dog do-do was a cause for laughter among friends and, as for falling on your bum, that caused hilarity all round for months on end.
My grandmother was born at practically the same time that the Bloom’s Dublin odyssey took place. For most people, this was a time of outdoor plumbing, with chamber pots serving as primitive ensuites. Say what you will about them, squatting over one every night was a great form of granny yoga, a way to keep the old supple enough to function on a daily basis. Fancy potties were decorative to the point of competing with Ming dynasty vases, tin sufficed for poorer bums. It was a time when limps, squints, and stammers were openly mocked, and as far myopic young lads were concerned, they were the joke.
My grandmother and her friends were all practical jokers and none of them would have needed to read Joyce to improve their minds. Their minds were active enough already and their neuroses formed the foundations of their individuality. Potties would have featured in all of their lives. But they would never have considered writing a doctorate paper on the symbolic significance of Molly straddling one. There were other, more humorous uses for the potty in their lives. My grandmother, about the time Joyce was presenting Ulysses to the world, came up with a novel use for the chamber pot. This was a new pot, I hasten to add, a decorative one. My grandmother was having guests to dinner, and this was a special occasion. The food was good, it was always good where my grandparents were concerned. My grandmother made her famous onion soup (as served in her restaurant) and poured it into her tureen for the day. She then walked into the dining room, placed her new chamber pot on the table and invited everyone to present their bowls.
As gags go, I’ve seen worse.
As writers go, Joyce would miss the cut on my comic writers list. But at least a woman on a potty, scratching an itch, and screaming yes into the night is a positive scene. Molly knows what she wants and does something about it. Yes, she does. Yes, yes, she does.
The millennial tale Normal People might be considered a masterpiece by many, but I ask you, where is the fun in the work?
Imagine a millennial style sex scene in Ulysses: Bloom enters Molly’s chamber late at night, drunk but standing, he tells her to get off the piss pot. This might be the conversation which follows.
Molly: “Do you want to fuck me?”
Bloom: “Yes.”
Molly: “I want to fuck you too.”
Bloom: “We will need each other’s written consent first.”
Molly: “Yes.”
Bloom: “And have to get naked.”
Molly: “Yes.”
Bloom: “And to…”
Molly: “Yes”
Bloom: “And…”
Molly: “Yes.”
Bloom: “And an orgasm?”
Molly: “No. No. No… Not for me. For you maybe, but not for me. For me sex and disappointment must forever remain linked.”
Would Molly ever dream of being so drearily normal? Maybe Joyce is not a lost cause after all. Still, I will never convince my mother to change her mind on the subject. Nor would I want to. And as Bloom’s Day approaches I can not imagine my mother incanting the words, yes, yes yes: unless, of course, she discovers a free, wheelchair parking place at the steps to the library.
When most people think writer, they imagine hands hovering over keyboards, they see eyes staring, unblinkingly, at a rapidly moving cursor. They visualise coffee stains on an Ikea desk, or nicotine-yellowed fingers pawing helplessly through notebooks for a forgotten phrase, or an idea in need of transcription. For those of you who have not sat there yourselves, staring at a blinking, stationary cursor, there may be romantic visions of high-backed chairs, behind opulent, antique desks which sit in expensively decorated offices. Others of you may conjure up a writer’s den which is a low-ceilinged, uncarpeted bedsit, with a miserable desk off to one side, and an unkempt bed pressed hard against an unpainted wall.
Few of you would imagine the writer as a bald, sixty-something crowded into an airing cupboard, reading his blog from a laptop which is balanced precariously on a mountain of freshly laundered underwear.
A microphone stands before him, mute and accusatory. It seems alive and takes the place of all the sarcastic teachers who ever berated him as a child for stammering over uninspired textbooks.
You may remember that feeling, the panic which spread through you as you counted-off heads and sentences in an effort to find the one you would have to read out loud to the inmates who make up the rest of your class. While you found your reading, other junior scholars opened mouths and stumbled through passages and your index finger turned white, bloodless as it ran back and forth under the sentence you were destined to share. At moments like this you muttered the words to yourself, silently incanting them, prayer-like, in your head, in the vain hope of memorising them. Finally, you were as ready as you anybody pumping toxic levels of adrenaline was ever going to be.
