My annual novel-writing adventure is over. I finished my last chapter and 51,398 words on the 29^th of November, which means I’ve won NaNoWriMo for the third time. Many other writers in my region have won too. 40,000 people worldwide wrote a novel in a month this year. Even those who wrote a few thousand words have won the challenge in my opinion, for daring to try.

As ML (municipal liaison) for Ireland NorthEast I’ve spent the last couple of days celebrating with my writers and planning for next year.

We held an online Thank Goodness It’s Over Party (TGIO) just after midnight on the 30^th. I got to dance the jive with an imaginary Pierce Brosnan at that one! We held our real-world TGIO on the evening of the 1^st of December. We chatted about our novels, what we plan to do next, and ate lots of chocolate.

Planning for next year is two-fold. As ML, I’m planning an October Plot Party in 2012 where we’ll plan our novels. A teacher in my region who runs a creative-writing club is hoping to run the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Programme too. The younger writers set their own word count goal (usually a bit smaller than 50K so it doesn’t compromise their schoolwork) and then dive in. It’s an amazing way to support the writers of tomorrow.

With my writer hat on I’ve been thinking about what I learnt this month. In 2007 I learnt I could write daily. In 2008 I learnt outlining in advance really helps me. In 2009 I won for the first time and became ML, but had to recognise my story didn’t work. In 2010 I learnt that I loved writing younger characters and discovered the limitations of having a ghost as a character. This year I learnt that I need more action in my plots. Also I had huge fun trying a new genre (children’s adventure fiction).

Are you tempted to join us in NaNoWriMo 2012? If so, jot it in your diary for October 2012 (for outlining and research). Then sign up today at www.nanowrimo.org so you get the introductory emails next year. We’d love to have you aboard!

Now excuse me, but I need to start printing my Nano children’s novel for my kids’ Christmas present. Then I need to finish and revise my 2010 Nano novel…before it’s November, again.

Grace Tierney (www.gracetierney.com) writes in Meath. Her work has been published internationally in print and online. She is the Ireland North East organiser for Nano (www.NaNoWriMo.org). Now that Nano 2011 is over she’s revising her second women’s fiction novel (started in Nano 2010). She blogs about unusual words at http://wordfoolery.wordpress.com/.

In the first place I would like to thank Jack Harte the current chairman of the Board of the centre who’s commitment to it in recent years is unparalleled and who initiated this celebration. He was among the first to advocate a centre for Irish writers. In 1991 he negotiated with Mat McNulty a joint project, An Irish Writers’ Centre. Mat was then in the process of setting up the Dublin Writers Museum next door. For some time Jack had been concerned about the facilities and services available for Irish writers. He founded the Irish Writers’ Union in 1987. He secured from the government a commitment to make a building available for such a centre and got a promise of some funding from the National Lottery too. Jack came forward again in 2009 when the Arts Council ceased to support the centre and it was in danger of foundering. His skill and determination has given it new life.

It is more than twenty years since I first became involved with the project that was to become the Irish Writers Centre. Mat McNulty whom I knew through Skal, the fellowship of people working in the Irish tourism and hospitality industry was responsible for drawing me in. As CEO of Dublin Tourism he had already put his mark on Malahide Castle, The Martello Tower in Sandycove, associated with Joyce’s Ulysses, and Shaw’s birthplace in Synge Street and helped to save them as part of our cultural heritage. But he was especially interested in the Georgian period, its buildings and furniture. These two beautiful Georgian buildings were in peril. They had been vacated some years previously by the VEC who had moved their marketing school to larger premises on Mountjoy Square. Their peril proved an opportunity for Dublin Tourism to restore the buildings and to give them a new future in the Dublin Writers Museum and an Irish Writers Centre. It was Dublin’s year as European City of Culture. The project would provide “a hub and a centrepiece to make access to our rich literary heritage more accessible and more tangible”. Dublin needed and deserved a museum to honour its many writers of world renown and the whole of Ireland would benefit from a centre to promote its writers and help improve their craft.

I was excited by the possibility of assisting the project by lending some paintings to complement the building and enrich the experience of visiting it and working in it. The humane influence of the paintings would help to transform an empty house into a home for writers and contribute to the efforts of the team which was being assembled to work here. Dublin Tourism had managed the restoration of the buildings. Its subsidiary, The Writers Museum, next door was involved in the development. In those days before the Centre was up and running there was a very close connection between the museum’s building and the centre’s; an interconnecting door on the second floor opened to a push and the director of the museum oversaw this building
too. That is how the paintings came to be given on loan to Dublin Tourism – Dublin Writers Museum but with the intention that they were to be placed in the Irish Writers Centre. The loan became a gift when a few years later I had become ill and faced my own mortality. I believe now that my involvement in that giving contributed in no small way to my management of the illness and thereafter to resume collecting paintings again.

