A conversation with Colin Barrett and Nicole Flattery
Liam Harrison | Tolka, Issue Four, March 2023
In July 2022 I set up a conversation over Zoom between two authors and friends, Nicole Flattery and Colin Barrett. I sent them a list of questions, asked them to hit record and left them to it.
Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic from Mullingar, County Westmeath. Her short-story collection, Show Them a Good Time, was published by the Stinging Fly Press and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, is set against the backdrop of Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1960s New York, and was published in March 2023.
Colin Barrett is a writer from County Mayo. His first short-story collection, Young Skins, was published by the Stinging Fly Press in 2013 and his second collection, Homesickness, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2022. His debut novel will be published in late 2023.
The questions I sent to Nicole and Colin were quite broad but often asked them about the craft of writing short stories and novels, as well as the importance of place in their work. All discussions of Mullingar roundabouts were entirely unprompted. I set up the Zoom from Devon; Nicole was in Dublin and Colin was in Toronto.
Liam Harrison
Nicole Flattery (NF): How are you, Colin?
Colin Barrett (CB): Good. How are you?
NF: Good, good. I was just at the Fleadh. It’s never been hosted in Mullingar before and it was just brilliant – they pedestrianised all the streets. I’ve never been so excited to be in Mullingar.
CB: That sounds like fun.
NF: I don’t really like Irish music – I’ll just say that openly – so, apart from the music, it was great. Seeing people from school, who look vaguely familiar . . .
CB: ‘Is that my cousin? Or just someone I saw in Mass a lot when I was seven?’
NF: Thinking, am I related to them, or just used to seeing them around? So, what have you been working on recently?
CB: Christ. Well, I finished the latest draft of my novel.
NF: Oh, brilliant! Congratulations.
CB: It’s far enough along now that that if I walk out in front of traffic they can still publish it fairly easily. It’s all there. I obviously don’t want to do that, but if that happens they can release a posthumous edition that just needs all the spellings corrected.
NF: And it’ll probably do really well, because you’re, you know, dead. People will be kinder.
CB: Should I fake it? Fake it and come back?
NF: I would probably really consider that.
CB: Just stage it. Imagine Roberto Bolaño is still alive and he’s just putting out increasingly bad books.
NF: I’ve never read any Bolaño! I’ve been told I would like him. What’s the one you would recommend?
CB: I’ve read the two big, long ones, 2666 and The Savage Detectives. They’re very good. He left behind a lot of marginalia and his executors keep pumping it out. A cheery note to start off with! ‘Wouldn’t my career do better if I were dead?’ The eternal question.
NF: It would, though. You wouldn’t have to deal with anything anymore. I’m learning to drive, so death is at the forefront of my mind.
CB: That’s one of the thresholds for a writer: can you drive or not?
NF: Well, I can’t yet. But my driving instructor is telling me I’m improving.
CB: I did a load of lessons in Mullingar when I lived there for a year.
NF: Did you? It’s a really hard town to drive in.
CB: Loads and loads of roundabouts. They’re going to love this in Tolka! ‘Loads and loads of roundabouts.’
NF: It’s just going to be an hour of us discussing Mullingar. But there is loads of roundabouts. They also keep moving the traffic lights, which makes you feel insane because you’re like, ‘That traffic light was over there the last time I was home.’
CB: They’re gaslighting learner drivers.
NF: That’s what it feels like.
CB: The roundabouts are really small. They look like you should just drive over them. A roundabout should be a minimum size. Some of them are the size of a fucking dinner plate. I’d think, I’m not going around that.
NF: A friend of mine really did drive over one of them. I think she failed her test. I feel like it’s going to take me a while to pass my test. I just can’t do all the things at once – the gears and the driving and the looking at the road – it feels like an excessive amount of stuff to do. I’m sure we can relate this to writing.
CB: It’s just like writing a book. What are you working on, Nicole?
NF: I have finished the novel now. I did the copy-editing two weeks ago. And that was good, actually, because it felt very complete in a way that it hadn’t before. Because it wasn’t complete – I was just telling people that it was . . . I have a cover and everything. I’ll show it to you over the camera. Let me find it . . . We can keep talking. How was writing your novel?
CB: It was hard. Took a long time. [Nicole holds her phone up to the screen.] Let’s see. Oh, yeah, that’s very nice. Very cool, yeah, I like it.
NF: It’s quite colourful.
