The first rule in writing stories is that there is no hurry. Some stories in my new book ‘The News from Dublin’ took a decade or more to finish. The second rule is that, once you decide the time is right, you must work with a kind of urgency. Settle down. Stop dithering and faffing around. Look down. Work as though this next paragraph needs to be finished now, now this minute.
Thus, one of a mixture of dreaminess and delay and then pure, determined action, a story slowly comes into place.
A story begins when, out of the blue, an idea occurs for a scene or a character or a drama. It stays in my mind. At some point I write the first paragraph in longhand. And then over a few months I re-write the paragraph so that I have five or six versions of it. The important thing now is to wait, let the scenes build up in my imagination.
Sometimes, a story fades. What seemed promising loses its glow. There was one story I wrote a while ago that I was happy with. But when I re-read it while preparing the book, I realized that it didn’t work. It was important then to drop it, forget it, leave it out.
With other stories, ones that seem to be working, the task is to finish them. But no matter what you do, the problem always comes with the last few paragraphs.
How do you end a story? It can be ambiguous and poetic, a single image. But which image? How does the image come? Usually, it comes over days of trying. You sit there, you close your eyes and let anything, anything at all, come into your mind. You write it down. Cross it out. Start again.
I type the finished story myself, making many little changes. But the typing also means that I inhabit the story in full a second time. And then from typing to printing out, which gives what was once tentative a kind of authority, the story takes on a life of its own. It now belongs to the reader.
