'I am not the headbutting type'

Niall Williams on prose style

Born in Dublin in 1958 Niall Williams has been quietly prolific since the success of his first novel, Four Letters of Love, in 1997. His eighth book, History of the Rain, was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2014, and his novel, This is Happiness, was nominated for best novel in the Irish Book Awards.

We chose his Time of the Child as one of the best-written recent releases in literary fiction. You can read the opening pages here.

What do you understand by the terms substance and style? How have these understandings influenced your prose in TIME OF THE CHILD?

When I was 21 and completing a Master’s degree on humour in William Faulkner, I met an American in Dublin. She was Christine Breen, and she was completing her Master’s thesis on an Irish writer I had never heard of. His name, she said, was John Banville. He had published four novels at the time, but few in Ireland knew who he was. Her thesis, as I recall, was titled ‘Banville on Banville, Style and Content, The Magic Circle.’ Reading it, I understood for the first time something of the inseparable marriage of substance and style.

In the 45 years I have lived with Christine since then, that understanding has deepened into practice. For the Faha novels, like TIME OF THE CHILD, the voice that tells the story is an integral part of the story, the telling is inseparable from what is told, and style and content are one.

If they discuss them at all, writing guides tend to cover the qualities separately and pay minimal attention to their relationship. What have other writers taught you about this relationship, and what have you had to learn yourself?

I find that it is impossible to say who taught me what, in life and art both. (You might as well try and separate substance and style). Everything and everyone influences you, if your heart and mind can stay open.

But my writing teachers were Dickens, Faulkner, Yeats, Garcia Marquez, and Seamus Heaney, to name a few. In each the substance and style are inseparable. I would go further and suggest that their work has a third element which is inseparable, that is their own spirit. Their work is them, complete with their own idiosyncrasies and hallmarks.

When planning TIME OF THE CHILD, to what extent did you disconnect substance from style? And when editing it?

I have never planned any work of fiction. It seems to me it would defeat the purpose. I find a first sentence and see if I can figure out what the next one is. The substance and the style emerge at the same instant and are indivisible.

Writers sometimes describe the substance of their books getting away from them. They begin the work planning to communicate certain ideas, but then in the attempt to match techniques to those ideas, they find they’ve communicated something very different. Rather than substance shaping style, the work’s style has shaped unexpected substance, occasionally of a transforming nature for the writer. Has this ever happened to you?

As above, I don’t begin trying to communicate anything. If I did then I would just write that. I don’t write fiction to communicate ideas. I wouldn’t know how. I write to tell the story of the people that appear on the page. ‘Give the people people,’ was Chekhov’s advice, I think. It is the characters’ story, not mine. So I do no shaping of story as such.

But there is a quote from Czeslaw Milosz that I like and which perhaps speaks to this. He talks of finding his home in one sentence, and ‘…an unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.’ So, shape, structure, form, whatever you like to call it, is important to me, at the sentence level, the paragraph level, and on. I shape the language, but not the story. The characters do that.

How can literary style be defended against widespread distaste for the slick linguistic style of marketing? Do you ever find yourself agreeing with readers or writers dubious about style?

I don’t know that I have thought about a need to defend literature. Maybe that would suppose that I was in an arena of some sort, and my experience as a writer is too solitary, too much simply me and the white space, to have any sense of greater debates. These don’t seem to me the concern of the story teller.

Literature is what I have given my life to. I have a vocational sense of it, believing that in fiction I can encounter the richness of humanity, and encounter it more fully, intimately perhaps, than in daily life. The style of my writing is something that has evolved, same as my skin, it is no more chosen than my signature is. So regardless of what the current taste might be, even if I were aware of it, and found that I was contrary to it, I could not change, any more than I could change my eyes.

Why do so few reviewers, critics, interviewers, and writing teachers pay attention to style? Which reviewers have looked at your prose in detail, and did you learn anything important from this?

I haven’t read any review of my work since August 16^th 1991, when The Irish Times review of my first play at the Abbey Theatre had the heading ‘Total and Embarrassing Waste.’ Once a book is published, there is nothing more I can do for it.

I can’t remember who said that a critic is someone shouting up at a bird telling it how to fly better, but I tend to agree. To read a review of my work would be the same as having a public discussion on my nose. I can’t change the nose. And I know its faults better than you.

Style is hard to teach, because it is the most personal part of writing. It is you, and in the end only you can become you. Your voice cannot be taught, except by living, which means loving, suffering, struggling, hoping, dreaming, suffering again, struggling again, and against all odds loving some more. All of this, in life, and also in the relationship with the page, results in your style.

How close did you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the minuscule nature of the prose issues you were working on in TIME OF THE CHILD, and what were those issues?

I am not the headbutting type. Novelists need patience more than anything else. I adhere to an unprovable belief that the books I am to write will be written, and by me. So they are out there waiting for me. I just need to continue to show up and be patient. Some will be better than others, the same way some years of my life are.

