 Welcome back. This is the last session for today of our Irish Writers' Weekend. My name is Jamie Andrews. I lead at the British Library on our public programming. The Irish Writers' Weekend is the first Irish Writers' Weekend. I hope the first, but definitely not the last. It's taking place today and tomorrow here in the Shaw Theatre and over at the British Library on the other side of the road. This weekend is for us at the British Library. It's a culmination of a whole year of fantastic island-related programming that we've been doing. All of which has been about building and strengthening our relations with the Irish cultural and heritage sector. Since this is the last session of the day, I'm going to do some thanks. Firstly, just to say how absolutely thrilled we have been to partner on this weekend with the Coarch International Festival of Literature. A massive thank you to the Coarch team, Manuela, Ashlyn and the former director, Sasha, who you'll see in a minute. Thank you also for your support to Culture Island and the Embassy of Ireland in the UK. We have long valued, long valued our relationship with the Irish Embassy. It's been fantastic to have the Irish Ambassador to the UK with us today. Thank you to our hotel partner as well, the Doyle Collection, who have been doing that most important of things, which is to give our visiting writers a roof and indeed a very elegant roof over their heads this weekend. We're really grateful to you for coming on board with us. Thank you to our friends and neighbours here at the Shaw Theatre as well. Our theatre at the British Library is currently out of action and we're very grateful that you've stepped in to help us host this event in the most appropriate of spaces, the Shaw Theatre, named after that great Irish writer. Finally, thanks as well to John to be to Amal and to all of the BL team. Do pop by if you are with us this weekend, if you're with us tomorrow, do pop by the British Library next door. We'll be hosting one of the sessions exceptionally, but excitingly, one of the sessions in one of our stunning reading rooms. That's a great opportunity to see one of those spaces. Pop by the building as well. We're open all day. It's open to the public. If you have time, come to our Treasures Gallery, our permanent gallery. It's free entry and in that gallery you can see the most extraordinary introduction to our vast collections that go back more than 3,000 years. Thank you to you as well, of course, for being here, for supporting the festival this weekend. I hope you enjoy the final session that's coming up today with award-winning actor Robert Sheehan, who is going to be joined virtually on the screen by the equally award-winning novelist, Donald Ryan. Now, at the end of the conversation, Robert will be over at the main British Library building. It's just over the road, just across the road, you'll be there. He'll be over signing copies of his debut collection, Disappearing Act, but be sure to pick up a copy of Donald's acclaimed novel, The Queen of Dirt Island 2, which will also be on sale. Now, to host both of them, please welcome our chair for this session, the writer and the former festival director of coach, Sasha Daball, who will be coming out with Robert Sheehan. Thank you very much. You can stand at the lectern if you like. I mean, whatever you like. Hello everyone. Hello everyone. Welcome. Is there any family members? Any nemesis? Anyone? Any enemies in the audience now? Raise your hands. Late. Didn't make it. They might sneak in the back. Thank you all so much for coming tonight. This is the last event of our first day of the Irish Writers Week in London. As Jamie mentioned, this is a partnership event between Courte International Festival of Literature and the British Library. It's been the culmination of about a year's worth of partnership building, so it's really, really, really wonderful to be here. I'm Sasha Daball, and I am so thrilled to be here tonight to have a conversation about stories across genres, generations, and diaspora with Robert Sheehan and Donald Ryan, who's joining us from the ether. So welcome, Donald. Can you hear us okay? How's the ether trading you? Great. I didn't realize I'd be so massive actually on stage. My bookshelf would be so bright yellow. You're on an 18-foot screen, man. Your head is huge. So the way that the conversation will go tonight is I'll do a bit of an introduction, and then we'll have readings from Donald and from Rob. Rob or Robert? Don't mind. Whichever. I don't really mind. I've been called worse. Well, hopefully it will not come to that. You never know. You never know. Then we'll have a bit of a conversation. There'll be time for questions from the audience, and then we'll finish up, as Jamie mentioned, with a book signing across the road at the British Library, and I hope you'll join us. And also, as you mentioned, I hope you will pick up both of these beautiful books, Disappearing Act by Robert Sheehan, which is here on this table, and The Queen of Dirt Island, which is in my bag at the back. But also for sale at the British Library shop. So, yeah, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Robert. Big round of applause. Thanks, Ollie, for coming. I really appreciate it. It's very new territory for me, all this being invited to literary festivals. It's new ground. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to wear, or how I'm supposed to behave. I think the thing is, is you can actually just do what you like. Because no matter what you do, they'll be like, oh, you're an artist. Very kind trick. Yeah, exactly. So we'll start off with some readings. Rob, how do you feel about going first, or would you like Donald to go first? I'll do an intro, if that's okay for you. Robert Sheehan is best known as an actor, with screen credits including Season of the Witch, The Mortal Instruments, Moonwalkers, Geostorm, The Red Writing Trilogy, Multi Ifta Winning, Love Hate, Misfits, for which he was BAFTA nominated, The Barrowers, and The Umbrella Academy. I did not know you were in The Barrowers. For real, I loved those books. I have to watch that. They coated all of our clothes in that bookbinding glue. That was real. Real. Theatre includes The Playboy of the Western World, The War of the Roses, and Endgame. Disappearing Act is his debut collection of short stories, which we'll be reading from today. So would you like to