Everybody else’s readings had passed you by, the meaning of the text was lost to you, but you were prepared, or were you? Your name was called, your palms became hot puddles of sweat, and suddenly your tongue was tripping over words which were a deformed version of the incanted ones, a spell gone wrong. Your index finger flew backwards more often than forwards on the page, progress through your sentence was painfully slow, but you got to the end of it with minimal sarcastic shrapnel hitting you head-on. The full stop was reached, and you hung onto it like a drowning man might cling onto a life jacket after jumping from the Titanic, with little hope of long-term survival. Although there may have been icebergs to the left of you, icebergs to the right, you were alive, safe for now. That’s when your teacher invariably asked you to read the next sentence.
By the time I reached my teens, my phobia of reading out loud had reached its zenith. By now, I was fumbling my way through Latin, French and Irish texts, and no matter who the teacher was, or what the subject, everybody in the class was expected to contribute. The written word, itself, held no demons for me any longer. I spent many nights tucked up in bed with a good book, a reading lamp illuminating words which kept me awake into the early hours of the morning. However, once pressed to share the joy I normally took from this solitary practice, the old tongue-tied-ness regrouped. During English class, my contribution to the public reading of our prescribed novel was a stammering, incoherent, deconstruction of a brilliant text into its disjointed parts. Somehow a working engine seemed to be transformed into scrap metal as I read. These readings can best be thought of as my contribution to dystopian storytelling at its best. The emotional scars ran deep. By the time I left school I was sworn off ever reading in public again, yet here I am, a mountain of clean linen behind me, a microphone before me and a script challenging me to a duel.
I first hit the un-mute button for my video work. A silent how-to on making apple jelly, or recovering a lampshade, sort of defeats the purpose of empowering others to follow suite. So, I wrote a script and set to work. The results have been hearteningly well received. Apple jelly fans are a passionate lot, lampshade lovers, less so, but very much more appreciative, in a quiet sort of way.
This podcast came about because people I knew preferred to listen to, rather than to read blogs.
While writing was an obsessive-compulsive disorder in my case, reading them was something I was reluctant to do. There was little point. My bleatings would get lost in the wilderness that is cyber space as it competed with millions of other writers who vied for your attention. But others were adamant, which is why I am standing in a linen closet, talking to myself right now.
The reason I am here is that getting the sound from the writer’s lips to the listener’s ears is fraught with difficulties.
Some people believe that so long as they possess an I-Phone they hold the key to worldwide, podcast domination. They believe that the phone is a multi-media, Swiss army knife of sorts, capable of keeping you current on your twitter feeds, posting pictures on Instagram, or filming, and editing, award winning documentaries. Can there be any doubt that recording a podcast must be simplicity itself?
The answer is yes. Sound is a devious creature. Without proper acoustic dampening, a bedroom recording sounds like one made in the deepest, darkest cave ever discovered. It becomes an echo chamber where whatever you say reverberates for eternity, even if you use a proper microphone; one shielded from direct contact with the p sound, which left unguarded, hits the eardrum like an out of tune base drum.
Whenever I sit at my desk and type, the outside world makes itself heard. Birds spread the message that they ready to settle down with any mate eager enough to respond to their lusty warblings. The wind today is from the east, and every April shower that comes along announces itself by hammering against my window, making this room unsuitable for recording anything, other than a shopping list.
Anybody who has read my blog about my writer’s desk will remember that I am a guest in my mother’s home. She has the ultimate say on any changes which get done to her house. And she is a no-changes-to-my-house kind of a person. This is ok with me, but it means that improvisation is required, if I am to record anything which meets even the most basic audio standards.
This is why I record my podcasts in the hot press. It is the only room in the house without a window, which means that the winds can blow as hard as they like without rattling glass panes, and birds can have the most raucous of orgiastic feasts, and my mic shall remain deaf to their antics. The clothes, too, are useful, as the washed linens, piled high on shelves all around me, dampen reverb, and make this room the only echo free chamber the house has on offer.