The pleasure of collecting has many aspects. There is the chase, the search, the finding, the badgering, the bargaining, the negotiating of terms, the acquiring. There is the delight in the acquisition, its installing at home, enjoying its presence. There is the study and understanding of its background, its style, its creative process, the acquaintance with the artist, sometimes developing into friendship. But then there is the added delight if sharing one’s pleasure with friends and others, in sharing paintings which have become precious and personal. Those who really enjoy art invariably wish to expand their appreciation and introduce others to the experience. have been greatly enriched by those who have generously influenced me in the past and I’m immensely grateful to them for that. These beautiful paintings have given me great joy over many years and it has meant even more to me that I have been able to share them with the people who frequent the centre. I am grateful for that too. I hope that they will inspire many more in they future as the centre goes from strength to strength.

Towards concluding may I also be bold enough to suggest to the Minister responsible for the Arts, Minister Dennehy, that he might look to the vacant derelict buildings on this side of Parnell Square to restore and develop them as the major centre for services to Irish literature. The old parliament buildings serve their present function very well and thousands of people, Irishmen and tourists, visit them every day in the course of their banking, business and private to enjoy and admire them and appreciate their history.  I find it a welcome distraction in dealing with my own sorry finances when I
go there.

And then finally, I would like to thank Sarah Symes and her colleagues, all of whom work voluntarily here who have organised the event. I offer a special word of thanks to the artists whose works form part of this collection, the first paintings I purchased and among them those who have participated in the evening, those who responded to the paintings in poetry and prose; and you who have come and by your presence have honoured me greatly. You make me realise all the more that in giving I am really the recipient. Thank you.

Frank X Buckley

24 November 2011

Haven’t started yet? Way behind on word-count?

Me too. Which is why I tried all the Nano Tricks this week.

1. I went to the Write-In

This is an in-person meeting of writers from the same region where we sit around, chat a little, and write a lot. It’s like a date with your novel. The Nano statistics elves claim attending write-ins massively increases your chances of writing 50,000 words.

It worked. I clocked up 1,240 words, handwritten. I discovered everybody else has already scoffed the chocolate I put in our kick-off-kits for consumption after passing 50,000 words. I met a twelve year old who’s writing a novel. She’s marginally too young for official Nano (participants must be 13+ to register) but she made me jealous of her amazing plot and writing confidence.

1. I followed my own advice

I finished my target word count before writing this blog post, because just for November, novel-writing comes first.

1. I promised myself a prize

There are a few perks of “winning” Nano. The one I like the best, apart from the amazing feeling of having done it, is the Createspace offer. This American print-on-demand company print a copy of your book, privately, for you to have on your shelf as proof of this crazy adventure. This year they will charge postage, but they are giving five copies which is just enough for my two kids, my two godsons, and one for my shelf. Perfect Christmas gifts. It’s not limited to your Nano novel or to 50,000 words. It could be your self-published poetry collection, a double-spaced draft copy for you to edit on, or simply one to lend to people who don’t “get” this novel thing. Writers in my region have done all of the above.

1. I joined The All Ireland Word War

The provincial team with the highest average word count wins. Writing – a team sport. Who would have predicted that?

1. I fell in love with some characters, a wild pony, and an evil Garda

In my story, I mean! My outline is filling up. The story is starting to take over. Ideas are popping into my head at odd moments. This is the power of writing every day.

1. I challenged other writers to race me via the forums

I wrote 5,940 words today. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. But now, finally, I’m on target with 15,000 words so far. This is priceless.

Week two is when many writers quit Nano. Halfway is so distant. All I can say is that week three rocks. You’ll be on the downhill slope. Just slog on through week two. It gets easier, honest.

Grace Tierney (www.gracetierney.com) writes in Meath. Her work has been published internationally in print and online. She is the Ireland North East organiser for Nano (www.NaNoWriMo.org) and actually enjoys the challenge of writing 50,000 words in just one month. After Nano 2011 she will complete her second chick-lit novel. She blogs on unusual words at http://wordfoolery.wordpress.com/.

“You’re doing WHAT?” is the most common response when I mention that I spend my Novembers writing 50,000 word novels.

The second most common response is “I started writing a novel once”.

National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org), or Nano to its friends (and there are more than 2,000 of those in Ireland this year), is a 30 day challenge to yourself to write 50,000 words of fiction in just 30 days. There’s no prize except the most important one – knowing that you can do it.

