Michael Collins

Archive for the ‘About life’ Category

Walking out of the local supermarket and into the main mall area three months ago, I saw a toddler, aged around three, standing near a toy car—you know the ones, you put your child behind the steering wheel, feed the slot a dollar, and the thing lights up, growling and shaking, to the utter delight of the young.

She was blonde, barefooted, and dressed a little raggedy, but she had an inner beauty, an exuberance, and a sense of wonder that, despite the weight of my bags and the prospect of a plod to my car in scorching thirty six degree sunshine, made me chuckle.

As I drew level, she stood on the car’s pedestal and called to someone behind me. ‘Daddy, daddy, look!’

Hearing a rough, throaty male voice echo through the mall, several people including myself stopped to look around. ‘‘Get off that fucking thing!’

The little girl, appearing not to hear, began to climb into the car’s driving seat. Her fascination with the machine was intense—as if she’d never set eyes on anything like it before. Perhaps from the country, I thought.

In the next moment, a thin, shaven-haired, thuggish-looking guy around thirty rushed to the girl, gripped her by one arm, and hauled her from the machine. His pale, hawkish face was twisted with ferocious anger—almost feral.

As he viciously bent the girl’s arm and her leg slammed against the toy car, she screamed in pain.

It was over in seconds, with half a dozen of us spectators left gawping in horror and shock as the man disappeared around a corner in the direction of the mall’s exit. Gradually, muttering in disapproval, we began to disperse and move in our intended directions.

Feeling nauseated, and trying to come to terms with a sense of guilt, I walked towards the car park wondering what I could or should have done. It had happened too quickly, I rationalised. The guy was probably on drugs—he looked like a junky, all emaciated and mean-looking—so any interference may have had terrible consequences for the girl and for me for that matter. He may have been carrying a weapon—he looked the type. Anyway, my involvement would have enmeshed me in witness statements, possible court appearances, maybe even some retribution from the guy himself. And for what? It’s possible the girl was an impossibly naughty creature and the incident was the culmination of a day of enormous parental frustration.

Beginning to walk across the deserted car park, I heard a terrible wailing. It was the girl, perhaps a hundred metres away, held against a battered old truck and being beaten with a length of plastic piping.

I was paralysed. I didn’t know what to do. My hands were full of shopping bags, it was unbearably hot, and there was nobody else around to help. The guy was also probably half my age and, built like a whip, would make mincemeat out of me.  As the girl’s cries became shriller, battering my ears, and the heat seared mercilessly up from the concrete, I felt like throwing up. Was this like being in hell?

Luckily that entire incident never happened. I made it up. The questions are: what emotions did it evoke? How did you feel about the girl, the father, and me? Did my inertia and pathetic rationalising make you angry? Were you imagining yourself in the same circumstances, and wondering what you would have done?

Sometimes we have to cause readers some discomfort. It’s not all about feeling good. If we can bring their emotions to the surface, make them angry, distressed, or even confused about how they feel, we’re doing our work.

What was the last piece of fiction you read that upset you?

Yes, it’s that time of the year when we might make some resolutions: this year I will write without fear—fear of rejection, fear of going public, fear that my innermost thoughts and dark psyche are being exposed. I shall write bravely, setting aside time to write—for myself—come what may.

Brave words, but what the hell has a specific time of the year got to do with what we should be doing right now anyway? A few wise words from Karen Nixon’s new blog got me thinking. She talked about our propensity for wanting to leave the old year’s pain and difficulties behind and make a fresh start in the new, and she made the valuable point not to wipe the slate clean, but to take all we’ve learnt, moving forward with the benefit of hindsight.

Well, here’s some hindsight. A writer doesn’t look forward to a point in time when the stars and moons are in perfect alignment to do his or her thing. A writer does it now. Now, I say. And, yes, as you take the New Year by storm, may the mistakes you have made in the blundering universe of writing be your reckless, charging stead.

To the breach!

Looking through an array of Christmas cards yesterday, I was struck by the complete lack of imagination of the wording inside them. Has it always been like this, I wondered. For the last few decades I’ve gone for blank cards because the generic wording never seemed to fit—for me anyway. And now the words all seem very much the same.

In the 2009 movie, (500) Days of Summer, a romantic comedy about a woman, Summer, who doesn’t believe in true love, and the young man, Tom, who falls for her, Tom is employed by a greetings card company to write the sentiments inside the products. I was fascinated. Do jobs like this still exist? I also really felt for him when his depression resulted in a departmental transfer—from greetings to condolences. But, more importantly, where are his cards?

How often have you received a card from someone you haven’t seen or heard from since last year, and seen something like, ‘lots of love from Aunty Flo and Uncle Bill’? And that’s it. No news. Not a scrap. Flo’s husband, Uncle Bill, may be recovering from a triple bypass following a massive heart attack, and Flo herself celebrating the year she climbed Kilimanjaro (aged 89, and probably precipitating Bill’s condition), but all you get is ‘lots of love’. Oh, and, ‘wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’, because that was already printed there.

Let’s make our words really matter.

Just to continue the light-hearted theme of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, and grinding to its climactic conclusion (see, it’s contagious), the winner of this year’s award goes to David Guterson, best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars.

