Roddy Doyle Interview

Hot Press' Write Here, Write Now competition as of One City, One Book uncovered a wealth of young writing talent and proved that the Irish literary tradition is safe in the hands of the next generation. Entrants were invited to create their own Barrytown, the setting for Roddy Doyle’s fictional trilogy, which was the chosen title for this year’s initiative. Doyle himself was one of the judges and attended the Write Here, Write Now winners’ presentation ceremony in the Mansion House, where he also partook in a public interview.

It was fitting that One City, One Book honoured the author’s celebrated trilogy, one of the key literary works to emerge from Ireland in the late ’80s. The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van portrayed Dublin working class life in a new way, with Doyle’s gift for dialogue resulting in numerous memorable and quotable lines. The novels were written in colloquial Dublin language, which allowed Doyle to capture the true vibrancy – and often profanity! – of everyday Irish conversation. Indeed, the author could be said to have done for Ireland what Irvine Welsh would later do for Scotland with Trainspotting.

Doyle’s stories caught the atmosphere at a time of social and economic difficulty. They remain an essential account of a country on the cusp of a radical transformation. Of course, Alan Parker’s successful film adaptation of The Commitments – a tale about the rise and fall of the titular R&B and blues band – brought the author’s work to a larger audience and made him into a genuine literary star. The movie’s soundtrack also became a phenomenon – a fitting achievement, given the role of music in Doyle’s work. He is the type of writer whose output often seems to have an in- built soundtrack, which made Hot Press an ideal choice to probe him about the creation of the Barrytown Trilogy.

A lively and compelling interviewee, Doyle had plenty to say about the craft of writing and what it takes to produce fiction that captures the popular imagination.

ROISIN DWYER: One City, One Book is inviting people to rediscover, or perhaps read for the first time, The Barrytown Trilogy. Looking back on the books, written over 20 years ago, how do you view them now?
RODDY DOYLE: I view them with great affection. I have to confess I didn’t read them again! Generally when I finish a piece of work I like to run away from it and start something new. I was really lucky, with the first book in particular, which I published with a friend here in Dublin. The Commitments became a bit of a monster, especially when the film came out. I felt I was going to be cursed with the film for the rest of my life. Even when I walked in here earlier, ‘Mustang Sally’ was playing and I don’t even like ‘Mustang Sally’! I thought I was going to be stuck with it for the rest of my life. Twenty-five years on, I don’t feel that way. I have written lots of other books, I have done lots of other things. I am older and I can relax about it.

The Commitments, written in 1987, was your first novel. Was it a difficult birth?
Yes, I think whenever I start a piece of work, and I have started many in the last 30-odd years, it is always a bit terrifying. It was literally a blank page because there were no laptops back then. Also, I think it takes a long time to get over the fact that there is nobody looking over your shoulder. You are your own person. There is a bit of freedom in that. It is also a bit terrifying. I wanted to start writing but I was allowing myself to be distracted by music and friendship and trivial things like that (laughs). I was working as a teacher so I had the summers off. I went to London in 1982 and spent three months there and went to the local library and just worked. I got into the habit, which is the most important thing. Now, I was writing muck for most of 1982 through 1985.

Did you ever think about abandoning it?
I always feel now looking back on it that it was almost like my apprenticeship. You wouldn’t want an apprentice electrician, who is only two weeks in the job, to wire your house. You approve of the fact that he is learning how to do it and he or she might come back in four years and do a good job. Writing was the same. That I was filling pages and getting into the habit was the important thing. I was also beginning to enjoy it and beginning to feel satisfied that I had filled, say, five or ten pages. Looking back, that was more important than the quality of the work – getting into the habit of being a writer.

Also, when I am writing a piece of work, most of what I write tends to end up in the bin eventually. I just fill pages first of all. It is a bit like getting to know somebody. You meet somebody and you don’t know them immediately and it's just as well because if you knew what they were like you probably wouldn’t bother! But you get to know them slowly and you might have a friend for life there, or your life partner, and it's the same with writing. You can’t know exactly what you are going to write when you sit down to do it. It is all about finding the words to tell the story.

