From irishtimes.com
By Frank McNally
Deadline fears, the law of typos and becoming a master diarist are just some
It’s 20 years since I started writing this column. And no, I don’t know where the time went. But here are 20 things I’ve learned along the way.
1. Working to a daily deadline is hard on the nerves. But the sad truth is, if I didn’t have a deadline, I’d never do anything.
2. That’s because the best idea I have today is never good enough. The one I’ll have tomorrow, where there’s more time to think, is always better.
3. Contrary to the impression I may have given over two decades, there is not an Irish angle to everything. You’d be appalled how many great events have happened down the centuries, the protagonists of which did not have a single Irish great-grandparent between them.
4. Unlimited choice is a tyrant. As anchor tenant of this column, you can write about anything: it’s left entirely up to you. This is a great privilege. And a curse. Sometimes you wish the editor would tell you what to write about. Then you could blame him.
5. They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of any discipline. By rough calculation, this should have made me a master diarist sometime around 2019. I can’t say I noticed.
6. The condition of not having any ideas as deadline looms is like hunger: they both gnaw at your stomach in the same way. Comfort eating is an occupational hazard. Unless you take up cigarettes.
7. Not taking up cigarettes in the last 20 years is one of my prouder achievements.
8. Deadline fear never goes away. One night last week, I noticed with a panic that it was 7.30pm and I hadn’t started writing yet. This was impossibly late, barring a miracle. But I couldn’t find my editor to warn him the column wasn’t coming. So the panic deepened until I couldn’t breathe. Then I woke up. It was 3am and I’d been having that stupid dream again.
9. When you write something wrong in a newspaper, there’s often a little voice in your head trying to tell you it’s wrong. You just can’t hear it because of all the other background noise. The little voice will only make itself audible when the noise stops. This typically happens at 3am too, when your mistake has gone to print.
10. Being a columnist is incompatible with a tidy desk. I can carbon-date the layers of paper cuttings on mine, but I’m afraid to throw any out because I must have had a good reason for keeping them in the first place, even if I can’t remember. And every so often, an idea does emerge from the mulch.
11. Daily diarists have no choice but to dramatise their lives. On the plus side, this means that when something genuinely bad happens, assuming it’s not fatal, you often have the consolation of getting a column out of it.
12. There are limits to that – or should be. Jeffery Bernard wrote a long-running column called Low Life, for which his alcoholism was a professional requirement. “The longest suicide note in history” as it has been called, was probably too high a price to pay for material. Although it did inspire a hit West End play. I envy him that.
13. When you’ve written 3,500 columns, you will repeat yourself occasionally. I like to compare this with Monet’s haystacks, painted over and over in different conditions. The excuse works doubly well for me because I have written about actual haymaking on several occasions. But the light had changed each time.
14. Muphry’s (sic) Law of Typos is immutably true. If you comment in print on an interesting or amusing mistake committed by another writer, your piece will inevitably contain an interesting or amusing mistake of its own.
15. Someone once said of the housewife-columnist Erma Bombeck that, whereas others aspired to mere Pulitzer Prizes, her work won “the permanent place of honour in American life: the refrigerator door.” I’m proud to say the occasional Irish Diary has featured on fridge doors too.
16. A few have also been framed on pub walls: the Irish columnist hall of fame.
17. On any subject about which you expound in a newspaper, there is somebody somewhere who knows more than you.
18. But being corrected only adds to your education. Writing this diary four times a week for 20 years has been like doing a PhD in Irish Studies. In American universities, that would have cost me a fortune.
[ ‘O, the drenching grey weather’: Irish rain in 40 wonderful phrases ]
19. Georges Simenon once claimed that “a writer has nothing to say after the age of forty”. Mickey Spillane disagreed: “If you’re singer, you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he’s good, the older he gets, the better he writes.” I’m not sure which is correct but to paraphrase George Orwell on men’s faces at 50, I believe that after 20 years on the job, every daily diarist has the column he deserves.
20. All things considered, it beats working.
