Chapter 2. My Dad Was a Ponce
1. What I Want.
I want to write a book.
Working title: 12-words & 8-stations.
A how-to-create book.
How to create easily using my techniques 12-words, and 8-stations. First we are gonna master 12-words. It gives you profound written material in 15 minutes.
2. Strategy
Each chapter of my book will follow the same formula.
What I Want
Strategy
Personal
Craft
Eureka
Muscle Memory
My Discovery
Your Discovery
3. Personal
This week, I am using the 12-words technique.
Title. My Dad Was a Ponce
Object: A ring.
12 associations:
Fur coat
Platform shoes
The Pope
The Pope's chair
The Pope’s ring
Kiss the ring
His absolution
Stolen money
Pension
Bedroom fireplace
The spider blanket
Jumping up and down on the bed
I must use my object. And all 12 association. Under the title.
My Dad Was a Ponce
My dad was a ponce. Not the kind who wears platforms and has a fur coat draped on his shoulders. He is stealthier than that. He smokes a pipe. Sits in his chair. In the house he owns. She doesn’t own it. We don’t own it. He sends £5 postal orders to his kids in Jamaica. A lot of money in the 60s and 70s — peoples’ rents are £5. She takes it to the post office. No wonder she hates herself. No wonder she drinks. Her Guinness is hidden below the sink in the blue painted cupboard. That he owns. Like he owns the bedroom with the cute black fireplace that she waits for his absolution to join him in. The rest of the time she sleeps downstairs in the front room with us. Beneath the spider blanket. The tenant. He has the mortgage. She is his tenant with the rent book. That she fills out cos he can’t read. How stealthy do you have to be to pull the strings of a puppet that can tell you anything. Except she won’t. She loves him. She must have told him how to do the swindle when her husband dies, the father of her four kids. The kids she leaves. She substitutes us for her dead husband's four kids. Now there is five. He’s in the ground, the husband who fell under the back end of the bus. They're sounding more like Rose and Fred West. Except he sits in his chair, the pope. Like Diego Velázquez's portrait of Innocent X. You have to kiss his ring. As he sits in his throne of stolen money. The dead man’s pension. He is sat in his papal chair the day I come home. Ivan is dead. Pauline’s friends have broken our flat door down and stolen the sheets. Stripped the bed. They’ve painted enormous on the wall. Bitch. I think it is in paint. The flat is derelict. The light is gone out. I leave. What choice do I have? He is sat in his papal chair. There is still no absolution. I go through to the kitchen. ‘Mum…Mum.’ She will hug me like this once again when she is in a care home, her brain eaten with what he gives her once she’s finished jumping up and down on his bed — in his bedroom with the cute black fireplace — so happy to see him. And he becomes Francis Bacon’s The Study of a Head.
Just over a month ago, 03.11.25, 49 years after Ivan dies 31.10.76, I spend £750 on linen sheets. Fitted. Flat. Pillowcases. Berry. Rhubarb. Botanical Green. When they arrive, I flick through the Rolodex of my homes. It is true. None of them have a decorated bedroom. They are all derelict. This will be my first.
4. Craft
2001, Paul Collins arrives at our door in his usual hyper fashion. There is usually something terrible or something wonderful happening to him. Today it is wonderful. Similar to when he finds NLP. Similar to when he is dealing in corruption. Similar to when he needs a Half-Caste Island. Until we tell him how many mad mixed-race he'll be stuck with — then chase him up the entry beating him with the dying rubber plant I am throwing out. My front-facing living-room is gorgeous. I study interior design, almost as much as writing. My house, mine and Tom's, is the meeting place for big ideas. We swap them all day while smoking weed. I only work part-time so I can write.
Mind-mapping. Pictorial brainstorming. You have to hand it to Paul, he is fucking phenomenal at retaining information. And showing you how. It's him who teaches me to play chess and reach 2nd place in the prison league. He doesn't come back for months the first time I beat him.
Mind-mapping. We practise together. He leaves his book. I remove words and brainstorm only in pictures. That immediately begin to talk to each other.
My first ever mind-map.
Mind-mapping becomes the lane of address books on the 5th floor.
I mind-map every single sentence of Death of a Salesman to see how Arthur Miller does it. I uncover the entire play travels on objects. I'm having this, cos I've already uncovered the object phenomena in 12-words. The clincher is Biff, Wiley's son, hates his dad cos he sees him give his fancy woman new stockings while his mum, Linda, darn hers.
Mind-mapping charts the progress of the dominant objects.
Mind-mapping each sentence, charting each dominant object, constructing a dictionary of my symbols takes around 3 months. Morning, noon and night. If I don't I'll have to keep going back to work in the fucking post office all my life.
5. Eureka
Contact Theatre has their eye on me, for a while. Well more than that. I am their Writer in Residence. I teach Contact Young Playwrights. Using 12-words, I get them to write amazing profound playlets. Mind-mapping teaches me and them the next scene is travelling on the same objects.
Supernova-eureka — every morning my dad undoes his bottle of whiskey. Pours some in a cap. Pours the capful on his head. Rubs it in. No one can tell me he doesn't. Yes, he fucking does. And, boy, she loves to pour herself a tumbler of his precious elixir if she is gonna kick up a proper fucking stink. And there it is — What's in the Cat is born.
I write it in the action I recall. Travelling on the backs of objects — infused with hyper-subtext. I translate into dialogue. Its a fucking classic.
6. Muscle Memory
I want you write down the first object – you have to be able to touch it — the first object you see when I say, 'Your Dad Was/Is ...'
Example when I say my dad was a ponce: I see a huge, ponce's ring.
List 1 — 12.
12 words I associate with a ponce's ring.
Fur coat
Platform shoes
The Pope
Etc...
Your title is: My Dad Was/Is a ... Fill in the blank. You have 15 minutes to write. You must use your title, your object, and your 12 associations. Strike them off the list when they are used. Type it up. Date it. Log it in your file.
7. My Discoveries
I'm shocked at the negative light in which I see my dad today. I have always loved him and preferred him to my mum.
Have I been stuck in mine and Ivan's derelict bedroom all these years?
Or have I wandered a series of underworld hells?
I doubt this healing would occur without participating in the process of MY MUM IS WHITE.
Including seeing beyond the idealised version of my dad.
Read the blurb on the back of What's in the Cat, I am in total denial that I aborted that baby.
My baby is the ghost.
The 8-station mind-map that helps me discover this.
8. Your Discovery
· What have you discovered?
· Journal about it.
· Complete 3 pages — every day. Okay, I let myself off on Saturdays.
· Before I do the mind-map or write the chapter I journal my 3 pages. It's like warming-up so your muscles are limber and flex easily.