'I look forward to their lazy, ride-hitching arses returning to the pits of intellectual and linguistic mediocrity from whence they came'

Eimear McBride on prose style

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EIMEAR MCBRIDE ON PROSE STYLE

McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face. She held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading and is the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

We chose McBride’s The City Changes Its Face as a best-written recent release in literary fiction. You can read the opening pages here.

In your early writing career, did you ever consider not working hard on your sentences? Were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations? Has your tolerance for less polished prose changed over time?

I can’t think of the sentence as a separate entity, independent of character or narrative, that I could choose to work hard on or not. For me all elements of a novel feed off each other and, as a result, create imaginative opportunities for each other. The sentence just happens to be the last stop on the conveyor belt of construction. It’s got to be worked hard on, for aesthetic purposes, but if all the mechanics that it’s providing the shell for haven’t been correctly assembled it’s going to collapse into uselessness as soon as it rolls off into the narrative. So ‘not working hard’ isn’t an option.

Of course, I’m also an opponent of what is traditionally meant by ‘the sentence’ – subject, predicate, etc. – courtesy of the influence of James Joyce. He really put the cat among the pigeons as regards my reading, writing and capacity for tolerating the self-congratulatory middlebrow phrase.

But is there really such a thing as ‘less polished prose’? Surely there’s only good prose and bad prose so, if you’re letting others read it, you’d better be fairly certain which you’re producing.

What do you understand by the terms substance and style? How have these understandings influenced your prose in THE CITY CHANGES ITS FACE?

What comes to mind is content and form, which are surely the same thing but sound less grand?

I certainly had to think a great deal about both during the writing of CITY. It has three separate narrative strands, and each required its own nuanced approach to language responsible for conveying the action. Sometimes these were small tweaks but, I do think, significant in terms of the psychological impact on the reader.

For example, in the ‘Now’ strand Eily refers to Stephen throughout as ‘he’ while in the various sections dealing with the ‘Past’ strand, her internal monologue is addressed to him in the second person, signalling a taken-for-granted intimacy that is absent in the ‘Now’.

Also, when working on the Film section, I could never allow myself to lose sight of the fact I was now writing a visual medium, which radically altered the nature of the prose. No interior monologue, just describing what could be seen, and then what it was understood to mean by the characters in the audience. It probably required a more technical approach than anything I’ve written in the past and might be the closest I’ve ever gotten to traditional prose.

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 have to take issue with the question. What on earth is the point of a ‘writing guide’? If you, the writer, don’t know how to solve your own writing problems, what makes you think you are a writer in the first place? Down with that sort of thing – although I suppose this interview is a type of guide too so now, I can enjoy a moment of basking in my own hypocrisy.

Anyway, reading is the only guide. Reading and then learning to ignore what you have learned from other writers and just getting on with it. As a writer, bloody-mindedness is the best thing you can ever teach yourself.

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?

Part of the difficulty of writing for me is that, when I sit down to work, there is never a plan to communicate anything in particular. I don’t have any great thoughts or interesting theories I feel the world will benefit from or, indeed, yearns to receive from me. There is only the grubby instinct to communicate something and the hope that find what it might be along the way.

Therefore I am heavily reliant on keeping all the moving parts going forward in tandem. Style and substance are yoked and help each other out by switching in priority when I get too bogged down in one or other.

Our cultural life is increasingly ideological, substance-centred. Does this help explain certain prominent writers’ indifference to style, and reviewers’ and critics’ indifference to their indifference? How do you feel about these writers’ work?

I look forward to their lazy, ride-hitching arses returning to the pits of intellectual and linguistic mediocrity from whence they came, once this ridiculous moment has passed over. And I hope they take all their lousy books and all their mob-in-training supporters along with them. It’ll be nice for writers with viewpoints that extend beyond making clap-securing statements of the utmost moral nobility, to be published into a less hostile atmosphere again.

Too harsh? Not really. Literature’s job is not to instruct the world, only to be it.

