Tag Archives: great writing

Finding the Write Point of Entry

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Writing is all about the entry point, how to get to that nucleoid of inspiration. Is it a memory of being a wide-eyed kid, digging through the rotten green wooden box at the back of the garage? Flipping Ian Potter’s desk in History class after he smashed my plasticine Jaws Boat? Or crying, football helmet still on, when the final cuts were announced? Or the obnoxious young adult demanding white wine at a beer hall in Munich?

Wise thoughts under thick hair

Or is it the slipstream of dreams, late for the train, cutting around wheel chairs, finding a bathroom on a balcony, children hovering over a featherless parakeet, a tortured young woman pitching a documentary about first love, late for dinner with my dead parents who say nothing and leave before they pay the bill?

Beginning to feel regret

Or is it all high fallutin’, how we never got past the tragedies of the Greeks because whatever we’ve got, it’s just keys to a rental car, LPs in the trunk, everything achieved, everyone known, all that zippity nil, remembering those things, throwing up, waiting to die. Yeah, that’s probably the one.

McGahern Knew His Dead Animals

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Irish author, John McGahern, known for his simplicity of prose, writes the following in his 1990 acclaimed novel Amongst Women: The cut field looked completely empty and clean. As Rose and the girls were crossing the grass to the tractor, they almost stumbled over a hen pheasant sitting on her nest. They were startled that she didn’t fly until they saw the feathers on the cut grass. The legs had been cut clean from her while she sat.

Not a pheasant nor missing legs…but on its way out

Her eyes were shining and alive, a taut stillness over the neck and body, petrified in her instinct. “The poor thing,” Rose said. “Still sitting there.” Neither could bring themselves to look again. All that was left of the hen the next morning was a little scattering of down and feathers on the drying grass. “A fox or a cat or a grey crow. Who knows?”