It is a strange feeling, though, standing before a microphone, script before me, underwear piled up high all around me, to read my work into a microphone in the hope of capturing something of the spark which tickled my imagination and brought me, willingly, to my writer’s desk with an urge to share these thoughts.
What drives me to splutter into the microphone, I cannot say. It is not an easy process. There is the problem of breath control. Really, an actor is more suited to this job than an author. A writer may hear voices as he writes, but that does not mean he can read them back to you as they were imagined. There are the coughing fits too, hay fever in no friend to a man locked in a hot press with a manuscript and a microphone. And what will people make of my voice? Is my accent off-putting? Perhaps it speaks of white privilege. Is it too male? To deep? Too squeaky? Body image may cause all sorts of neurosis, but when you are stuck with a voice recorder, watching audio levels rise and fall with your voice, in a stuffy little room, you can get well past neurosis and enter the gates of total funk.
And if you supress that panic all the way to the end of the blog, the process is only half-way through. Now comes the edit. Your first opportunity to listen to messages from a linen closet. Only, now you get to see your voice as well as hear it. Waveforms appear before you and accuse you of whispering here, or shouting there. If you are like me, you cannot tell a lut from a decibel, so the screen you face is more like an art instillation than anything else. It seems deliberately obscure. But with the help of YouTube videos, you eventually have a file ready for podcast. Whether anybody will listen to your finished recording, is not really a question that bothers you. You have had your say. You have read every word of your blog without interruption, sarcasm, or laughter stopping you. You have given voice to the words on the page, sometimes, that is the only thing that matters.
Why, you may well ask, would I even think of using a Nom de Plume? It is not like I am a civil servant who could get themselves, or their government, in trouble by expressing ideas which might be problematic for their political bosses. Hugh Leonard and Flann O’Brien were names chosen to protect the writers from becoming unemployed civil servants. Not that Flann was happy with only one pseudonym, he also wrote under the protective umbrella of Myles Na Gopaleen. One might argue that the name change, not only protected Flann, but also his family. He was a difficult man at the best of times to explain away. Imagine how a maiden aunt might have felt if she became aware of his strange, writing proclivities. Think of the strain she would have taken upon herself, the delicious guilt of being related, no matter how tentatively, to this peculiar genius. Imagine the almost teenage glee of confessing sins on his behalf, to the local parish priest, sins hidden in prose she could never bring herself to read, and which must be all the more suspect for that. After all, if you cannot, for fear of contamination, open one of his books, there must be terrible sins hidden inside. Oh, the shame of it!
His uncontrollable urge, one he indulged, to lock himself in a room and write some of the most extraordinary fiction ever written by an Irish man, would have been seen by many family members as eccentric at best, perverse at worst.
So, there are many a good reason for a Nom de Plume, at least there were, you might argue. There is no need for one now, in these liberal times, you might say, but are you sure of that? Think of the hordes of internet trolls simply waiting to shred to pieces writers they happen to take offence with. While they have every right to be as offended by an author’s work as their grandparents had, the writer should have as much right to her privacy as her grandmother had. Think of all those who had to have a flag of convenience to avoid looming troubles, or to get published at all.
You may not be aware of it, but many writers were continuously at war with the rest of their society. And in a way they still are. Many are on the frontline of the culture wars. These move with the times; today’s liberal is often seen as tomorrow’s conservative. As the times are always in flux, attitudes always changing, the winning side is never clear cut. Many writers are simply part of the clamouring classes as myopic as their peers. But there are always those who see clearly. They will never be the most popular, or the most widely read, because they will present as balanced a view as possible. They will mostly fail, but they will strive heroically first. Fighting in a headwind no one else can see, they should have a Nom de Guerre rather than a Nom de Plume.