tell us a little bit about the book before you start? Yeah, like, all my life, I really liked writing. If ever I was on a train, I'd sort of get stuck into a notebook and be writing lots of stuff. It was always for fun, really, writing. I really enjoyed, and it was sort of a form of creativity, you know? And then, you know, there was a moment in Los Angeles where I used to live there years ago, and I was at this charity function, and there was a deputy editor of a magazine, and I said to her, I'd write an article for your magazine, and she went, all right, what would it be about? I said, shadow puppetry. And she went, what? I went, yeah, you know, and then I didn't write anything. You know, just a sort of a passing thing. And then a couple of weeks later, it was kind of niggling at me, and I tried to write something. I was kind of doing a bit of research online, but everything that I tried to write as part of this kind of self-imposed assignment, I absolutely hated. It just came out as word turd on the chain. And then I just sort of started writing as if, like, ah, you know, I'm just having a chat with someone that I know, and I like and I trust, you know, and try to, and I realised that my, like the stuff that I hated was school. I was basically, I was writing like a textbook, you know, I was trying to, but I don't know who writes textbooks, but the ones that we were made to study in school were profoundly boring, you know, boringly written, and a lot of the humanity was sort of stripped away out of them, you know, it was strange. And so when I was trying to do something in a kind of a real way, it came out like a weird textbook. It was odd, and so I had to kind of shake off that conditioning, and then I started writing, as soon as I started to feel more of a voice in writing, then loads of little kind of thought bubbles and little kind of, little farts popped out on the notes section in my phone where, where I suppose the kind of raw material, the very, very beginning grains of this started where I was just trying to kind of making myself chuckle, taking down little sort of little things, and so that was years, you know, that was, you know, there was bits and pieces that had sort of evolved into stories, that was back in 2015, and then I started taking it a little bit more seriously around 2019, and sort of cobble together maybe seven or eight very, again, very sort of embryonic short stories, and showed them to Gill Books, who were incredibly encouraging, who sort of went, yeah, no, but keep going. You know, there's a kind of, you know, going on there, and you should keep at it, and maybe come back to us when you have a, a collection that could fill a book, you know, something like 15 or 20, and so I went, all right, I'm going to do it, and I worked really hard on it at that point, and, but I still didn't really know what I was writing, you know, I sort of, I was just, you know, the stories had like weird punch liney endings, it took, I suppose it took me in a very luxurious way, several years, I mean luxurious and not very hard working, several years to kind of arrive at a place where I kind of started to hear my voice in a more clarified way, and so then they commissioned the book, Gill Books, God bless them, and then this pandemic thing happened, I'm not sure if you noticed, it was a huge global pandemic, and it was sort of beautiful timing because I had, you know, forced seclusion, I had a contract that I had to fulfil, and I had a creative project to focus on, and so it was just, what a gift this thing was for that time, you know, and I also found out how incredibly undisciplined I am when I'm trying to write a book, which I'm going to try and pick your brains about later on, Don Ryan, can you give me any tips in terms of how you go about editing your books? So, yeah, so where does that bring us up to? Yeah, lockdown, and then just wrote them, re-wrote them, re-wrote them, re-wrote them, and then I realised at a certain point that the stuff that sticks, the stuff that's really good, were the kind of chunks that were brought on by the sort of sensation of inspiration, that remained, like, I really like my meditation, and that's kind of laid the groundwork for what I call now the sort of physical sensation of the subconscious, which happens every now and again, and it feels like this invite, and you go, write something, write something, write something, you know, and if you're lucky you write something as a continuation of what you've already written, and so the book evolved out of that feeling, and it was a feeling that was defined by no thoughts whatsoever, just what they called flow, I suppose, and I tried to write a book by placing my faith entirely in flow, you know, and so a lot of Irish stuff, childhood-y kind of stuff came out, dysfunctional families from small town Ireland, you know, and there's a story that starts off in kind of small town Ireland, and then there's one at the end that kind of ends the book in small town Ireland, apart from my father's short story, which is kind of like, ah, Brendan, good of you to join us. That's my brother. All right, Brendan. But yeah, so I thought, you know, the one at the end is kind of funny, it's a short story set in a small Irish town, you know, in the spirit of this event called Salvador Daley, that's the name of the short story, so I'll give you a blast, I'll give you maybe a couple of pages just from the start off of it. That'd be great. Salvador Daley, written brackets, mostly brackets in Los Angeles, I knew this fella in the hometown, he couldn't paint, but he was a firebug, a proper little pyromaniac, cling, cling, you'd hear his zippo go, cling, cling, early in the morning, nights close and he'd be up before the cock crows in the summertime, roaming through the parish, ears perked for a clock to spoil the silence, and when he heard the alarm going off, cling, he'd be in that bedroom window and on it with the zippo. Mad coincidence really, him and the artist fella having such similar names and such similar dislike for clocks. Mam says he'd keep us all punctual with Salvador, at least we've that to be grateful for, I says yeah, and grateful for another one of God's mysteries that he hasn't been banged up for manslaughter. He'd the whole town trained well enough to wake up seconds before their alarm, Jesus, forgive me, you'd be raging when you'd beat the clock with waking by