Bestselling author Sarah Webb is teaching a Writing Popular Fiction course this weekend, Saturday 12th May. It will cover motivation, breathing life into your characters, plotting, point of view, dialogue, research, rewriting and editing. Places are still available. Here’s what Sarah has to say about biting the bullet and becoming a bestselling author:

Two months ago I spoke at the Waterford Writers’ Festival. The subject of the panel discussion was How to Write a Bestseller. The chair of the session, the very able Vanessa O’Loughlin from www.writing.ie asked us to consider the key elements of fiction writing and what makes a bestselling novel: character, dialogue, plot, making your book stand out. Also on the panel were fellow popular fiction writers Monica McInerney, Sinead Moriarty and Niamh Greene.

It got me thinking about the nature of the ‘bestseller’. A bestseller is simply a book that sells a lot of copies, a book that has thousands of happy readers, all actively recommending it to their friends and family, and on Facebook and Twitter (which I think is the way most bestsellers are created – by word of mouth).

So I thought I’d jot down some of the things that came up during the panel discussion in case they are useful. And at the very end I’ll let you in on the secret – how to write a bestseller – as yes, there is a secret!

First of all: Character

We all agreed that creating big, interesting, real, lovable yet flawed characters is the key to writing good popular fiction. Monica McInerney said she creates her characters before plot; for Sinead Moriarty it’s the other way around. But when it comes to characters, you have to think BIG. Monica writes warm, funny family dramas; Sinead’s books tend to have an issue at the centre – breast cancer, anorexia, breakdown of a family unit – and she takes her research very seriously indeed.

Research

Sinead said something very interesting – she said that you can write about anything as long as you do your research, which she finds very freeing. You keep reading until you know your subject backwards, she said. One of her books, Pieces of My Heart (about an anorexic teenager and her family’s struggle to help her get well again) took a lot of research and after the first draft she had to go back and unpick the chapters that were too research heavy and rewrite them. She was very honest and open about this, which I think was helpful for people to hear. Rewriting is a topic that came up a lot. More about that in a second.

But next: Dialogue

Niamh Greene talked about dialogue and how important it is to get it right. She reads out her dialogue and works on it until it’s perfect. I talked about how each character has to have their own way of speaking in a book, their own voice. If you are unsure about how to approach dialogue, read some of the masters – Roddy Doyle, Marian Keyes, Anne Tyler.

Plot

I explained how important it is to select a subject/setting that you really, really want to write about. It has to be something that fascinates you and that you’re dying to tell your readers about – eg zoo keeping (my latest novel, The Shoestring Club has a zoo keeper in it), the life of a young ballerina (Ask Amy Green: Dancing Daze – now that research – in Budapest – was such fun!).

I always say there are two types of people, the planners and the seat of the pant-ers. Planners know where their passport is weeks before travelling, seat of the pant-ers don’t. If you’re a planner, you may need to plan your book. I’m a planner and I make detailed plot notes for every scene of every book. Now, often these change once I start writing, but I need the plot notes to start a book in the first place – it’s like my safely net in case I get stuck along the way. A book takes a long time to write, and you need all the help you can get!

Monica is not a planner, her books evolve as she writes; Sinead is a planner. We are all different writers, just as we are all different people.

Theme

I talked about theme, about how your book has to say something. At the heart of The Shoestring Club is a family secret and the book is about how a buried secret can have devastating consequences.

Julia, the main character, blames herself for her mother’s death – this is at the heart of every mistake she makes in life. And until she comes to terms with this, she will never live a full life.

What’s your book about?

Can you tell me in a few lines? If not, you need to work on your book’s theme. And this doesn’t always come easy. Sometimes the theme won’t be clear to you until after your first or second draft.

Rewriting

The difference between a published novel and an unpublished novel – the rewrites. Simple as that. Your first draft is just a starting point. Keep working on it until it’s a perfect as you can make it. Again, see my Write a Book Course for more on this.

Motivation

You have to want to write more than anything in the world. If you don’t have this overwhelming drive and passion, there’s no point in writing. Marilyn Munroe once said: ‘I wasn’t the prettiest, I wasn’t the most talented, I simply wanted it more than anyone else.’ Do you want to get published more than anyone else?

Because that’s the secret. Motivation, tenacity, drive. And the willingness to be honest, to cut a vein and bleed all over the page; to write about things that scare you, upset you, terrify you. You have to dig deep. It has to hurt. If it doesn’t, there’s no point writing. Unless you have to write, unless you have a burning need to tell people about something that means everything to you, don’t bother.

I’ll leave you with these final words from Pablo Neruda:

‘For me writing is like breathing. I could not live without breathing and I could not live without writing.’

Yours in writing,

Sarah XXX

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Sarah Webb has written nine bestselling novels including Always the Bridesmaid, Anything for Love, and The Loving Kind. Her books have been published in many different countries including the U.S. and Indonesia. She has also written many children”s books, has contributed short stories to several collections including “Moments”, and has compiled and edited two charity collections of her own, “Travelling Light” and “Mum”s the Word”. She writes a hugely popular series for readers of age 10+, Ask Amy Green. After studying Arts in Trinity College, Dublin, Sarah worked in the book trade for many years as a Children”s Buyer.

An interview with John Kearns, 19^th April 2012.

Eddie Linden became one of the leading figures on the international poetry scene through his journal Aquarius, which ran from 1969 to 2002. While Aquarius was seminal to the development of many poets in the UK, Ireland and internationally, Eddie is also an accomplished poet himself and last year saw the publication of his selected poems A Thorn in the Flesh from Hearing Eye press. We hope you can join us at the Irish Writers’ Centre for an evening of poetry and reminiscences from Eddie and many of his Irish friends on Tuesday April 24^th 2012.

JK – Something I wasn’t sure about because there are various accounts, was where you were born – in Coalisland or in Scotland?

