We’ve all made stupid mistakes before. The only comfort is the knowledge that everybody else fucks up too, so we’ve rounded up some of our favourite writers and editors to peel back the Tipp-Ex on their diaries to reveal your biggest mistake.
I should say ‘No’ more often. Up until very recently, I used possess a demented self-belief that I would never need to turn down any opportunity that came my way. I thought myself entitled to a never ending list of accomplishments. I was wrong. In the last eighteen months I have developed an appetite for committing to exciting time-consuming projects. I have also promised other people, whom I admire, my time and limited skills to deliver on various mini-endeavours, only to find myself disappearing into the place where emails go to be ignored. My enthusiasm has damaged professional and personal relationships.
Most of this misplaced willingness to ‘do it all’ is borne from a mostly lonely six months in cold Toronto, where I watched all of Battlestar Galactica twice while tapping out mediocre legal essays. I returned to Ireland, via a stultifying Vietnam, determined to never find myself doubting my utility again. I started to say yes to things.
Accepting you have to take a step back should not feel disappointing, it is human. Instead of thinking possibilities, of punctual successes, I am now slowly learning to carefully consider my actual capabilities.
Amanda Coogan (Performance artist)
I perched on the banisters of central staircase in the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, ready to jump on my mountain in an ill-fated attempt at flying. I was not sick I kept telling myself, repeating the mantra ‘there is no tomorrow’. I jumped. I soared in the air. I could feel my left nipple falling out of my dress. I am in the present moment. My dress is falling down. I’m falling down. I land. My dress is now perched just below my breasts. I feel the uncontrollable tickle of a rippling cough in my chest. I’m not going to cough. I’m unceremoniously topless. I’m going to cough. I can feel the cough rising. I purse my lips, I won’t let it out. My chest starts heaving. My lips are firmly closed. My whole body starts shuddering. Feck the topless ness I’m going to cough. My hand feels around and grabs the loose fabric of the fallen down dress and rams it in my mouth. I cough. Long, hard and gratefully with the fabric is oozing out of my mouth.
Mistakes are opportunities, or so we’re told, but they don’t feel like that at the time! I had spent two back-breaking months sculpting my mountain for this live performance exhibition, sent it off to Manchester and took to the bed with flu. Rather than arriving in Manchester days later glowing and fit as a fiddle, I arrived with nose flowing, a chesty cough and a few pounds lighter (never usually a bad complaint!)
Performance art is one of those live experiences where anything can (and does) happen. The stories of bodily fluids oozing out of orifices are legendary. The instances of wind emerging from said orifices are considered fair game in this most non-theatrical live art form, one lets nature (er) flow. The fits of coughing that thrust the performers body into convulsions were, however, not the kind of corporeal action I had planned for. Lesson learnt? At the onset of a coughing fit always have a skirt handy to trust into your mouth.
Rayne Booth (Temple Bar Gallery + Studios)
As a child I wanted to be an archaeologist. Then a vet. Then the front woman of a rock ‘n’ roll band in which I would play the guitar and sing covers of songs by The Pretenders. Finally, I decided I wanted to be a painter of paintings that looked like the things they were paintings of, and I went off to NCAD to make this dream a reality. I have managed to get to the place where I am now by not – mercifully – doing any of those things. Looking back along that path, where the forks converge back into a single track, I can dream about how my life would be if I had made the opposite choice at any given moment. At the time, the things that have led me to the career I have today didn’t feel like decisions at all, just the right/fun/most obvious thing to do. I am happy that I can look back over everything I have done without any serious regrets. Not to say that mistakes haven’t been made… (Some embarrassing ones that only my good friends know about, some sartorial, some relational, most involving alcohol and a few bad haircuts)… but I am grateful for them. They add to my experiences and have shaped the person that I am now. Also, I can say with certainty: I wouldn’t want to be 21 again for the world.
Conor Creighton (Writer, journalist)
There’s a piece of old Yiddish wisdom that goes: “There are no such thing as mistakes. How can there be mistakes if everything comes from divine sources? There are spheres where all errors are transformed into truth.”
If I’d been beaten each time I’d misspelt a name or misread a quote, I’d be writing this from a bed, into a machine, with my remaining teeth and a long thin stick.
