How Comic Books can teach Dyslexics to Read

 By Jay Stringer. 

An earlier version of this article was published several years ago at Panels.Net, a now defunct comic book website. 

I'm often asked to explain dyslexia. The trouble is, I really can't. It's not that I don't know how my brain works. It's that I don't know how your brain works. Dear reader. Dear neurotypical reader. If I can figure out what you see when you try and read things, and the places in your brain that you store information, then maybe, maybe, I can start to explain how my brain is different. 

I often wonder about colour blindness. How was it discovered? Obviously, now we know it's a thing. And it has symptoms. And people can be diagnosed, and there's a wealth of research into it. But back before we knew it was a thing, how did we find out it was a thing? Two people looking at the same colour, the assumed same point of reference, how did they each realise they were seeing two different things? How did person A come to realise they were seeing something different in 'red' (for example) to person B? What did that conversation look like? 

You can lose whole hours in the day trying to figure out how the inside of your head works, and whole days trying to figure out if someone else's head works the same way. (Whatever you do, don't become aware RIGHT NOW of your tongue. It's just sitting there in your mouth doing nothing. No, now you made it move. Oh god, it moves. And it's just there....all the time. What the hell? Creepy.) 

What I can tell you is what dyslexia isn't. It's not about spelling. Not really. That's a symptom. Dyslexia is about the way my brain processes information. Both on the way in and the way out. And about where I file that information when I'm not using it. I have amazing long-term memory. And terrible working memory. What's working memory? It's loosely similar to RAM on a computer. The steps I need to go through to make a cup of tea are stored in my long-term memory, but when I'm actually in the middle of making one, which step I'm on in that process is stored actively in my working memory. And mine is....goofy. Allied to that, colours have frequencies. On the screen you're looking at right now, you can adjust the brightness and contrast to make an easier reading experience. Our eyes and brains are doing that naturally all the time, because every colour we look at has a frequency. Some higher, some lower. Dyslexics are often incredibly sensitive to some of those frequencies, especially to white. White can overpower us, and that's a large part of why we can lose words on a page. Dyslexics also often have colours that can neutralise the effect, and getting glasses with lenses adjusted to the right tint can make reading a lot easier. (My colours are red, yellow, and some greens.)

I can't tell my left from my right. (I actually can now, mostly, at forty years of age. Through muscle memory. Through learning a few cheats over the years. But there's a delay of a few seconds while my brain accesses the memory.) I struggle to count money because it's a logical sequence and utilises my working memory. I can't say the alphabet all the way through. I can't say the months of the year backwards. And yes, I have varying degrees of difficulty with reading and writing. 

I’m going to ask you to do a strange thing. Right now. I’m going to ask you to stop reading this piece. Just for a few seconds. I’d like you to stop reading, and think about how much you actually read each day. Think about road signs. Think about labels on food packaging. Think about the instructions on whether the door you are approaching needs you to push or pull. Think about walking into the shop for household supplies, and all the little bits of reading you do as you walk around filling your trolley. Now think about living the same life, going about the same routines, without being able to read, or with reading being extremely difficult. How would that affect you? It would be pretty hard, right?

The world simply isn’t designed for people who struggle to read, and they get left behind in small ways each and every day. One of the main reasons I'm here today, writing this piece, is because comic books pulled me out. Comic books taught me to read. Comic books gave me the basic building blocks I needed to work around the simple things my brain just couldn't seem to do. 

Most of this is with the benefit of hindsight, of course. A dyslexic child doesn’t know they are dyslexic. At the time I thought nothing of the afternoons I would spend separated from the class, reading very difficult books about a dog and a ball and a boy. My grandfather would spend hours with me after school, trying to teach me the difference between a verb, an adverb and a noun.

I still probably don’t know what they are, but it doesn’t matter. None of the rules of grammar or spelling are essential in learning to read. They become guides later on, a road map for staying on the right course, but they are not where the journey needs to start.

What’s needed is clarity and context. Given those two things we can learn anything, from basic reading to advanced nuclear physics. But we also need to think about the way we process information, about how we know where to store things in our memory and about what keeps us moving forward, adding to what we know.