Chris Baty started this crazy idea in America in 1999. It has since become a worldwide challenge to writers from age 13 upwards.

This is my fifth year. In 2007 I wrote 17,000 words, with two pre-schoolers underfoot. I was hooked. I completed and revised that chick-lit novel afterwards and it’s out seeking a publisher at the moment. In 2008 I managed a more respectable 35,000 words and began to feel that 50K was actually possible.

But 2009 was when I dove right in and signed up to be a Municipal Liaison (regional organiser) for Ireland NorthEast (http://www.northeastnovellists.wordpress.com). I encourage writers across my area (Meath, Louth, Cavan, and Monaghan). I host writing parties, hand out Nano stickers, moderate our online forum, circulate pep emails, oh yeah, and try to write 50,000 words in my spare time.

Amazingly, despite the ML volunteer job, I crossed the finish line, along with nine other writers in my region. One of whom was only 15 years old. The feeling was immense, plus I’d learnt I could churn out 2,000 words of rough draft in just two hours, especially when I wrote every day. By 2010 that meant I cruised to 75,000 words.

Since then our still small region has grown to over 200 writers (other regions in Ireland cover Dublin, Galway, Northern Ireland, NorthWest, SouthEast, and the catch-all Elsewhere). This year we have sub-groups in Dundalk IT and young writers in Waterstone’s Drogheda.

But back to week one. I’ve started, which is the hardest part. I’ve a patchy outline for a children’s adventure story and some character notes. But I’m already behind on word count (only 2,093 vs. the target of 5,000 by today). Having extra work and volunteer commitments and kids on mid-term break is not helping. Add in a vomiting bug (him) and a chesty cough (me and her) and I’m in trouble. But once they return to school and I can write in the mornings again, those words will accumulate. I’ll keep you posted.

It’s only day 3. There’s still plenty of time to join us. You need ideas, words, and a few hours. Write on the train. Write in the waiting room. Write during your lunchbreak. Stop watching those soap operas for a few weeks. Imagine characters during your shower. Scribble notes on receipts. Let a novel take over your brain this month. You won’t regret it.

I mentioned in my last post that I spent a number of years out of Ireland when I went back to college and studied for a Masters and then a PhD in Creative Writing. This involved spending time in a variety of rented (and borrowed) accommodation, usually surrounded by books and always by the sort of creative clutter I appear to require in any writing space I inhabit. The number of books surrounding me seemed to increase mysteriously and exponentially over the four or so years I was away; when first leaving Dublin, I only brought with me those books that seemed vital to my creative process: Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town, my collected Kavanagh, all the Kerrie Hardie collections I had to hand and Raymond Carver’s A New Path to the Waterfall, to name a few. But added to these were the results of all the visits to second hand bookshops, antiquarian booksellers and charity shops that crossed my paths in Norwich, Paris and Bangor (quite the jetsetter, was I). I seem to remember owning several copies of Richard Ellman’s masterful biography of James Joyce (the most common book to turn up in a second hand store, I discovered), a copy of Mrs Beeton and several beautifully bound copies of obscure Victorian poets and novelists.

I came to inhabit the new places I lived through familiarising myself with their bookquarters; Norwich may have disappointed on so  many other levels, but that little area around the cathedral, where antique shops jostled with booksellers along the narrow medieval streets, remains one of my most vivid memories of the city. Paris was all about the second hand, English-language bookstores; I was spending four months in a top-floor apartment with no television and only French-language radio, so I fell upon the Red Wheelbarrow and, naturally, Shakespeare & Co, with all the fervour of a gourmand having finished the Atkins Diet. I read voraciously and indiscriminately, and the piles of books grew higher and higher around my desk by the window. Of course, when, after four months, I had to leave the little deux piece with several scores of bags of books (and a few clothes), family members and friends were called upon to provide a mule service and bring cases of them home. To my eternal shame, I never called upon the one friend of a friend who’d kindly brought a batch home with her to retrieve those books. How cavalier was I with what I thought was an inexhaustible resource.

But how things have changed. I read this yesterday  and discover that the days of books are not only numbered, they are actually in the minus sign already. The advent of digital technology, the proliferation of electronic media, has put paid to the art of book printing for ever, so it would seem. We are now embracing our e-readers, our kindles and our iphones, and forgetting for ever the dusty smell of old paper, the velvet rub of aged leather binding. And this notion profoundly depresses me; I’d have never have gotten the feel for Norwich or Bangor or Paris if I’d been wandering around, head down in some screen or other. Technology has its uses, but its tyranny is to take our eyes and senses away from the world around us, and to focus us into a small narrow square of plastic and flashing cursors. The book, on the other hand, has the tangible link with everything that has gone before it – previous owners, the atmosphere of the second shelf down in the rare books section, the faint whiff of whatever coffee stained the fly-leaf.