His novel, Ed King, brings the Sophoclean tragedy Oedipus Rex (note the pun) from the distant past into late 20th century Seattle.

In one scene the main character “massaged, kneaded, stretched, rubbed, pinched, flicked, feathered, licked, kissed, and gently bit her shoulders”, but the clincher for the gong was “Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap.” And I love the end of that scene: “Then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch.” Well, after all that you’d need to, wouldn’t you?

What is it about reading a sign? You’ve seen it plenty of times—someone drops litter beside a fully signed-up trash can, dogs and their human slaves roam unfettered on a dogs-on-leashes only beach, we skip across the road when the sign says, DON’T, and junk mail appears in the letterbox, despite the sign that asks otherwise.

Do we not see signs, or are we ignoring them? Why isn’t the message getting through?

Maybe our message just isn’t strong enough, poorly worded, or too obscure. Perhaps what we want to say is drowned by the clutter of our lives, or perhaps we aren’t reading words any more and just want to look at the pictures.

How has reading changed for you?

Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs. ~ John Osborne

In Michael Hyatt’s blog about five ways to find time to read, he comes up with some useful ideas. You can read the blog post here.

Finding reading time seems to be a real problem for many avid readers. Time slips by, and how many books have you read in 2011? One of Michael Hyatt’s solutions was to make a sacrifice and turn the TV off at 9pm. I’d go further than that and suggest that if you seriously want to catch up on your reading, don’t turn the bloody thing on at all.

At home we made an effort to avoid TV over ten years ago. As a result, I munch through a book and a half week on average. Let’s see, that’s almost 800 books. And what have I missed on the box? Hmm.

After dinner, I feel as weary as the next person. In fact it’s hard to get up the enthusiasm to do anything, never mind read. But once I start and the magic swirls from the pages, it’s way past bed time before I realise. What say you?

Things are about to warm up around here. Shorter, sharper blogs, delivered with far more frequency. Not that we’ll lose all the thinky posts—they’ll still be there, and we’ll have a few more from time to time.

For starters, I’d like to mention Lionel Shriver’s gut-pulling novel, So Much For That. If you’ve felt reluctant about putting your weight behind your words when you write—pulling your punches—take new heart and dive into this superb example of how people really are and what makes them that way. Shriver writes with furious energy about people, as sad, disillusioned and utterly unlovable, and yet …

Get into it!

In the olden days—no guys, that’s not a mere twenty years ago, let’s say the mid 1800s—we can picture the writer, sitting at his or her desk, quill in hand, staring contemplatively out over some peaceful English rural scene. For the sake of romanticism, can we forget the more likely scenario of the starving, emaciated scribe, shivering in a windy garret?  Let’s stay with the positive image—the writer who is blessed with oodles of time, is free of distractions, and loaded to the gills with money. So what’s changed?

My book coaching clients never complain to me about how hard it is to write a book. We all know it is. For some, it’s the hardest thing they’ve done in their lives and, for them, the rewards are the greatest.

For those who are struggling, we discuss the difficulties of writing and devise personalised strategies that remove some of the biggest, ugliest boulders, and then get down and dirty, roll our sleeves up, and shovel the rest out of the way. Fortunately we can all do this from the comfort of our favourite chair, and the nearest we’ll get to dirt is a few crumbs of toast or coffee spills.

But what writers do complain about is the loneliness, the isolation, the desolate feeling of having to live inside their own heads for long periods at a time. And it’s not necessarily happening for them during the time spent at their desks. The affliction can manifest at family dinners—the slow mechanical chewing of food, having coffee with a loved one—staring into one’s coffee cup with a faraway look, sitting in a movie, or, the biggie—lying awake in the middle of the night. In fact, living-in-the-book-syndrome can strike anywhere and anytime during the book writing process. So what can we do about it?

First, is it necessarily something we should stop? Of course not. It’s all part of the creative process. Having plots and ideas running constantly through our heads is the result of our unconscious and conscious minds doing the extraordinary work required to produce a really great book. But we do need to guard against reaching a point of obsession. That’s when our relationships can break down and our day jobs can suffer.

To start with, talk to people about your project—at least until their eyes begin to glaze over. Seriously, there’s always someone who wants to talk about writing—fellow writers, writers’ groups, bloggers (be one yourself and let it all hang out online), and you would be amazed at how many wonderful ideas your friends will help you with when you’re prepared to share. Yes, that means talking about the precious global conspiracy theory

you’re writing about without assuming that someone’s going to steal it and run off to the nearest book agent. Believe me, that’s just not going to happen. And when you’re bombarded with great ideas, just make sure you acknowledge your friends and their help properly when your best-seller is published.

Sleepless nights can be tough, and not too many friends appreciate being called in the wee hours. Even long-suffering partners can get a bit tetchy when their beauty sleep is curtailed by a restless author’s busy brainwaves. Keep a notepad by your bedside to jot down some of those mind-bending thoughts so you can deal with them comfortably in the morning. Smartphones are great for that sort of thing too.

