Colm Toíbín is the multi-award winning author of five novels and more than 10 works of non-fiction. His awards include the Encore award (for The Heather Blazing), the E.M. Forster award, and the International IMPAC Dublin award (for The Master). I’ve been a fan of Toíbín’s writing for a long time and, now that I’ve met him, I’m very pleased to be able to say that he’s not only an astonishingly good writer, but also a generous, clever and formidably handsome and energetic man.

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Kurt Vonnegut once published a list of rules for writing fiction. This is what he said:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things: reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

He also said, ‘The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.’


What rules or principles would you add to, or subtract from, Vonnegut’s list?

Oh dear. I don’t have any rules or principles. On reading Vonnegut’s list, I am glad about that. What a dreadful and stupid list! I suppose I am interested in rhythm and what is between words. I suppose I would suggest that maybe if you write one sentence and then put a full stop you could think soon of writing another sentence that would sort of follow on from the one before. Maybe that might be enough. Especially if you are concentrating hard on establishing a kind of seamlessness, or an ease, in the diction.

You’ve taught in the MFA at the prestigious New School in New York, Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin and you’ve also led workshops in fiction at the Arvon Foundation. Might you give me an example of the kinds of things you say to your students? Things you say in order to help them avoid common errors, things you say in the hope you might help become better at this difficult craft?

I don’t make any generalisations, so I read each piece and try and make comments on how it might be better, often going through it line by line. I often complain about too many flashbacks. Also, I try and suggest that the only interest fiction has is when someone behaves out of character, so if someone is intelligent, then best have them stupid for a while and vice versa. I am also against a whole grain in American writing which is male, macho, so I don’t encourage any guys to write about penises. In Texas I had to ban any mention of the penis. I am also against any form of obvious show-off experiment in writing. In the New School and Stanford and Austin, however, I mainly taught literature courses, and only more recently some creative writing. I hope more happened in the literature classes, or they were more demanding and useful for the students, especially when we were reading Jane Austin, or George Eliot, or Conrad, or Henry James. I think your job in creative writing is partly to entertain the students, make them laugh, or tell them gossip, so that they think that the class is not boring and then that business of not being boring might make its way into the stories they are writing. I try to make no declarations, but read line by line. And then I end up making many declarations. Another is that people I care about have more than one quality and it is a pity that so many characters in fiction do not have more than one quality. They just have one, and they behave in character all the time. The kind character is kind, the cruel one cruel. I think I tried to stamp that out.

At the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in 2004 you gave a talk about The Master (which was shortlisted that year for the Man Booker prize) and you mentioned the importance, in fiction, of what almost happens between characters, the dramatic importance of what a character thinks he might do, but doesn’t do, the things a character might want to say and do, but for whatever reason fails to say or do. Could you perhaps elaborate on this?

Sex is a good example. Something that is almost sexual has more power than sex. And something that came close to sex but didn’t get there has more drama. Love is maybe like that, and loyalty and goodness. I am not talking about life here but about the making of fiction, the working up of drama in fiction towards truth, or, even better, something that is almost truth.

Has anybody ever given you a particularly useful trick or constructive piece of advice about writing?

Mary Lavin, whose work I revere, once told me that even though the New Yorker only paid her for the stories they used, she always, if she had several ideas, began the story she thought they were least likely to take. And John McGahern used to say, often quite early in the year (in the spring even), that he hoped he would not have another idea until after Christmas.

When did you start writing?

When I was 12 I began to write poems. I wrote many poems between the ages of 12 and 20 and then for three years I wrote letters home and then I wrote journalism and now I write fiction and long pieces about books and writers and some stuff about painting. I have also written a play and more recently some new poems.

What caused you to realise you had talent?

Oh I always knew I had that. I don’t know what caused me to realise it. It was always apparent. Or maybe the opposite is more true. I come from a family of five, and the others, or most of them, were very intelligent and did very well at school. My brother, who was four years younger than me, could read before I could. They were always very surprised, I think, when I did anything much, and I have no real talent, just persistence and a lot of things on my mind.

What was the first piece of writing you published?

I published poems when I was a teenager in a Catholic magazine called Eirigh. It came out every month. It was edited by a Capuchin priest who liked my poems.

Could you describe the experience of writing in your early years, compared to how it feels to write now? Is there a difference? Did you get a powerful rush of good feeling from writing good passages then, or a rush of pleasure from getting praise then? Do you get less of a rush now from success or praise? Or perhaps it’s the other way round?

Oh there’s no pleasure. Except that I don’t have to work for anyone who bullies me. I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it. I don’t read reviews now. I suppose if a book I wrote came out and everyone, including George Steiner and James Wood, said it was rotten and I should not be published any more I would find out and I would mind for a while. But not for long. I would be over it in a day, maybe less.

