On the benefits of working slowly

You’ve had a very international life. You grew up in Ireland, where you studied literature and drama. You subsequently lived in New Zealand, where you earned a PhD in English literature, and in the Netherlands, among other countries. Could you describe your path to becoming a writer?

I was always writing, even when I was a kid, aged nine, ten. As a teenager, I wrote a lot of poems, as that’s really what I read. I read poetry and plays, because I was a very slow reader. It felt like a very intimate interaction. There’s all this blank space around the work, and it seemed to invite a direct conversation between the author and the reader. An activity, rather than something that you receive passively.

I went to the North of Ireland to study at Queen’s University Belfast, partly because I didn’t have the grades to go to college in the Republic. And also, a lot of the poets I was reading were from the North, so it felt fated to go there.

When did you start to write prose?

I didn’t start writing prose until I moved to New Zealand and was having a block with poetry, partly to do with culture shock, the landscape being so different. I was missing the density of the dark back room, where people were smoking and talking about Louis MacNeice or the latest Ciaran Carson or Sinéad Morrissey or all the poets who were living and working there. There was such an active reading culture around poetry. And then I went to this completely different country, with these vast open spaces, where people were shyer and less loquacious, and it was such a different atmosphere that I couldn’t write poetry. Within a couple of years, I had the sense that I would have to write into a new form and, by then, I was reading novels properly. I’d come to appreciate them as a form and as something that I could have a conversation with.

Did completing your PhD in literature affect your writing process?

It did in that it allowed me to quit my job. I went to New Zealand to run a marathon. Once I realized that I might stay for six months or so, I ended up getting a job at Google, and I got sucked into a very different life for a few years. I was writing the odd poem, but really, I knew by then how much you had to write and how seriously you had to go about it to become in any way good.

The PhD was a way to extract myself from that life and to take writing seriously again. And it came with a huge pay cut. I was always trying to save money, that was always the project with the jobs that I had beforehand, to try and save money to have six months’ worth of time where I could mostly write. The problem is you just never take it, because it never feels like enough of a nest egg. And so even when I was doing the PhD, I was also teaching at the university, and I still had some consultancy work from a previous business. I was sharing a flat with seven people. I was doing everything to save money. And then, I did the PhD really quickly, in two and a half years, so that I had six months of spare funding.

I did write a novel during that period, and I had written another practice novel as well, which I never wanted to show anyone; it was never intended for that. I hadn’t taken any creative writing courses. I had only done one poetry workshop during my undergrad. I wanted to learn how to write prose just by writing it and by throwing away a couple of hundred thousand words.

Oof. But necessary, often. What sort of work did you do at Google?

At Google, my job title was something daft, like Creative Maximizer. The job description involved writing. Before that, I was working in clothes shops, I worked wrapping Christmas presents in the basement of a corporate building. My bank account was dwindling, and I think I was down to $30 in New Zealand dollars. And I was crying at a bus stop after having had my fourth of five interviews at Google, just thinking, “I messed this up. Why did I think that I could do this?” And so, when I did get it, I was grateful for that financial relief. I’ve always been financially nervous, I guess. I suppose I feel glad that I’ve managed not to let that take over and compromise what I’m writing. Or at least I like to think that I haven’t done that. You don’t write poetry or short stories or literary fiction in general for a sense of security!

How have you balanced day jobs with creative work?

I’m not, unfortunately, very good at balancing. I’m a monotasker. Right now, I’m promoting a book, and it means I’m not writing at all. Because I can’t multitask, because I’m such a monotasker, I do other work for periods and then I write for periods. It goes in waves. I am aware that it’s a privilege to be able to do that and that not everyone can, and you do what you have to do. For me, thankfully, I’ve thus far been able to alternate between doing other forms of work and writing.

What has been the most surprising realization?

I think it’s always a shock if you finish a novel. Even when you’re three quarters of the way through, it just seems like the unlikeliest thing in the world. So a positive shock has been finishing novels! A negative shock is that, when you finish the novel, it teaches you nothing about how to write the next one.

Your first book was a collection of poems, after which you began to publish short stories and novels, most recently The Alternatives. Does your background in poetry affect your approach to writing fiction?

It definitely does. Because I’m a slow reader, I’m writing for a slow reader. I’m assuming that the reader is hearing every word. I’m always trying to hold onto that, trusting the reader and writing for your very best reader. I think poets do that. There’s no pandering. That training in the generosity of the reader and trusting in that generosity really formed my writing process as a prose writer.

What is your drafting process like? Can you take us through a day in your life when you’re immersed in writing a novel?

I write in one draft. I begin at the beginning, without any plan, without any notes. The only notes I might have are character names, that kind of thing, and usually, what that is, in a notebook, is me spending time with the character in my mind and giving intuition the reins. I’m very, very slow at the beginning, as I circle around and feel something out. The choices made are made by intuition, rather than anything intellectual or artistic. Usually, the first lines that I write in the blank Word document end up being the first lines that are in the published book. I write completely into the dark. The process for me is one of discovery on every single page in every single paragraph. It’s why I write, that reward of arriving at some place that you could never have set out to arrive at, that your imagination wouldn’t have been able to concoct. And hopefully, being, at the end of a book, a bigger person than you were at the beginning, thanks to spending time with other characters who have other ways of thinking.