Think of that age old tradition of giving newly recruited troops each a war name. Thomas the Brave sounds far better that Tom Smith 1072 and far more intimidating when shouted across the battlefield. Imagine you were christened Alfonse Patrick Mary Brown, where is the blood curdling inspiration in that? But perhaps Alfonse Patrick Mary is a strong lad, and a passingly good archer, why not call him Strong Bow? And as for Dan Murphy (whose sole indication of brain function is his continuous misinterpretation of the word forward to mean retreat?) What shall we call him, after handing him a mop and putting him on permanent latrine duty? Somehow, I suspect he would become Dysentery Dan and would be scarier to friends than foe. Every army has them, no matter what their true name is.
Who, you may wonder used a Nom de Plume in the past? So many, that I could write a doctorate paper on a tiny cross section of them and still leave room for hundreds of scholars to mine this seam of intellectual gold after me. Not that a dead writer has much to say of such small-minded pursuits.
Take Jane Austen, published as A Lady. She was not alone in being A Lady. Bookshop shelves of that era were creaking under the weight of A Lady’s works. Imagine the insult to Jane and all her fellow A Ladies of the time. Think of the biting satire she must have contemplated writing about the publishing industry she was forced to work in. There must have been a ‘Pride and Prejudice Among the Printing Presses of London,’ begging to be written by her.
As for the Bronte sisters. They were so harassed by the male dominance of the writing scene that they were forced to publish under the names of the three alleged brothers, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Samuel Longhorne Clemens, was so weighed down by his name that he could not publish under it. The name is so whimsical and elitist that no one could imagine that it would hide a biting satirical voice, one that resonated with millions, but only after its owner hid behind the name, Mark Twain.
Stephen King also wrote under the name Richard Bachman. In his case he was not hiding the fact that his parents had gone mad at the baptismal font. He was disguising the fact that he was simply too prolific for his publisher to admit to. No writer, they assured him, could be taken seriously if they published more than one book a year. Eventually Richard Bachman died of ‘cancer of the pseudonym.’ What a way to go.
Stan Lee was a pseudonym that became Stanley Martin Lieber’s legal name after he became too successful as Stan Lee to deny his involvement with The Marvelverse he helped create.
There are many reasons for changing your name on the cover of a book. But the main one is about shelf appeal. How many people would buy into a children’s fantasy book by Anne Rice. Maybe, if she had form. But as a new writer… Better to add a couple of initials followed by an extra syllable or two. And thus, J K Rowling was hatched. She was also later published under the name Robert Galbraith, because the expectations of her loyal Harry Potter fans would have been shattered by real world fiction set in an adult world.
It is the real world which concerns me. How would my name look to the eyes of people interested in crime fiction. The readership is mainly female, and they have very fixed expectations about authors. While, in the past, women changed their names to appeal to a general readership, now more men are doing so. For instance, there is a very large, bearded gentleman who only recently stepped out from behind his Nom de Plume. He was a romance novelist who feared terrible sales figures if his readership learned of his sex. Most people however, simply use their initials as the flimsiest of disguises. If that gets past the prejudice of the reader to such an extent that they pick up your book, then it is worth considering.
The question remains, should I wear a public disguise, or not?
Jim Clarken is as good a name as I require in everyday life. But how would it look on a bookshelf, fighting for the attention of a browsing public? Would James look better? How about Seamus? Is the balance right? I could use the name James Thomas, my first two names, but that is sure to be in use by somebody else. Thomas Aquinas could be legitimately used too, don’t ask, it was a baptismal mistake. No one remembers this gluttonous philosopher now, it would raise no eyebrows if, hundreds of years after his death, he broke into the crime market. As for initials, ‘J.T. Clarken,’ has no balance to it. I hate to say it, but I might have to be myself.
One of my sisters keeps bringing up the subject of narcissism with me in a way that I find disturbing. What is going on here? What could possibly be on her mind? Is there a hint that she thinks I may be one? This doubt in her mind, which crosspollinated with mine, led to a late-night google search on the topic by yours truly?
Here is the low down. There are many types of narcissist. The Trumpian being the only one that most people tend to notice. But then there is the workplace bully too, a bitter pill who, on closer inspection, transpires to be one. There is also the domestic poor-poor-pitiful-me devil who drives every household member to thoughts of violence. However, the one I like most, is the social narcissist who, armed only with lipstick and a selfie stick, sets out for deepest Africa to feed the multitudes. However, in all my research I never once discovered mention of the narcissistic writer. Not that I would expect one. We are a shy, retiring type of folk, too busy in our attics to bother the world at large. However, sometimes we do pop our heads out of our molehills and wander into the world at large. This is the tale of one such adventure.