Your first novel, The South, was completed in 1986 but turned down by many U.K. publishers and not published until 1990. In this period, however, you went on writing and The Heather Blazing and Homage to Barcelona, were published not long after The South. Was it difficult to continue writing in the face of rejection and uncertainty during the period 1986-1989? Do you remember what any of those early rejection letters said?

Yes, it was difficult. Not difficult to write. I knew the novel was good and I suppose I believed that those who turned it down were fools. Both John McGahern and John Banville had read it and they said it was ok. They both wrote to me. So, since they were the two people I was reading, I took that very seriously. I just went on working on the second novel, despite the fact that the first was being turned down. (Bad Blood and Homage to Barcelona were commissioned.) I’m not sure if I would have gone on for ever, had each novel been turned down, but I might have. Recently, the guy who turned me down first and would have been a perfect publisher, asked to see my next novel. I told my agent not to show it to him. The second editor who saw The South held it for two months and then lost it, not having read it. She didn’t even apologise or ask to see it again. I see her sometimes. She doesn’t know that I am the guy. Macmillan said that they did not want to do the book, but if ‘she’ wrote anything else they would like to see it. Robin Robertson, whom I know now and like, turned the book down twice, holding it for two months each time. The book was finally published by Serpent’s Tail, who were marvellous, I ended by being published by Macmillan for almost twenty years but by Peter Straus who was not the editor who thought I was a girl. (He is my agent now.) Andrew Motion, who was also an editor somewhere then, said I wrote too like Joyce. I could go on. It is all very fresh in my mind.

Have you ever had an important mentor or teacher? Somebody who helped you to become the writer you are?

In boarding school, I had an English teacher (who had been John Banville’s English teacher) and a Latin teacher. Both of them told me that I was able to write and were very kind about what I was trying to do.

You went to the Christian Brothers School in Enniscorthy and the final two years of your schooling took place at St Peter’s College in Wexford. What was your experience of school?

I disliked my teachers at the CBS and I think they disliked me too even though I did nothing special. They disliked all of us. One of them picked his nose all the time. It was hard because my father was a teacher in the secondary school while I was in the primary school. He died the summer before I would have been his pupil. I was no good at anything. Teachers would arrive and think I was going to be brilliant, but it wasn’t long before I got found out and they would start to insult me. All this changed in St Peter’s. It was a totally different atmosphere. Teachers, or most of them, had respect for you. It got a very bad name later for sex abuse. I think this is a pity because it was, most of the time, a good place and I learned a lot there. I learned to live away from home. But that was just for starters.

Were you glad to leave Wexford?

I liked going to Dublin and then to Spain and then it seemed natural to come back to Dublin and make my home there. But I always missed Wexford. Not the people or anything, but the landscape and the light, or maybe just a certain section of the Wexford coast, and the towns of Wexford and Enniscorthy. I am writing this now with the Wexford night outside and the sound of the wind coming up from the sea. I am spending a lot of time here and hope to spend more. I am nearly happy here. And when I am not here these days, I dream about it and wish I was here.

What happens when you don’t write? When you take a long break (for whatever reason) do you suffer from any kind of withdrawal?

I never don’t write. Maybe a week or 10 days a year if I am moving around... Or if I have a hangover, which is not often now. But otherwise I work most days, usually seven days a week, or at least I think I do, but it often seems like nothing. I don’t suffer any withdrawal, but always guilt for work not done. And then I do it. Then I work.

You travel a great deal. Are you able to write in hotel rooms and airport transit lounges?

Not in transit lounges, but if there is something on my mind – the beginning of a new story, for example, I can write it in a hotel room. I wrote the story ‘A Song’, which is one of the stories I am happiest with, in a hotel room in a few days in between readings and interviews. Obviously, I re-wrote it when I got home (I wrote it in longhand), but as far as I remember I made very few changes.

I don’t really travel a great deal. I have a house in a remote village in Spain, a place I have been going to since 1976, and I spend three months of the year there and I work intensely while I am there. I seldom leave. Only to play tennis in a place a few miles away. I swim a few times a day there in a pool in the garden. I also spend three months of the year now in the US, and I do that partly for the solitude, partly for stimulation. I hang out in London or New York a bit but always for a reason. And I never travel for pleasure anymore. It would bore me too badly.

Which of your books was the most difficult to write? Could you perhaps describe a little about the difficulties you encountered?

It’s always difficult because I resist it. But then after a while it’s not really difficult, but it’s never fun or anything. With a few of the books, especially The Heather Blazing and The Master and the new novel Brooklyn, there has been a real problem in not having a sort of breakdown as I worked on a particular passage. I don’t want to go on about this too much, but there is a passage in each of those books which I found almost impossible to write and then harder and harder to re-write. I hope never to have to look at those passages again.