two minutes or one minute or ten seconds, leaping out of your skin from sleep, cling, where you'd have dreamt them flames. If daily was around your house he'd melt anything he found trying to tell you the time to the point where he wouldn't try to hide it like, the clock went off and me in the shower once and I didn't hear. I came back in to find the whole bedstead and the headboard all charred and blackened, but the alarm on it still worked for ages. And in school, writhe'n around, or passed out in the desk, the nuns never let him sit at the back anywhere near the coats. He full emptied himself in Brennan's class once, woke up and didn't give a bollocks, didn't even go to the toilet, it stank, it made my eyes water. And it was around that time he stayed up in butchers on some kind of social respite thing during the first big trial, till they cleared Fergal and the rest. But no one knows for sure. All sworn to secrecy. Butcho came downstairs one morning and Salvador was using printer paper to set the old grandfather clock a light. It belonged to Butcho's granddad, been in the family for ages and never told the right time. Butcho to chase him out into the garden with pots and pans where Salvador had burnt circles into their lawn of grass. And Butcho told me Salvador bars of chocolate stashed out in the tool shed and in under the hedges all over the place. He found a pound of Kerrygold once hid way up in the Rowan redberry tree. Butcho's cousin Kev lives about a 25 euro taxi out past Butcho in the sticks. And he said stumbling in at the end of the night he saw Salvador out there, alone in the field. Cartwheeling, cheering, celebrating something Kev couldn't see. Kev's father had to go out with the shotgun once or twice but give him a fair wide berth. Salvador would have built camps out in the ditcher. He'd stay out there days apparently. He'd eat the grass out of the ground letting off bangers and howling at the moon. That'll do. Thank you. That was gorgeous. A bit full on. Yeah, you totally had me. I was gone. I was like, oh, we're still here. I bet, I guess, cool. Thank you so much. I guess we'll head to the ether now. Coming live from the ether. Dylan Ryan will be doing a reading. Dylan Ryan has published six novels and one short story collection. From his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, to the most recent book, The Queen of Dirt Island, all of his novels have been number one bestsellers in Ireland. Awards include the Guardian for his book award, and he was the first Irish writer to be awarded the John Money Prize for European Literature. Last week he was shortlisted for the Un Post Irish Book Awards for a novel of the year. Congrats on that, Dylan. Thank you. I really like that Robert's moved his chair in, so it's kind of like we're just here for story time. Take us away. Story time. Before I start, if you don't mind, I might read the entirety of the epigraph from The Queen of Dirt Island. Mary O'Malley, my dear friend, and one of the great poets of her time, kindly allowed us to use the last verse of her poem, History as an epigraph. Or is it an epigram? I'm not sure. I think it's an epigraph, yeah. So I'm going to read the whole poem. It's quite chart. It's only four verses of four lines each. But I'd like to read the poem in memory of an Irish warrior and goddess, Vicky Philan. History by Mary O'Malley. This story is about a mother and a daughter, a god taking what he wanted. Demeter's girl. All we know of them is hearsay. Some figures and vases. The woman with her sheaf of corn. Her rage stopped the harvest. Bare shelves brought the gods to the table. This story is about a bargain and a trick. A young girl eating a pomegranate, a seed in her teeth. The girl has no say in our best known versions. We see her climbing from the dark, eyes hurting, the light x-raying her bones. Year in, year out. Demeter might have said, stay if it's easier, let the crops rot. But the myth needed growth. This is no time for shady business, the bargains and chains. We too live in important places. Let the books remember the local battles. Rewrite the plot. Let the harvest wither. This is your life. She is your great event. Keep her in the sun. That's history by Mary O'Malley. Can you hear me okay, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Okay, so I'm just going to read a short chapter from the Queen of Dirt Island called Proposal. And the novel is, well, it's a novel set in a small house in Northebrary, and it's pretty much the house where I was raired. And I was raired amongst women. So my grandmother kind of is a huge influence on the book. And my mum, obviously, even though my mum would read the manuscript as a pile of A4 pages, as she always does just in case, put it down and said, yeah, it's fairly good, though a fair betia. Where did you get the one I left in from? None of herself in the character at all. I think that's a good thing, really. I managed to disguise the fact that it's pretty much just my mum in the book. But as you know, it's my mum in an alternative universe. And so at this point in the novel, she's being proposed to by the brother of her late husband. And the proposal is witnessed by her daughter, Circia, who is 11 at the time. And it's a short chapter called, legual chapters called Proposal. Chris proposed to mother on an evening in early summer, with his working clothes on him, as though he'd been seized suddenly by some amorous impulse, some wild desire that had been lying dormant. He came rushing down from the fields to the village. Half cocked, as Nana said later, though she didn't wholly disapprove of his hastily conceived and poorly executed plan. He stood along while at the side door, mumbling. Circia had never seen a redder face. Mother had stepped back to let him in. She had a cigarette just lit, and she was pulling on it deeply. Come in, Chris, she said, through a cloud of blue smoke. Now I want, Eileen, my boots were covered in muck. I won't drag it in along your clean floor. I'll clean my arse at mother. And Chris laughed, a high chuckle, the way he always did. Chris enjoyed mother, and she liked him right back. From somewhere, from the ether, or the blue heavens, or the fumes of new growth, or agricultural diesel, he drew courage, and he made his proposal. Eileen, I was wondering, Circia heard him say, wondering what, Chris, I was wondering if it wouldn't be the best thing for all