EL: I used to assume that it was in Coalisland, but now I believe it was in Scotland– I think my mother had come there. I never knew my real father, he died in south Armagh, but I did meet the family some years ago with Constance[Short]. My father was long dead by that stage. I’d always wanted to meet him and I’d a great dream that one day we’d meet in Cullaville near Crossmaglen in South Armagh where he came from. But it never happened. He never married or acknowledged me. My grandfather’s brother John settled in Dublin and his grandson is a solicitor there. The funny thing was that the street where John Behan [the sculptor and Eddie’s friend] lived in Marino, was the same street as where my great uncle John Glacken lived. John’s mother only lived about four doors away from them. My family are definitely Irish.

JK – And what about yourself – do you feel more Irish or Scottish?

EL – Oh Irish. I’ve always felt more Irish. And I suffered a lot when my foster father inScotlandremarried – he married a very bigoted Orangewoman. She tried to get rid of me and I remember as a boy of 10 being taken to my mother’s house and seeing my mother being insulted: “Take your Fenian bastard back!” It left me with a hatred of racism and sectarianism, particularly in Scotland where it was very bitter, and that comes out a lot in my poetry. I was glad when I came toLondonto get away from all that. That’s when I joined the Communist Party.

JK – I was interested to read about that in Who is Eddie Linden?, but it was the invasion of Hungary in 1956 that dampened your enthusiasm for the party?

EL –Hungarywas one of the things. I never lost contact with the party. In fact one of the last general secretaries, Gordon McClennan, died last year and for the last five years of his life we were in contact regularly. He was a lovely man. His last days were spent helping the pensioners – he was part of the pensioners’ movement.

JK – But in the book, Sebastian Barker writes about the influence of a priest, a Fr Andrew Scott, on you around this time?

EL – Fr Andrew was a Dominican in Scotland. The Dominicans at that time were very progressive. When I went back to the Church it was like going to the Catholic Church from the Communist Church, they were identical. They both were authoritarian. It’s like what I heard recently about priests that have been silenced. One of the great theologians to be silenced by Romewas Hans Küng. And one of the big things that annoy me is the anti-progressive attitude of the Catholic Church to people who are gay.

JK – So tell me how you got into poetry.

EL – Poetry happened to me late. I never thought that I would have a book of poems out. I wasn’t happy with the first book because there were a lot of misprints in it. It had extracts from my diaries – diaries which were eventually lost. They would have been helpful for John Cooney [currently writing Eddie’s biography]. But from 1969 I was dedicated to my magazine Aquarius. I got great help from the late Timothy O’Keefe of the publishers Martin, Brian & O’Keeffe. Brian helped me with the layout and adverts, Tim did reviews for me, Martin helped a great deal too. They didn’t last long, about five years, but they published The Green Fool by Paddy Kavanagh and later on they published his Collected Poems too.

JK – They published Sebastian Barker as well I think?

EL – That was through me, I got them to publish him. At that time the Arts Council were giving grants to publishers. That meant that publishers were able to publish more poems. They started with Sebastian Barker, later they did Shaun Traynor. But they didn’t do much poetry except for Irish poetry like Kavanagh.

JK – What was it that prompted you to start up Aquarius in the first place?

EL – I’d been friendly with John Heath-Stubbs. And I’d started doing readings at the Lamb and Flag and I had people like John reading along with George Barker, Thomas Blackburn and others and the magazine grew out of that. The second magazine was a special Irish issue with a cover by Eamonn O’Doherty and it was edited by Pearse Hutchinson. I never got a grant for that, but later on I did an Irish-Australian issue where the Australian Arts Council helped to pay for the Australian poets and there was an introduction by the late Peter Porter and I did an Irish issue there. I got a lot of help with that through a man I met at the Irish embassy called Con Howard. I started organising readings also at the Irish Club in Eaton Square and that was through him too. He managed to get funds from the Irish government and I was able to bring over Pearse and a number of young poets like Paul Durcan and Eiléan [Ní Chuilleanáin]. Then I published Madge Herron from Donegal, though she had settled in London by that stage. And from then on I was always in contact with Irish poets.

JK – How many special issues of Irish poetry did you do?

EL – I did two issues. If you notice in Eddie’s Own Aquarius Seán Hutton provided a list of all the issues that came out. I did it all on my own. There were no grants when I started, but I got a lot of good will from people. Harold Pinter really set me up when he sent me £100. It’s not true that it was the only magazine where he allowed his poems to be published – people have said that, I did publish him but he was published elsewhere too. He always remained a supporter of Aquarius though.

JK – Thinking of all the poets you’ve published, who do you think you’d be proudest of?

EL – I think I’m very happy to have published people like Matthew Sweeney. Anthony Cronin must have put him in touch with me and he himself was living not far from me in Maida Vale and he had started a broadsheet. He sent a copy of it to Samuel Beckett. Beckett didn’t send a poem, but he sent a donation. I’ve always been proud that I was able to promote the poetry. If I thought a poem was good I would write to the TLS about it.

JK – I’d imagine those years were pretty fractious times in London with the situation in the Poetry Society, Eric Mottram taking over at Poetry Review and so on. 

EL – They were fairly separate. It was around that time that I got fairly involved and became a council member of the Society. I remained so for about thirty years and that was a way of promoting the magazine. I think that Aquarius did its best. I was pleased that I was able to do something like that. I realised that I had reached a new generation and I felt about three years ago that I did my bit. I think the last issue I finished with the help of A.T. Tolley in Canada was a John Heath-Stubbs issue. I got to know Prof Tolley and he got me to do an issue on the poets of the 1940s. I remember getting articles from David Gascoyne, the surrealist poet, who spent most of his early life in Paris and whose biography has just come out by Robert Fraser. I’m halfway through it and it’s a remarkable book that really ought to be read.

JK – Gascoyne’s a writer that doesn’t get as much attention nowadays as maybe he ought to. For a lot of younger poets I think he could be quite inspirational.

