The rules of write club

Roddy Doyle has nine novels under his belt; Kevin Barry has a debut novel on the way. Brought together over a pot of coffee, they discuss writing, reviews and great music. ARMINTA WALLACElistens in

AMONG THOSE at this year’s Cúirt festival in Galway were two Irish writers, one a well-known literary figure, the other just embarking on a career in writing.

Roddy Doyle has written nine novels including The Commitmentsand Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the Booker Prize in 1993. His new book, The Dead Republic, is the final part of a trilogy which tells the story of Ireland in the 20th century. Kevin Barry's debut collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, won the Rooney Prize; a puppet adaptation of his story Burn The Bad Lampis currently playing at the Town Hall Studio in Galway. His first novel, City of Bohane, will be published in spring 2011.

The Irish Timesgot Doyle and Barry together over a pot of coffee – and listened in on the resulting conversation.

THE DAILY LIFE OF THE WRITER

Kevin Barry: "I worked as a freelance journalist for years, so I've always written professionally to some degree – since I left school, really. In my 20s I would have worked late at night, and a bottle of red wine would often be involved. I'm a morning person now. Straight to the desk. That's my best time, the first couple of hours. I'm a dead loss in the afternoons. Can't do a thing. So I go and get the shopping in, or go cycling or swimming or something.

“The first hour is critical. I write pretty much seven days a week now. The days when you don’t, you feel miserable – there’s a sort of a guilt thing there. You’ve one purpose and you’re good for fuck-all else, so you might as well do it. And it doesn’t feel like work as such.

“You mightn’t be getting rich and famous, but you’re free. It’s a kind of freedom.”

Roddy Doyle:It's a pure form of self- employment. I wake fairly early but I wait until about half-nine before I start work. I work all day – to six o'clock, usually. I divide the day into different projects. If I was writing a novel, two hours would be a good long time; I don't think if I added another hour it would be any use. I tend to make a cup of coffee, or hang out the washing, or something really mundane, and then I do something else: a short story, or a book for children, or a screenplay.

“I work a five-day week, usually – unless I’m up against it with a deadline. I was a teacher, and that was nine to five including corrections and stuff. When I started writing full-time I slipped easily into the office hours.

“At the same time there was something telling me, you should be doing the Charles Bukowski thing with bottles of whiskey and so on. I attempted to write once after two pints of Guinness. I think I even missed the laptop. I was . . . happily vague. It doesn’t work.”

KB:"I buy these little balls. Bouncy balls. [He produces one from his pocket.] A lot of my day is stood just bouncing that against the wall."

RD:"Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. . ."

KB:"Would you believe I've never seen The Great Escape.

RD:"Ah, it's great. But there he is, bouncing the ball against the wall."

KB:"There you are. I'm obviously the Steve McQueen type."

KB:"The more you write fiction, the more you realise that it doesn't happen in the front of your brain. It comes out of the subconscious. This is a great liberation, but also kinda scary because there's no guarantee that anything is gonna come. What you have to do is make a pact with yourself to be available if something does.

“During that first period in the morning, I try to get something down on the page. It will be an awkward piece of work, and nine-tenths of it will be cut – or all of it, very often. But it’s good to get something you can manipulate.

“I read aloud a lot, as well. A lot of my work is in dialogue, and the ear will get the false notes that the eye won’t. To an observer my working practice probably looks and sounds a bit nuts. I’m talking out loud all the time. And pacing.”

RD:"Well, at least you're aware of it. If you ask me do I talk when I work, the honest answer is: I don't know. I play music quite a lot, and when the writing is really going well the music will have stopped and I haven't even been aware of it.

“Also, I’ll find myself hunched right over the keyboard – almost physically climbing into it. Despite all the attempts at sitting up straight and keeping my arms level, once it’s going well I’m like Quasimodo. Hunched over the thing.”

KB:"I can't listen to music at all. I've tried. It doesn't work for me."

RD:"It's not so much I actively listen to it – but it's there. It's repetitive and rhythmic. Philip Glass's Music With Changing Partsand Michael Nyman's After Extra Timebasically dragged the last quarter of a novel out of me. It's like . . . energy."