Let’s boil this down to Story, Plot and Narrative.

Story.
Story is the what. A collection of events. You do this, then you do that, then you eat a dinner, then you do something else, then we get to the end. It’s the basic data of anything that we learn. Okay, here’s a problem for us straight away; dyslexics can’t really do order. We don’t do logical progression. Give us a whole bunch of data, and on it’s way into our heads it scatters like a pack of playing cards thrown across a room.

Plot.
Plot is when. This is the road map to move through the story. It tells us when to climb and when to rest, when to turn and when to hold. For learning, this is the guide that tells us when to take on information and where to store it. Dyslexics have no problem taking on information. We’re taking it in all the time. The problem is storing it. Where did we leave that thing that we needed? How to we find it again? How is it relevant to what we’re doing?

Narrative.
This is how and why. Narrative takes story and plot and fleshes them out with context and motive. You do this, which then leads to that because of the other, then you eat because you’re hungry and haven’t had any food since whenever, and you like the taste of the bread. Then you do that thing that you’ve been doing every day for twenty years, driven by the memory of something, then we get to the end and you lay down for a well-earned rest.

We all combine information in different ways, and at different speeds. Some can add story and plot together in a mathematical equation that leads to narrative. Dyslexics like myself can’t learn anything without a narrative to hold on to. Why am I being given this information? What does it do? What is it relevant to? What similar thing should I store it next to in my head?

The books I was being given to read at school were no help. Oh, hey, there’s a picture of a dog. And a squiggle next to it that probably means “dog.” So what? Nothing’s happening here, there’s no information for me to file away, and if I do store it, where do I put it? What is it relevant to? And that’s a ball. Nice. But the ball is not moving, I’m bored.

There is a simple thing you could do for all children as they learn to read, but for a dyslexic it could be life changing; put a comic in their hands.

Comics as a medium rely on clarity and context. They are pictures and words being used in small panels to tell a story. Essentially they are hieroglyphs. They are a form of communication older than any of these words I'm typing here. Older than the grammar we are taught in schools. Almost as old as the oral traditions we've built everything on. 

The real art of telling a story in a comic is in giving the illusion of movement between the panels. Things happen, your eye moves from one image to the next and your brain builds a structure to carry the information. 

It’s the perfect medium for learning to read.

Staring at a page of prose, even now as an adult, can be a challenge. The words are just black marks on a page. They just sit there. They don’t do anything unless they connect with the right memory, the right piece of data in your head, to give them some purpose.

Films, on the other hand, do too much. They give you everything. All the movement, all the talking, all the emotion. Watching a film is essentially a passive process for your brain.

Take a look at this example, from Amazing Spider-Man #33, with art by Steve Ditko and words by Stan Lee:

This is something that comics can do better than any other medium. Ignore the words for just a moment and look at the images. In fact, imagine there were no words. Would you still understand the story? Absolutely, you would. Steve Ditko has given you a road map. Look at both the pictures and the panel construction. There is movement. There is narrative progression. The panels start as small, compact spaces, with Spidey as a tiny little figure underneath the machinery. It’s claustrophobic. It’s hopeless. Look then at the third and fourth panel. As he pushes upwards, so the panels push, they stretch. Then again with the fifth and sixth panels. They create the sense of movement, and Spidey’s growing size within each frame tells us about his own strength and confidence. There is a lot of heavy lifting going on (pun very much intended) between Steve Ditko’s pen and our brains. The words become an added extra.

You don’t need to be dyslexic to appreciate that example, of course. It’s one of the purest examples of the language of comics, and readers have been marvelling over the page for decades. It would be difficult to create that sense of movement, that primal understanding of narrative, with prose. A film could tell the same story, (And Spider-Man: Homecoming did) but then the screen would be doing all the work. 

What happens here is that you do the work. Your brain picks up on the visual cues left by Ditko, and fills in the gaps. This is why I use it as an example for what dyslexics can gain from reading comics. A comic book trains your brain. It works the right muscles and, if you’re struggling, they can teach you to read. 

