That Guy: Zen and the art of acquiring the write stuff

Opinion

Well, it has been a long time between drinks for this columnist, and I feel I should come right out and say that this "comeback" column is being written under duress as I have extremely tender testicles at the moment.

I am sure many readers have been wondering where I have been for the past four or five weeks, but before I answer that question I just want to apologise to Deborah Coddington, who has been left trying to keep our page rating single-handedly.

I understand Bill Ralston has made some contributions to the cause, but let's be honest, the obvious sexual tension between Deborah and myself is what the readers really pay to see.

I am writing this from Italy, because for the past five weeks I have been on a two-week writing course in a monastery run by a mysterious brotherhood of monks.

The editor sent me on this course because, while he feels I am probably the best columnist he has I'm probably the one who could benefit most from an intense grammar, syntax, spelling and deadline training course.

Much of the course involved the monks attempting to get us to find the writer deep within ourselves, so we can write more honestly and passionately.

For the most part this was done by sitting us down in chairs and walloping our testicles with knotted ropes, as seen in the first Daniel Craig Bond movie.

I am not sure if they got the idea from watching the movie, or whether the movie's writer attended this course himself at some stage, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter because it &*#$*@^ hurt.

Most of the writers on the course were highly successful: many have written for the likes of Time magazine, Newsweek and Hustler, but I was the only representative from New Zealand, and the only person to have a column published in both Penthouse and New Zealand Horse and Pony magazine. The fact that it was the same column makes it all the more impressive.

The monks taught us to forget our successes and to become a "struggling writer" once again by using some rather unorthodox methods, like breaking our fingers in an olive oil press and making us write everything backwards with a broken carpenter's pencil.

On week two we could use an old steel typewriter but we could only use our nose, as both hands were tied behind our back in preparation for another testicle flogging.The typewriter looked like it had come out of Leon Trotsky's office after the infamous ice pick incident; it was certainly of the right era, and never had I seen so many writers after completing their essays looking like they had just walked out of a cage fight.

Incidentally, that is more or less what we had to do next. I can tell you one thing: the best writers on paper don't necessarily make the best writers in a death match.

The monks for the most part were raging alcoholics who made their own red wine in the serene gardens of the monastery but, to be honest, it was terrible stuff so they got most of it from a bottle store conveniently located about a hundred metres down the road.

We were encouraged to drink non-stop for four days to see if we could write drunk like the great writers of old. This wasn't my best work and another reason I haven't submitted any columns over the past three or four weeks. In fact, one of my later columns seemed to be a blank page with vomit all over it. Even that looked like it was plagiarised from the person from Newsweek who was sitting beside me.

Anyway, it's great to be back, and as a better writer who is once again in touch with his tender side.