CB: Just move it to your left. Oh, yeah, that’s good.
NF: And this is the American cover.
CB: Yeah, these covers make sense. They relate to each other.
NF: I think this conversation could just be me showing you different things to the camera.
CB: [Laughing.] In the interview it’s just like: ‘Nicole holds her phone up to the screen.’ This is like talking to my mother. She’s trying to show me footage of the TV, someone like Pat Spillane on the screen, you know, through her phone. And there’s a big shine on the screen from the afternoon sun. And I’m like, ‘I can’t see him’. And she’s like ‘Seán [Colin’s brother], come up! Come up and close the curtains!’
NF: [Laughing.] Oh, that’s very sweet. Tell me, how was writing your novel?
CB: Long, slow, painful. You know, we got there in the end. I spent ages on the first draft and then you have to do so much more with it. With a short story of 4,000–5,000 words, after working away at it for months, when something isn’t working or it’s shite, there is the possibility, however delusional, that you can fix the whole thing in one day. You just can’t do that with a novel. And you also have to try to honour the original spirit when you started writing it, three or four years ago. Because you don’t want to change the tone of the whole thing at the last minute. The biggest thing, for me, was realising that the first draft is just a draft and it’s not the finished thing. How did you find it?
NF: I was the same. Obviously, we both come from a background of writing short stories. I didn’t share any of the novel with my editor until I was finished. I don’t think I’d ever do that again.
CB: I did the exact same thing and realised I shouldn’t do that . . .
NF: I thought I’d have to wait until this novel was perfect to show it to anyone. I’m definitely one of those writers who doesn’t know what they want to say in the first or second draft. I was trying to figure it all out.
CB: It’s a case of getting it all out there at first. It’s like a transcription of a dream. It’s all just a pile of material.
NF: I’m not a planner. I’m not like, ‘This character will do this’ and ‘This character represents this’. I did put little Post-its up but that was only to make it look like I was doing something . . .
CB: ‘In case anyone walks into my writing room I have some Post-its!’ With just ‘character’, an exclamation mark and an arrow going nowhere.
NF: [Laughing.] You read interviews with some writers and they’re like, ‘I plotted this, this and this’. I don’t think I’ll ever be that kind of writer.
CB: Everyone does it their own way. I certainly did a lot more structural stuff with the novel. Just putting a shape on it and seeing what’s superfluous and what’s necessary. I’m in a really tender place towards anyone who finishes a fucking book. If you managed to keep a series of characters and a plot roughly in sequence until the very end, then well done. That’s really hard. My novel isn’t particularly plot-heavy, but just making sure that everything’s happening at the right time of day and that it syncs up with something else in a character’s life, all that was only happening in the second draft. You have to do the things you like doing – having character moments and trying to be original with language – but also just respectful of getting the story going, and getting from A to B to C. As my editor put it, ‘You have to give the reader a chance; you can’t punish them.’
NF: You worked with me on my stories. And you could say that—
CB: I wrote your stories for you!
NF: [Laughing.] A big revelation! I gave you driving lessons in Mullingar and, in return, you wrote my book for me.
CB: Fair trade.
NF: But I feel like my stories, and their kind of voice and character, work well – at least I’m saying it does – across eight to ten pages. But I don’t know if you would stay with that kind of character and voice for two-hundred pages.
CB: There’s an intensity that you can manage in a short story. Whether it’s through the language, character or mood. But you can’t extrapolate that over two- or three-hundred pages, so you have to approach these things in a different way. Whether or not I succeeded in doing that, I certainly tried. We’ll find out in another fucking year . . . Maybe we should talk about our stories as well?
NF: Before we talk stories, I want to ask: what do you like to read in a novel? After I finished the copy-edits of my novel I thought, I’ve got to read a novel that does big historical events. And I read Libra by Don DeLillo, and that was a bad choice . . . I thought, Fuck this. There are so many people in this book, but it’s amazing!
CB: I love Libra, but I had to go absorb a lot of twentieth-century history about the CIA, Oswald, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then I went back to understand it.
NF: I definitely did the Cuban Missile Crisis at school and I didn’t remember anything . . . But it was so atmospheric and I really loved that. I had never realised what I really liked reading or admired until I wrote my novel. What do you like? Do you like plot, character, atmosphere?
CB: [Laughing.] All of it, you know. ‘Plot.’ ‘Character.’ ‘Themes.’ ‘Motifs.’ ‘Symbols.’