You see images for context, you see the words that go with them, and your mind learns to fill in the blanks. You learn to build the narrative as you go. As a child, I suddenly got it. I had a structure, a guide for processing the information I was taking in, and where to store it. I had a reason to keep moving through the pages.

If you know someone who is a struggling reader, give them a comic. Give them the best comic in your collection. You might change their life.

Jay's new mystery thriller Don't Tell a Soul is released July 26th. Available wherever books are sold. There's a Dyslexic Reader Edition - a paperback formatted for dyslexic readers- available with the ISBN 978-1-9168923-2-3.

Epub Quick Links: Apple. Amazon US. Amazon UK. 

The Boy With The X-Ray Specs

By Jay Stringer

I made a point of writing about dyslexia on here last year. It's been interesting lately to have a father contacting me to ask for advice about his young daughter, and for me to be in a position to try and give someone the kind of road map that I never had. So, whilst I'll never feel qualified to be an expert in anything, I decided to hold to my decision to talk about this issue more often, and to give advice when I can.

I'd been hearing for a few years now about colorimetry. It seemed that wearing tinted glasses could help dyslexics to read. I dismissed it every time it came up. I mean, I'd always liked wearing sunglasses, and none of them had made me any better at reading, right? But the more I listened, the more it made sense. My own experience told me that a lot of my problems came when the page turned into something like a magic eye puzzle; the black print on a white page would turn into black shapes fighting with white shapes, and often the white was winning. It's not just with white, but that's the biggest problem. The tint would reduce this and add definition to the shapes, making the black sit still and behave as printed words.

There was no universal fix-all tint. It seemed that everyone had their own, and that they could change over time. I started to play around. I began changing the settings on my computer at work and home, and quickly found that some colours did make an instant difference.

After a year of fiddling around with the local dyslexia charity, and trying to get in contact with specialists who would carry out the tests for free, I found out which high-street optician would do it and booked in with them. It meant paying -and it was one of the pricier high-street stores- but I figured this was one test worth taking. Early on in the test - a fun experience that basically involved sticking my head in a metal box and reading a lot- I figured out how to cheat it. It would have been simple to give the right answers to lead to a really cool looking colour, one that I wouldn't feel like an idiot wearing. But I'm old enough now to know that kind of cheating is pointless.

The test was leading us toward some very bold colours; yellow was working best for me, and both red and blue showed good results. From there, my optician did me the favour of trying to find the least obtrusive combinations of colours that would work, to try and soften the tint of my glasses. The end result is a kind of amber.

I could try and get away with only wearing them when I'm sat at a computer or reading a book. And, when I have more money, I may well get a 'normal' pair for the slight prescription that I now need (as dyslexia wasn't the only eye test I'd been putting off for too long.) But people take for granted the amount of reading they do in day to day life. Anyone who's lived with me -and especially my long suffering wife- will attest to the lengths I go to not to show how much I can struggle sometimes when reading labels in the supermarket, or trying to read maps in a hurry, or any of the small things people do without thinking. So, whilst I may get that 'normal' pair of glasses at some point, I'm going to have to get used to wearing the tinted ones so I may as well force myself to do that first.

That 'getting used to' thing is the downside. I guess in some children you could convince them they were getting to wear super cool sunglasses, but for a great many others they will be getting one more thing to be self conscious about. For me, as a thirty-something, wearing glasses in and of itself is just another thing to add to the list of new problems. Past a certain age you accept these things, along with not being able to fit into that jacket you loved so much, or checking your hair line in the shower. Maybe it's the creaks in your knees when you bend down. Whatever. But even with this, the tint is proving a challenge. For the first couple of days I couldn't help but feel like an idiot, especially since I was wearing glasses that looked suspiciously like something Bono might be pictured with, and had to deal with a lot of jokes from work colleagues who wanted to decide which pretentious rock star I was copying.

