Colm Tóibín on 'The News from Dublin'
Colm Tóibín's 'The News from Dublin' is a dazzling collection of short stories rooted in the experience of home and exile, featuring a cast of characters who find themselves navigating life far from home or estranged from their own past lives and previous selves.
We caught up with him recently and he graciously shared some secrets of his writing process together with a few of his favourite things.
Most of the stories in ‘The News from Dublin’ were written over a long period of time.
I don’t ever take notes. If something cannot be remembered, then it is destined to be forgotten. A story begins when, out of the blue, an idea occurs to me 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. (With the story ‘The Journey to Galway’, I did as many as twenty versions of the opening.)
The important thing for me now is to do nothing, just 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. But the initial inspiration for the nine stories that are included in ‘The News from Dublin’ stayed as the structure of the narrative began to emerge, becoming more detailed and solid.
At some point, almost like a runner in a race, you decide to sprint, to move fast and with purpose. The task is to finish the story. No more imagining and lingering and slouching around. At this point, I work from early morning until late at night. 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, close your eyes and let anything, anything at all, come into your mind. You write it down. You forget about it for an hour. And when you go back, it can seem like rubbish. Cross it out. Start again. One story needs a soft landing, another a memorable image, another something that seems like nothing but is natural, not written to impress or be noticed.
The only way to revise a story is to read it in full and do this a few times a day, making small changes, re-writing paragraphs. The morning is a cold time, unforgiving, and a good time to realize that a phrase or a piece of dialogue or a whole paragraph must go now, disappear, it is no good.
I type the finished story myself, making many little changes. But the typing also means that you 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.
In the process, the first rule is that there is no hurry. Some stories in ‘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. The great question is not a large metaphysical one, or one that requires any great knowledge about literary theory or form, it is simply this: what are you doing now? The only way to write a story is to write a story. 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.
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Some of Colm's favourite things:
Books about Dublin:
Girl in the Making, Anna Fitzgerald
Dead as Doornails, Anthony Cronin
As If By Magic, Paula Meehan
A Poet's Dublin, Eavan Boland