EL – He was. The story of David is interesting. A woman came into his life [Judy Lewis] when he was in a mental hospital on the Isle of Wight and she was reading poetry to the patients. And on one occasion she read a particular poem and he came up to her afterwards and said “I wrote that!” She didn’t believe him at first, but it was a salvation for David. He started to write for the TLS after that and he was invited to poetry festivals in Cambridge. At the end of his life he got a medal from the French government for his contribution to literature and he met up with a lot of the old poets that he knew – it was a remarkable thing. He made a wonderful recovery and never looked back. One other person who knew him very well and was important to me too was Elizabeth Smart, Sebastian’s mother, who wrote By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. She was a great inspiration and I used to spend weekends and holidays at her house in the country. I wrote a poem in which I talk about the “The Dell” in Suffolk where she lived.

JK – Somebody who was obviously very important to Aquarius was John Heath-Stubbs. What was he like to work with? It sounds like he was very supportive of you?

EL – Oh he was. At one stage he was annoyed when I published Blake Morrison, who became a really good friend, because he was very anti-The Movement. In the new edition of Agenda there’s an article about John when he was at Oxford with a man called Michael Meyer and they brought out an anthology of poetry at that time and they left out Larkin and Kingsley Amis. John always regretted he didn’t put Larkin in, although I don’t think they cared much for each other. Larkin included John in the last thing he edited though and John. His publisher was OUP and he did a translation of the Italian poet Leopardi and I believe it was a really good edition. He never did a lot of translation, but on that occasion he did it really well. And then the OUP dropped him and he was taken up by Michael Schmidt in Carcanet through Charles Sisson. From then on, John was published by them, though he never really did as well as he should. He did get reviewed in the TLS – whenever I brought out special issues I always got reviews in the TLS.

JK – I suppose a work like Artorius might be a bit intimidating for some readers.

EL – I think he spent 10 years thinking out that poem and it was published eventually by Enitharmon. He hated Alvarez – also part of the Movement – and Alvarez left him out of his anthology. I don’t think even Ian Hamilton cared much for the kind of poetry John was writing. He didn’t belong to any group. He was always regarded as a Neo-Romantic, but he didn’t like that. But check out that article in Agenda about the dispute between the Movement people and John’s generation.

JK – What about another poet loosely associated with the Movement, Elizabeth Jennings?

EL – Yes I did get her to do readings. She was a very nervous sort of person, spent a lot of her life living in rooms at Oxford. She was very eccentric. It was the same with Madge Herron. Madge used to think in Irish and could be difficult, but was a great poet. She had started her career in the Abbey Theatre and she sent her poetry to W.B. Yeats, who encouraged her. She became more eccentric when she moved to London though.

JK – Were there any other Irish poets who stick in your mind.

EL – Well Seamus [Heaney] started publishing in Aquarius and I was very pleased to have published him and other northern poets like Paul Muldoon, from Tyrone where my family are from. I published Paul when was just starting to get publishe by Faber. There are so many others that I can’t think of them all.

JK – Thank you. 

Being part of The Guardian’s digital revolution has seen a blurring of the old boundaries between the print and the electronic media. Once upon a time, not long ago, the dividing lines between writing for a newspaper and scripting for radio and television were clearly demarcated. Until recently my own career in journalism was a constant to and fro across the ‘No Man’s Land’ between print and broadcasting. The advent of digital media though has wiped out that distinction so that in any given working day I could be writing a 300 to 500 word blog for the on-line edition of Guardian Unlimited; doing a major feature article of more than 1,000 words that could take up to two pages in Saturday’s edition of the newspaper or scripting a 60-second think-piece for broadcast on the Guardian’s audio section.

Blogging, tweeting, podcasting, online/self-generated broadcasting…are all words and phrases becoming increasingly common place for writers. Novels are going straight from the author’s imagination and keyboard to internet delivery systems like eBooks and Kindles, by-passing traditional forms of publishing. The newspaper industry is no different. The Guardian for instance now emphasises the ‘Digital First’ philosophy where news stories, features, opinion pieces, editorials, sports commentary and so on are given their first outing online as opposed to the three dimensional space of paper.

In terms of media intersection perhaps the most interesting challenge for journalists like myself who have come out of the tradition of two separate media worlds (print and TV/Radio) now is to constantly interchange between the two. So for example take this story I worked on back in the summer of 2010 when I went out on a drug interdiction operation with the Irish Naval Service along Ireland’s western seaboard. This was a combination of a relatively long news feature, which not only went online, but also appeared in the paper itself. In addition there was the accompanying film that a Guardian cameraman shot, and I co-produced and scripted. This required not only the ability to convey a fairly dramatic scenario out at sea but also to script to pictures; to be able to write voice-over that was germane to the images and the overall context of the story. This increasingly is my working world!

In terms of combining the written word with the visual the Guardian writer/reporter is now also required to be a broadcaster. One of the popular audio visual tools to describe a story is the use of the photographic slide show combined with commentary as well as of course a back-up written report. So for instance this unusual story about a man who keeps a museum to the Northern Ireland Troubles in his garden shed is in the usual form. However, accompanying that story which appeared both on Guardian Unlimited and in the actual paper was an audio slide-show.

This was a gallery of pictures taken by our photographer Kim Haughton underneath which ran a recorded, broadcast quality, interview with the owner guiding us around his private museum. Here is another example of the multi-dimensional aspect of modern digital journalism in action. This is where the reporter/correspondent/writer can no longer just think in terms of his or her words on a page but also has to be able to script to pictures and sounds.

Of course the corner stones of lucid, honest feature writing, reporting and indeed scripting remain essential. Good prose, to paraphrase George Orwell slightly (still the patron saint of journalists and writers alike) should be like a window pane: clear, devoid of jargon, verbal camouflage and crude propaganda whether it be through the medium of printed paper or indeed cyberspace.

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Henry will teach an eight-week course at the Irish Writers’ Centre from 26th April to 14th June. It will focus on new forms of writing and novel ways of delivery in the digital age. As a comprehensive series of classes on various aspects of writing in the digital world, the emphasis will be on practical training and hands-on drills. The weekly itinerary covers blogs, podcasting, tweeting and audio packages. More information on Henry is available here and you can listen to an audio interview on feature writing recorded last year.