The short, ‘Work/ Life Balance,’ came into being after I attended a weekend film production course. Here, I met like-minded individuals who wanted to make their own calling card films. Over a cup of coffee, a group of four of us decided to help each other make a short. The group consisted of two writers, a writer-director, and a want-a-be producer; four narcissists in my sister’s speak. Male hormones were to the fore after our rather inadequate course, and we held a series of meetings which eventually yielded an outline plan. The writer-director (are hyphenates a sign of narcissism?) passionately pitched a short about a tramp. He proposed that we should all write down-and-out themed stories, that way our shorts would complement each other’s. I’m a writer, I said yes. Everybody agreed.
Brainstorming the idea with Isabella Codd (my story collaborator), we discussed the death of a homeless man on the streets of Wicklow town just a few days before. We considered the town council’s reaction to homeless people sleeping on benches meant for tourists. They removed them. We talked about the street people we knew, wondered what their stories were, what mental issues they were diagnosed with and asked ourselves who cared. How, we wondered, could we tell their stories? The answer was, of course, that we could not. But maybe we could tell somebody else’s story and manage to reflect on a homeless person’s plight and its reflection on us as a society.
And so, our story is that of a young man living on auto pilot, trapped on a treadmill, caught in a perpetual commuter’s hell. Every day he passes by the homeless man, but never sees him. Then things begin to change. Over the course of five days, he wakes up to his surroundings and ultimately connects, not only to the world around him, but also to the down-and-out he has never noticed before. After outlining the story with Isabella Codd, I wrote up a screenplay which was both very simple and very complicated to film.
At the next meeting, the writer-director had another idea, this time involving a courier cyclist, the other writer wanted to make a short about a man-eating sofa, while the producer was earnestly thinking about a man-eating shark film. My down-and-out screenplay was handed around and rose a few sceptical eyebrows.
Lots were drawn. I drew the short straw, which meant that the only completed script would be the first of our projects to be made.
Now, here is the thing about producing a no-budget short, everybody is investing in themselves, showing off their talents, and giving up their time for free. If you are thinking of writing a short, you owe it to everybody to write one which highlights their talents, as well as your own. The question then is how to work to the team’s strengths.
Our budget was zero, or as near zero as I could make it. Lights, camera, and makeup had to be paid for, everything else was blagged.
By now the writer-director was pitching a third script, the other writer was struggling with the technical problems of having a sofa eat someone, and our producer was unavailable to organize a blagging offensive, actors, makeup, or music. So, I added my first hyphenate and became the unofficial producer. My new title was writer-producer. Oops, what would my sister say?
Wearing my writer-producer’s cap meant making important decisions. The first was to shoot digitally, which had die-hards shaking their heads in disgust back then. The second was to make a silent short; one less technical headache to deal with. The breakdown of the script was easy on one level, but difficult on another. There were only three locations to deal with, but there were a hell of a lot of costume changes.
Planning done, it was time to go meet some people and get them on board. A writer is not necessarily the person to do this. I needed a human interface, somebody less scary than me, perhaps; somebody who could smile and mean it; somebody who understood the project. Thankfully, there was someone who matched these criteria. Isabella Codd did a fantastic job of translating me into human by recasting me into the brooding director of the short, instructed to speak, only when prompted to during our recruitment drive. See how hyphens, like mould, multiply if not treated immediately. It seemed that I was now as weighed down by hyphens as a Russian general is by medals. Oh sister: things were not looking good for the state of my mental health.
Despite her handicap, me, Isabella convinced Shane O’Niell, Eoghan Kelly and Michelle Buckley to star in our short. And star they did. Not only that, but Michelle introduced us to the phenomenal musician and composer Timara Galassi. No matter which hat I wear, which hyphen I hide behind, there is no denying the importance of her score. It not only gave the short a rhythm, a strong, thumping heartbeat; it added light, comic touches to the film which lifted it when needed, and the pathos, so essential in the film’s closing scene.