A writer pitched to us a piece arguing against Auraist’s emphasis on accomplished sentences. What truly mattered in writing, he believed, was daring ideas and narrative. We said we’d publish his findings, if the piece was well-written. We never heard back from him. Do theorists from this school ever corner you at parties?

I have heard of these parties, I may have seen a film that featured one or two. But living in rural west Clare, and on many days meeting only the postman, we have never attended one.

In general, I try to avoid any discussions on theory, because I do not write from theory, I write from emotion.

Many readers who no longer buy novels cite their inability to fully immerse themselves in fiction, to suspend their disbelief. How important are voice and style in TIME OF THE CHILD to casting the fictional spell that helps such immersion?

Voice is everything. As if to agree with myself on this, I write out loud, saying each sentence in a barely audible murmur as I type it. In this way I am first telling myself the story. I am both the parent telling and the child listening, and so bound inside the voice of the story.

I have always worked this way—something in me shrinks back a little at the verb ‘worked’ here, as it has never seemed like work to me, any more than breathing does.

I am a firm believer in the idea you refer to here of casting a spell, and in my case linking that to the ancient Irish traditions of oral storytelling. In those stories the point was never to get to the point, but to pass the night. To keep the audience inside the armchair of the story while the fire still had heat. This obviously dictated the form, the need for digressions, diversions, changes of pace, tone etc.

In my own view this form was also inextricably linked to the west of Ireland landscape itself, where no straight line exists and there are multiple ways to get anywhere. I am trying to achieve some form of this landscape in my Faha novels.

What do you understand by the term overwritten, and how often do you come across overwritten books?

I think all terms like this, which represent judgement, change as you grow. What you didn’t think of as overwritten when young can seem so when older. Or vice versa.

There is no absolute, it seems to me. For there are many many readers and they bring to each piece of writing their own criteria, meeting it at a certain point of their own time, their own education and circumstances and life experience.

So personal taste is hopefully an ever-evolving thing. I find that as I have gotten older, I pause judgement more. Remember, all verdicts can be overturned.

Nabokov recommended never beginning two adjacent paragraphs with the same word, which many writers might see as overly fussy. Which stylistic suggestions have you rejected as too trivial?

I had not heard that recommendation. Now that I have, I must reject it as overly fussy.

I never, ever think of these kinds of artificial rules. Write freely, revise with tact, somebody said, and that seems sound to me. Every rule can be broken.

What ratio between writing and editing would you recommend, and has this ratio changed over time?

I can’t give recommendations because I believe that each writer must find their own way of doing it. And it seems to me it doesn’t matter the slightest whatever way you do it, as long as you do it.

There have been writers who say they edit a lot and others a little, but lot and little are relative. The goal is to produce something that you can not only put your name on but is in fact your signature, that unique piece of you that is your spirit but is now outside of you on the pages.

So if to achieve this you require forty drafts or one, it doesn’t matter. You are simply working at trying to do the hardest thing in life, be yourself.

For some writers a draft means rewriting an entire manuscript, while for others it can mean scanning through the text for typos, etc.. What’s your definition, and has this changed over time?

As I have said, I write out loud, and so I really only write one draft. By that I mean one full version of the story. When working on a book I sit down each morning for about two hours and make sentences. I do not have a word count or goal other than to make the best sentences I can.

But when I come back to the chair the following day, I reread aloud what I did yesterday, making small changes, so in this way the draft is always redrafting. When I get to the end of a book I read the whole thing aloud once more, doing the same tiny edits.

Then I give the book to Christine, who knows me better than anyone alive, and she does an edit. Then I read the book again and accept or reject her edits.

Then it gets sent. There is no rewriting as such, it is all the one draft, but it is also redrafted hundreds of times.

How important to a writer’s style are freshness, virtuosity, and wit? Can these four qualities be taught?

I don’t believe they can be taught, for they come from your own spirit. The greatest gift to all fiction writers is the knowledge that no two people on the planet are the same. So too, no two writers. What the world wants from you is yourself, and by great good fortune, that is the only thing of value you have.

How can we avoid haughtiness but still write with authority? Is this a particular problem for male writers? Does authority matter?

An author of fiction gets his or her authority from knowledge. He or she knows the story better than anyone on the planet, and so is the only one who can tell it.

Haughtiness seems to me a different thing, it comes from disregard for the reader. You will always avoid it if you think of the reader as beside you, not in front or behind.

The one stylistic quality you can never overdo is clarity. Do you agree? If not, please describe some sentence-level blurrings you find acceptable or admirable.

There is a quote from Joseph Conrad about the task of the fiction writer. The last part of it, as I recall, is ‘…above all, to make you see.’ This is the first rule of clarity for me. First I see the characters and their world, I see them in close detail, and then try and make the reader see as clearly as I have.

Do you have any stylistic advice specific to literary fiction?

When you think it is perfect, by which I mean as good as you can you make it today, when you have put a little pressure on each word and nothing has given, when you are sure that it is ready, read it aloud. Then make the changes.

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