When your brain interferes with the writing process
John Dunning’s about to tour for his latest Cliff Janeway novel, but as he tells the Arizona Republic, writing it — and previous books — is tough going because he has Attention Deficit Disorder:
All his life he has suffered from attention-deficit disorder, which led
him to drop out of school in the 10th grade. His condition was
diagnosed only eight years ago, when his teenage daughter received her
diagnosis.
“When the doctor told us that it was a genetically loaded
disorder, everyone in the room turned and looked at me. That’s when I
knew.”
Dunning says his condition, which is characterized by racing
thoughts that jump from subject to subject, is severe enough that even
today he has trouble paying attention to anyone or anything long enough
to take in information. “I can go to someone’s house, be introduced,
then be taken to the back yard to see their prize-winning roses. But by
the time I get back in the house, I’ve forgotten why the heck I’m there
or who I’m talking to.”
Medication can help those suffering from ADD, but it’s off-limits
to Dunning because he has high blood pressure. But he manages to muddle
through — however slowly.
“It takes me about an hour to write a single paragraph, and then it’s usually a terrible paragraph,” he says.
“If you could see the first drafts of my books, they would scare
you to death because they look like they were written by the village
idiot. But when I start on the rewrites something happens. Still,
because of the ADD, it takes me at least twice as long to write a book
as it does anybody else.”
Focusing on a project for long periods of time is often critical to producing a finished work, and no doubt having ADD hinders Dunning in this pursuit. But his story is about an otherwise able-bodied man making the most of a condition he’s had all his life. Canadian mystery writer Howard Engel, however, is another story altogether, as I explain after the jump.
Engel is the author of the Benny Cooperman mysteries, which began with
1980’s THE SUICIDE MURDERS. He broke ground because it was pretty
unusual to have a Jewish, genial, somewhat squeamish PI working the
beat in the small town of Grantham (really St. Catharine’s), located just outside of Toronto. In
fact, it still is unusual. But with nine additional titles, including 2001’s
THE COOPERMAN VARIATIONS, the series’ popularity grew and attracted a
throng of fans. Engel helped to found the Crime Writers of Canada
organization in the mid-1980s and firmly established himself as one of
Canada’s most popular writers.
Then, in 2001, he suffered a mild stroke. But not just any stroke: this one resulted in a condition called alexia sine agraphia.
In other words, Engel retained the ability to write as well as he once
did; the problem was that he couldn’t read what he wrote — or anything
else, for that matter.
In April 2002 he spoke to the Toronto Star’s Steve Russell about coping with the then-new condition (link unavailable):
Award-winning mystery novelist Howard Engel
finds himself confronting a medical rather than a criminal challenge
these days as he undergoes the process of recovering from a stroke he
suffered last summer.
It began when Engel
awoke one morning in his Toronto home and found he was unable to read
the newspaper. “The print was all jumbled,” he recalls. “And I thought,
“Oh-oh, something’s up.”
Engel
subsequently spent four months convalescing at the Toronto
Rehabilitation Centre. Crucially for someone who works as a writer, one
of the stroke’s side-effects was that it made it difficult for him to
read.
Since his discharge from hospital,
the 70-year-old author meets regularly with therapists in a determined
drive to regain his health.
“It’s like
taking a step at a time,” he says. “Doing physical exercise, seeing how
you make out shopping, managing on the TTC, practising reading.
“No
question, the stroke has slowed me down. Everything looks different
after you’ve had one. Your perspective changes. More than anything, you
get caught up in the remedial structure of trying to get back in shape.
“Besides that, you start questioning the permanence of things. You get intimations of mortality.”
While rehab helped somewhat, the problem didn’t exactly disappear — and Engel wasn’t about to give up on writing. So what to do? The answer was to keep on with it. He would write, and then spend hours deciphering what he’d written with the help of his editor at Penguin Canada. Eventually, after much rewriting, the book was complete, and the result is the just-released MEMORY BOOK, the 11th installment in the Cooperman series.
Engel doesn’t stray far from his own history, and gives Benny a doozy of a conflict: he wakes up in a Toronto hospital, unsure of his surroundings and with curious memory gaps. He, too, is suffering from alexia sine agraphia, but in Cooperman’s case it’s even more debilitating because, as it turns out, the condition was caused by a blow to the head. Why was the Grantham-based detective in Toronto? He can’t remember. Why was he found in a dumpster next to a murdered professor at the University of Toronto? And who hired him and why? Though Benny spends most of his time as a patient, MEMORY BOOK is incredibly suspenseful because he must sift through his own mind, which doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it once did, in order to find out what happened — and solve a murder while he’s at it.
The Canadian Magazine Quill and Quire gave Engel’s latest effort a very good review which I have to agree with:
Memory Book has the feel of a drawing-room mystery since, aside
from one short excursion, Cooperman is confined to the hospital. His
good friend Anna Abraham helps him with some fieldwork, but otherwise
he works the phone (after he recalls just how to do that) and questions
those who come to him.
Engel does a masterful job of putting us
inside Benny’s confused head and letting us puzzle over the clues at
his pace. It’s occasionally claustrophobic in Benny’s woolly mind, but
it’s an intriguing perspective from which to solve a crime. And the
solution is satisfying and not easy to discern before Benny, with the
help of the police, reveals all at the end of the book.
It would be a satisfactory mystery on its own, but with Engel’s backstory, it’s almost amazing that this was even produced. Whether this is Engel’s final hurrah remains to be seen, but I’m glad to have read this effort — and now must hunt up the Cooperman backlist.