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Please forgive me if this posting takes you longer to read than usual. That'll be because I'm typing it very slowly.

The reason for that is that I'm only using one hand.

I'm not telling you this just to get a bit of sympathy, although quite frankly that would be nice. Rather, I thought I'd use this opportunity to share with you an opinion that just about everybody - including me - has voiced in order to cheer me up:

"Oh, well, you can write about it in your next book."

To be fair, not everyone has assumed it'll be the next one: only that the experience will be useful source material at some point. But it is intriguing, this general assumption that when a bad thing happens to me I'm likely to write about it.

Equally intriguing, by the way, is that nobody's mentioned money. There's no sense of, "Shame you broke your wrist, but you'll get a few quid out of it when you put it in a story." The feeling seems to be that the writing itself will be the silver lining, a compensation in its own right.

I don't know if I will ever write about this sort of injury in a story; but it's noteworthy that - while it has been and continues to be painful and inconvenient - more than anything, I've found it interesting. It's all an experience: the moment of sharp, sudden, numbingly wrong pain; the first sight of the swollen question-mark of my once exclamation-straight wrist; the jarring pangs as every speed-bump takes me ruthlessly closer to hospital; the strange blurring of the world as the morphine takes effect; the peculiar internal disassociation as the doctor and orderly take hold of an end each of my twisted forearm and pull it back into shape; the hot rush of blood back into my veins after the bier block... I've lived it all, but I've also noticed it all, and noticed it in a way I don't think I would have done, once upon a time before my working life was taken up with stories.

So perhaps Anne Rooney was right, when she said in Saturday's entry that "Writing is our way of making sense of the world" - or perhaps writing teaches us to make sense of the world. Whatever the truth of it, I'm going to leave you with a question posed to me in sympathy on Sunday evening, by the lovely Katie Fforde:

How do people who don't write deal with it, when terrible things happen to them?

John's website is at www.visitingauthor.com

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A-Level English was a long time ago, and I don’t remember an awful lot of what was said in class about our set texts. I remember our completely missing a very rude bit in Hamlet - it only dawned on me some years later that Shakespeare had smuggled an actual naughty sweary word into an exchange between the prince and Ophelia - and I recall several conversations about A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides being possibly the most boring thing any of us, including our teacher, had ever read. I also remember our wondering how Johnson had acquired such a reputation as a great wit when he clearly wasn’t very funny at all:

Johnson: I’ve got the best bed!
Boswell: If you’ve got the best bed, you must admit that I’ve got the best bedposts!
Johnson: Well, if you have the best posts, we shall have you tied to one of them and whipped!

Brought the house down in 1773, apparently. Maybe it was all in the delivery.

Anyway, one throwaway remark which has stuck in my head was our teacher’s explanation of why Joyce, in Dubliners, had included in his character description of Mr James Duffy, protagonist of A Painful Case, the following line:

“He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.”

Miss’s explanation for this was that it was to round out and press home the fact that Mr Duffy was a bit of a weirdo. I mean, it’s clearly a very bizarre practice. What kind of a strange potato must he have been to do that sort of thing?

I remember keeping my mouth firmly closed and looking down at the desk, not wanting to catch her eye or draw attention to myself, because there in my head was burning the thought: “I do that!”

Now, I was well aware that I was a bit of a weirdo, or at least that I’d never quite fitted in at my school. Still, this particular foible didn’t really seem to me to be such a strange habit - certainly not strange enough to be included in a character sketch simply to highlight weirdness. But this was clearly the Official Explanation, and thus all the explanation I was going to get. And so - as with Hamlet and his smuggled sweary - for me it would be years before any further light was shed on this particular issue.

It was only a year or two back, during an exchange on the Scattered Authors’ Society’s discussion group, that I realised: this is actually quite normal. At least, from what others were saying, it seems to be normal among published authors, and so - I assume - it’s probably quite normal among unpublished authors, and quite possibly among people who have never written a book and have no particular desire to. Quite a few of us seem to have little writers sitting in our heads who take details of not just our own lives but also things we observe or hear about, and - in the words of one of Jordan’s managers - write it into book words. Having said that, I don’t often do the full sentences in my head any more. Descriptive words and clauses, yes, and other sentence fragments, but gone - for the most part - are the full sentences containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense; and I think the reason I don’t compose entire sentences internally is that now I compose them onscreen, and not in isolation but as part of something.

Which brings me back to a thought I had not long after our teacher told us that Joyce had given Mr Duffy this habit to show what a weirdo he was, which was: how did Joyce know that some people do this, unless it was something he did - or had done - himself?

Perhaps in Mr James Duffy, Mr James Joyce had put something of his own character. Or perhaps what was being highlighted was not Mr Duffy’s oddness, but the wastedness of his life: here was a man with a head full of sentences, who never wrote them down - and who never moved beyond sentences about himself.

PS - I'm off to London in a few minutes; I'll be running in this year's London Marathon on Sunday. If you're going to watch, do keep a look out for me and cheer me on - I'll be wearing a green Stroud vest with a red and a blue stripe.

And if anyone would like to sponsor me, you can go to http://www.justgiving.com/johndougherty.

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