Naturally, I resisted with every bone in my body. Going back to school was the last thing I wanted to do, I whinged. It was humiliating enough to be a failed novelist, without having to bear that in front of others who (I was convinced would be) brilliant and professional writers. I whinged some more.

“You should really, really, seriously do my course,” Conor said.

Of course, he was right. I hummed and hawed and eventually signed up, arriving late the first night – a sign of my fear and ambivalence! The others in the group were, I felt, streets ahead of me as writers. The last thing I wanted to do was to read anything aloud – and Conor made me do this, on the first night, a horrendously difficult writing exercise. I left the class, almost in tears, vowing not to return. But as Conor and I waited for the same bus, he gently suggested that as I’d paid the fee, I might as well finish the course. “But I’m the worst in the class!” I wailed.

“In that case, you should definitely finish the course,” he said.

So, yes, I did finish the course. By the end of the term we were a polished little group. I realised, after reading some more of my manuscript, that it was actually alright. Some of it was really good. It was publishable. From the feedback of the other writers I was able to quickly fix huge problems I’d been having – this is the major benefit of working in a group. Somebody else will immediately have the answer to a piece of bad writing you’ve been torturing yourself with, and you’ll cut blissfully to the chase. Joy of joys, by the end of that summer I had not only finished the novel but I had met a super group of friends, found a publisher, and had been signed for three more books.

I can safely say, that if I hadn’t had my arm twisted into doing that course at the Irish Writers’ Centre, I would never have become published. Like most people who have a yearning to write stories I lacked the professionalism and discipline to turn a story idea into a book. The beauty about working with a professional writer in a workshop is that you cut through a lot of time-wasting, and get down to the real nuts and bolts of what will make the story work. Now that I teach first-time novelists at the Writers’ Centre, I see the same problems that I had coming up over and over again – motivation to get the story down on paper, motivation to keep writing when everything else keeps trying to get in the way, and finding the confidence to just do it, just write it. Stop agonising over your words and write the story. Just write the story that you want to write.

Of course it isn’t easy. The most difficult thing, when you have set out to write, is knowing what to write. Then you have to know how to write it. Working in a group makes a huge difference. Working with a professional who’s done this before, who’s doing this all the time, can save you a lot of time wearing out the delete button.

I’d love to say that there’s a magic trick to getting your first novel published, but I guess that the magic is in taking a professional attitude (rather than dreaming that it will all just come together some day. . . ), and taking on the task.

Have the yearning and the love of writing. Learn the technique. Practice the technique. Practice some more. Get feedback. Use the feedback. Set goals. Stick to the goals.

Every professional writer will write in a different way. I plot first, write a synopsis,  then a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, then fill in the gaps . . .and then all of the plotting and chaptering changes as I write. Others start with character, and let the character drive the plot. There are no hard rules. But you won’t know what’s going to work for you until you try.

Learn from professional writers all about the publishing industry and how it works. Read as much as you can, watch as many movies as you can, learn from television, film, journalism, theatre, keep learning from other literary forms about how story-telling works. And then write the story. Write it down. Keep on writing. Write some more. Write the story that you want to tell.

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Juliet is teaching a six-week course packed with fantastic tips on how professional writers write novels and get them published. The course, which runs from 1st May to 5th June is workshop-based providing a chance to share work with others and enjoy their feedback. If you’ve just started a novel, or if you’re just at the dreaming and plotting stage of novel-writing, this is the course for you. Classes will focus on character development, motivation, writing from the imagination, plot development, structure, style, genre and tips for approaching the publishing industry.

Your stories have been described as ‘dark and atmospheric, why did you get into crime writing above other genres? Without a doubt, crime fiction is my favourite genre to read, so it was natural for me to want to write it above all else. I’m trying to imagine attempting a romantic fiction or sci-fi novel: I wouldn’t even know where to start. Where would I hide the body?

There’s lots of talk about Ireland being more crime-riddled and dangerous since recession, has this impacted on how crime is portrayed in fiction? Is there? I thought we were pretty bloody before and during the recession, that seems to me to be era the gangs rose. It’s possible that lesser crimes like burglary have increased, but murder and other violent crime seems ever present regardless of who has what in their pockets. There are definitely more weapons available, that translates into fiction. Weapons and drugs.

How long does it take you to write a book? About nine months, a good old gestation period.

Do you interview sources or pluck the details & plots from the ether!? Depending on the book, I’d say both. I did a good bit of research for my last book, The Chosen, as it was set in the USA. I had to be very sure of my terrain which was essential to plot, and I had to learn how to operate a long bow and how to make arrows and so forth. It was very enjoyable. I read a lot too, hunting magazines, forensics, books on psychology, that sort of thing, but that’s a pleasure and something I would do in my spare time anyway.

Do you have any quirky habits when writing or a particular time of day when you’re most creative? I write in the morning (badly) and in the evening (fluidly), with the mid-afternoon taken-up with reading submissions or editing. I’m also training for a marathon at the moment, so it’s a pretty full day, with little time for quirks: unless you consider operating as a cat butler a quirk. I don’t. More a chore. Stupid mammals, not having opposable thumbs.

Are any of the characters based on people you know? Not really, most of the people I know are far nicer than the people who appear in my books. That said, if I met someone I actively dislike you can be sure they’re going to meet a grisly end amongst my pages.

You list your favourite authors as: Robert Crais, George Pelecanos, James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, John Connolly – what do you particularly like about them? That they have the ability to combine good writing with escapism without losing credibility. I think it’s fair to say that you can read any one of their novels and come away with something you didn’t have before you cracked them open. The older I get the more I appreciate the skill and practice that goes into good writing.

Give us a writing tip! Read! Don’t ever stop reading. I cannot fathom people who write but do not read.

Your last book The Chosen was a departure from the QuicK Investigations, was it harder to write? No, but I had the story kicking around in my head about a year before I sat down to write it, which is unusual for me. It was kind of nice to stretch myself mentally too. It’s easy to get moored to one particular formula, so this was a nice break.