NF: [Laughing.] Metaphors!
CB: They’re all my bag. But, no, I recently read Richard Ford’s Wildlife. It’s a novella about a teenage boy and his parents are breaking up and it’s all from his point of view so it’s a limited adolescent consciousness. The tension comes from his very limited perspective on what’s going on. You begin to read against what the young fella sees and then you can see what’s happening with these characters. My impression, the first time I read it, was that nothing really happens, that it’s just a character study, about mood and voice, and all that wanky literary stuff. Reading it the second time, I realised it’s just a really tight read. There are no superfluous scenes. Every scene that I initially thought was a nice little character moment progresses something along and introduces this character and then this character, and every little thing is in the service of building momentum. There’s no redundancy. When writing the novel I began to notice it in every book – from the ones that look like long rambling books or beautiful short reads – most of them are tightly written and move along a clear structure.
NF: Yeah, that was something I had never thought about with novels before writing my own.
CB: They trick you! If a novel appears smooth in its voice, it defuses your critical sensibilities and you think it’s a lot more offhand than it actually is.
NF: There’s a question here about spending time outside Ireland. You are physically outside Ireland; I am in Ireland, but my book is set in New York.
CB: But you did write it in Ireland?
NF: Yeah, mostly in Smithfield.
CB: All books should be written in Smithfield.
NF: [Laughing.] Smithfield and Temple Bar. As close to the Factory as you can get.
CB: The Irish Factory . . . The Irish Manhattan . . .
NF: [Laughing.] It required a lot of imagination!
CB: Was Warhol’s Factory in Manhattan?
NF: Yeah, in Manhattan, like 62nd street.
CB: You’re the expert now!
NF: Did you write your new collection in Canada, then?
CB: There was maybe one story written in Ireland. But it didn’t make much difference to me. There’s only one story set in Toronto. I’ve lived here for five years but I still feel like I have a very superficial impression of the place. A good chunk of that time was during the pandemic, so it was very restricted in terms of where you could go. The story that I did set in Toronto takes place during the pandemic. It doesn’t matter where you’re writing, really. I mean, you can go somewhere, and maybe it makes your senses keener about where you’re writing about, but I think Homesickness would’ve probably come off the same whether I was writing in Ireland or Canada. I don’t know . . .
NF: Were you working on your novel during the pandemic, like myself, or were you working on the stories? I think that claustrophobia affects a book more than whatever country you’re in. It had an effect on my novel in a way that I hadn’t expected.
CB: Was that useful, do you think? Not, like, for your general mental health but for writing the book?
NF: I was lucky because I had no outside interruptions. But then I started to think my characters probably don’t sound like people anymore. It’s just difficult to know . . . I definitely felt mad, which was good for the book, because the novel is about the writing of a book, and how intense that can be, so maybe the conditions were useful. I’m not someone who goes out and needs to talk to someone on the street to get ideas, though – how did you find it?
CB: Well, the novel is set in Ireland, and I wasn’t talking to Irish people here in Toronto, so I was working off memory. My kids were stuck at home with me, so I had to parent full-time. I just went back to writing in the evenings. I reverted to an earlier stage in my life when writing was only something I could do in bits and pieces. And, because it wasn’t my fault, it weirdly took the pressure off, as my expectations about what I could get done became more modest. Obviously, everything got delayed. But in the day-to-day writing I just managed to get on with it.
NF: I felt really lucky because my mind was elsewhere and I didn’t feel as involved in the news, even though it was always there. The news in Ireland was insane. Like, ‘Three people had some cans by the canal: should they be shot?’ That felt very weird . . . Because there was so much reading that I had to do for this book, I did feel it was good to have something on my mind.
CB: Our consensus is that the pandemic was good, then! [Laughing.] It made us work a bit harder.
NF: [Laughing.] So, every time we write a book, do we need another pandemic?
CB: I found the writing a bit of a reprieve and escape from the dread of it all. So that was good. It doesn’t always work that way with writing.
NF: A question here asks how we write about place – one of the things Liam mentions is the bar in your story ‘The Alps’. How did you approach writing that?
CB: It’s just based on places I know. A lot of the stuff I based these stories on was from when I was a kid, and kids are very observant. If you want a kid to be a writer (or maybe you don’t!), take them to the pub when they’re seven and let them sit around with middle-aged men.
NF: [Laughing.] I think that’s good advice.