concerned. If you and me, if I and you, if you and I, if me and you, and then he said it straight, nearly in a shout, will you marry me? Circia saw mother bend forward as though someone had struck her in the stomach. And she grabbed this, the lapels of Chris's overalls, and pulled him into the kitchen, slamming the door closed in the same movement. Chris's eyes were opened wide in shock. Whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't to be manhandled off his feet. He straightened himself and put a hand over his face and drew it downwards as if to reset himself, to regain something of his passive confidence. What kind of rubbish are you talking, Chris? But Chris didn't know it seemed what kind of rubbish he'd been talking about. But I need applause. We wouldn't have to, you know yourself, be married in the fullness of the word. We'd just, you know yourself, get the bad look off of things. You know how to accompany me. You're certainly the baby. Baby. Circia was 11 years old, and she opened her mouth to protest this slight, with some vague wisdom rose from within her and silenced her. Padi and Chris, her uncles, called her the baby, and maybe they always would. I love you dearly, Chris, said mother, and I'd be a lucky, lucky woman if I were free to marry you. My heart and soul married to your brother, and I will be, I'd say, for all of eternity. Chris said it was okay. He was sorry. And mother said she was sorry too, and she kissed his cheek. And Chris dragged himself back up the hillside, and he didn't come down again for a long, long time. Oh! That was brilliant, thank you. Oh, thanks a million. Thank you so much, Donald. That was lovely. It's so nice to hear, like, for all that I think Irish writing is wonderful on the page. I think it's incredible to hear Irish writing specifically read aloud. There's something about Huburn O English that just lends itself to reading and performance, and I think I was reflecting on that, especially having you here, Robert, with your background as an actor, and I know Donald's a fantastic reader. And yeah, I guess I wanted to ask you both if you felt that kind of... the performance of it, the oratory nature of Huburn O English influenced writing how it can form part of it, and yeah. What do you think? Do you like it? Fully qualified to jump in here first. Donald, you kick us out. Sorry, no, it's a small delay, so I'm probably going to keep interrupting and just looking like I already just... That's all right. You're just a really keen. Well, to be honest, the idea of Huburn O English are, you know, the overlaying of English and the syntax of Irish and the retention of phrases and words and ways of saying things and the construction of sentences. It's what actually saved my idea of myself as a writer because, like Robert was saying, I spent years struggling to kind of find a voice and to start to like that same. I mean, I spent 10 years living in a haunted apartment and for half the time I was almost fully alone and for most of the time I had a fairly, you know, low pressure clerical job so I had, I mean, I had just portions of time to write and every single thing I wrote just rang untrue and just I hate it. For some reason, I was insisting on writing in a middle class English voice and for a working class that was just made no sense. But that's what I taught a writer was. Yeah, yeah. Just like Robert was saying about the text books and that kind of language being the word you had to write. You know, I had this thing in my head as well. I was fairly well read. I mean, I didn't, I don't know why I had this notion. But the very simple expedient of writing in a so-called dramatic voice just allowed me to hit that floor that Robert was talking about. I mean, and that's such an important thing, you know, when you actually get into that state where the world falls away and you have that mythical thing flow actually working through you and stories starting to form itself on the page. Jesus, just a great esteem of all time. And I think that using my own true voice really, really helped in that respect. Yeah. It's funny, sometimes you're trying to write, because I don't really speak Irish fluently. I mean, I've I've got a very rude, yeah, pooplifocl, yeah, you know, rude and entry Irish I have. But there's sometimes, you know, sometimes where I was writing the book obviously in English, and there's times I don't know if you felt this, John, where just the corners of English felt a bit wrong, you know. It's like there was something I was trying to mean and put across and put down, but the furniture of English just wasn't right for the Feng Shui, you know. And that definitely happened to me. I definitely noticed that and sort of made compensation for it. And I thought, oh, yeah, that's a that's I suppose one of the subtler costs of being colonised. That's that's kind of. I'm so glad you brought this up in the British Library at the Irish Library weekend. This is exactly where I wanted the conversation to go. No, seriously. Great, let's talk about it. Yeah, you know, because it's a rhythm. There's a kind of something there that's unconscious. When when it's gone well, you know, don't say it, that rhythm wants to come out. But if it doesn't have the sort of linguistic tools to be represented on the page, it just doesn't feel. I mean, you know, it was it was a rare thing that you know, but I mean, you know, to try to I suppose me starting off with that book to try to make it sound natural I to rewrite it like 100 times. And did you bring your practice as a performer into it? Like would you read the work aloud to try and find the voice because I know a lot of writers do that. Yeah, and I had I had a real I had a real hubris that I had to kill at the start. As soon as I'd written anything that I was vaguely proud of, I was mad to read it to my friend which was the worst thing ever because I go, oh, I've got this little thing. I'll read you this, you know. And then and then one day one of my friends looked to me and went and I went, what? You don't think it's great too? And you know, at then I realized the value of speaking the work out loud. And seeing it bounce off of another ego. And it, you know, not land as well as I'd hoped and that was the most those were the most valuable times. And so and then then I stopped reading. I just put a barrier up because I don't read this anymore. And then and then I and then