Get weird, but get writing
I don’t have a great memory. Well. That’s not entirely true. I can remember the lyrics of the theme tune to the 1981 Alexandre Dumas rip-off Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds as if I wrote them. But the name of the person I was just introduced to, well that disappears faster than a show I’ve become invested in on Netflix.
Because of this haphazard recording of my own life, there are not many vivid memories of school. Or at least memories that I can trust. Apparently we didn’t get lost in Aillwee Cave. That was an episode of a TV show.
But one incident that will always stand out was an English teacher telling me that ‘writing’s probably not for you’ after I turned in an essay about a door that would open into a different world depending on what colour jumper you were wearing.
For context, we were asked to write an essay starting with the sentence: ‘There was a red door at the top of the stair.’ Which is what I did. What it lacked, and what others seemed to have, was someone waking up and it all being a dream. This teacher loved Dallas for sure.
Admittedly, my attempt was no Neil Gaiman, but I don’t think it was bad enough to rule out any further attempts at writing. It set me back for quite a bit too. It didn’t stopped me from writing, but it stopped me from sharing.
I can’t remember who (see the aforementioned memory issues) but that changed when someone let me read their version of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and I realised that it was absolutely fine to be absurd.
Now, to this day, I don’t know if I’m a good writer or not. I don’t even think I care all that much to be honest (though my therapist will tell you I very much do).
But I do know that I am ***a*** writer. So at least I proved my teacher wrong in that regard. Today, some 20-odd years later, people pay me for my words. And I do know a lot of them. Big ones. Little ones. Hell, I even know the ones I never quite learned how to spell. Resteraunt, Restaraunt. Restraunt. Dammit.
And while the reasons I would eventually become a writer were manifold; supportive friends and family as well as a myriad of other privileges including access to time and materials. It is because of that teacher, and only that teacher, that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about writing.
I think about what makes writing good. I think about what makes writing bad. But mostly, I think about what makes writing interesting. To the extent that I’m often way more invested in how something is written, than what is actually written on the page. Even if something doesn’t pay off, an attempt at trying a different approach is enough for me to enjoy it.
Take the brilliant 1998 novel My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk. The plot revolves around miniaturists working in the Ottoman Empire in 1591 and is narrated from a number of different viewpoints. The primary narrator is Elegant Effendi, a miniaturist who has just been murdered and is telling their side of the story from the afterlife.
And while that’s interesting in and of itself, dead narrators are nothing new. Indeed, it’s a little cliché at this stage. Far more interesting is that one of the chapters is narrated by the drawing of a horse, another by a counterfeit gold coin, and yet another by the titular character… the colour red. It’s an incredible piece of art (as is Erdağ M. Göknar’s translation into English) that shouldn’t work, but does to an astonishing degree.
That’s why, when Phil Quinlan contacted me in 2020 to help ghost his memoir, I told him that I’d love to, as long as he was willing to trust me when I suggested something very different from what he had in mind.
I’d known Phil since 2014 when I interviewed him for The42.ie. On the surface, Phil’s story is desperately sad. A 15-year-old who could have been an Olympian, a Premier League footballer, or an Irish rugby international. But because of a catastrophic clash of heads on a foggy November morning in 1989, his life has taken a different path, one that has seen him overcome challenges Olympians and professional athletes could never imagine.
When Phil came to me, he’d shopped his life story around a few places and — despite the compelling nature of it — he’d had very little success. I asked Phil if he’d be interested in trying something a lot different. And, in June 2020, Phil said he would be, and I got to work on And A Bang On The Ear.
I don’t want to go into too many details about what’s in the book. Please buy it. But what I’ve done, thanks to Phil’s generosity and trust, is to tell his story in a way that should give readers a sense of what life with a traumatic brain injury is like.
With that in mind, Phil’s story is told through a series of back and forth time jumps—in much the same way he told me stories over the past number of years — to demonstrate how challenging it can be to focus after an injury like his.
Each chapter also opens with a different account of the moment of the injury, the immediate aftermath, and the months and years of rehabilitation that followed. There are some minor contradictions in those eye-witness accounts, which there should be. Memory is a photocopy, not a photograph; and I wanted to reflect that a minor difference in two people’s recollection minutes after the injury, could become major ones 30-odd years later.
And finally, there is the chapter about the injury itself (which you can read on RTÉ). This was a toughest chapter to write, not just because there were many different accounts of what happened and the immediate aftermath, but also because of how important this moment is. It would sell Phil’s story short to say that this was the defining moment of his life, but it was certainly the one that changed the course of it the most.
And the only way I felt that I could do it justice, was to leave the reader walking away knowing exactly how it felt to have a concussion. So it’s supposed to be confusing, the lines between reality and dreaming a little blurry. And I think that’s what we’ve achieved.
Risk and reward
The day Phil called me, I knew I wanted to provide him with the pedestal his story deserved. We achieved some of that when O’Brien Press bought into the concept and said they’d publish the book.
My second goal was that readers would enjoy the concept as much as I loved working on it. And so far, so good.
Paul Howard, who so kindly wrote the foreword, called the book ‘extraordinary.’ Chris Sutton has said it’s a ‘must read’, and Marie Crowe was incredibly generous when she said And A Bang On The Ear was both ‘devastatingly honest and at the same time entertaining and engaging. A tale worth reading.’
And that’s why I wanted to write this post. Not to reminisce about Dogtanian, to pat myself on the back, or to plug the book (though, again, it would be great if you could buy it). But instead, I wanted to write this to remind myself that it’s okay to be a little weird. If I’d known at 16 that Paul Howard would say this about something I wrote at 40, I wouldn’t have waited so long to take a chance.
You shouldn’t either. Get weird, but get writing.
And A Bang On The Ear is published by The O’Brien Press and is available for sale in lots of places.