CB: I think it’s very good advice!
NF: You don’t see kids at pubs so much these days.
CB: You just have to sit there and you’re both fascinated by adult conversations and bored by it. That’s a good place to be, I think, because you’re on the threshold of it. It’s not for you but you’re there and it’s filtering into your consciousness. The pub in ‘The Alps’ was based on a clubhouse bar in my local GAA grounds. You tweak these places as you need them for a story. That’s the root of it, really. Your own attitude to place is very distinctive and very Irish. Some of your stories contain a heightened version of reality – like in your petrol station story, ‘Show Them a Good Time’?
NF: Yeah, where they’re all working in a petrol station and it’s not a real job.
CB: It’s almost like sci-fi, the way you end up writing it.
NF: That was based on a real petrol station. I don’t usually name places. I think there’s an idea about Irish writers and place: ‘This is their county and where they’re from’, or whatever. I feel like I don’t do that. Well maybe in this one and the college in ‘Abortion, a Love Story’. The other day someone asked me, ‘Is it Trinity?’, and I was like, ‘No.’ [Laughing.] It clearly is . . .
CB: There are easy things you could do to clue the reader in, to show them that it’s obviously Trinity, and I think you mostly avoid them. And reading about the petrol station, I’m thinking, this is definitely written by someone moulded in the furnace of Mullingar, but nonetheless, the easy things you can put down to identify it are avoided. I did something like that in Young Skins in naming the town Glanbeigh.
NF: You’ve got a great petrol station in there.
CB: [Laughing.] Petrol stations, y’know! When electrical-car stations replace them all I hope the next generation of Irish writers can still go in somewhere and get a cardboard ham sandwich and a sticky bun, served by a surly fifteen-year-old.
NF: And the way they’re just little islands, aren’t they? They have all their own rules. I love them.
CB: [Colin does a bad Cockney accent.] Liminal spaces, ain’t they? Are you not interested in rooting stories in things that feel too easy? Or is it freeing to do that? I think I found it freeing to do it in Young Skins, to have a made-up town, even though it’s clearly just based on a bunch of places anyone who grew up near me would recognise.
NF: I think it’s definitely freeing. There’s a sense of unreality in my stories, which you touched on. And once you establish the oddness of the place it allows you to establish the oddness of everything else. That being said, even if I make the stories strange and weird, people always identify with them. One friend recently said about one of my stories, ‘That’s about me.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s not about you!’ [Laughing.] Because she had a farm growing up she was convinced it was her farm in the story. But there is that whole thing of being from a small town – I don’t want to name the pubs. It just makes my life that much easier.
CB: It’s more freeing. If someone asked me to write non-fiction about where I grew up, or whatever, I’d be like, ‘Hand me the gun.’ It has to go through fiction. I don’t live in Mayo anymore, so it’s just a place in my memory and I feel it’s more of an imaginative space, which frees me up to write more explicitly in a literal sense about it.
NF: Speaking of Mayo, that’s where all the writing comes from these days. It doesn’t come from Mullingar . . .
CB: You know, we’re having a good run at the moment. I’ve barely been there in years, though. How did you find writing about New York?
NF: I totally jumped into it. I thought, What’s the worst that could happen? We’ll find out . . . Have you ever seen Eyes Wide Shut? You know how it’s not shot in New York? And he just built it. I thought, I want it to feel like that. Because it just makes that film stranger.
CB: Your stories in Show Them a Good Time are set in precise places, but you occlude explicit references. It’s funny how there’s certain places you can write about and those you can’t, even if in the actual work you obscure a lot of that. Years ago I tried to write a story set in a Dublin suburb and it just didn’t work. I lived in Dublin for years and I had the experience of walking around the place, but it just didn’t stick as a story. It’s very mysterious what you feel comfortable writing about. I felt comfortable writing about Toronto during the pandemic, but if I didn’t have the pandemic, I don’t think I would’ve written the story in Toronto.
NF: I thought about this when setting my novel in New York. So many films and TV shows are set in New York, so, when it comes to writing about it, your imagination has already done a lot of work. It’s an imaginative version of a place, which I think I found easier than having to write about what ‘life is like out in Dalkey’. I don’t think I’d be able to do that.
CB: Leave that to the Dalkey novelists. That’s their problem.
NF: Stay away from Mullingar! They can write their Dalkey books. You write about place so well in Young Skins. When did that come out again?