(None of them would have guessed Paul Westerberg)

So; Tinted glasses for dyslexics. It's a challenge. It's tough for adults to get used to, and probably even more difficult for children. But all that fades away the first time you sit down and read a book and realise that you're simply reading the fuck out of that page. No going over the same line 33 times, no looking away then looking back in the hope the words have got bored of moving. I imagine my tint will change over time. My next prescription will likely be one of the much bolder colours that we worked hard to dodge this time, but by that point I won't care. So, if you know someone who's struggling, whatever their age, find out which opticians near you can do the colorimetry test and jump in with both feet.

What was I reading, I hear you ask? Why, Tumblin' Dice by John McFetridge, of course. You don;t need coloured glasses to enjoy the hell out of McFet's writing, you just need taste.

I Aint Dyin' To Offend you, I Got A Dyslexic Heart

By Jay Stringer

Hey, Grammar sucks, right? No, okay, it doesn't.

Dave posted last week a very well thought out piece about the teaching of grammar. Sandra posted her own views yesterday. It's fair to say I agree totally with Dave, but I understand where Sandra is coming from.

Dave's post was really talking about teaching. It wasn't about the professional writer. And the other thing is that neither Dave, nor myself, are saying that Grammar isn't important. We're just questioning the running order of those priorities.

My point of view is an argument I need to make in two parts. First I need to say why I hold those opinions, then I need to tell you why that qualifying statement doesn't matter.

I'm dyslexic. It's only been in the past year that I've stopped making excuses for myself, and hiding issues away. Although i've always been willing to tell people, its only recently that i've started writing about the effects, or showing the ways that i struggle. My wife might be used to filling in my forms, reading directions, and checking the labels in shops, but i'm no longer letting people "at the desk job," think that I'm stupid simply because my brain handles information in another way.

The more active i've become in talking about it, the more i'm noticing there seems to be a war on dyslexia, too. Many educational authorities still don't recognise it. Many people who are meant to be teaching these people are doing so without a basic understanding of it. There are many famous people from the past who have been identified as dyslexic, or of carrying traits that would indicate it's presence, and there are now increasingly blogs, websites and journals that seek to disprove this. I've had someone look me in the eye and offer to show me studies that prove dyslexia doesn't exist. I wonder if these same people would stand in front of a blind man and offer to show him proof that he can see. So I must warn you, it's an issue I'll be getting louder on in future.

Clearly my thoughts on this issue can't help but be coloured by my perspective. I come at issues of the written word with something of an outsiders point of view. However, that doesn't matter. That shouldn't matter. The fact that my views have been informed by this don't impact the views themselves. I'll clarify what I mean by that later on.

It goes without saying, in my opinion, that anybody working at a craft should learn the basics of that craft. The examples given previously in this discussion allude to this. Yes, we want a carpenter or a builder to know the basics before they build us a chair or a house. Yes we want a pilot to have take lessons before flying our plane.

But what are the basic issues of their craft or job? I don't care if the pilot knows the accepted order to press buttons in, as long as he knows how to get the plane up, fly it, and land it safely. He may well be fudging a few things, like everybody at every workplace ever does. He may miss out some protocol, or switch on the flux capacitor before engaging the doohickey, and I couldn't give a toss. I don't care if the carpenter knows how to use a spirit level, or how to correctly mark his angles or cut his joints. I just care that he can build a seat.

Look at us. what percentage of readers actually care what aspects go into the craft of writing? Do they look at how we judge when to describe the room, or what we think of writers block? No, they want to read a good story. And none of us wants to see how sausages are made.

My favourite band in all the world are The Replacements. When Paul was playing with Bobby Stinson, he was playing with a guitarist who couldn't explain musical theory to you, and wouldn't know to point out a scale on the fret, but let him loose and he could spit fire with that guitar. Twenty years later Paul could have his pick of expert session musicians, but can any of them tell a story?

Because that's the thing. Thats the basic fundamental. It's story. It's point. It's message. Everything that comes afterwards is the dressing and presentation.

And there are tools out there for adult writers. I have people who can help polish my stuff. We have steps we can take to present ourselves as professionally as we can, and those are steps that we absolutely have to take. The professional, semi-professional or aspiring writer has to take their work seriously. No question.