Once I reported on a musician from Kosovo who had been in the KLA. Only he hadn’t. That had been the booze talking. What he meant as a joke I’d taken deadly serious. When the article came out, he had to go into hiding in case the real KLA found out. Well, what can you do? Apologise sure, but apologies are so weak. What happened to us that ‘sorry’ merited atonement? I’m more of an eye for an eye guy. He should have denounced me as an ex-IRA man.
Long story short, he moved to London where the article was originally published and found that his music career was given a boost by his supposed terrorist past. It got him bookings. He even designed a Kalashnikov logo. He now had a reputation to uphold. In interviews they ask him about the KLA and he smiles, ‘next question’.
So, you see, there is a sphere where are all errors are transformed into truths. It’s called London.
Like Watt in Samuel Beckett’s novel of the same name, who regrets everything he’s ever done, I have a closet full of mistakes to choose from. I’ve made some awful mistakes, some so awful that writing about them here would be tragic rather than instructive. But one comes to mind which might serve as an example for any budding young music journalists.
Seven years ago a music magazine gave me a free pass to the Electric Picnic in return for interviewing some of the bands. I made my mistake halfway between Dublin and Carlow. I opened a can of Bulmers and decided that I would have no problem attending the festival both as a reveller and as a critic.
The next day, I crashed into the artists area to interview a band called the Dodos. If it wasn’t for the dictaphone, I might never have known how drunk I was during that interview, but unfortunately every last moment of my shameful attempt to interview them was recorded. Days later and still hungover, I tried to transcribe my slurred, nonsensical questions of the band, who were laughing at my expense. I felt like I was in a karmic hell. Indeed, I can still hear myself now, asking them come with me to the dance tent, begging one of them for a sip of his water, and finally announcing that I needed to puke. Never again, I said; though it took me a few more years to finally learn my lesson.
Aoife Walsh (The South Circular Press)
Liz Calder, founding director of Bloomsbury, has said ‘if you’re a publisher you can’t also be a best friend, only a very good friend. You have to toughen up’.
To be an editor you must develop a system to help you see the thing you’re looking for, first time round. So, my definition of a second chance is more like a last chance. But following the rules of grammar and learning a house style are nothing compared to handling the hopes and dreams of an author.
My biggest mistake occurred late in my first job in publishing with an academic press here in Dublin. Spending eight hours a day poring over scholarly manuscripts gives sincere weight to the ‘attention to detail’ part of your CV. I had got to a stage where I was allowed to meet with authors and discuss alterations to their texts. One author was particularly keen that his PhD thesis be published just as he had written it. The subject of the book was of a North American persuasion (he hoped it would sell well over there too), and he had taken the liberty of using an American style, for example, putting the month before the date. Being the last one in, it was my gorgeous job to tell him that we would be changing many of these elements to the British style, to which he had strong objections.
It is amazing how bringing a manuscript within a press’ house style can be considered by some writers as the correction of an error in their work. That’s why it’s called style; it’s unique to each publishing house. I think my older, wiser colleagues were tickled by how seriously I was entertaining this author’s concerns about the tiniest details of his text, when they wouldn’t have even mentioned them to an author if it were their job. Anyway, we got through the style debacle and the book went to print. This press often received advance copies (galleys) just days before publication and sometimes even afterwards, such was their willingness to stand over their decisions and trust that nothing horrendous had happened. Well, the galleys for this book arrived over morning coffee and I decided, unusually, to scan them.
Inexplicably, somewhere during typesetting, a whole section of footnotes had been swapped from one end of the book to the other. I was flummoxed, because for the whole of the preparation of the book, the footnotes had been the least of my worries. I got one of the few bawlings of my career from the publisher that day (all the others came from him too). I had to literally ‘stop press’, while I hauled out the last proofs again to discover at what point the mix-up had occurred.
I know now that the mistake I made was not to misplace the footnotes. That really was a spook in the machine moment. My mistake was to be overwhelmed by the presence of this author in the preparation of his book for publication. What I learned was not to let an author’s opinion of me conflict with my job to carry their work to their audience. The author-editor relationship is a professional friendship, which is under threat because it is based on trust, confidence and responsibility. Now, as editor and publisher of The South Circular, while I agree to take care of someone’s story, I’m also agreeing to not take them for granted. Writers write, editors edit. And if I must leave a writer to write, she must leave me to edit. When I do my job well, the authors’ words will appear luminous to the reader.