What inspired you to launch your own publishing company? I thought the time was right for such a move. It was a huge learning curve of course and many lessons were learned in the process, but I’m glad we did what we did; it seems to be working out for us with two titles behind us, and hopefully two more to come this year.

What are you working on now? A novel set here in Dublin about two children who run away from home to escape an abusive father and walk straight into a drug war in the process.

“Arlene Hunt may just be the best female crime writer to have emerged from these islands in recent years” – John Connolly

Arlene who will teach a Crime Writing course at the Irish Writers’ Centre from 25th April began writing at the age of 27, and produced her first novel, Vicious Circle, within the year. This book was eventually published by Hodder Headline at the end of April 2004. Her second novel, False Intentions, introduced two characters, John and Sarah of QuicK Investigations, who were set to become a regular part of Arlene’s work, and was published in May 2005. Her third novel Black Sheep was published in June 2006. Arlene’s 4th novel, and the third in the John and Sarah series, is called Missing Presumed Dead (MPD) and was published in June 2007. It was translated into Dutch and is available under the title ‘Vermist’ and is due to be published in Russian. Her fifth novel, the fourth QuicK Investigations book, is entitled Undertow and was published in Septmber 2008. It was nominated for Best Crime Novel at the 2009 Irish Book Awards. In 2009 Arlene completed her 6th novel, Blood Money, which was published in March 2010. It continues the QuicK Investigations series. Her 7th novel, ‘The Chosen‘ was published in October 2011. It is a standalone thriller based in the USA and will be published by Portnoy Publishing.

by Sean O’Reilly

The other week, scanning the bookshelves in one of those charity shops, in Dublin city centre, I had the uncanny experience of realising that a number of the books used to be mine. I’d moved house a few months earlier, shed a few boxes of books and here they were back again, resurfaced, broken spines, dead barcodes, some of the titles still hot and resonant of another time. I slid one out: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It was scalded by the evidence of my past in a note I’d made in a margin and I saw myself years back, an older younger self, still silently walking the streets of Dublin in the first days after arriving here, trying to memorise the street names, that book in my pocket.

I loitered around in the shop for as long as I could, checking out the ties, the DVDs, a red bucket full of watches, waiting to see if some punter might be tempted by one of my old books, that man with the blackthorn cane, that woman taking sly photos with her phone, and whether I would give in to the desire to follow them, the desire to end up somewhere new, out of my depth, stripped bare, ecstatic, to create a new path through a suddenly mysterious city. But nobody was interested in the fiction shelves that afternoon.

Outside on the streets I watched some men putting up posters for One City/One Book 2012 above the anti-household charge placards. This year it’s Joyce’s Dubliners. He fought the printers for the right to name names, to use the real names for real places. Johnny Rush’s, cab and car rental in The Sisters, The Shelbourne Hotel in Two Gallants, The Herald in A Painful Case, Brown Thomas’s in A Mother. This type of scrupulous realism was unheard of here and so was the guilt-laden psychological realism Joyce had learned from Ibsen.

It got me wondering about the contemporary city, and how in the writing groups I’m involved with, the question of naming always seems to come up, whether a writer should use the actual names of recognisable places. Funnily enough, it’s a question that only arises in writing about the city. A story set down the country, so to speak, is rarely as nervous about naming as an urban story. The rural story can rely on a sense of place, nostalgic perhaps, and usually created by vaguely animistic descriptive passages about landscape and weather that the city story turns away from, preferring instead to indulge in the naming of iconic sights in the city like the Spire, Connolly Station, The Grand Canal. It’s a small detail but symptomatic, I think, of a desperate straining to find a city we all share, a city we have in common, a visible city.

Maybe naming the names is not enough any more. Maybe there are so many eyes these days it has led to even more doubt about what is being seen. So many screens and portals nobody knows who is really doing the looking, the watching, or who is really browsing who? I’ve read that new writers are less interested in place than verbal pyrotechnics or that the crime thriller is the last hope for the realist novel now that the city is big enough to have a dark underbelly! Maybe, unlike Joyce, writers are wary of dealing with anything topical, having bought into the idea that literature and politics are a bad mix. Or does it just seem impossible now to capture the cultural complexity of the city, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the hybrid sexualities, the trafficking of languages.

One City is a PR touch-screen phantasy. We all have our own secret city, our private monuments and parks, graveyards and houses of pleasure, burning unnamed ley lines twisting from Clondalkin to Skerries.Maybe in our dreams it all joins up, like Calvino’s description of Zobeide, the city of desire. Founded when men from many nations came together and discovered they all had had the same dream: a naked woman running through the streets of an unknown city, each of them in pursuit, each of them losing her. These men decided to build a city just like the one in the dream but at those points where they had lost her, those intersections where she had escaped, they would make some changes, alterations, a wall here, no wall there, to prevent the woman escaping again. In time more and more men arrived and each of them made their own corrections. No one in the city of Zobeide has ever seen the woman again. Even the chase has been forgotten now.

The Young Pretenders Writers’ Group is a newly formed network for young writers (age 18 and up) who want to meet kindred spirits in an informal setting. Unlike other writing groups we don’t sit and listen to each other reading our work; we exchange stories and ideas online and meet in person every few weeks to discuss, offer advice and support, and just share our common passion for writing.

We’re currently looking for writers of all shapes and sizes to join us – bloggers, journalists, aspiring novelists, and everything in between. If you’re starting off in the world of publishing and want to meet like-minded folk then come and join us. For more information email youngpretendersdublin@gmail.com. We’ve just joined Twitter too: @YPWritersGroup

Denise Blake will read this Friday at the Irish Writers’ Centre (1pm) as part of the Lunctime Readings. She was born in Lakewood Ohio in 1958 and returned to Ireland with her parents and family to live in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal in 1969. Her first collection of poetry, Take a Deep Breath, was published by Summer Palace Press. Her second collection, How to Spin Without Getting Dizzy, was published in Spring 2010. She is a regular contributor to RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany and her work is in five Sunday Miscellany anthologies. She read as part of Poetry Ireland Introductions series, Out to Lunch readings and took part in the Clé Author and Publisher library tour. Her work has been published in The SHOp, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly and West 47. She is a founder of the Errigal Writers’ Group and received an MA in poetry from Lancaster University through the Poets’ House. She has wide experience of giving creative writing workshops in national and secondary schools in Donegal as well as working with adult groups.