But there are deeper issues here.

You want confessions? Okay. Many of the things that have come up during this past week, issues of verbs, adverbs, nouns.....none of these mean anything to me. I'm 30 years old, and I know how to tell you a story, but i'm not going to be able to explain to you what any of those terms mean. I'm not going to be able to hold a conversation on how many words should be in a sentence, or when you should and shouldn't use quotation marks. Even at the thought of trying, i'm wondering where the nearest fire escape is.

There are people around me who know these things. My wife is a journalist. My agent is very patient and can explain to me various elements of grammar. But I think they both agree I can tell a story.

To go back to Dave's point, it is vital that we engage the kids first. Encourage them to join the topic, to give ideas, and to put those ideas down in writing. Everything else can wait. Everything else is just the rest of us forcing rules onto them.

Just this past week, on one of the message boards I'm known to check out, I saw a teenager join in a conversation. This was someone who was clearly not used to writing in this way, clearly not used to joining in a conversation and expressing thoughts in written form. And the first reply he got was asking if he was kindergarten because some of what he wrote was in text speak.

Way to engage. Way to encourage.

And you know what? I've been that kid. Sometimes I still am.

I would rather read a novel in text speak that had something to say, than a book written in perfect modern prose that failed to express a single interesting idea. And I would rather engage that kid who sits down to join in than throw a rule book at him and drive him away.

The figures in adult illiteracy are astounding. A commission in 1998 showed that 7 million adults in England alone are functionally illiterate. Google tells me that 37 million in the U.S. suffer the same way.

Now, we can't generalise as to what is affecting all of those people. We don't know their circumstances, we don't know their poverty level or their access to education. But I have worked with adults who struggle to read and write, hell, I'm one of them, and I can say we need to engage people first.

At junior school I couldn't pass a spelling or grammar test to save my life. Teachers would work on this with me. They would give me the letters all cut out and ask me to rearrange them, they would give me books that explained what a noun was, or what an adverb was. They would talk to me, and eventually tell my parents that I was lazy, or that I didn't apply myself. I spent time outside some of these classes, eventually, looking at picture books, because if I didn't fit their lesson plan then I didn't fit the lesson. Later, at high school, the other people in my class could double my scores at S.P.A.G but they couldn't touch me on comprehension. Also worth noting that at high school I was pulled to one side and offered the chance to withdraw from certain subjects by the head teacher, because I was lazy and unfocused, and they had exam scores to worry about. 20 years later, I'm the one who's on here now selling you my fiction and arguing my points.

Because I got story. I'd had story my whole life. Both my grandfather and my mother would spend hours sitting with me and telling me stories, engaging me with narrative. They would encourage me to tell them stories, and I would talk, and I began to write, and I would draw them comic books.

There are people out there in the crime community, like Allan Guthrie and Charles Ardai, who were good enough to look through early work of mine, work that didn't fit an acceptable standard of grammar or formatting, and to encourage me.

Narrative is what we pin things on. It's how our brain stores information, how it files our memory as we go along. Ideas are what make us pick up the pen, or open the laptop. Ideas are what make us run around the room as a child pretending to be an aeroplane.

We've all seen films that are technically brilliant, but where it's clear the filmmaker or the writer had nothing to say, or didn't know what they wanted to say. I'm sure we've read many many books that have perfect grammar, but not a single moment of life.

Because priorities can be off. The wrong thing can be encouraged. Format can win over content, and rules can win over imagination. I've seen it, I've lived it.

But as I said up at the top, my dyslexia isn't the point. If and when I throw it into conversations like this, then i'll get, "well, in your case..." or "of course, if there is a disability." It's a good thing to throw in to get people thinking differently, but it's also something that takes the conversation down a blind alley.

I'm not saying that kids with dyslexia should be exempt from the grammar police. I'm saying there is a problem with the grammar police. For all kids, and adults, who are looking to learn to read and write, the rulebook should be something that comes later. Get them engaged. Get them involved. Get them confident enough to express themselves. Get them to enjoy expressing themselves. Get them to the point that they care about clarity, and everything else, including the rulebook, will follow from there. We need to not make grammar into a song and dance. Not get it to the point when people -as I have done- can stare at a page panicking over whether or not the work fits the rules, or whether I'll look stupid.