I have a few personal rules. There’s a time and place for celebrating your achievements. It’s important to know when something is ready and to let it go. You hold your breath until the book lands on your desk, bound, trimmed, covered and price-tagged. You know that if you look hard enough, you’ll find something silly and annoying. But that’s the agony and ecstasy of publishing: pride in doing your best and humility in knowing there’s more to do.
I approach each manuscript like it is an equation that needs to be solved by being published. And editing means to weigh up everything systematically and to make my mark once, coolly, and to move on immediately, not daring to look back. Publishing is to not second guess my best training, my best ideas, my best instincts. Editing and publishing The South Circular is using all of these things to become the person I want to be.
I’m willing to be corrected on everything I’ve just said, and this is why I love publishing. It is still a creative business which requires a lengthy and intense and sometimes mortifying apprenticeship. What’s more humbling than correcting your own mother tongue? I believe we are only as good as the last issue of The South Circular we put out and we can still get it wrong with the next one. But something drives that reach for perfection and the risk taken with each new story. I’m going to say something that might be controversial here: I don’t consider a story complete until it is published. That’s something I look for in choosing work for The South Circular: something that will survive publication, something that might even be better for having been published.
The biggest mistake I ever made occurred over twenty years ago now, and although I was admittedly still quite young at the time, I have always felt that the repercussions have been of such magnitude and duration that it would be an act of abhorrently bad faith to try and pass it off as something I couldn’t possibly be held accountable for. The truth is that I have lived with the guilt for as long as I can remember: at first it was felt as a sort of dull interior throb, but at around the age of eight the full weight of my actions came into focus and the guilt grew a whole lot sharper. It began to manifest itself physically. I became an incurable fidget, cracking my knuckles from dawn until dusk, tearing the skin between my fingers at such a rate that my hands now resemble the sites of famous bloody battles in a war that looks set to continue apace. ‘Consciousness is much more than the thorn,’ says Emil Cioran, ‘it is the dagger in the flesh.’ On more occasions than I would like to remember, I have offered my apologies to the person who fell victim to my most egregious of errors, the person who, because of my own irresponsibility, must drag himself from his bed very early every morning and, in spite of all he knows, recommence the irredeemably meaningless grind with which I have burdened him. It’s Kevin Breathnach, the other one, that things happen to. I have been told he accepts my apology, but when I look him in the eye and ask if there is anything at all I can do to make up for it, he is silent for a time before bitterly he reflects: let’s not be born again, these 11am starts are too much for me.
Sarah Davis-Goff (Tramp Press)
I spend most of my working hours with the ‘slush pile’, the publishing industry’s term for the pile of un-read, unsolicited manuscripts that inevitably builds up. In the old days (and even still in some gorgeous, delicious-smelling, old-fashioned publishing houses), the slush pile was a mile-high tower of paper, threatening to topple over and asphyxiate the intern. I mean this metaphorically and literally. Now the slush pile is generally a digital folder marked ‘Here Be Dragons’ on the intern computer.
So I spend most of my time nose-deep in manuscripts, reading the words of others; awkward words, words misplaced and unsettled, wrong words.
But, very occasionally, the words will be exactly the right words.
I have made the worst mistake a reader can make; I read the right words but did not trust my judgement of them. I only thought the manuscript I had quite by chance put my hand upon was not a manuscript, but a work of art. I told my superiors that I thought so; but I had only wrong words to describe those right words, so the superiors did not believe me.
My worst mistake was trusting others over myself. My biggest success was realising this mistake, eventually, and finding the right words to fix it. That manuscript was a work of art; that work of art found itself on the Man Booker long list this afternoon. Really the success is not mine, but the failure still is. And that is the most important thing.
Jim Ricks (artist, performer, political activist)
Biggest art mistake? Easy. Moving to Galway.
What? That creative fun loving hub in the Wesht? Yep.
I did a MFA through NUIG at the Burren College of Art in the remote Burren. Truly exotic for a native Californian that’s usually lived in the heart of urban places (having misspent much of my youth spray painting US cities). So the Burren was a shock — and a good one. A retreat, an artists’ residency with studio visits and a thesis.
Having gotten a lot out of my 2 years there, why not move to the regional ‘city’? It’s a fun place right? Sure its character was damaged by optimistic Tiger-era sprawl. And it is filled with chancer landlords and developers and party minded students and hippies. But sure I’ll go there and run a gallery and a studio and do some shows. Which I did. But I also ran into some dead ends. See, Galway isn’t a city in any modern sense. It is a town. And a provincial one on the margins of the European art scene.
