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MJ Hyland interviews Colm Toíbín

MJ’s Interview with Colm Toibin in the latest issue of The Manchester Review

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.’

read the rest of the interview here

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