Friday 23 September 2016

Finding the Story Teller

There is a lot of advice out there on how to write: use simple words, short sentences, don't have two characters with the same name. I could go on - I have taken several classes in creative writing, have read loads of articles on the craft of writing. And I have profited from all of this, I have to admit. I have served a long apprenticeship on learning how to write and I am still learning.

So it never fails to irritate me a little bit when I start reading a novel which does not obey any of these rules, a novel by an author who has had several books published and, according to the cover is "acclaimed".  In the novel I am currently reading, a crime thriller, sentences are half a paragraph long, characters tell the story to keep the reader up to date, and everyone sounds more or less the same despite the author's attempts to give them different voices. Not one single character stands out or grabs my attention in any way. The story line itself is interesting, indeed it is very current in its theme, but to be honest, it wouldn't bother me if I never got round to finishing the book.

And here I perceive another lesson. No matter how good the plot, if the characters don't grab you, you are most likely going to give up before the story really gets started. There are natural born story tellers among us. I recall when I worked in London yonks ago in a typing pool, one girl told us the story of a film she had seen the previous night. She kept us totally spellbound. Years later when I saw that it would be shown on TV I settled down to watch it expecting an exciting film. It was boring in the extreme and I switched channels after around fifteen minutes. This girl kept us all enthralled with her own life story. She gave us the whole history or how she had moved to London, leaving her boyfriend of several years, and how she had met a new guy and was madly in love. We all hung on her every word!

Alas, there are far too few such story tellers in the world. Writers can learn how to create tension, how to plot, how to hook the reader, but once in a while there comes an author who really stands out by his or her way with words, a writer who can pull us into their world of fiction and make us never want to leave it. When you open a book like that, you have hit gold, believe me.

Friday 9 September 2016

National Hug Your Boss Day

According to the National Day Calendar, this is the day you should hug your boss.  This made me look back on the many bosses I have worked for over the years.  Taken all in all, I have been very lucky.
As a secretary in London I was nearly always late for work and had to pass my boss' office on the way to my own.  We invariably had this conversation:
Me:  'Morning David'
David: 'You're fired!'
As you can tell, he was a lot of fun - as long as I did my work right, of course.

I had another boss who lived not too far from me and who was often late himself so he nearly always gave me a lift while pointing out to me that if he hadn't, I would be late.

As a very inexperienced typist in the typing pool of a large company in Dublin, I was asked to stand in for the Chairman's secretary for a week. She instilled into me the absolute necessity of watering all the plants both in her (luxurious) office and the Chairman's. I was so afraid of doing the wrong thing that I watered just about anything that stood in a pot. When she returned to the office she congratulated me on salvaging two plants which she had given up as dead and asked me how I had managed it. She hadn't time to chuck them out, she explained, and wasn't it lucky that I was so skilled at plant management. The Chairman was so impressed that he insisted I filled in for his secretary whenever she went on holidays after that.  He was a gentleman of the old school, who felt I was overworked if he gave me more than three letters a day to type.  Those were the days!!

Of course I have had some bad experiences, too. Everyone is only human, after all. I'd better not go into that, I think. Suffice it to say that my somewhat naive notion that the boss always knows best was shattered. As were my idealistic ideas that the boss is always fair and if you work hard you get rewarded. But this was all part of growing up.

So here's a toast to all bosses, the ones I worked for and liked and the ones that made me cringe.  God bless them all!

Thursday 8 September 2016

A Tech-free Trip - well, almost!

It was only when I got to Dublin airport and decided to check for messages that I realised I had left my mobile phone at home. Horror of horrors! As I was arriving late, I planned on going straight to my hotel in Frankfurt city centre and sending my daughter a text to say I had arrived safely and make plans for meeting next morning. There's always the internet, I consoled myself.  However, my gmail account wasn't having any of this nonsense. I was not at my usual pc and they wanted answers to questions such as "when did you create your account with gmail?"  They also wanted me to check my mobile. Grrrr...  I had one mobile phone number written into my little diary which I had - with more luck than intelligence - packed into my shoulder bag. I accosted a handsome young man (!!) and asked if I could send a text on his phone. Ole, if you ever read this, please accept my thanks again, you saved my life!  I sent off a text to my son explaining what had happened and gave my hotel phone number. 
It all worked beautifully. My daughter got my message and phoned me at my hotel and we made arrangements of when and where to meet.  And so the whole week went.  I met some former colleagues, having already arranged the time and place before I left Ireland, so no hassle there. Everything went smoothly simply because there was no way of making last minute changes or sending texts to say "I'll be half an hour late". 

I can't say it was liberating, especially at the beginning, because the urge for instant communication has been drilled into us by the mobile communications people. But by the end of my stay I was completely used to being without my phone. Being without your mobile simply makes you a better communicator!  Instead of "I'll send you a text" you have to say something like "we'll meet at the town hall tomorrow at 2 p.m." and then you have to be there.  You can't take photos of anything and everything at will, you just have to relax and enjoy the moment.  And you have to ask and read notices in order to find things out as you can't simply google it.

No. I have not thrown my phone away and I have done some texting this morning already.  But at least I now know that I don't need it absolutely to survive in the communications jungle.  It's a cheering thought.

Finally, I read an article on the BBC's website.  It is a true and tragic story of a family who left home without mobiles or credit cards and although they were always near major cities and towns, they were practically untraceable. They literally disappeared off the radar.  Makes you think.
Here's the link:

the mystery of a tech-free road trip in Australia