I had to force myself to read it again to people I trust and stuff. Just to kind of hear it out loud and everything else. So yeah, you know, I I love the the idea of reading it out loud because all of my narrators are relatively unreliable and speaking in the most of them are speaking in the first person and they're speaking in the present tense for the most part because I wanted, you know, whenever the book you pick it up now or in a hundred years I wanted to feel like the stories happening right this second. So for all of that it does lend itself well to being spoken out loud. Yeah. And when you were putting the stories together did you try like a third person past tense, etc. Or were you like, no first like I want these to be kind of stream of consciousness into a third party you knew or you were going? Yeah, sort of just went with the instinct to keep them most. I mean there are ones that are in there that are third person, you know. There are ones that definitely needed to be third person. But generally I thought you know I'm going to make a book of characters before their stories. You know the notion of a flawed character who for whatever reason their minds are not at rest and their restless minds have consequences in the outside world. And so that felt most pertinent to do it from the first person. That's a lovely point actually because in The Queen of Dirt Island though it's a very different book Donal I feel like we also are presented with a couple of really like richly drawn characters who whose minds are not at rest, you know who are dealing with a lot of different things but the form of the novel allows you to get to know them further over time and then also in the novel we have a third person which it's odd because it's quite a close third but it's also quite dreamy. You know it almost feels like a fable at times. I would wonder if you could say a little bit about that Donal and where that came from for you. And actually I do I totally agree Rob that when you're writing the first person you have this inbuilt immediacy and you fully inhabit the characters you're right and I mean I was the first person for most of my of the last 10 writing years and it's just it's lovely and it is limited it's quite hard it's a real challenge to to create an authentic voice that isn't yours in the first person but I think it allows you to step almost completely outside of yourself and it's wonderful it's really and it makes for very powerful stories I think like in Rob's collection and of course then sometimes you can't use it to be a third person you have to be almost a Missy Godlike and you have to create you can wreak havoc and you can kill and maim and injure and abandon but the first person you get very involved you know what you really do and I think even with a close third I mean most of the vignettes in the novel are they're lends through the eyes of Sirsha from she's growing up and she you know towards the end of it she's a grown woman with a child of her own and it kind of I wanted it to read a series of impressions and I wanted it to be something that was easily accessed basically I didn't want anyone to see it as a hard book a book that was going to require any kind of effort beyond just reading of it I wanted it to be not easy but just something that would strike a chord because I suppose all books are personal to the writer but I just felt at the time that I wanted a book to be something somebody could read before they went to sleep maybe think about it Is that where the structure came from? Yeah well I mean I have to say I wrote the book in a huge panic because I spent nearly two years writing a much longer novel that I thought there's probably a hubris earlier and hubris is something that shakes in a sales all of us at certain times but I mean I wrote this long novel in a state of absolute abject hubris this is going to get novels that say of all time one book where I say this is going to be a novel prize like you know and I sent it off to my editor and my publisher and they must have gotten together and written a really politic and surface kind of saying this is the worst thing you've ever written really obviously they're very kind about it as they all these are it was going to take a huge amount of work to make a publisher and I just couldn't face it and so I said I'm going to write a different novel very quickly and so I had to use a very strict modular structure so that it wouldn't go off on any of my tangents because I had no time to be way over my deadline and it wasn't my events so it was press considerations but it worked out thank god I hope that other book works out eventually too but I don't exist anyway I think that's really interesting that you felt any to put limitations and constraints on your characters because they did want to come back to the question of character for both of you because that is something that really stands out in both works is that you both create such richly drawn characters and they really do feel very alive on the page in different ways so yours Donald were so alive that you had to give them rules so they didn't wander off and do anything weird to wander off sorry go ahead no no go on Donald I'm just going to there's a bit of delay you know you're up Donald okay well as I started to write just to say about the chapters being all the exact same length it occurred to me that every day of our lives is the exact same length it takes the exact same amount of time for the art to rotate once in its excess every single time some days of our lives things happen that become part of the fabric of our souls and other days you know you wake up and you kiss your kids goodbye and you go to work and nothing which happens and the day is forgettable there will be a day in your life that will be the last day of your life but still it's one rotation of the planet so it seemed actually very natural for each vignette to be the exact same length because just of that the modular nature of itself was constrained by the plank constants time and matter plank constants I know I just read about that actually when two days ago did you read that book Helgoland by Carla Rovelli brilliant yeah I read that as well going on about trying to make quantum physics understandable for for a few pages yeah that's good and how about yourself how did you feel bringing these characters to life did they emerge fully formed have they