Donald Trump’s less than polished personal style means he’s authentic and can be trusted on matters of world-historical significance. Tens of millions of Americans believe this, as did millions of Britons about Boris Johnson. But Martin Amis argued that paying close attention to style helps your audience trust that you’ve also paid close attention to your subject matter. Who should we believe, all those millions or a man who squandered his kids’ inheritance (substance) on his teeth (style)?

Isn’t this the Van Halen ‘Brown m&ms’ clause? In the 80s, rock/ metal band Van Halen stipulated in their contracts that all brown m&ms were to be removed from their rider and if the brown m&ms were not removed the promoter had to forgo their fee for the concert. In this way, they claimed, they ensured promotors read their contracts closely and adhered to all the technical requirements for safely staging a show. This was because, if they failed to remove something as seemingly unimportant as the brown m&ms from a bowl of sweets, what more serious provisions might they also have ignored?

So, on balance, I think I’ll go with Van Halen and Martin Amis on this, regardless of the disappointment of those who may have lost an inheritance but gained a hatred of orthodontists and/ or m&ms.

How can literary style be defended against widespread distaste for slick linguistic style in other fields such as marketing? Do you ever find yourself agreeing with readers or writers dubious about style?

I think if you’re claiming that literary style and marketing style are apiece, you’re in the wrong business. Writers who are too lazy to lift their work above the generic and readers who can’t be arsed to demand it, are not people whose opinions about literature are worth considering with any degree of seriousness.

It’s hard to write a book and when I go to the effort of reading one, I absolutely expect to encounter something between those covers which only that writer could produce. If it’s just one great lolloping exercise in evenness of tone and loose-end tying, then they are wasting their time and, more importantly, they are wasting mine.

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 think this comes from a reluctance to grow out of the notion that, deep down in its core, reading is about escapism. Hence the reluctance to encourage writing that requires more active participation from readers. Also, the increasingly poor rates of pay for reviewing make more casual reviewers increasingly less inclined to put in the time required for a more interesting level of critical engagement.

One of the few things I‘ve learned from reading my own reviews – now a thing of the past – is that even the most illustrious critics sometimes feel insecure enough to have to read the reviews of others before sharing their own opinion - as evidenced by the misreading of the time frame made in the very first review of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing which got replicated in reviews all over the place.

Is it important? I think understanding that your writing can make people feel unsure about their critical capacities is useful when confronted with inane or aggressive reviews.

Using distaste at overwritten books to justify your underwritten prose is as mistaken as neglecting your narrative because you dislike formulaic thrillers. Is this accurate? What’s the oddest defence of poor prose you’ve heard?

1. There’s nothing wrong with formulaic thrillers. Everything has a place so don’t pretend you’re playing at a higher level. 2. Just put the time in, man. 3. ‘Experimental prose is pretentious.’ Really? Or did you come here by mistake?

Erik Hoel has stated that the MFA’s domination of modern literature has produced writers trained through gruelling workshopping to minimise their work’s ‘attack surface’. We might note the parallel influence of focus groups on political discourse and of test audiences on cinema. Has too much workshopping added to the volume of flavourless published prose?

He’s hit the nail on the head here. I do think there a lot of committees at work in creative writing courses and some publishing houses as well.

But the most dangerous is the committee so many writers seem to have accepted the presence of inside their own heads. And as much as I understand the very natural desire to reduce the ‘attack surface’ it’s important to remember that, however unpleasant they may be, attacks don’t matter, not really. Yes, they may sink your book sales-wise but if you alter anything about your work in order to swerve them, you are already attacking it yourself and have failed it at the most important hurdle. Your work will survive beyond the life cycles of external attacks. It cannot survive an internal one.

A MUST-READ NOVEL OF 2025 IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, IRISH TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, STYLIST, AND MANY OTHERS

‘One of the finest writers at work today.’ Anne Enright
‘McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure.’ Claire Kilroy
‘Eimear McBride does extraordinary things with language . . . she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it.’ Guardian

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