CB: It came out in 2013.
NF: And would you consider yourself a post-Celtic Tiger writer?
CB: That’s what everyone said when they read it, yeah . . . I’m sure that stuff is in there, but it’s not at the forefront on my mind. You don’t sit down with a notepad like, ‘Themes: post-crash Ireland’. It doesn’t work like that for me . . . That’s not a value judgement! I’m sure some people do write that way. Like, did you do your historical research before or after writing the novel?
NF: I went too deep. I did a good bit for a year before writing it. Actually, I met Kevin Barry and he told me, ‘Stop researching now, and just write. Otherwise, it’s just a form of procrastination.’ And that was really good advice because I was just travelling around the world saying, ‘I need to see an Andy Warhol exhibition in Paris!’ As we were saying earlier, I don’t approach writing with any kind of clear themes, and then I was surprised, when I finished the novel, that it has a lot of the same themes as my story collection. With Show Them a Good Time, I wasn’t trying to capture ‘post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’ but, at the same time, I was living in it. There were no jobs, lots of rundown places – this is all going to creep into the work without even thinking about these things.
CB: It was in no way something I consciously thought about. I just had very modest goals, like ‘finish the draft’.
NF: Get through the day. [Laughing.] Your stories are so funny – did you find that was hampered in writing the novel in any way? Do you think the novel still has humour?
CB: That’s an interesting question. Again, I never sit down and think, I want to tell a funny story. I think you’re probably the same. It comes out of the circumstance in the story. If you just can know your characters and work out the situation well enough, the opportunity to write something funny presents itself . . . It’s another very mysterious and tricky thing, trying to find the tone that you want to hear in the novel.
NF: I’m the same, and I found it difficult. I think my novel is more solemn than the stories. Not that it’s humourless. I just didn’t feel like that kind of absurd tone from the stories fitted the novel. It’s hard to be funny in novels. They can make me laugh, but often when they’re not trying to make me laugh.
CB: There’s more of an evenness to a novel. You can’t be too much of one thing and you have to respect that. You want the language to be distinctive. A lot of the novels that I like are voice-led novels. There has to be an evenness in the voice so that they can accommodate solemn stuff as well as humour – they also always have to get you back on track for the story. That’s a very hard thing to pull off.
NF: It takes a long time.
CB: Have you been writing any stories recently?
NF: I haven’t. I did write one for Declan [at the Stinging Fly] and that was it. I really want to write one because I haven’t written anything, apart from some reviews, since finishing the novel. I feel really lazy admitting this . . . It got very difficult at the end of writing the novel. I have an idea for something new, but I have to wait until I want to work on it . . .
CB: You’re replenishing your energies!
NF: I don’t know about you, but when my story collection came out I was always like, ‘Writing a story is as hard as writing a novel’ and now I’m like, ‘It’s not . . .’ [Laughing.] I did find the process very tough. For the novel I felt like I had to get up every single day and return to it, even when I didn’t want to. While with the stories I’d go for a walk or see what else is going on.
CB: One of the questions here is about how we came up through the magazines and journals.
NF: Declan Meade’s Factory. [Laughing.]
CB: Writing for them suited my lifestyle of not doing very much for very long in any one time. When I had a day job and when I was unemployed, I would work on a story for a little while, like a day or two, and flit in and out, and then come back to it. I always like to be working on more than one thing, even when I was writing the novel. I wrote Homesickness and the novel at the same time in parallel. I would be working three or four months on the novel and when I wanted to blow my brains out I’d go and do a story for a while. How did you do it?
NF: I was just writing the novel and some reviews. But I think you’re right. When I was working on the story collection I would be working on two or three stories, and one would be nearly finished and then I’d jump to another one. But with the novel . . . I’m going to make it sound like real torture! Like I was locked in my apartment by Bloomsbury . . .
CB: ‘It was in the contract, Nicole. We were allowed to lock you in the attic for six hours a day.’
NF: [Laughing.] But I did focus on the novel in a way that I hadn’t done before. When I started the first chapters I felt like they could almost be stories. I missed writing stories. They can give such a sense of achievement and can be written in six months, which is a manageable amount of time. Whereas the novel can fall apart at any moment – it can fall apart after three years . . .
CB: Jesus . . .