And yes, I am aware that by writing this blog (and not trying to publish a pamphlet somewhere to post on the gates of Trinity College) I am participating in the electronic media phenomenon that is threatening to make my beloved books extinct. But this little screen I’m typing into is still surrounded by books and magazines, the floor around me is still covered with volumes that have been exciting me for decades, for months, for days.

I’d love to hear from others about their favourite bookshops, or best book finds – you’d never get the same charge from a kindle, unless you accidentally dropped a cup of water on one!

Good reading

Nessa

Beaumaris and the Straits

Belinda McKeon, whose fine first novel Solace has just been published by Picador, has a fascinating piece on today’s Irish Times about the process of writing the novel, entirely Irish and Ireland-based, whilst living in Brooklyn. You can read it here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2011/0804/1224301812213.html

Reading her article, McKeon brought me back to the only time I’ve lived abroad for a prolonged period, which was during the years 2002-2006, when I went back to College, to do a Masters in Creative Writing and, because it felt like a natural progression at the time, a PhD. My ‘abroad’ was no further than the UK, first Norwich, then three gloriously happy years on the island of Anglesey. But although it wasn’t very far in terms of nautical miles (a mere 2 hour ferry journey), it was far enough in imaginative terms to allow me to engage with my own culture in a very different way than had I been still living there among all that was familiar and thus unseen.

McKeon talks about listening to Irish radio, following Irish twitter feeds and even reading the online version of the Longford Leader on one occasion – this helped her to build the fictional world she was creating, not by researching it, but by recreating the emotional atmosphere that would help her to reconstruct her own version of an Irish world. James Joyce would have recognised that instinct, meticulous re-creator of an 1904 Ireland that he was, although in his case it was more a matter of plaguing the little brother to send him theatre programmes and details of who won the 1904 Gold Cup.

I didn’t want such familial or even technological aids, for that matter. When I was writing my verse novel, In Sight of Home, it was the dual vision of the here and there, the echoes of one culture in another, than captured me. In North Wales, the echoes of Ireland were everywhere; on Anglesey, the stone-walled fields of grass and granite were very reminiscent of Wicklow’s grazing planes; place-names had similar origins, for example the Llŷn peninsula originated in the same god Lugh who gave Leinster its name. That peninsula, the closest point to Ireland and beloved of the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, is littered with townlands named after the marauding Irish who swept over the 27 miles of the Irish Sea to take hostages and booty. There’s even an early Christian church named for St. Patrick (Llanbadrig on Anglsey), although closer examination reveals the five possible Patricks for whom it might have been built.

So the book I wrote was very much about reflections, of understanding oneself and one’s culture better through the mirror of another experience, another culture. Here’s a poem, taken from In Sight of Home, which tries to give voice to that:

The landscape is patient,
permits my slow
discoveries.

I turn a bend,
a buzzard leads me,
wing-span wide enough
to fill the windscreen
as he beats the air,
then sweeps away seawards.

I test out place-names,
my tongue still mutinies over
u’s and w’s, hellish double ells.

And proof the eye
will fool you:
standing on Mynydd Mawr
looking towards Wicklow
you might be on Bray Head,
looking back at Lleyn.

Someone speaks,
a different music soars,
reminds you that the ground
you stand on is not your own,
though it might
lend itself a while.

The first lambs out,
and it only February.
Here, where I write,
there’s a new vase,
the first daffodils
coaxing the sun.

As I result of my own time ‘abroad’, I’ve become intrigued about how Irish writers respond creatively when finding themselves living in other places, and, equally, how writers from other countries react when coming to live in Ireland. I’ll be discussing that further in my next blog entry but in the meantime would love to hear from anyone who has had a similar experience.

See you next time

Nessa

On Publishing Poetry and Short Stories

by Ailbhe Darcy

This summer I published my first collection after ten whole years of printing out poems, writing cover letters and slapping stamps on self-addressed envelopes. More often than not, throughout those ten years, the whole sorry lot would land back on my doormat screaming rejection. It’s a slow, hard road to publication and easy to feel alone on it. It’s equally easy to feel like you’re going nowhere – not to mention mad. Most writers have experienced such a limbo, Ciaran Carty assured us at the Irish Writer’s Centre on the 2nd of July, only to amend his words. Limbo, he said, is “a state of existence which will merit neither heavenly bliss nor the forms of heavens after death.” Better to call the unpublished writer’s realm purgatory than limbo, because there is some hope.