KB:"Music influences my work a great deal in terms of mood and tone. The story See The Tree How Big It's Growncame out of the old Bobby Goldsboro song, Honey. I just thought of a guy standing up in a pub singing this. But music has been a subject in your work as well, Roddy. Are you a frustrated musician?"

RD:"Not now. No more than I'd be a frustrated footballer. I'm too old to be a referee, even. But no. A fan. That's all."

PRODUCING SOMETHING FUNNY

RD:"I never laugh when I work. Sometimes I'm aware there's a line that some people might laugh at – but I don't think, now's the time for a joke. It doesn't really occur to me."

KB:"I don't think you can try and write funny. If it's there, it will come out. But if you try too hard it's certain death. I think you develop a mode as a writer. All my stories are really about comic suffering. The books that made me want to write in a serious way, when I was in my teens and 20s, were Saul Bellow and Philip Roth – who essentially write comedies. They'd be lurching into the bleakness of black comedy, but still."

RD:"I'm always wary of punchlines. The idea that you'd write several pages – or even half a page – just to get to a punchline worries me. I'd hate to manipulate entire chunks of prose just to get to a line. I'd rather throw out the line.

"Sometimes I'm not even aware what the story's going to be. I've been working on one for weeks – on and off, on and off – and I only realised what it was about yesterday. I was on the train coming to Galway, reading the paper, and I realised, 'Oh, that'swhat it's going to be'."

KB:"The idea of putting a piece away in the drawer for a while is increasingly important to me, as well. When I write a new story my response to it is always, 'Another fucking masterpiece! I've moved the entire form forwards!' It's always a good idea to put it away. Then when you take it out again, you go, 'Uh-huh, same old, same old'."

REVIEWS: READ OR IGNORE?

KB:"I've only had one book out, and a couple of plays. So I haven't had a bad review yet. I tell myself I'll deal with it in a sober and restrained way – but I've a feeling that I'll go nuts. I'll find out where they live, and I'll be around. Of course you read them. But I'd say it would be rare that you'd get anything that would make you change the way you think about your work, or the way you do your work. How do you deal with it, Roddy?"

RD:"It isn't that easy. I was advised by somebody – another writer – not to read reviews. But I'm too curious, too anxious. So I do read them. The really scathing ones you know immediately – and I've had plenty of them.

“This time around I’ve had some great reviews and some really, really dismissive ones. The dismissive ones remind me of bad teachers. Sarcastic teachers. They make me angry – but only for a little while. The best way to deal with it, I find, is just to work. Work on something.”

KB:"Kingsley Amis had a good attitude. He said: 'It's okay to let a bad review spoil your breakfast. But not your lunch as well.' "

RD:"Yeah. But this time round I surprised myself. I was really annoyed with one or two of them – considering how the word culture is being bounced around the country, as if it's the only thing that will save us from destitution and . . . leprosy.

"But one thing did annoy me. There was a bad review in the London Independent on Sunday; and when I opened the Sunday Tribune, they had taken that review. And I thought: 'Could they not get somebody Irish to review the thing – and if they were going to use a review from elsewhere, could they not find a good one? Or maybe a good one and a bad one side by side?'"

LITERARY FAME

KB:"John Updike says it's a relative thing. It's like saying 'a famous weatherman'. Writers aren't famous now the way they were in the mid-20th century, when you'd have writers on the cover of Timemagazine and stuff."

RD:"We're not visually famous, either. You're not under the same pressure as, say, a singer-songwriter whose posters are everywhere for every gig they have. I was talking to three different groups of people on Shop Street this afternoon. Now, if I was walking down Henry Street in Dublin that wouldn't happen. It's only because people in Galway are in literary festival mode, so they're primed to look out for writers.

“My name is probably a household name in this country, and yet most people wouldn’t have a clue what I look like. I don’t know what literary fame actually is, and it wouldn’t keep me awake – I hope. It’s nice to meet other writers at festivals, though, because it is a very solitary occupation. There’s a certain giddiness when we get together. It’s like a school trip. And we never talk about writing.”

KB:"French writers, now. They're the ones who want to talk about writing."

RD:"Oh dear. The ones who are in the corner – or at the bar. The deep ones. I tend to veer away from those."

SO WHAT DO WRITERS TALK ABOUT IN EACH OTHER’S COMPANY?

KBand RD:Football.