When did you start writing poetry? Firstly, I know the moment when I started to love poetry, it was when I read Seamus Heaney’s poem, Docker. We were studying the poem as part of the English segment in a foundation course in Magee College and I loved the imagery in the line; He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross. It was the first time that I could see into a poem for myself. The course was to be my return to education but instead it was my awakening to poetry. I was in my thirties and I had young children. I would never have considered writing a poem before that time. I started reading poetry and writing my own pieces. I was so thrilled with myself when I started producing work. The excitement of seeing new words appear has never left me. There were two strong forces in Co. Donegal at the time – The Killybegs Writers Group and Letterkenny Writers Group – so there were people who were supportive and showed great encouragement. Eventually a group of us evolved into Errigal Writers and we still meet twice a month.

What’s been the greatest obstacle to becoming (and remaining) a poet? The “who do you think you are?” chorus sitting on my shoulder. But the question could be; what has helped you stay writing? This is a great country for writing and I have had so much support, starting with my local community. There isn’t a week goes by that I am not asked “are you still writing?” by someone who is willing you on. When we first started Errigal Writers we organized Gerard Byrne to give us workshops and the Irish Writers Centre helped us out. We continued to bring other established writers to Donegal over the years and they have all treated us with a professional respect. I was lucky to be chosen for the Writers Workshop in UCG ( as it was then) with Paula Meehan as our facilitator. You can’t get a more professional, and yet compassionate, person to work with. I was fortunate also to be able to do the MA course in the Poets’ House in Falcaragh. There are so many established writers who are generous with their time and energy. I’m on the directory for Poetry Ireland’s Writers in the Schools and that experience is wonderful.

What gets you started on a poem—idea, image, personal experience? The greatest motivation I have is being a member of the Errigal Writers. When I know we are due to meet things start moving in the back of my mind for a while. I become more aware of my surroundings and more susceptible to imagery around me. I will read more poetry in those days and watch performances on you tube. And then I try to find a silence that lets creativity come into the room. I have found my favourite type of moleskine notebooks and I always write the first drafts in longhand. I just love that moment when the first draft is finished.

How did you go about getting your poetry published? You have to get work published in magazines; Poetry Ireland Review, the Stinging Fly, The SHOp were the magazines who first accepted my work. I also had pieces on Sunday Miscellany and I love recording for radio. Again I’m fortunate in that Joan and Kate Newmann of Summer Palace Press have a home in Donegal. They used to hold wonderful workshops and readings in their home in Kilcar. Eventually they accepted my manuscript and published Take a Deep Breath in 2004. They put so much work into the editing process that it is a gift when the book is published. My second book , How to Spin Without Getting Dizzy came out in 2010.

You are very involved in community-based projects, how did this happen and why is it important to you? I’m not as involved as I should be but I live in Co. Donegal, we don’t have organisations running readings and workshops on an ongoing basis so the Arts Scene kind of works from the earth upwards. Our Arts Officer, Traolach O’Fionnain is very approachable and he encourages us to create events. There were times in the group energy where we needed to perform, or meet other writers, or work with established writers or publish work, so the only thing for it was to organise it ourselves. North West Words is a group who now hold readings with featured writers and open-mic on the last Thursday of every month. I do think there is a hunger for poetry readings here.

Are festivals a good outlet for poets? Festivals have the funding for organising events and advertising. Anything that gets poets and writers performing in an area is good.

Do female poets face particular challenges? Do young male poets seem to have a higher profile? Yes. But whether that means that female poets face more challenges I’m not sure. It is a very long road.

What are you writing next? I’m writing poems for now. That is what is coming when I put the pen to paper and I’m grateful for them. Hopefully it will shape into a third manuscript.

Any advice for emerging writers? Love what you are doing. Work at the craft. Read. Be prepared for the long distance not a sprint. Don’t be crucified by rejections. Look carefully at the word emerging, it carries hope and a future. It isn’t: never-going-to-happen writers, but emerging. I love the feeling that anything can happen once you are writing and sending out work.

I didn’t have much luck publishing anything then and I stopped sending work out. I did continue to write – I wrote a novel or two – but I was teaching full-time too so the writing waned. I taught in primary schools in Tallaght and more recently in Harold’s Cross. About two years ago I sent two stories to The Stinging Fly literary magazine. Sean O’Reilly was guest editing the summer issue and he liked a story I sent in and published it. Declan Meade liked them too and asked to see more. Luckily I had a bunch of stories written over the years. From that he wanted to do the collection. It was kind of a dream come true – I thought these stories and characters were destined to spend their lives gathering dust in the corner of a dark wardrobe! Getting a book published is something that stops me short when I think of it these days, approaching the publication. Putting it together for The Stinging Fly Press has seemed amazingly easy – Declan’s way of working with writers, I think, makes it feel that way.

It can be difficult to keep on writing if you’re not getting published. You lose heart and stop sending stuff out. That’s why literary magazines and online sites for the short story are so important. You need to feel part of some kind of writing community too. Some of the stories were written fifteen years ago, some are more recent. They are quite varied, both in setting and in characters; they deal with ordinary people – men and women of all ages – in both rural and urban or suburban settings. I am interested in the seemingly small events that can suddenly turn a life, and how the characters not only cope with these, externally, but more especially how they mediate them internally, how they strive for interior coherence. Fate and chance play have a presence in many of the stories. I always start off with a character, a voice. If that comes right early on, then you have greater faith in the story. If not, it can be quite disheartening.

Mary will read a story entitled And Who Will Pay Charon from her forthcoming collection The China Factory at the IWC tomorrow at 1pm.  