On the rare occasions that crazy people come to me asking for advice on a piece of writing, or struggling to get something down, I only have one real question for them, "what are you trying to say?" Talking to Dave at the weekend recording an interview for his next release, I hit a wall in how to phrase a question and he did pretty much the same thing, "what are you trying to get to?"

That's what matters, and that is really the only rule. Elmore Leonard had ten of them, and he's a better writer than me, but I only really have one.

Clarity.

Get clarity. Get to what you want to say. Figure that out, and then figure out the clearest way to say it. If you do that, then chances are everything else will take care of itself.

.........

What's the point in me coming all this way without giving a few tips to people who have the same panics as myself, people intimidated by grammar. I have a few things that I keep in mind when i'm writing, and they help me find that clarity that I crave.

1. Forget that it's writing.Think of the language as it was meant to be, verbal and flowing. Think of what you want to say, and the clearest way to say it, then right it down.

2. Any time you want to pause or take a breath, thats when to throw in some punctuation.

3. It's worth reading back through your work in reverse order, a section or paragraph at a time. If it's seems clear backwards, then chances are you've structured it well enough.

.........

For the whovians out there, or just general podcast fans, i've take up a guest spot on the Fuzzy Typewriter podcast to talk about the new series of Doctor Who. I filled in a little of my history of the show in last weeks episode, and i'll be back in this weeks to talk about episode 6.2, Day Of the Moon. Chances are the show will already be available by the time this post goes up.

Bored Of Edukation

By Jay Stringer

After yesterdays great post from the Weddle, I was tempted to change my plan. I thought maybe I should make you all jealous of how I spent my weekend, but I realised that lying in bed and shouting at the passing seagulls is not a very glamorous existence.

So, back to plan A.

Over on my own site I've been running a few pieces on living with dyslexia. Being such a big comic book geek, I like the occasional crossover, so I'm finishing the series here at DSD. In the first two entries I talked about some of the every-day problems that I can encounter, as well as a few early indicators to look out for in a child. Today I want to look more about the positive side.

I wouldn't trade it for the world.

At the end of my last piece I said that the only job I've found so far that suits the way my brain works is to be a writer. First I want to expand that a little bit; it's being a story teller. When I was a film student there were a great many things I sucked at. I couldn't direct my way out of a paper bag, my acting was appalling, and my time-keeping was non-existent. The one thing I did really well was editing. I could sit in that booth and piece together a story from raw footage quicker -and at the time I liked to think- better than anyone else. Moving all of those pieces of the story around on the screen, cutting, stretching, stealing. Remembering two lines of dialogue that we had in one piece of footage that would fix the problem with had with a scene five minutes further on, editing the ending so that I knew what the beginning had to be like. These were all things that just felt natural to my 3-d brain. A story has a shape, a structure and a feel, and it felt very organic to me.

Back to the writing. It might sound crazy. How can someone who struggles so much with words say that writing is his best fit?

Something that gets overlooked -and often destructively so- is the big difference between writing and spelling.

Spelling is just a hang up. It's a set of rules and guidelines about how we should contain our ideas on the page. If we include grammar in that, then it becomes even more restrictive. At the risk of offending a few people, it becomes even more anal retentive. These rules are constantly changing. Spelling is as relative as Einstein's time. It varies from country to country, generation to generation. The rules that people try to enforce these days bares little in common with the writings of Chaucer, but the spoken word still has a lot in common with the old fella.

So these things change, and yet people get beaten into trying to conform to one thing or another. You know the surest way to make sure a dyslexic child doesn't progress? Try and force him into those rules. Hell, I still can't say the alphabet, and I couldn't explain grammar to you if my life depended on it.

But writing is different, just as with my extended example of video editing. It's taking a block of text, or a blank page, and arranging patterns around until it looks right, until those patterns click together in a way that is telling a story, and has an ebb and flow, a rhythm. It's 3D mapping; taking the structure and flipping it, spinning it, chopping it. Beating on it until it's the right shape.

