My first foray into writing, I was twelve- or thirteen-years old attending Killinarden Community School, in Tallaght, Southwest Dublin, Ireland. My school is located on the periphery of the estate, sandwiched between our own and an estate called Jobstown. Appropriate name for the housing scheme, because like the Biblical Job, to say life felt challenging is grossly inadequate. Life felt like being smote by the Lord. These estates (and the others comprising the mass of west Tallaght) were rife with domestic violence fuelled by alcoholism, joyriding in stolen cars to escape the dysfunction at home and later heroin addiction acquired when eventually sentenced to prison for engaging in such activities.
In K.C.S not much was hoped for the students. The most expected of us, that we completed the minimum under law education requirements before the girls carried their first pregnancy, the boys received their first custodial sentence to young offenders institution. That was to sit the Junior Certificate at fourteen, after that your parents (or parent) would not be harassed by the state should you drop out. One of the punishments in K.C.S for misbehaviour, was to write out by hand multiple times the school rules found in your journal. Teachers decided how many sets of rules you had to write depending on their judgment regarding the severity of your disruption to class. There was one teacher who never gave the school rules as punishment. Mr. Reynold’s preferred instead to assign short stories of between 500-1000 words on, “Life inside a golf ball. Summer as a blade of grass on lawnmower day. Life as a chewing gum etc.” My classmates hated Mr. Reynold’s, begging to be sanctioned with the rules instead of his stories. I didn’t, I found his stories quite easy, even sometimes enjoyable.
Like a lot of boys, soon as my Junior Certificate was completed, I dropped out and would not interface with education or writing again for a decade, until sentenced to four years in prison for drug dealing. There’s much to write about prison, but I won’t go into it here, sufficient to say it’s a binary sink or swim environment. Prisoners call serving a sentence, “Doing your whack.”
If you dare to mutter complaint about your sentence in the presence of other prisoners, you’ll be swiftly told, “Do your whack, man!”
What’s that? You’re climbing the walls going through withdrawals banging on the door for a medic?
“DO YOUR FUCKIN’ WHACK, MAN!” Will be the chorus reverberating around the wing scolding you.
How I did my whack, was going the gym five days a week for that prison sculpted body and attending school. One day during class for the composition module to complete my high school English education. I had to pick from a selection of topics / prompts to write short stories and essays. My English teacher read them wide eyed while cheerily declaring, “You’re a creative writer! We have a creative writing class; may I enrol you?”
I shrugged, “Yeah sure, why not.”
A few days later, I was sat in my cell writing my first ever serious attempt at a short story that wasn’t foisted upon me as punishment by Mr. Reynold’s, “The Spirit of Pharmakeia.”
As someone with a checkered history of substance abuse, I can say with confidence, writing is a true buzz. It’s not just a natural high, there’s a spiritual component. Sometimes I was scribbling away on notepad, needing to stop and get up to pace the cell chain smoking to help dissipate bubbling energy, frequently awe struck. Where are these words even coming from? It wasn’t all gravy. I felt like there was not so much an expiration date, but a deadline. If I procrastinated on an idea too long, a certain uncomfortable compulsion built to the point I was compelled to write and if I took too long before beginning, then frequently the writing felt eerily like an exorcism, and I was vomiting the words onto the page desperately racing to get the first draft done so I could begin revising and feel relief.
Thankfully, movements through space which we measure using time are constant and I was eventually released. Determined not to return to crime for reasons I won’t go into in this post, I somehow got the idea in my head, “Hang on, I have these short stories from prison. I have the experience of serving a sentence and all the madness that came along with it. Why not combine them? A combination of memoir and anthology makes for a book.”
Thus began the writing of my first book. Once complete, with uncontrollable eager optimism I submitted the manuscript to various publishers for their consideration. Months passed; nothing and I mean not even crickets. Oh well never mind, the good Lord loves a chancer and helps those who help themselves, does he not? I’ll just try again. So, I started writing a novel When the manuscript was complete, I sent it off to even more publishers and agents than the time previous. Obviously, the good Lord was just testing my fortitude and resolve, building character and all that. The novel will be picked up, published, sell a bunch, then there’ll be demand for my memoir / anthology. Months passed, actually got some rejection e-mails. A publisher and agent bothered to take the time to write that they were passing on it. Oh well, that’s progress at least, isn’t it? I mean obstacles are there to keep out the unworthy, are they not? Okay, no more prickin’ about. It’s time to get serious. I’m going to write something from the primordial deep within and I’m not holding back. I’m shaving my head, I’m fasting, I’m growing a beard and I’m rolling up my sleeves, putting everything and I do mean everything into this next work. I’m going to fuckin’ war, son.
That’s precisely what I did. You’ve no doubt heard of “method acting,” well now it was time for method writing. So, I ventured inside myself and bore my soul. When the manuscript was complete, for the third time I submitted it to the usual gatekeepers. The rejections came prompt this time, more than I can count from the top of my head. Then they arrived, e-mail from an agent, another from one of the bigger publishers in my country. The agent stressed that she enjoyed it, but it’s so hard to get a book across the line these days that she thinks it falls just short. The e-mail from the publisher said, “While we read your work with interest, we just don’t feel it’s the right fit for [redacted], however, please don’t be discouraged. It might be possible that another publisher will be interested in your work.”
Like Job in the Bible, I felt complete desolation. I wanted to just sit naked wallowing in my grief. Some people might take encouragement, seeing progress but consider the following. Most people who lived in the past, currently living and will live in the future, never give a single goal their total all and fail, it’s an agony known too very few. They never hit the ceiling of their potential, so it remains potential. Whereas those who dare to try and fail, hitting that ceiling, it’s no longer potential. Such is the case for those who attempt with all their might, realizing you’ve been weighed and measured. You know your potential because your face crashed into the ceiling of its limits, there’s no longer fantasy estimations regarding your calibre to hide behind soothing, you stepped into the ring and found out.
So, what did I do? I stopped writing. I wish I could say that was all there was to it, but it wasn’t. What once was my private sanctuary that got me through prison, became tainted. It was no longer a buzz, becoming about chasing a deal like I’ve chased so many drugs in my life. I was grief stricken. I’d never had a hobby I enjoyed my entire life and when I finally got one, instead of doing what any sane person who discovers treasure does, hiding keeping it to himself, I fucked it up by trying to sell it. Who tries to sell treasure? Fools who know prices but not values, that’s whom. I was the biggest fool of them all.
A couple of years passed, wounded I wandered through a personal desert without oasis. I tried to keep it out of my head, but it would persist pestering me. Gnawing away at me, eventually as if I was about to embark on a secret sordid affair with a married old flame, I agreed to one more dalliance on the condition I didn’t submit it anywhere, it was just for me. I wrote a novella in private. I was so happy I uploaded it to Draft2Digital, just to get the single paperback copy for myself. Words fail to convey the joy I felt holding it. I remembered that familiar feeling, I knew it many times in prison. I was transported back to writing in my cell, sure it’s a buzz, but there’s also mystery. WHERE DO THE WORDS COME FROM? I was back writing, but not repeating my mistake. I wrote for the sheer fuck of it.