WATCHING NUALA O’ FAOLAIN EAT A SAUSAGE SANDWICH

Relations between men and women are in an awful state. The old world is dead, but there’s no new world yet, we don’t know what to do or which way to go. There’s young-ones with money taking over Temple Bar and old Dublin, Joyce’s Dublin, is dissolved into paltriness. The whole point to Dublin was that it was accessible, shabby, alive. People wandered around it all day. Now they go from A to B, spiritually impaired. The wandering has stopped and mass exodus towards apostasy has begun.

This is what Nuala O’Faolain feels, 11 months after her book Are You Somebody? was released. This arresting memoir, by a dedicated controversialist, presented itself by pure accident and topped the best seller list for 20 weeks in 1996/7. The book indwells itself in the public and private life of Ireland, so much so, that Nuala herself is stunned at the emotional episode it has created. People wrote to her from Trinidad, Australia, China, Chicago, and even from a trekker’s hut in Nepal, to offer her images of themselves in response to hers. In an unpublished extract called Afterwords, she writes:

‘I never envisaged such cherishing. When I called my memoir Are You Somebody? it was largely to pre-empt the hostile people who’d say, at my writing anything about myself at all, ‘who does she think she is?’ I never imagined awakening something a bit like love.’

She was asked by New Island Books to write an introduction to a decade’s collection of journalism articles. She felt it was impossible without chronicling some fundamental aspects of her life. She had no intention of ‘writing a book’, rather the lengthy introduction was an unavoidable resolution to a complex and lacerated childhood.

‘Trying to live and push as much life into myself,’ is Nuala’s motto. “Sensation and feeling, that’s how I want to live. I want to really live. On the other hand I can hardly live because I am missing all kinds of skins that enable other people to live fully. I’m 57, but it’s as if I’m 17, trying to learn how to be happy. Yet sometimes I feel it’s not happening, because I’m the only person who knows about me.”

Her cat Hodge is so like Patrick Kavanagh it’s not funny! He has the same cynical pissed off expression and he’s a begrudger. I imagine PK’s eyes were as strikingly gold on occasion, when he woke half dead from alcohol. But Hodge doesn’t indulge in the ‘wrong’ kind of drink or write poetry. He’s a misanthropic feline, with attitude, Nuala adores him, despite his mucky personality. “I bought him off a sinister man for £150,” she explains. “They’re both the same, they don’t have very good personalities…ah sure Patrick had his good days too, like when he’d win on a horse and want to share everything with you!”

In her UCD years, Nuala shared a flat briefly with Patrick Kavanagh who used to piss and groan out the doorway in the mornings. Dublin was dark and dramatic then…Noël Browne’s Socialist Party met regularly in Moran’s Hotel to discuss the future of Ireland. Students sat around Bewleys, scoffing potato pancakes, discussing ideas for short stories. Nuala spent many a night drinking bottles of Vintara in Leland Bardwell’s flat in Leeson Street, writing bits of scripts for Radio Éireann. There was an unselfconscious scattering of ideas all over the literary Dublin of the time. You were assessed in terms of yourself, and warmly welcomed if you fitted in.

In 1958, while studying English at UCD, things did not always run smoothly for Nuala. At one stage she had to drop out of University and work in a hospital kitchen in London. When she returned to Ireland, Mary Lavin gave her an allowance for six weeks so she could resit exams and finish her degree. Shortly afterwards she read ‘medieval romance’ at University of Hull and eventually secured a scholarship for a B.Phil in Literature at Oxford. After she graduated she taught English Literature (briefly) in Dublin, before moving on to the BBC in 1970.

She produced outlandish and stimulating programmes: protesting pornography with the Queen’s gynaecologist, querying religious sects that buried their prayers inside batteries at the San Andreas Fault, chronicling personal problems of Yorkshire transsexuals and a documentary on the Bogside Community Association. Yet she was never au fait with any aspect of her emigrant life. She became increasingly desolate and disaffected in the UK, to the point where she had not choice but to return home. The year was 1977. The same vigour that hauled her through those early years, was bulldozing her towards inescapable crisis. She signed herself into St. Patrick’s Hospital as a full-time alcoholic, addicted to tranquilizers, desperate for help. It became apparent that she had to go right back to the beginning of her life, and start again.

Nuala O’Faolain was born in 1940, in an era of art deco, when Cat Woman first appeared in comics, when faulty condoms were made out of sheep’s intestines and UFO sightings were reported on a world-wide basis for the first time. It was the same year John Lennon and Frank Zappa were born, and Scott Fitzgerald and Emma Goldman died. Irish ‘O’Faolain’ is a diminutive of ‘wolf’ and is among the fifth most numerous names in Ireland.

In 1939, Tomás O’Faolain joined the Irish Defence Forces, spending most of his spare time writing to his ‘chroidhe dhil’ (Nuala’s mother) with details of moving his young family to Donegal. The following year he cycled up to Dublin from Dunree on the Inishowen Peninsula to greet Nuala at the Rotunda hospital. Her mother and father were desperately in love. By the early 1940s, Tomás had metamorphosed into the auspicious Terry O’Sullivan. He began his journalism career by taking the ‘Radio Train’ to Killarney for Radio Éireann, and his ‘Dubliner’s Diary’ column for the Evening Press. His ostentatious career and social life, took him further and further away from home. Mrs O’Faolain, glorified wife and onlooker to numerous extra-marital affairs, began to feel totally cast aside. Increasingly, she sat in her armchair in the kitchen to drink and read. “This is how she chose to eventually die”.

Nuala attended seven schools in total, during these early years, when she lived in a farm-labourer’s cottage in North County Dublin. She was hauled off to boarding school in Monaghan in 1954, when puberty became ‘a problem’. There she nurtured her love of reading, and fostered an urge to learn. ‘My life only began when I learnt to read,’ Nuala once wrote. And she read everything she could get her hands on. Saul Bellow, Alice Munrow, Chekhov, Keats, Dacia Maraini, Dermot Healy, Joyce, Eoin MacNamee, Montherland, Richard Ford, Kaftka, Racine, Jane Eyre, Robert Lowell, T.S. Elliot, Shakespeare, Kawabata. For too many years novels were all Nuala cared about. She has read a book every few days of her life without fail. In later life, she sees the characters of decades, gathered around her, to keep her company.

