Michael Mullooly | Senior Staff Writer
Writing can be lonely. It involves a lot of alone time staring suspiciously at a blank Word document with an empty head and fingers that feel like anchors. It requires a lot of angry discussions with yourself and emptying the Recycle Bin before anyone can read the deformed garbage your pathetic imagination conjured up. It can become a vicious cycle, a two- man play where you get to experience doubt and self- loathing as the writer, and hatred and scorn as the critic. “It’s a lonely job, one that compels you to work in isolation.” Darren Shan said that, and if you don’t believe him then get out of my column.
When I started my blog back in the olden days of summer 2012, I remember being gripped in the middle of the night with the beginnings of an idea for an article. I leaped out of bed straight away and looked for a notepad so I could commit the idea to paper before it vanished. Unfortunately, I was in Wexford at the time and apparently they’ve never heard of paper because there wasn’t a scrap to be found within a hundred feet. As I frantically searched I could feel the idea slipping away like raindrops on the window of a moving car. Pretty soon all I’d be left with would be a blurry smudge, no good for anything. After ten minutes I stopped hopping from foot to foot and came up with a solution. I picked up my Nintendo DS, entered PictoChat, and began to tap tap tap each letter of each word laboriously into the handheld. The whole situation felt surreal; there I was, hunched over a tiny glowing screen, no other light but the moon’s, capturing as best I could an idea that had come to me at 3am. People have been committed to asylums for less. At least they have paper in asylums.
The problem with being alone for long amounts of time is that you can get sick of your own company pretty fast. It can get even weirder than that however. One time I became paranoid and was convinced my subconscious was determined to wreck all my writing attempts for that day. The hardest part of writing is getting started, so to warm up I usually type random sentences, just the first things that come into my mind. On that particular day I wrote my own name out three times. I then stopped and stared at it for a while: “Michael Mullooly. Michael Mullooly. Michael Mullooly.”
‘Too repetitive’, my inner critic commented. ‘Walt Whitman Wannabe.’
I looked at it some more. The longer I stared the more I disliked it. It felt like I was mocking myself. And yet tragically, I couldn’t think of anything better to replace it. I couldn’t even bring myself to delete it and bring my word count back down to zero. After several more minutes of opening random tabs then flicking back to the document to see if inspiration struck me, I deleted my names and replaced them with the sentence “Walt Whitman Wannabe.” The alliteration was pleasing. Satisfied with the day’s work, I happily chucked the document into the recycle bin, emptied the garbage into the ether, then went and ate some Coco Pops. You have to choose your battles.