been inside of you for a while some of them emerged quicker and some of them emerged incredibly slowly some of I sort of like yourself I sort of got to a point where I'd overwritten something and then I threw it out and I started again and you know and there's a lot of detritus I think and I had to become okay with that that I might have started off a thing or there was a section of a story that was going to be in it and then I had to just accept the fact that even though I like this bit it has no place over all you know all that stuff yeah I really really for me I really loved going on long walks you know and sort of visualizing the story as a tiny thing zooming out the lens massively and looking at it and going you know what about what happened ten minutes before this story started which is the kind of thing of course you do in acting as well as you know you don't just start from the point where it's like you know scene one you know you said if you're going to write a character or perform a character you have to give them as much basis give them as much flesh and bone as is possible I heard this great thing Daniel Day-Lewis said about acting he said you know it's impossible to portray a character before I've had at least maybe six months of just marinating on them and I thought wow that's because anything less he would regret for the rest of his life and I thought that's a really that's an incredibly hard good work ethic that man has because it's like anything the longer you spend thinking about something the more it reveals itself to you know the more flexible and human they become and so I suppose in that regard the acting thing was very very useful to me approaching writing because I thought well it's the same principle really but I probably you know I probably had a little bit too much time to write this book too much and not enough at the same time I was reading it I came in on a plane today I was reading it and I was loving it I was still really loving it I'm still very very proud of it and then there's parts of it where you go I would have worded that better and I remember reading this thing about Ray Bradbury and he Fahrenheit 451 was his first book he wrote and he wrote it in about 10 or 12 days really quickly in fact he ran to a library and there was a sort of a typewriter that you put coins into right back in his day and so he just whacked out the whole book in like less than two weeks on this coin operated typewriter in the library fucking hell Jesus I mean think of the luxury of technology that we have today but he after he'd him and his pal was just walking along on a boulevard in Los Angeles and some police pulled up wound the window down and going what are you doing? nothing we're just walking along the street and he was like they were like yeah go home and they were like what the fuck and that's sort of this sort of shock that he'd gotten from a person in authority he just ran to the library and he was like fuck Fahrenheit 451 about corrupt authoritarian figures and what was my point about all that oh yeah yeah that he'd he'd gone back to Fahrenheit 451 years later and was like this bit this bit but then what can you do you have to just you have to just accept the fact that it's at some point the work goes into the world incredibly helpful and motivating and I tried to fill as each character up with as much richness as I possibly could and sometimes you'd be making some toast or whatever and a funny something would sort of kind of drift into your head and you go that could be good for oh you know Salvador or whatever the thing would just sort of drift in and then kind of drift down and find its place where you'd had one in the book so I had to learn to trust myself you know I read this cool thing that William Burroughs said where he said even when he was a junkie he trusted his own subconscious like he'd been a junkie for 20 years you know just like that's really interesting yeah he said like I'm not going to worry that I can't remember something or I need this piece of information I need to control it but just ask myself a question the answer would come you know it might take a day it might take 6 hours it might take a week depending on how much heroin I've consumed but the answer does come in the end and in that sense the mind is far far bigger than we give it credit for in our moments of doubt I think that's amazing to have built up that trust in your own voice because I feel like that's definitely as you were talking about your experience coming to writing where emerging writers will stumble is they'll start to get into that and then they'll second guess what's being produced or what's coming up so I think we're going to take some questions from the audience but before that I just wanted to ask one more question of you Robert you mentioned acting as being really valuable enriched in terms of a place to draw on for these stories and that definitely came to mind when I was reading them but I wanted to know how it felt for you because acting you're creating a character within yourself and then you're using your body and your voice to perform that to people it's also a very collaborative practice especially on TV it's like the cruise there's a writing process there's being rewritten there's directors there's effects now how was it to move from that to a really really solitary creative practice where actually you don't have a puppet master you can be like and now there's a dragon and now you're green you don't have to get anybody else involved the solitude was difficult it was difficult to go to a place of creative seclusion having spent my entire adult life and before that creating on a stage with a few other people going and sort of and yeah that was very very hard and still is I'm writing something else now because for me you know I'm sure you've experienced something similar where you're writing you feel a breakthrough happen a silent yet exhilarating breakthrough brilliant I've just made this book better now I've just done so hard really and you kind of go so I just sometimes a publisher I just send them stuff that I've done that day just because it just for the process of sharing it you know but then again a lot of acting preparation especially when you get into making telly making films and stuff in fact there's a graph you could draw between the budget of something versus the amount of rehearsal in advance