“When I get on in age, I’ll have to write novels,” she insists. “Sure what else can I do here? I’m here on my own all the time: you can hardly call that living. I will go and live in Clare full-time and write my books, crammed with characters, men and women & other people’s cats and dogs.”

Her input in broadcasting has been sedulous and when she returned from England in the late 1970s, she took a job at RTÉ, producing the Open Door and Booklines programmes.  Journalist Jonathan Philbin Bowman debated many issues with Nuala over the years, but states quite clearly that his various opinions of her don’t always fuse: “Nuala is a very fine writer, equally capable of great sensitivity and occasional near sanity. There are times when she is not sure herself, how to bridge that gap between intellect and passion. But overall, she is consistent in the amount of human compassion she shows people.”

Nuala joined the Irish Times in late 1980, following a conversation she had on radio with Gay Byrne, about elderly Irish women. Today, she is a highly respected columnist, who writes about all miens of Ireland in a unique, manifold way. Angela Bourke, writer and lecturer summed up her journalism in the following way: “They are essays that have urged us over the years, to pay attention to the weave of the society we live in, weft as well as warp. She notices always the threads that run always: the lives of women, of children, of quiet men, the hurts inflicted and forgotten or suffered and remembered. Class politics, gender politics, power relations. These are her particular themes.”

Some find her writing uncomfortable because she insists on adjusting to a certain understanding of how things really are. A certain amount of people recoil when truth flails around so unselfconcsiously, other embrace her honesty as if it were a long-awaited benefaction.

On Poverty: ‘If you live one of those local authority estates on the edge of small towns – the ones whose name appears predictably in the court reports of the local paper – who will care about you?’

On Drugs: ‘Hard drugs are the worst thing to happen to Ireland since the famine. But we forget, we lose interest, we fortunate ones can afford to.’

On Female Sterilisation: ‘Women are in no position to be airy-fairy about their bodies, they bleed, their wombs swell, they labour just like animals to bring forth children, then they feed them, wipe the waste from their bodies, shovel grunge into their mouths…to bring them through to independence.’

She writes her articles, pen avec paper, on a rough wood table in her kitchen, where we sit now. Molly the half Collie, runs in from the back garden with a stick for me. We fabricated a friendship in the isolated minutes after Luke, Nuala’s lodger, showed me in and handed me a cup of cha. Nuala trundled down the stairs, hair soaked, wearing a blue flowery dress and a big, amiable smile. There is an extraordinary expression in her eyes, as she talks unhindered, with a sausage sandwich hanging halfway out her gob.

“My lodger Luke is the dearest man in the world, but I am terrified of him coming in drunk, my whole life I’ve been watching people come in drunk.”

What comes across most fixedly about Nuala’s life is that she is dreadfully hurt by what she calls “one of those hugely damaged, big Irish families.” It is this unresolved ache that propels her to discover truths that would otherwise be unreachable. She has undoubtedly survived all the things that have entranced, beguiled, sickened and outraged her. Yet at this stage in her life, she feels she has no immediate or momentous purpose, and is very alone.

Sean MacConnell, Agricultural Correspondent in the Irish Times is probably Nuala’s closest confidant. He has known her well for ten years, and worked with her father in the Evening Press many years before. To sum up Nuala in a sentence he told me, “She is an amazingly bright, remarkably strong woman, with great integrity and great vulnerability.” His first impression of Nuala was that she was unbearably shy but had a suave charm. “Just like her father, the one thing that really stands out about Nuala is that life is a huge learning process, and because she is so open to new interpretation, she can be very unpredictable.”

Going back to the book where the explication of her life and success ultimately lies, I ask her why she began and ended with poignant accounts of her parent’s ill-fated marriage? “I hadn’t realised that I’d go back to them, I think out of some mixture of loyalty and being imprinted by pattern, I was trying to oblige them by ruining myself. I was tempted to join my mother in her despair all my life. I was actually very close to her, even though I didn’t like touching her or being with her. I pitied her so utterly that I copied her. I am very lucky they both died when I was about 40, it gave me a chance to live. I have been very lucky too, that there must’ve been some instinct for life in me, that I was lucky enough to get off with Nell, who insisted on life.”

She spent nearly two life-giving decades with Nell McCafferty until they split up last year [1996] when their many differences became insufferable. “Back to whole relationship/family thing: take my brother Don, who just died recently in London. He had a family of his own, but couldn’t let go of the past. He sat in his room and drank and starved himself and drank again, until he could die. He was just following out the logic of it.”

She tells a story about ‘Michael’ and ‘Rob’, her two tremendous loves featured in the book. They haven’t even bothered to drop her a line, or pick up the phone in response to her story being published. Her whole life it seems has been flooded by moments of unimaginable intensity, followed by long spells of desert, and all-consuming work in between. Her mother had been the same in this respect; nothing matters except passion, mythos is something to covet, something to adore…

On the way out the door, Nuala points to the rocking chair in the kitchen and says: “You know I sit there and drink red wine and read and read and read, just like Mammy.” When the car chugs off up the road, almost of its own accord, I ask her if she travels around the countryside a lot. “I do,” she says, “just like Dad did.” So at 57, writing, reading, drinking wine and contemplating how to live, she is a synthesis of her mother and father. How could she be anything else?

Bibliography

• A Radiant Life: The Selected Journalism of Nuala O’Faolain (2011)   
• A More Complex Truth (essays from the mid-1980s to 2008, published in 2010)
• Best Love, Rosie, published posthumously in 2009
• The Story of Chicago May (nonfiction, 2005)
• Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman (nonfiction, 2003)
• My Dream of You (fiction, 2001)
• Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (nonfiction, 1996)