Writing is about meaning, story, voices and memories. And these are all things that a dyslexic brain is naturally attuned to.

Back when I was being diagnosed, the psychologist showed me a painting of a tree-house. I was allowed to look at it for a short amount of time before it was taken away, then I was asked questions about it. Now short term memory can be a bit of a problem, because we access information in a different way. Many of the questions I was being asked were making me feel stupid, because I simply couldn't remember the answers. But then she asked me one that wasn't about remembering unimportant facts and details. Is there anybody in the tree-house? She asked. Yes, I said. How do you know? Because there was no ladder hanging down from the door. Someone must have already climbed up and pulled the ladder in after them.

Of course, straight after giving me the chance to feel clever like that, she then went and asked me to say the months of the year in reverse order. Secretly I think she only did it to laugh at me.

Einstein was dyslexic. A man who couldn't even find his way home managed to change the way we see the universe. The theory of relativity is so simple and so obvious that it takes someone with a different view of the world to come along and see it.

I think I'm a better story-teller because the written word is like a second language to me. My mother and grandfather filled my head with stories and songs when I was young, so I had an understanding of structure, pacing and character from a very early age. At an age when other kids might have been starting to fill their heads with the rules of the language game, I was pre-occupied with images and stories. Later I learned to read through comic books, I was getting to grips with narrative more than rules. And then like a novelist who won't let facts get in the way of a good story, I came to the written word unwilling to let English get in the way of what I wanted to say.

(Which didn't lead to good grades, but that's another story.)

I have another example of how dyslexia helps me as a writer, but you'll need to bear with me for another tangent.

I've picked up a reputation as an adult for having a good sense of direction. Generally I can find my way anywhere on foot, and I never get lost. That last part is not really true. I'm lost all the time but it's the way that I do it that counts. As a child I was known for having no sense of direction. I could get lost on the way from the living room to the bathroom. This is another trait quite common in dyslexics (I mentioned Einstein earlier. Google 'Einstein red door,' for a laugh.)

What I realised as I grew up was that I had a way around my problems with direction. It seemed to me that everyone else could handle sequences and facts. Their brains could work in MS DOS, and there was a logical progression to information that meant they could also find their way where they wanted to go. It was simple; turn here, then here, then turn left, then turn right. Job done.

I couldn't do that. I would lose track of the sequence by the second or third turn. My brain was a desktop window, it filed information differently, and the key was to use visual cheats. Now, this could be the way everybody does it, I don't know, but it didn't seem that way as a child. I couldn't think in terms of a flat map on a piece of paper, because that had no relevance to me finding where I wanted to go in the real world. So I started 3D mapping. Everywhere I go, every time I walk past a street, or into a room, or get off the bus, my mind is adding to my 3d map. Each street is added in and connected up to the last one that I saw. I'm always seeing not where i am, but where i am in relation to everything else, and so I can give the impression of never being lost. That's also why I found Manhattan so easy to navigate so quickly. Once you get your head around the fact that the centre is a grid, and then add in the bits around that off the grid, you always know where you are on the island. That's what I'm doing all the time.

Now, how the hell does that long winded crap relate to writing?

Okay, I did promise, so here goes.

I've said before that I'm one of the 'seat of the pants' writers. I don't plan things out and I don't use much in the way of notes. But the truth isn't really that simple. As with the video editing, as with arranging shapes on a page, and as with my sense of direction, my brain is always building the story. As I walk down each page and turn every chapter, the model of the story in my head expands. So I always know exactly where I am in the narrative, and have a pretty solid idea of what's behind the next door.

So across the 3 pieces -one today at DSD and two over on my site- I've tried to show a little of my side of things. I've probably not done it justice; I couldn't explain how my brain works anymore than anybody else could explain theres. It's like Elvis Costello dancing about architecture, it just don't work.

But one thing I hope I have gotten across is that you'll rarely hear me complaining about it. And that's because dyslexia rules. I wouldn't have it any other way.