If I Were A Real Writer...

... I'd be excited about fields.

Writers get fierce excited about fields. Irish writers do anyway, in my experience at least. Whole books are written about fields, about the events that happen in fields and about the fields themselves.

Manchán Magan, the travel writer and native Irish speaker, became so excited about fields that he wrote a book called Thirty-Two Words for Field, about the dozens of words in the Irish language for fields. An impressive achievement.

But I don't get it.

I can't think of anything to say about fields except that they're damp and green, and sometimes have animals in them. I wonder if this is because I'm always having to watch where I'm going in a field, due to my wonky eyes. It’s hard to take in the beauty of a field when you're trying to avoid lumps and bumps, or limbo-ing under a fence.

Photo by Hanna May on Unsplash

Here’s a picture of a field with lots of scrubby grass, and the face of an animal is poking through the grass.

So, I don't share in this obsession with fields. It's not just the look of the fields people rhapsodise about, but the endless opportunities for play they offer. Or did offer, pre health and safety, pre GDPR, pre mass media. Collections of memoir and short stories abound with tales of idyllic hours of play in fields, particularly ones with spreading trees in the corners.

I don't buy the idea that these people spent fifteen hours a day in fields and never got bored. Nowadays, this would be called child neglect. I reckon they only stayed in the fields because there was nothing to watch on telly.

Well, apart from a programme called Daithi Lacha (David the Duck for non-Irish speakers,) which I'm told principally consisted of a voiceover intoning, 'Aililiu, arsa Daithi Lacha,' or 'Alleluia, said David the Duck.' I'd run for the fields if I were stuck with that.

The poet Dylan Thomas didn't like nature at all. He didn't even like writing about the sea, even though he lived near it – that's hardcore. He brought the attention to detail of a nature writer to indoor settings. I like to do that too.

I like to write about rooms that hold important conversations within their walls. And I can wax lyrical about plates of food, the sound of a voice, unexpected splashes of green on a city street.

I'm going to take it then that I am a real writer, even if I don't get excited about fields. Because I am still excited by the unexpected within everyday settings. And I believe my role as a writer is to bring those unexpected details to readers.