Which of your books did you most enjoy writing?

No enjoyment. No, none.

If there’s no pleasure in it, why not quit?

Because I have things that will not go away. Some of them are true, some slowly become imagined. They do not disappear just because I write them. If I don’t write them, I find that suddenly I am writing them. They make their way into sentences and I feel a need to finish what I began, to formalise it and then publicise it. I emphasise that it heals nothing. Quitting would be like deciding never to listen to music again. It would be mad, unnecessary. I also have sought fame as a novelist – the phrase is V.S. Naipaul’s - and I presume that the urge for that is essentially neurotic. I don’t think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become?

What is your writing routine?

I try and finish everything I start. Often I work all day and all evening. I have no routine. Sometimes I do nothing, but not very often.

You’re a prolific writer. You’ve already written six novels, a book of stories and more than 10 works of non-fiction and you’ve edited four additional major works and you write for the LRB and the New York Review of Books and you are art critic for Esquire… and that’s not all. What does doing nothing mean? Could you say a little bit about what you do when you’re taking a break from writing?

I have a few close friends and I see them. But things have narrowed. I am a member of the Arts Council in Ireland, and have just agreed with the government to stay on for five more years. When I am in Dublin, I can spend two whole days a week in the Council when things are busy. But I try and work in the evening of those days. I don’t go to movies now because I don’t like most movies, and I don’t do sport unless I am in Spain where as I said I swim and play tennis. Dublin is a very quiet city, with not much social life, despite its reputation.

What do you enjoy most about your life as a writer?

The money. I never knew there would be money. It is such a surprise. And I like not having to leave the house in the morning. Yes, the money.

Is there nothing else you enjoy about your life as a writer?

It is not for enjoyment. It has nothing to do with enjoyment. I like selling foreign rights, but that feeling would last no longer than 20 minutes.

Do you avoid talking about your writing (before, during of after a work-in-progress) or do you find being interrogated (or interrogating yourself) useful?

I often tell friends what I have in mind for a book and they listen patiently. I was interrogated once in 1975 by the Special Branch of the Irish police force and one other time by the British police. I didn’t enjoy it at all or find it useful. Nor did they much, I have to say.

Why were you questioned by the British police?

For the British, I was Irish with a funny name and had an attitude and I was going through Heathrow Airport minding my own business. It was 1983 and they were doing what they liked. I was questioned by the Irish police because they followed me in an unmarked car as I was walking home at night by the canal in Dublin and I didn’t like the look of them so I ran up to the bridge. I was carrying a volume of Keats. They ran at me and brought me to the station and held me. It was in 1974 when they were doing what they liked. I was completely hysterical. When they realised that I was not an IRA man, they let me go. They were not known for their intelligence. (One of them kept opening the volume of Keats and reading it as though it contained a code.) Nor were their British counterparts very intelligent for that matter. I remember they called me Paddy and asked me what I had against the English. I love the English and had even – in 1975 – considered joining the British Civil Service who took me on a two-week training course, which was my first time out of Ireland.

Do bad reviews bother you?

Yes there are two fuckers whose reviews I was foolish enough to read and they have had no luck, none at all, since they wrote the pieces. But I never read the Adam Mars Jones stuff – he didn’t like a few of my books - so I don’t mind him and even invited him to a launch party and I have recently forgiven someone called Hari Kunzru because not doing so would have taken too much energy. And he made me laugh in Toronto. And I thought he was sort of good-looking.

What did Hari Kunzru say?

I don’t actually know. I just know that he joined Adam Mars Jones in saying rude things about my book of essays Love in a Dark Time on the Late Review. But I didn’t watch it.

Have you ever been surprised by anything in a review?

John Lanchester in a review of my second novel said that it made a diptych with the first. I was very surprised and pleased.

Are there things you haven’t yet done as a writer; things you’d still like to do?

Yes. Yes.

Could you give me an example?

I am working on a new play. I would like to write some good poems. I have two novels in my head that I would like to write. I have some short stories half done and some more half imagined.

What kinds of things do you think you could never write (but wish you could)?

I can’t write comedy, although people laughed at bits of my play. But I can’t write comedy. I’m not sure I want to, but I don’t like not being able to.

When you have a bad writing day, what kinds of things might be the cause? When you are in a grim mood about your work and the limitations of your talent, what is the theme or quality of the thoughts you have?

I don’t really have bad writing days. I just get on with it. I don’t have grim moods unless underlying everything - the work and the day – there is a basic grimness. I can do nothing about that. I have never put a single thought into the limitation of my talent. But now that you have mentioned it, maybe I should start thinking about it. Thank you for raising the subject.

You’re welcome.

M.J.Hyland

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