You were working as a teacher. Did this inform your work and if so how?
It was marvellous. I loved teaching. But there were lots of things that were an advantage. I am not being cynical when I say the days and the weeks off came in handy, because they did once I got into the habit of writing. I think most of The Commitments, which is a very short novel, was written in the Easter holidays of 1986. I had started it in January and by Easter I knew what I wanted to do and I wrote every day and into the night. I didn’t have a family back then, so I didn’t have any responsibilities other than to myself. I wrote the bulk of the book in those two weeks. The holidays were a great advantage. But on a deeper level, just listening to voices all day every day was hugely important. I grew up in Dublin just around the corner from where I was a teacher, so I wasn’t landing in a foreign place. A long time before thinking about it as a writer, I really enjoyed listening. It was never eavesdropping. It was the rhythm of the language, the wit, the slang words that stayed; the slang words that lingered for a few days and then were gone; the difference between the way boys spoke and girls spoke, all these things began to inform the writing. I wasn’t hugely aware of it at the time. I was simply living it.

The Trilogy is renowned for its colourful true- to-life language. How much of it was drawn from your workplace, social encounters or evenings in the pub?
Well, all the language is made up. If you go through the trilogy page by page I could probably show you a line or two but very, very little. It is fictional and if kids used that sort of language in my class they would be in trouble! Or if I did I would be in bigger trouble! There is language you can bring anywhere with you and there is language you can leave on the step before you go into the house. Sometimes that formality between the two is broken down somewhat because of parents like me! The big challenge with The Commitments particularly was to capture the way the Dublin accent seemed on paper. It breaks the rules. Sometimes a Dublin person instead of saying ‘any’ would say ‘anny’, as in ‘are we going there anny day now?’ And it was a simple decision – I decided I would spell it ‘anny’ so that people reading it would have to read it that way. So it is a spelling error but it is a deliberate one.

Some of it is obvious like dropping the ‘g’ at the end of adjectives or dropping the ‘d’ at the end of ‘and’. So all those little rules I made partly from listening to kids talk and that. But I grew up in that part of Dublin. I had a working set of ears so it was in the air.

Dialogue is hugely important in your work. What can conversation convey that descriptive prose can’t?
I have always felt that there is nothing like dialogue to bring a character to life. I have always been drawn towards that type of writing, and I read everything and anything. I have one shelf at home that is full of the books that I really love as opposed to the books that I have just enjoyed. They are not all the same but there is a large amount of dialogue in a lot of them. I think if you are trying to capture a certain person and a time and a place there is nothing like a dialogue or writing in the first person. A Nigerian writer, a friend of mine, sent me some stories and I read the first one last night. Immediately the English as spoken by these fictional characters, these Africans in Ireland, came off the page. It was really lively and that brought it to life better than any description of where they were living, or where they come from, could. Dialogue, more than anything, made them human. So by happy accident I decided to write about a bunch of young people and I decided they would form a band and it was a big band as well. So there was no real room for physical descriptions. If a gang of people walk into a room you are not going to start describing the room, they are going to be talking immediately, or they are not going to be talking – and that is the point. So it is either the talk or the absence of talk that is the most important thing. All writers have their style and initially I certainly had characters talking all the time. Then later on, I reacted to it and wrote different things just for the heck of it.

Did you know from the outset that The Commitments was the first of a trilogy?
No I hadn’t a clue. I only did that once – there was a character called Henry Smart and I decided I would write three books about him. I think it was in year five that I cursed that I had decided to do this! It was a project that took years, a decade, but I am glad I did it all the same. But no, I had no idea The Commitments was the first book of a trilogy. I was just writing a book and then when I was finished that one I decided I would write another one. I don’t know why exactly, but I decided I would home-in on a character that only had one line in The Commitments, Sharon Rabbitte, and make the book hers. Then her father began to take over the book so then I decided I would write a book about him and then I stopped and there were three.

