Abstract
Dyslexia needn't be a writer's block, says a journalist who has learned to take a few transposed letters in her stride
When I sat learning to type as a teenager, I never dreamed that my tendency to tap out “hlaf” and “thrid” would prepare me for a happy stint studying Middle English as a postgrad, where that kind of thing, known as metathesis, passes for normal. At the time – the manual-machine days of carbon sheets and Tippex – my mistypes were just a nuisance, a symptom of the mild dyslexia that an educational psychologist had pronounced I suffered from when I was dragged off to see him at the age of nine. He recommended I fight the problem by making the two sides of my brian … sorry, brain … work together by doing tasks requiring two hands: learning a musical instrument, building Airfix models. After five years of murdering Mozart and recreating the sinking of the Bismarck in grey plastic, I assumed I was probably cured.
Probably not. I still mostly type in Middle English, until a kindly bit of advanced software corrects the text for me, unasked. But I am not unhappy at this glitch, as I think my dyslexic tendencies overall may have an unexpected upside. Could those with dyslexia be differently wired in a good way?
I began to suspect this when I read those cheery articles about the genius level of many dyslexics – Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. Why wasn't dyslexia a barrier to their level of intellectual endeavour? They obviously didn't get stuck in their studies, desperate for special help – but why not? Was there something about the way a dyslexic brain works that is a wet nurse to inspiration?
That was where my (wholly unscientific) hunch that dyslexia might give its sufferers an inbuilt advantage, even the non-genius-level ones, began to look less mad. And oddly, it gained more traction when I started covering comedy for the Culture section of The Sunday Times and discovered that a number of great standups were dyslexic – the typical names trotted out were Eddie Izzard, Robin Williams, Billy Connolly, Jay Leno, Ruby Wax, John Bishop, Ross Noble. Did they represent the usual percentage of dyslexics in any sector of the population, or the opposite, an identifiable trend? When I looked more closely at the comedy these standups created, I thought perhaps it didn't matter that I couldn't answer that question. There's still something unique in the way they work.
What they can do is deploy the mechanisms of comedy in a turbocharged way. People who don't have dyslexia can be funny too, clearly. Strip down most good comic ideas and you will find some form of unholy mash-up of two different elements that wouldn't normally meet. Monty Python were masters of this, giving low-level hoodlums a vocabulary that could stretch to litotes and hyperbole, and pompous civil servants a silly walk. A works canteen isn't inherently funny; ditto the Death Star. But put them together, spin out the consequences, and you have the inspired sketch in which “Geoff” Vader tries to order penne all'arrabbiata from a jobsworth catering operative, one of Izzard's most popular routines.
But what Izzard, Connolly and Williams et al can do is churn this kind of thing out for hours on end. The effortless length of some of their shows (Connolly at one point was doing four-hour sets) has to signal something beyond the ordinary. It's as if they were born with a funny-making machine wired into their synapses that processes everything they feed into it and out it pops, off-kilter and hilarious. So even if they go off-piste and start improvising, the level of comedy they produce is the same.
Okay, so what does this have to do with journalism? I would have said, not that much really, until I encountered the late AA Gill, whose television reviews I edited for more than 20 years.
Gill had such a severe case of dyslexia that it rendered much of what he typed incomprehensible. The alphabet soup on his computer screen meant something to him, though, as he could apparently read it down the phone line to his copy taker of the day. He had lovely ladies in Leeds when he started out, who called him “duck”’ and “love” and – often hilariously wrongly – typed what they thought he had said. We sat puzzling over “my newt's livers of beef” until we read it out loud, fast. I realised how lucky we were to have this extra layer of defence against his raw copy when a desperate-looking man accosted me at a book launch: “You edit Adrian Gill every week!” he said, with the wide-eyed desperation of the Ancient Mariner's wedding guest. “How do you do it?” I was confused until he explained that he was the editor of Gill's fiction and received his copy without benefit of any sort of descrambler.
Gill never took notes, but had total recall of conversations, incidents, details – which may or may not have had something to do with his dyslexia. More importantly, he never wrote a boring sentence.
I realised why when I took a closer look: his copy was more like a series of pictograms (albeit expressed in words) than plain old prose. It hummed with imagery and life, not to mention humour. I never asked him about this but have to assume he thought in little pictures, which flashed into view effortlessly when he started forming what he wanted to say. He creamed off the images that worked and, even though he couldn't tell an adjective from an adverb, effortlessly stuck them together and crafted them into perfect metaphors.
No effort to come up with that zinger
So instead of saying, as he did in his last piece from the oncology ward, “My doctor specialises in lung cancer”, he latched onto the visual that his brian, sorry … conjured up, as if to order. You can deduce the steps his mind went through: the doctor was like a man fishing for something unseen in a dark stream … some anglers are really brilliant at it, making flies that snare a fish where others can't, as Gill had no doubt observed on his shooting expeditions in the Highlands … they were specialists, like the one treating him. The eventual sentence he arrived at was: “All he does is lung cancer. This is his river, tumours his trout.” And I bet it took him no time, or effort, at all to come up with that zinger.
The interesting thing about that last example is that it appeared in a piece that, for all its cocky comedy, was the most serious Gill ever wrote. It isn't just comedians who can turn their dyslexia into career gold. What they instinctively do is the basis, in fact, of a good prose style, the kind that draws readers in regardless of the subject matter. It allows the writer to paint a scene and characterise a speaker and the tone of a conversation, without resorting to cliché or platitudes: the choice of imagery will make it fresh and colourful, and the reader will experience it that way too. Gill wouldn't refer to the “xenophobic British”; he came up with “brass-bandy Brits” instead. Post-Brexit, we had “Munch-scream politics”; after his scan, he found he had “the full English” – tumours in a range of different organs – “an aggressive, nimble cat-burglar lung cancer that is rarely noticed till it has had kittens”.
Like a great standup, he did this week after week, always to the same high standard and fast (I once had to ask him for an extra 700 words and he dictated it to me within two hours, note-perfect).
I wish I thought there were hundreds more Gills out there to replace the treasurable one we lost. His gifts were rare: the pictograms, after all, came from his immense knowledge, born of an intense curiosity for everything around him, which he mugged up on, however laboriously, with relish – history, anthropology, classical music, food preparation, fine art, where to buy the best hats. It was all grist to the Gill mill. And not everybody has that kind of drive, or the ability to fuel and sustain it.
But what is so heartening about his career is that it was never impeded by his dyslexia; I would be prepared to bet that the opposite was true, that his differently wired brain was the source of his great gift. I would laugh at myself for saying that if I hadn't had something similar said to me recently by a children's writer with severe dyslexia, Sally Gardner, who couldn't read until she was 14. Yes, she confirmed, she thought in pictures too. She had always been attracted to the visual, went to art school and illustrated her own books. This tendency had definitely informed her writing style. In 2013, she won the Costa children's book award for the novel Maggot Moon.
She also underlined a significant problem that dyslexic writers face after the struggle to read and communicate: “I can only come away with half what I am paid, because the other half has to go to a copy taker – I can't type up my own work.” Serious dyslexia has no cure yet, only tactics and exercises to help limit the damage, but on a more practical level there are measures we can take. Perhaps if we want to get more Gills into the writing trade, we should not only encourage them to join, but should consider setting up volunteer squads of copy takers as midwives to their efforts.