And here’s a great idea. This evolved from discussing suitable work areas with one of my clients—a busy mum. Home was too distracting—too much happening to focus properly, and her time was extremely limited. We decided on the local library as an ideal environment and found that it had an unforseen bonus. My client reported that she felt sufficiently closeted in her own space to do her writing without the feeling of being alone. Surrounded by strangers beavering away at their own projects, her creative juices were stimulated without the distraction of conversation or demands from her family. Give it a go!

So what has changed? Our romance writer is still at his desk, revelling in the luxury of time. Is that a clue? Perhaps we’ll go more into that in my next blog. What do you think?

In my late teens, I and three companions—my girlfriend, Vanessa, and two cousins, Derek and Lenora—decided to take my very shaky Ford Cortina from London to the south of France. We’d never been to France and had been invited to help rebuild an ancient farmhouse in return for food, a place to camp, and drink.

The people who’d invited us were friends who’d either forgotten or chose to ignore the fact that all four of us drank an awful lot, particularly when a bottle of red wine of dubious quality was only two francs—but that’s another story. We had to get there first.

One thing that both Derek and I were totally fixated on having was real French coffee in a real French café, with cognac and foul-smelling Gauloise cigarettes at hand, of course. This goal was to be attained as soon as possible because it would mark our arrival in France and, in our naïve minds, instantly immerse us in French culture. We probably even expected our excruciating schoolboy French to become fluent in the moment, allowing us to discuss the finer points of Sartre and Beauvoir with the locals.

It was mid morning when we spotted the most ideal café on earth. We were heading south through northern France, having endured a shocking channel crossing by new-fangled hovercraft. I was at the wheel when we drove onto French soil and was still nauseous enough from the rough seas to come off the first roundabout into the wrong carriageway of a motorway. We agreed that all that traffic hurtling towards us couldn’t possibly be in error, and proceeded to hold it up while we turned around. The ensuing insults and horn-blowing were quite upsetting and we had the impression that the Gauls would have preferred us to keep going while they weaved around us.

All was forgiven when we entered a quiet and tranquil village off the beaten track (we were quite lost actually) and admired the café of our dreams, perched in a sunny, picture-postcard setting at one side of the village square. It was a moment of great anticipation. Even the ladies had become excited at the thought of soaking up the atmosphere of beau monde de France.

After the sunshine outside it was quite shadowy inside the café, resulting in a little body shunting and toe standing as we shuffled around and peered into the gloom. A long wooden servery dominated the room and behind it we could make out an enormous lady dressed in a grubby white pinny. Derek, always the more courageous, called in a voice a little louder than the norm, ‘Bonjour, bonjour, comment vas-tu ma fille?’ Or I think that’s what he said. As my vision adjusted to the shade, my attention was distracted by the observation that the lady was extremely hairy, and sported, apart from thick black hairy arms, a moustache and beard. The resultant stony silence didn’t deter Derek at all, and before I could say anything he’d forged on, ‘Pouvons-nous avoir le petite café et cognac maintenant madame?’

In the corner, four men were huddled over a game of dominos. Their game forgotten, they stared, in a not discernibly friendly way, at the rude commotion in the doorway. I was torn between bolting and continuing the debacle. The latter won simply because the men were dressed in baggy grey outfits, brownish formless jackets and—wait for it—wore berets. So French! That did it.

‘Let’s just take a seat and see what happens,’ I whispered. The others were visibly relieved. No-one said a word, so we had nothing to lose.

The scraping of rude wooden chairs on the lumpy lino as we sat down seemed to fill the entire room with teeth-jarring noise but we eventually got ourselves settled. Derek had given one of the domino players a friendly nod which, although ignored, encouraged the group to begin playing again—in utter silence.

Thick strong coffee arrived in tiny cups. We’d never seen anything like this before. Nescafe was as sophisticated as it came in England. Four glasses of strongly smelling, foul tasting, urine-hued liquid followed. Derek and I lit a Gauloise, gave each other a triumphant wink, and smugly contemplated the scene. We’d made it. We were in France, amongst the French and doing things that normal French people did.

A number of glasses of so-called cognac later it began to taste quite good. We began to replan our route to take in more of these out-of-the-way places. They were obviously fun and interesting. We began to relax. We were experienced and successful travellers now. As my alcohol to blood ratio increased, I became more effusive, waving my hands and arms about in what I perceived, in my ignorance, to be the perfect Gallic manner.

The café had a poodle—a black, long-haired thing that spent its time scurrying around the tables in an ever-hopeful quest for titbits. It happened to be tootling by when, in one of my most vociferous moments, I made a strong point by energetically windmilling an arm. This was the same arm that had the hand attached that held a Gauloise. The cigarette’s smouldering tip brushed against the poodle’s forehead and stayed there.

It wasn’t until I lifted the Gauloise to my lips and noticed that there was no longer a lit end, heard the appalling racket of a dog reacting to its head being singed, and smelt the awful stench of burning fur, that I realised what had happened.

Derek and I leapt to our feet and, in trying to save the dog from further barbecuing, managed to upend the domino table which, sadly, was in the final, nail-biting throes of a game.

Thank goodness one of us could still drive. The getaway would have done James Bond proud.