A Writer’s Notebook V

3rd November 2007 with 2 Comments

There’s a sentence in my notebook which says: Mind and imagination are crippled by notion, conviction and opinion.
Sounds like a quote but it came to me one night while I was sleeping. I woke with the words in my head. They weren’t quite arranged in that way when I first heard them. I wrestled for [...]

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The Wind That Shakes The Barley

8th June 2006 with 10 Comments

The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Ken Loache’s film about Ireland in 1919 and the unanimous winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, has been much criticized by the British press.
A “poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence … The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not just wrong. It [...]

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About Writing:

When I started writing that story, I didn’t know there was going to be a PhD with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realised it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realised it was inevitable. Flannery O'Conner writing about her short-story 'Good Country People'

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