The books revolve around the lives of the Rabbittes. Was the idea of the family as the centrepiece present from the get-go?
Well, the family isn’t really there in the first book. They all have families: Outspan’s mother gives him the Children’s Allowance money to help him buy a guitar. They are either being supported, or not, by their families, or the people they go home to, and you have hints that things are good or not so good. But then when I decided I would write something more intimate, The Snapper, it just seemed, well, there was a family there in the first book and therefore she has a family. Part of the friction, part of the tension in the story is that she is bringing this baby into this family and into not ideal conditions.

Also, not in any autobiographical way, I come from a family obviously, and while I was writing the books I was making a family – if that’s the right verb – so it is part of the fabric of life. Later on, I wrote about people whose family experiences were awful. I created a character who didn’t have a family, who went home looking for his mother and she was gone and that haunts him for the rest of his life. When you are telling a story and you have a character, you begin to think beyond just the character, and if he is or she is by themselves you often ask 'why?'

Barrytown is full of memorable inhabitants. For our aspiring writers, how do you go about creating and developing a character?
It's a slow process. I am writing a novel at the moment and I think I am about 45,000 words in, which is quite a lot of words, but I still don’t know exactly what I am doing. And I won’t know exactly what I am doing until it is finished. There are yawning holes in any story, so it is a slow process of getting to know the character and the rhythm of the language that suits that character and what to tell and what to leave out. Lots of it ends up in the bin and that is part of the job as well, being happy enough to throw out words even though it might have taken you months to write.

So the book changes substantially along the way?
I have written ten novels and I can only think of one line from one novel that was the original first line and that is The Snapper. ‘You’re wha?’ said Jimmy Rabbitte Senior. After that, for pages, I don’t think anything else survived. I threw it out because I didn’t know what I was doing and it was the same with all the other books. I don’t think any start has been the actual start. As all the writers in the room here will become increasingly aware, we all make our own rules. What I do is I just fill pages first of all. Then when I have a certain amount done and I can say to myself, 'I am writing a novel', I start getting fussy and I go back and start looking at what I did earlier. But I remember when I was writing The Snapper, I had copy book on top of copy book on top of copy book. When I was finished it and she had the baby, I went back and there were characters and I had no recollection at all, none at all!

What happened to them?
I hadn’t a clue where they came from or what they were doing there. It is a bit like you leave the house, you go away for a few days and you come back and find you have five children. You only remember having three, but they seem to be part of the household. For the rest of your life you are trying to figure out where did those two come from? But you don’t want that to show on your face! Luckily with fictional characters, it sounds absolutely awful, but you can just tear them out and throw them in the bin. I remember reading that there was a daytime soap in the US called How The World Turns or something like that, and there was a character who went upstairs to get his tennis racquet and he never came down! Maybe they just thought he was such a twat that if they never mentioned him again he would never come back down! That is where your editing comes in, if you have a character that you can’t account for. But I think taking away words can make more of the words that are already there. But you have to put the words on the page first.

Do you edit as you go or after a certain amount of chapters are completed?
I prefer to just keep going, particularly if it is a longish novel. With experience I recognise that there is a lull where the energy goes and it could be into the second or third year. The shortest was six months and the longest was five years. There is a certain point when it just feels like so much of a chore you can’t remember why you decided to do this in the first place. It’s then that I print it out and edit it. It has always worked for me, I feel more proprietorial and I begin to own it again. It gives me the energy to keep on going.

So The Snapper is 60,000 words long. But the first draft was 120,000 words long; half it ended up in the bin. The last novel I wrote was 90,000 words or so and the first draft was 150,000 words. When you are working on a first draft, a good day’s work might be 1,000 words. I think if I get over that I am pleased. I don’t really care if they are all that good or not – I worry about that later. Then on the second draft a good day’s work is maybe 1,000 words in the bin. Now the problem if you are too mathematical about it is that you end up with nothing!

So do the number of words binned reduce, the more novels you complete and experience you gain?
No, not at all, I am a firm believer in writing too much at first. It’s being kind to yourself as well. It is not like journalism where you are under a deadline. I have only ever signed one contract for a book I hadn’t written yet so my working circumstances are different in that regard. I really admire people who can write at speed and write brilliantly at speed. I wonder how they can write at two, three or four times the speed I write and be brilliant – I wouldn’t be able to do that.