PEN 12 December 2008
I had the lovely opportunity to talk to Irish PEN this evening. It’s always great to get out to talk about the books and tonight was no exception. The chat was held in the Irish Arts Club in Dublin’s town and that’s a venue that has seen a thing or two or many. At this stage I feel like I’m lying when I say I have written 7 novels, 6 of which are published with another steaming down the line towards bookshops in the new year. But somehow this has come to pass. And even though number 8 refuses to start itself, I am having lovely thinking sessions about it and they are yielding nice ideas. It’s the putting of them all together that’ll be the tricky bit, not least because I want this 8th one to be stylistically and structurally very different from the others – not just for the sake of change but because I want to try something that’s been brewing in me a while. I’ll have to admit to all of you Leo Street fans that it ain’t one in that series BUT I am so overwhelmed that hardly a day goes by but I get a query to the website about her that I really do feel it’s time to revisit that whole set of characters and stories. It’ll be interesting to see how the intervening years have changed how I look at her. Nights like tonight when people have questions about the books always sparks new thoughts about all of them and ideas for further adventures. It’s also SO encouraging to find there are readers out there that any and every writer goes back to their pen and pad or notebook (paper or electronic) with renewed vigour and that’s how I am now. Hardest question of the night to answer was ‘what makes a dull book?’ Aside from personal taste and plain bad writing (and sometimes a story can survive the latter) a book can be worthy, well written and DULL…very, very difficult to pin down…or just pretentious and therefore a chore. Impossible to get to the bottom of that. although on the flip side it’s easy to point out why and when something is wonderful…I guess positive things are so much easier to pinpoint because they are joyous, in their way, but the negative ain’t?