that they do and ironically the more money they have the less rehearsal that you do it boggles my mind if I leave any legacy on this earth in acting I hope to try to put rehearsal of the actors back into television and film have you been on these streaming platforms and you click three or four different TV series and they're all acted shit sorry but it's true there's just this profound lack of preparation going on a lot of them are young and they're not bad actors but they need a bit of preparation but the culture of making television and films the larger the budget the less the rehearsal for the actors it's literally like it's watching a TV series the difference between riding a bicycle and riding a bicycle it's like they put so much fucking money into these things but yet the voices that are delivering the story and the everything in front of the camera haven't been prepped correctly that reminds me of in writing actually in Donald you'll probably have an experience of this that often when a writer gets more and more famous the bigger the fame the less the edit because they're like well you can write what you like it doesn't matter and you're like probably still needs a little bit of editing again, I tell you can lead to a lot of waste of money have you read any work by Ema McBride? no so she's an Irish writer, you'll probably know her work so her first book was called a girl is a half-formed thing and her second book is The Lesser Bohemians and she's trained as a stage actor and so the way that she talks about her writing practice I just think you would really like because she talks about she writes in a very experimental style almost behind stream of consciousness like before the thought is even a sentence and she talks about how she wants the words on the page to do what an actor would do on the stage and she's also an incredible reader so I think you'd love her before we throw it out to the audience Donald I just wanted to ask you try to exploit you now for tips first audience question is Robert he's coming to us from London I'm in an edit at the moment and I sometimes it's little mini breakthroughs but often it's like wading through mud at the same time I love the flow and all that that instantaneous exhilaration but the focused creativity of the edit I'm back kind of struggling on and I'm doing it painstakingly slowly but thinking there's definitely a better way to do this and I just wondered broad strokes wise when you when you have all the raw material in place kind of thing what do you do in terms of approaching it to sort of refine it well I leave it for ages and I abandon it and I usually kind of sulk it doesn't need it's perfect the way it is and then he sends back loads of notes and my first reaction was really violent I was going that's fucking bullshit brilliant so far and then recently we just shut up and stop giving out and sit down and do it and it literally is just a real slag trying to to be mechanical about language and to be mechanical about class and to actually try to make intricacies as good as they can be it can be a real slag but gratifying in the end but you know it's kind of late night and a spare time kind of work because it's just it feels as though you've done the hard work but then you realise the hard work just starts when it comes to actually making the thing readable and publishable and making it fit for a bookshelf I don't think this is what he wants to hear there's no big revelation in here tell me that that's it, that's what it is there's no prescriptive or proscriptive list you can give to somebody and say this is how you do it you just have to just do it I think it kind of goes against the whole idea of teaching creative writing but I think every writer is so different and everybody has a different ambition and a different style and a different way of telling your story so I think all you can do really is try to make somebody as happy as possible about the whole process and you know what that's really the essence of it I think it's so important to put editors and good readers are so important and I feel like you guys have touched on the idea of a first reader a lot actually in this conversation the idea that you need someone who's going to give you honest feedback and really tell you if something is good or not but then you also there's almost like a reader zero that's the person who you show it to where you're like I did something and then they're like good job that's great they're always going to tell you what's good no matter what you kind of need both right that being told it's good prematurely can be kind of dangerous too I think when you get that feedback from the universe you've done the thing great you could draw a line under it my wife actually has she has a range of that's great and is a modulator but I'm really looking for her and she knows how to deliver them she'll always say yeah that's great but sometimes you go oh my god that's great and I know the first that's great is shit and teary-eyed or maybe bloodless or has had some kind of reaction that I can see because I stand at an oblique angle from her she reads so I'm almost behind her but I'm watching all the time for a certain change in your aspect oh my god she's a great reader here did you guys get our postcard by the way from Sicily thanks a million rub for that aww that's alright no worries we sent yourself and Maria a postcard from Catania in Sicily when I was last year when was that now what month is it it was a year ago we recorded for posterity we should probably take some questions from the audience I want to give everyone a chance we have a question down here at the front can you have roving microphones so if you could wait until the microphone reaches you it's on the way and if anyone else has questions you can put up your hand and I will start to get a little rota on the works I've just taken a photo here because I'll go home tomorrow to tip and I'll say I was on stage last night in London which meant rubber chain and someone will go you worry ah aww I wanted to do a little photo or a video of Dave as well who says his his droll love and I don't have my phone on me do you have your phone on you? I do, do you want me to take a picture of you? do you mind if I do a quick video on it and you all say I wish you were here Pat Arish, here you go would you do that for me? you have to press the record button as ironically as