NF: But it won’t! Another one of the questions is about both of us writing quite long stories – you wrote ‘Calm with Horses’ and I wrote ‘Abortion, a Love Story’. ‘Calm with Horses’ might be a novella; I don’t think ‘Abortion, a Love Story’ is, but it’s long. Did it just naturally happen, or did you want to write a longer story?
CB: I think it just naturally happened, and it was fun to write. The novella falls in between things. A seventy-page story is very doable, though. They used to write them more back in the day. I was reading some Tolstoy and thinking, Now I’ve read War and Peace and Anna Karenina, what else have you written? And he just has lots of 130-page stories. You can get the intensities that you get in a short story but you’re not quite committing to the big canvas of the novel. When I was writing ‘Calm with Horses’ I was definitely encouraged by my editors. Declan said, ‘It’s not a short story. It’s not done yet – keep going with it.’ It still had the thing that stories have where it’s all up in the air until the last moment. You either pull it off or you don’t. There’s more structural rejigging with novels, but novellas still have that bristling energy that I associate with writing stories.
NF: I remember I was working with you on ‘Abortion, a Love Story’, which was very helpful, and you told me I should write out the whole play at the end, and that was what made me write it longer.
CB: ‘You’ve got to do the play!’ Like with ‘Calm with Horses’, where I’ve set up this whole crime thing, and then, ‘You’ve got to do the crime!’ It’s funny how endlessly you have to be told this. You write something and someone says, ‘You’ve set this up. Now why haven’t you followed through with it?’ ‘Oh, I just wanted to end on this nuanced note of complexity.’ And they’re like, ‘No, get to the fireworks factory.’
NF: I think the ambiguity can work really well, in some films especially. But most of the time it’s an extremely frustrating experience. With ‘Abortion, a Love Story’, I thought if I’m going to write from two points of view it’s probably going to be a longer piece. I was deciding between a short story and a novel – and it was too odd to be a novel.
CB: It has a very unique energy to it. It’s the right length for what it is. It’s a lovely form to work in. We should probably be more aggressive with our publishers, and be like, ‘This is seventy pages, and it’s a novel.’
NF: I love a short novel. There’s nothing like it. You feel so smart: ‘I just finished that in a day.’ Another of the questions here asks, do you think it’s fair to treat short stories as a kind of warm up to the novel?
CB: See, we’ve made it sound like it is.
NF: And it isn’t.
CB: But I think that’s just because we’ve spent so many years writing short stories, and it was hard, and it’s slow and painful as well, but it’s in the past now. I think the best work I’ve done is in short stories. I love short stories. They’re not as commercially successful but who gives a shit. It’s harder to sell stories, but most novels don’t fucking sell anyway, so what’re you going to do . . .
NF: I know. Every so often there’s an article that says: ‘Short stories, are they back?’
CB: [Laughing.] They’re back! It’s a form I love and it’s the one I gravitated most towards when I was trying to write properly. In a romantic way I just loved the form, and my ambitions didn’t extend beyond trying to write one good short story in my life. I spent the majority of my writing life trying to get better at that form. I still love it and I still read it, and I’ll hopefully continue to write them too.
NF: I fully agree. I think when I was starting to write I was reading the Stinging Fly, and the short story is very heavily promoted in Ireland.
CB: We’re very lucky that the Stinging Fly is around and there is an actual native industry that supports the short story. That was maybe the first time I felt that, ‘Maybe I could be a writer’, discovering the Stinging Fly in somewhere like the UCD library. ‘Hang on, this is about fucking now. This isn’t from the Paris Review in 1978 – these writers are all alive! I’m pretty sure they’re not even that old!’ We were just very lucky that that culture was there. Declan published a couple of stories and I would do the readings and the launch nights. It was very nice to engage with that scene. It’s not something that’s always available.
NF: When I was starting out there were writers like Claire Keegan, for example, who only wrote short stories or novellas. I knew so little about publishing at the time that I never considered that you might be unable to get publishers if you didn’t write more.
CB: I never thought about that stuff. Ignorance is bliss! It doesn’t make any difference worrying about it, if you’re an aspiring writer, fretting over book deals and all that. You have no control over it.
NF: That’s absolutely it. I was thinking about that when I was finishing the novel – I’m done now. I don’t have any control over anything once this is done. And it encourages you to get back to doing something else – like you need some little world that you can have control over.
CB: You’ve bought yourself a little time to start work on the next thing.
This conversation first appeared in Issue Four of Tolka (November 2022). Issue Four is available to purchase here. You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