With everyone signed up it was time to go to work. A story board was drawn, a shooting schedule organised, a filming date agreed on. Costumes were gathered together, food arranged and, all-in-all, a carnival mood settled on us as we gathered on the streets of Wicklow town to shoot Work/ Life Balance.
It took a mere six weeks to go from first meeting my co-conspirators to shooting the film itself. It would take over eight weeks to edit the film and add the music.
In the meantime, we held meetings to organise the second short. The writer-director had dropped the courier story and had now written a forty-nine-minute horror script which included car chases and shoot-outs. Our second writer was getting cold feet and our producer had failed to land his shark.
The editing of the movie was a challenge, but thankfully our editor was brilliant. However, hopes of presenting a jazzy, black and white short to the world dissolved on the cutting room floor when a good monochrome could not be settled on. Thankfully our producer had no say over the final cut, so what you see adheres very closely to the original script I had written. Working with Isabella, Tom and Timara, we glued our silent film to the soundtrack and created what you see today. No matter how many hyphens a person has there comes a moment when you have to sit down and decide if any of your personas can stand over their work. Playing the short for the first time on a laptop with only the tinniest of sound systems I relaxed for the first time in weeks. This was a short which fulfilled on its promise, it was a gild-edged calling card for everyone involved to use. In my opinion it was a no-budget gem that deserved a wider audience.
No matter how many hyphenates I use, the word salesman is never stuck between any of them. That job falls at the feet of the producer. Note the single word title, there is no hyphen required here, no ambiguity about this person’s role. This is the money person, the idea to cinema person. Ideally a person who can deal with multiple devils at any given time. This is the type of person who could have guided Faust safely through negotiations with creatures from the nether world and turned his story into a happy one. Every film needs such a person; a mono-focused, testosterone-filled, producer. It was time ours came on board. But about this time he went on holiday and became difficult to contact. This is possibly a producer’s second greatest trait, their unavailability when it suits them.
Ignoring my interpersonal handicap, I did my best to launch the short. This again involved Isabella Codd vouching for me as a human being while we organised a premier for the movie. A venue was sourced. Pictures went to the press. A red carpet was found. Invitations were issued. And finally, a hall was filled with people on a cold December night.
They mingled around the wonderful venue that is the Tinahely Arts Centre. There was mulled wine to be sipped, mince pies to be tasted and chat to be had. Then it was time to take a seat.
No story is told in a vacuum. It needs an audience if it is to fulfil its promise. No matter what that promise is, it has to be kept. A short film, like a short story, must quickly make its point. It does not matter if that point is to retell the most faded of jokes, or if it highlights the latest philosophical questions, it must do so quickly, and the audience must feel that they got the punchline.
Taking a seat alongside the audience, I felt that I was not part of it. I was an outsider, a neutral observer with my own agenda. I wanted to see them watching a story they knew nothing about, to observe their eyes as light from the screen reflected on them, to see if they fell into the story unfolding before them, or if they remained unmoved. Thankfully the magic lantern cast its spell and even the most cynical among the audience were absorbed during the telling of the tale. A round of applause can be faked, but rapt attention cannot.
Afterwards, one person approached me and said, ‘He’s toast.’ In other words the story worked on him enough that he wanted to share his opinion about it. Another person told me her story, of waiting with an unconscious, homeless man for an ambulance to arrive. The film had brought her back to that day, a couple of years before, when she was the person who made the emergency call.
At an arts festival where the film was shown a few months later, I listened to two women excitedly look for clues in the story and share them with each other as they watched.
“He’s getting up earlier,” one of the women told her friend, only to have the other woman tell her a minute later, “Look. It’s Friday, he’s not wearing a tie.”
This feedback shows how much work an audience will do for you if you trust them to.
I also knew some teenagers at the time, from Germany, musicians, who watched the film five times in a row, enthralled by how the score drove the story along. Everybody involved in the film contributed so much to making it what it became.