you can muster alright 3, 2, 1 hang on, is that filming? I don't know, let's see I wish you were here that's so lovely beautiful that's brilliant, thanks for that would you like to ask a question? hi, is this on? Donal hi, I'm from Thurlis actually I'm concerned about the notion of voice and the way you explained so I have the Thurlis voice I have the London voice where I've lived for 20 years I have the United States voice where I've also lived and there's the voice sort of the critical voice which looks on so I can relate to your writing and that I have the Thurlis voice which is the first person voice and it's core and it's honest and it's real but I don't know which journalist or producer here so I use the critical voice a lot but I want to try to return to the sort of voice you've got but I have no clue how to get back to that because my head rules now let's see, you need to get back to Thurlis then you get plenty of them Thurlis what do you know what I'm talking about? all the best people come from Thurlis that's the perfect emigrant, emigrae, response you have to go home that's the only possible answer but you know what I'm saying, it's difficult actually just ironically I had one of my most terrifying experiences when it comes to voice in Thurlis and the Source Art Centre because I was reading I was asked to read a story I wrote called Langqop which is set in Ham in Syria and I was asked to read it to a group of Syrian people a theatre full of Syrian people who had settled in Thurlis and half way through the story I was thinking Jesus I just googled Ham I googled it and I realised it's mostly the suburbs are kind of dusty and dry and this centre is a kind of vibrant marketplace and that's all I know about it and I went off half cocked and wrote the story set in the town so my voice is going to just be ridiculous and when I finished the story a Thurlis woman stood up and said as you said I'm very concerned but the voice of your story I just don't believe it and thank God a Syrian lady just saved my ass she said I'm sorry but I'm surprised to hear it on and it hasn't been to Syria because you just got it so right and she was just being kind that was so amazing no but you clearly you took 10 years you were hanging out on your flat doing other things so you struggled so just give me the quick fix on this quick one Don literally I just wrote in my own actual voice literally I wrote in the voice of my friends and family I mean the characters in my first book were mostly involved in building work and I had been as well and I worked in meat factories so I drew on those kind of I suppose you could say the rough energies and the kind of legutions of guys working building sites and the guys of slaughter cattle were living guys my own friends and family so I tried to reproduce the sounds and the structures of that kind of speech but you know you can't just lob it onto the page there's always that artifice that plays between narrative and actual speech that you have to try to occupy so you're in this kind of interstitial space between a voice being very real and a voice being contacted in order for your story to be told properly because I mean it was pointed out to me that on the stage of spinning heart the main character describes his friend's sun-dried line-burned flesh and he's supposed to be delivering a monologue as the foreman of building sites and there's no way that he in reality would describe his friend's hand as having sun-dried line-burned flesh but then I was thinking but I worked in building sites and I'd say sun-dried line-burned flesh so it's okay but you know it's kind of not in the way either we probably have time for one more very pissy question can I use one more? Sasha from online, we've got a friend from the US, Tiffany Chang has written in, she's an American entomologist what's that? you're about to find out Rob she's an expert in insects and she asks and a paraphrase about your relationship with cockroaches can you elaborate please cockroaches? specifically Robert? I'm not in a relationship with a cockroach any cockroach relationships have been very fleeting in my life I feel like there's something I'm missing here yeah me too why cockroaches? it was around the imagery and the use of insects and the imagery of insects in your short stories in the book? yes I can't remember there's a lot of snake stuff in the book weirdly how do you feel about snakes? apparently quite strongly my subconscious there's like three there's three stories that have very strong snake themes and the publisher was very very insistent that I spread those out and keep them very far away from each other so I put them right next to each other just in case the snakes get any ideas you want to work together? yeah there's a variation I guess he's an Irish person but I can't remember any insects in the book certainly not cockroaches what's that? oh shit yeah to be honest that one and the other one I'm trying to keep on the back burner because of the sexual abuse but but house in the country is a short story from the perspective of he's about 10 years old I think and he lives in a rural house in the countryside in Ireland which is owned by this sort of abusive eccentric American character who is a hoarder and he so there's just cockroaches everywhere there's cockroaches on the television there's a cockroach called Hooty who sits on the TV to get a suntan and so I don't really have I think probably snakes are deeper in my psyche than cockroaches I think cockroaches was just a thing I used to really viscerally demonstrate how disgusting this house is that this kid lives in listen lads I think this is about all we've got time for but this was an absolutely glorious conversation lovely time thank you for joining us from the ether thank you for joining us from the ether thank you to all of you it is absolutely impossible to do an event at an Irish writer's weekend without being like boule boss, boule boss lads boule boss round of applause but yeah we'll now head over to the British Library proper so there will be a signing as mentioned before you can come meet Robert have a wee chat text donal your thanks tweet donal are you on social media donal no my wife is on twitter kind of on my behalf really you can tweet donals wife if you enjoy the event and thank you to everyone who watched online yeah thanks very much love to her from Augustina and I thanks guys