Carty, who has been the editor of New Irish Writing since 1988, was at the Centre as part of a very successful information day on publishing poetry and short stories. The frustration, the hope, and the pleasure of the journey – that is, of the act of writing itself – each vied for a place as the dominant note of the day’s talks and question-and-answer sessions. The editors present – as well as Carty, we heard from Declan Meade, editor of The Stinging Fly and founder of the press of the same name; Rebecca O’Connor, editor of The Moth; and Jessie Lendennie, founder and Managing Director of Salmon Poetry – all emphasised the enormous numbers of submissions they receive for the enormously limited space they have to fill. There is a woeful lack of outlets for unpublished writers in Ireland, Carty told us.

If there were moments during the day when an onlooker might seriously question the wisdom of attempting to get published at all, these were effaced by the reverence with which both Kevin Higgins, as a poet, and Kevin Barry, as a fiction writer, spoke about their belief that no poem or short story is ever finished until it finds an audience. It is the reader, not the writer, they suggested, who inks that final full stop. Still, Kevin Higgins warned us to surrender the notion that publication is a magical gateway to everything being finally all right, or that Declan Meade is a god who can tell you once and for all whether or not you’re a writer. The writer’s lot remains lifelong one of anxiety: forget being ‘discovered’ and seeing your name in lights; you will never even be sure that there’ll be a next poem for you to write.

Kevin Barry touched on a similar theme when he spoke about fiction as a burbling or a percolating that happens in the back part of the writer’s brain, to some extent out of the writer’s control. Once you realise this lack of control, he said, you can worry less about making the next story come. You can even recognise that the bad days, the days you can’t write, are often the days when the most percolating is going on. But this realisation is also terrifying, he admitted, since there’s nothing you can do about it if the writing simply doesn’t come. So you have to make a deal with your subconscious: you’ll be disciplined – you’ll make yourself available, at your desk with your pencil sharpened, for a certain amount of time each day – and then if the stories do come you’ll be there to welcome them. Kevin Barry himself writes first thing in the morning. Most writers, he told us, eventually become morning writers, exploiting that hour when, as Don De Lillo put it, they are still “puddling in dream-melt.”

Both Barry and Meade stressed the importance of putting a new piece of writing away in a drawer and giving it time to mature before thinking about sending it out for publication. While Meade acknowledged the usefulness of deadlines as a motivational tool, he warned that writing to a deadline could mislead you into thinking that a piece was finished just because you’d achieved the word count and put down the pen in time to catch the postman. He, Rebecca O’Connor and Jessie Lendennie all gave the impression that a lot of the work they rejected was rejected for this reason: it simply hadn’t been worked on enough. You can publish too early, Ciaran Carty agreed: he published a story at the age of fifteen in the Evening Herald called “The Devil’s Advocate” – it was his first and only published short story.

In general, then, the advice throughout the day was to move slowly, putting one foot in front of the other on that long road. Publish in magazines and get out to open mics, said Kevin Higgins; work up to longer readings. Eventually people will start coming up to you after readings and asking where they can buy your poems or stories. Then you’ll know you’ve created a need. Even then you should continue to move slowly, beginning to think of the poems or stories as a group and gradually building on them and selecting from them.

Throughout the process, all the editors reminded us, be sure to get the ABC’s right: don’t, for example, send your poems to a magazine that exclusively publishes short stories. Read the submission guidelines. Check the website before you email an editor with an irritating question. Tricks for evading rejection-induced despair include sending work out to more than one magazine at a time, so that you weren’t waiting for that single envelope to land on your doormat. Assume you’ll be rejected. Have somewhere else lined up to send the poems, the minute they arrive back. Key to getting out and about, Kevin Higgins suggested, is being easy to deal with. If you’re invited to give a reading, turn up. Don’t be late. And don’t forget your glasses.

Very important: hanging around getting drunk with writers will not make you a writer.

Finally, if there was an unexpected subtext to this fascinating day, it was this: have sympathy for the editors. The working lives they described were filled with struggle. But their words, all day, were overflowing with their passion for the job. For the writing.

Ailbhe Darcy launched her first full collection of poems Imaginary Menagerie this summer with Bloodaxe Books. In 2009 she published a chapbook-length collection with tall-lighthouse called A Fictional Dress, and poems of hers have also appeared in two Bloodaxe anthologies: Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (ed. James Byrne and Clare Pollard) and Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (ed. Roddy Lumsden.) She has published work in magazines in Ireland, Britain and the US. This year she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and she continues to work towards a PhD at the university. She co-edits Moloch, an online journal for new art and writing.