Galway’s ‘artistic’ side is largely fueled by the well-established Druid, Macnas, and Arts Festival. Unfortunately historically there hasn’t been the same leadership in visual arts. And they have lagged way behind. Frequently mentioned is the fact that when the money was there to do it, a municipal gallery was not built. Galway is full of empty buildings, high rents, amateurism and little vision from above. I found myself alongside a select few trying to take it all on… and with some successes. But perhaps I was a bit idealistic.
Doors haven’t opened as easily for visual artists in Galway and the artists have only recently made strides together with ‘a united voice’. Unfortunately, there’s some typically petty business thrown in as well. I was met at times with opposition along the way, and felt a bit demoralised and a bit unnoticed.
I moved to Dublin about a 1.5 years for a studio at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and have some perspective now. And the thing is Galway was importantly a case of being thrown into the deep end of arts administration and organisation. Curating, and working on behalf of peers and creating opportunities for other artists is now something I’m well versed at. All things I can now directly apply to my practice. Kind of like a second, somewhat gruelling, second Masters.
Most people will tell you that a sign bearing “Free Comedy Show” is a warning sign. However, having made no other plans that night, we thought that it would do no harm to have a look in, check out the up-and-comers. After three terribly unfunny “comedians” graced us with their tedium, the fourth took to the stage and entered into a race war with a redneck Iraq vet in the corner. “Leave the Irish students alone!” quickly changed to “Hey man, you Muslim or something…” Even though I was in fact the catalyst to their fury, we tried to sneak out the back door. Having forgotten that half of our party had left without giving us their portion of the bar tab, things got hairier. There’s no such thing as a free lunch and there’s no such thing as free comedy.
Dan Bolger (Managing Editor, Liberties Press)
After realising that me and academia weren’t ever going to make a happy couple, I set about trying to get a job in another notoriously competitive industry: publishing. It wasn’t exactly easy, but anyway Liberties were kind enough to give me a job eventually as an editorial assistant. I was thrilled, and on my first day I came in early with that kind of English-major exuberance/arrogance that says: I’ve read an awful lot at this point in my life and my taste in books is impressive and amazing and everyone should understand this.
I don’t want to give away any identifying details, but the first book I was given to work on was a non-fiction piece aimed at an Irish/tourist readership, describing local attractions around the country. The writing wasn’t dazzling or anything, but looking back it was probably mostly OK. I had an idea of what an editor was theoretically supposed to do, i.e. get or drag the best out of the book and author, make sure there aren’t any factual mistakes or obvious stylistic errors, different books and styles will require a different editorial approach, that kind of thing.
I straight-up rewrote it. No marked suggestions, no track changes, just took the word doc and rewrote the book. Some of the original text must have remained, but not much. I was probably expecting the author to come back to me, hailing me as the next Max Perkins. Boy was I wrong.
A day after I sent the manuscript back, the author rang me up and chewed me out for sending back an unrecognisable version of a book he’d written. I know now that I totally had that coming, but at the time I was taken aback. Could he not see the favour I’d done for him? And on an editorial assistant’s salary? So I compared the documents to see how much was different and, man oh man, I groaned when I saw all that red. Then I was embarrassed. I knew pretty much instantly that I’d screwed up, like it was intuitive. I’d have been pissed off too.
It turned out fine in the end, but this gave me a hell of a lot more respect for authors and the work of others more generally – if you start monkeying around with something too much, you’re going to break it. And if it’s not yours to begin with that only makes it worse, which probably applies to most things in life. Ultimately it was an accelerated course in the Role of an Editor. Lesson 1 is: you are not the author, and you shouldn’t try to be, and you don’t always know best. So I turned what I was theoretically supposed to do as an editor into what I actually did as one.
I like to think I’ve gotten better at my job since then, cultivating a softer and more collaborative approach to working with authors, especially when it comes to fiction, where you’ve got to be extra sensitive. If something doesn’t read quite right, or if that plot point isn’t quite working, or if this character isn’t quite as developed as she or he should be – whatever – it’s better to just point it out and maybe offer some suggestions. An author is the book’s parent; I’m its friend. It’s a real privilege to have been able to work with some of the authors I’ve worked with. The key word there is ‘with’.
This is an extended version of a feature article that appeared in Totally Dublin 108 (September 2013). Illustrations are by Michelle Eismann.