One can never tell how people will react to your story, but trust them and they will give you their time. Us writers and filmmakers owe it to them tell a story worthy of their time. I hope this is what we did with Work/ Life Balance.
So, throwing all the hyphenates aside, I think one word can sum up what I and my fellow filmmakers are, we are storytellers.
I sometimes feel that there should be a twelve-step program for people like me, those addicted to the telling of tall tales.
Step one: My name is Jim Clarken and I am a storyteller.
But is a twelve step program a little narcissistic in its focus? Could I safely tell my sister that I’m on one, without raising serious doubts in her mind about my true intentions? Maybe this is a topic for another blog.
My previous desk was a cluttered space, invariably littered with note-covered envelopes, dusty bric-a-brac, and mismatched office equipment. It was a proper writer’s desk. The only thing of elegance being the vintage, Anglepoise lamp which sat, camouflaged, beneath scrawl-covered post-it-pads. The table was exactly the correct height for me, and the chair was just so. Comfort is what I’m talking about. This was my private space; where I could write, think, or sleep, depending on my mood.
Sadly, that desk was in Sandyford, while I was trapped in Portlaoise for the first Covid Lockdown. As a result, it became my first covid casualty, sanity my second. Everybody knows that we writers have needs; enough of us have told you so. And at the top of that pyramid, our uppermost requirement, is a space of our own. A sacred place, shared only with our muse or, more often, nagging, writerly doubts.
Some scribes like to work in a shed, some need a library, for the more outgoing, a coffee table at a local café is a prerequisite. All of us have a place where we write, even if it is only a tray, laden down with pens paper and note pads. During that first, eerie lockdown the tiny box room in my mother’s home became my new creative hub.
Boxrooms come with serious limitations, size being the obvious one. In my case there was also the view; not mine, but that of the bored soldiers on sentry duty in Portlaoise prison. My window was in their direct line of vision. This increased everyone’s discomfort. They stared at me while I stared at their concrete watchtower and pondered my next sentence. In moments of distraction, it occurred to me that they probably would have liked something younger and female to watch over. As for me, I wanted something more pastoral by way of distraction. Barring that, my old view of an industrial estate carpark would have been a perfect substitute. It would certainly have been prettier than the watchtower; and a lot of life floats past one’s eyes in a carpark.
Building an extension was out of the question, there would, no doubt, have been objections from my patient mother, not to mention her old-fashioned neighbours and the rule-bound county council.
A comfortable garden shed like the one George Bernard Shaw had – one that could be turned to face the sun as it moved across the heavens – was also out of the question. The builders were in lockdown after all. So, in a fit of desperation, I reached into the closet for a solution to my problem. While many people are anxious to come out of their closets, I had to work very hard to get into mine.
Closets by their nature are dark, musty places which no one enters, except in the worst sort of horror stories. This gloomy, boxroom, hell hole took the horror film cliché very much to heart; with its uninviting interior, its abundance of cobwebs and its collection of damp, dusty, discarded books. Judging by the smell of the place, dust mite orgies were a 24/7 event. If you suffered from allergies, simply opening the closet doors would have landed you in a noisy, overcrowded A&E with respiratory failure. To think that this space was to be my salvation.
After relocating the mouldering inhabitants from their dreary hiding place, and transferring the relentless mite orgies to another closet, I began to convert this most unpromising of spaces into my writer’s desk. Extended hoovering sessions followed by the ‘lick of paint’ led me to a sudden realisation; there is a fantastic advantage to living with a ninety-year-old in their own home. Possessions gathered over a lifetime lurk in every corner. A trawl through the darkest, most cluttered recesses of the house offered up a montage from some of the greatest artists who ever lived. This inspiring gallery now lines the cupboard interior and offers a feast for the eyes as inspiring as anything ever viewed through a glass windowpane.
Finally, I feel at home, sitting with my back to the grim, prison watchtower and staring into my freshly decorated, closet. Whenever my most inspirational muse disappears on a coffee break, or is suffering from a Monday hangover, I need only look up from my keyboard to draw on six hundred years of creative insight. It seems to me that my closet has developed a view all its own.