It always sounds so insane, because of course you’re coming up with these characters yourself. But that’s not what it feels like. I was walking down the street the other day with a new acquaintance. I had formed an impression of her, I’d learned several things about her. We’d been talking for a good while before, and we were walking to an event together. And then, she said: Oh, my oldest daughter is studying such and such. I hadn’t imagined her as someone with two daughters. And that’s what it feels like when you’re writing a character, that you find something out about them, rather than deciding what’s true of them.

The risk of my writing process is: if it doesn’t work out, it can’t be saved. I can be two years into a novel project before discovering that it just isn’t a novel. But the upside is that, when you get to the last line, it’s the last line of the book. And the book is usually ready then to send off, at least initially, to my agent, before maybe a round of edits and then, out. So it’s very euphoric getting to the end.

So revision for you is really a process of line editing?

Exactly, yeah. Line editing and maybe there’ll be something not quite right, just some little detail… It could just be a line of dialogue that doesn’t sound true to where a character is at mentally in that particular moment.

You know something about the characters when you begin a novel. Do you know anything about the plot?

No. No. It’s different for each book, but with The Alternatives, I knew that the character I was starting with was an earth scientist of sorts. She’s a geologist. And so, I knew that this was going to be me, in some way, facing up to where we are and how I feel about that and what it is to love someone who works in environmental science. There was a certain psychic space that I knew I’d be entering, but is that plot? I don’t know. There is an inevitability. I don’t know if I even believe in plots. I think nothing is really in a state of stasis. There’s always some sort of inertia and usually change and friction in every aspect of our lives. If you’re thinking in terms of plot, you take that somewhere and you escalate that. But reality does its own escalation.

Your fierce intellect is always on display in your work. At the same time, your fiction is quite funny.

I’m someone who really loves reading funny work. I find it hard to recommend a book that didn’t make me laugh. As an Irish writer, I grew up reading James Joyce and Beckett and Anne Enright, really just such funny writers. There is a tradition of the tragi-comic that I’m writing into. And so, what trained me was not only what I enjoy as a reader, but also, what’s sanctioned by the culture as legitimate, serious literature.

How do you balance the work around being a writer—promoting books, applying for fellowships, writing reviews, interviewing other writers, judging prizes—with creating original work of your own?

Well, I don’t feel overburdened right now, because I’ve had the Cullman Center fellowship this year. It comes with a stipend; I highly recommend it. But this year is an anomaly; it generally is kind of a piecemeal, patchwork type of life.

I see all of that as being part of the job. Even if you are in the very, very, very lucky position to be able to write full time, which almost nobody is, even in that scenario, probably 50 percent of your time is not actually writing. So thinking about those other things as being part of the job, because in another way, writing isn’t something that you can do 100 percent of the time. I don’t believe you can. I think that we don’t have enough wisdom within us. We need to process what we’re witnessing, our experiences and encounters. And if you try to write one thing immediately after the last thing, it’s going to end up being a zombie limb of the previous project, philosophically, emotionally, in terms of wisdom.

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck?

If I’m stuck, it’s usually because I’m either trying to write something that doesn’t want to be written—there’s something theoretically interesting in it, but I’m missing one of the points on the constellation as a human being in order to write that story—or it’s because something’s wrong. That’s a really excruciating, nauseating feeling, because it’s very hard to name what’s wrong. For me, it’s never something like, “Oh, the pace of this scene is slack.” It’s something that I can’t pinpoint, I have to unravel the prose line by line or paragraph by paragraph and get back to the point of dishonesty, where you’ve done something that’s convenient for a scene or written a line of dialogue that sounds funny in a character’s mouth, but just isn’t what they’d say; something that has derailed the truth of the thing or where the thing wants to actually go.

How do you think about pace?

I think that, early on, I benefited from writing on my own. I benefited from the lack of any sense of a deadline or urgency or a competitive mindset—the awareness of other people producing work. That gave me so much license to learn slowly and to do things slowly. And I really philosophically believe in slow work. I do think that, if you can get yourself to practice that through your life, you will serve the work so much better.

How do you avoid burnout?

I waste an awful lot of time. I think the costliest thing about my life is how much time I spend wasting, whether it’s procrastinating about things or opening and closing tabs, which is one of my key pursuits. The thing is, I have to not beat myself up for wasting time, because it always, in retrospect, seems necessary. I do believe in a gestation period. I believe in downtime. That’s really crucial. And I think that it staves off burnout. Maybe that’s a really obvious thing to say, not doing anything! But it isn’t not doing anything… You’re doing something, but you know that it’s not the thing that you should be doing or the hyper-productive, rational, reasoned thing to do. And the key thing is to try and not beat yourself up.

On the other hand, I will say that, usually, when I start writing, it’s because I’ve reached peak self-loathing. So that is usually the engine that gets me going in the end.

What is something you wish someone had told you when you began to make art?

Write loads. I wish I had known earlier on how much I would improve by writing, I don’t mean by trying to publish, but just by writing. I think I would’ve gotten better sooner, had I known how much I needed to spend time sitting in front of a computer.