'Look after your sentences and f**k the begrudgers.'
Donal Ryan on prose technique.
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In your early writing career, 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 came across a sentence in Joyce’s Ulysses at the age of fifteen, while reading it in an attempt to impress my English teacher, that hamstrung me as a writer until I was nearly thirty:
“On his wise shoulders through a checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.”
I remember thinking that here was the perfect sentence. I thought also that there was no point in embarking on an attempt to simulate, echo or honour such an immaculate linguistic moment. My ideas about myself as a writer were kicked in the groin. I got over it, eventually. Anne Enright’s pellucid, perfect prose, especially in The Gathering had a similarly deflatory effect on my ambitions, as had John McGahern’s in Amongst Women.
Coincidentally, I’ve discussed the Joyce sentence with Anne. She reckons it’s the appended clause ‘dancing coins’ that makes it.
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 HEART, BE AT PEACE to casting the fictional spell that helps such immersion?
I speak a lot to students about that spell, or the ‘fictive dream’ as I call it. It can be hard to anticipate the elements that will rouse your reader from it, cast them back to full awareness that they’re reading a story that someone made up.
In Heart, be at Peace, and in its forebear, The Spinning Heart, I hoped that the authentic demotic voice of my characters and their raw honesty would keep readers immersed, but some are troubled when they encounter idiomatic language; others are disturbed by the multiplicity of voices and their vain attempts to link all of the characters. We really should have inserted a foreword advising readers not to worry too much about that.
But for the most part, readers seem to respond favourably to the style of the books; the reading experience is akin to being a visitor in a village, being temporarily immersed in its dynamics, functions, dysfunctions and dramas, getting some intense hits of story, but never the full story – no narrator is fully reliable, all confessions are, in a way, self-serving. But I hope that the sentences I ascribe to them are as close to a mimetic representation of actual speech as possible while retaining the conceit of narrative.
Aspiring writers are usually told either that style and substance are in fact the same thing, that they are ‘one’, or they’re advised to look at these two qualities separately. What guidance can you give such writers about the relationship between substance and style?
They’re tough to separate. Each informs the other. Sometimes an artful incongruity between them can work, as in the jauntily conspiratorial voice of the murderous narrator in John Banville’s’ The Book of Evidence.
My advice to writers is to try not to think too much about the blurry relationships between these things, to be clear before all else, to make sure that they’re using the right word, not the word that they think sounds good.
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When planning HEART, BE AT PEACE, to what extent did you disconnect substance from style? And when editing it?
I don’t have any memory of disconnecting them. My sole objective stylistically was authenticity; these voices had to sound like the voices of the people who inhabit the real places where the book is set. Jason had to have an inner-city Limerick inflection. Bobby had to have the locutions and idiom of a builder from a village in Tipperary. My editing efforts were focused more on the contortions of the story into the space afforded to each speaker so that tension built incrementally towards the conflagratory closing scenes.
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)?
The obfuscatory nature of most political speechifying is strangely enthralling. The contortions can form themselves into a thrilling spectacle; word after word after word all amounting to nothing, no position taken, nothing conceded, nothing gained…
Most politicians, logically and reasonably, inhabit a centre ground, where we almost all exist, but where no one is really sure of anything, where people are too busy trying to get by to get too involved in the abstractions, or defeated by the horrors, of the wider world. Certainty seems to be the privilege of the hard edges, the braying absolutists.
Personally, all I know for absolutely sure is that no human should purposely harm another. But if I were to present myself as a candidate for a position of power, I’d have to disguise that fact with all sorts of semantic gymnastics. I’d have to front it out, and adopt a certain style of communication in order to seem like I actually stood for something.
When you think about it, rambling, off-the-cuff incoherence is Trump’s style; it doesn’t feel planned or studied but it must be choreographed to some degree. It’s harder to win people over with slickness, with carefully prepared, diplomatic, predictable, but ultimately inexpressive language.
The same is true for storytelling; the appearance of naturalness, of spontaneity, is important; readers respond to the idea that a story is being told to them as they’re reading it – no one likes the idea of the storyteller sweating in their attic over each word.
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’m always surprised when marketers or advertisers use too many words. Radio ads in particular make my teeth itch sometimes. I spend a lot of time while driving shouting SHUT THE FUCK UP at the radio, especially when some poor actor is being forced to ‘sound natural’ or ‘sound ordinary’ to help corporations to sell some evil product like equity loans or health insurance. Aaaaah it’s too much. It’s no wonder that trust in all types of commercial narrative is tenuous where it exists at all.
Books are obviously products, storytelling in all its forms is a commercial activity; the trick for writers is to try to adopt a style that feels like no style at all. Updike’s Rabbit series is a shining example. One of the greatest prose stylists of all time, writing books filled with sentences of miraculous beauty, all presented from the inside of the mind of ‘everyman’ Rabbit Angstrom, with the same feeling of absolute ‘rightness’ as Leopold Bloom’s at once intimate and universal stream of consciousness in Ulysses or Holden Caulfield’s petulant, glorious monologue.
How much time did you spend editing HEART, BE AT PEACE? Is this more or less time than you spent editing your earliest publications?
I usually spend four months drafting and four weeks editing. It sounds very compressed, but they’re short books, I work long hours, and I have a full-time job, so writing is pushed to the interstices of life. I think it’s been roughly the same for all eight of my published books to date.
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?
I consider, or at least refer to, the copy I send to my editor to be my first draft, even though I might have made hundreds of changes to it. I like to get each passage as right as I can before moving to the next one, though, so I’m a constant re-drafter, I suppose you could say. Then Brian and I work to produce a few more drafts until we have something we can agree on. I’m lucky, he’s a great editor, as is my publisher, Kirsty Dunseath. And my wife, Anne Marie, points things out all the time that I can’t see: inconsistencies, ambiguities, contradictions.
To what extent should writers avoid cliché?
Sometimes they’re unavoidable. They’ll be present in dialogue, very often, in the form of well-worn idiomatic or aphoristic speech. And sometimes the attempt to represent a particular milieu can be seen as a lapse into cliché: a hard-drinking navvy, a pugnacious New Yorker, a style-conscious Parisian etc. etc.
Freshness, virtuosity, wit, and that elusive stylistic quality known as charm: how might a writer whose prose lacks these qualities go about learning them?
By reading and reading and reading, I think. It’s the easiest and best apprenticeship that a writer can serve. But it can’t be forced. And many a charmless writer has earned a decent living from hacking out good stories.
There are readers who dislike ‘busy’ sentences, in which too much is conveyed too quickly, they feel. Does internet writing lead us to expect relatively uneventful sentences? Describe your approach to stylistic energy and richness.
This is dangerous territory: close consideration of these things can cause them to linger in the conscious mind and encroach on the naturalness and spontaneity of the creative act. The first iteration of a sentence is usually the closest to purity; the one that’s on the page or screen a beat in advance of its conscious consideration.
Tell us about some of your favourite tones in your own prose and in others’.
I love the lightless, oppressive tone of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. It’s relentless, that novel: and even though we’re told the ending on the first page, we read in hope for the couple, even as hope is obliterated over and over again.
I also adore, and have been influenced endlessly by, the swagger of Stephen King, the gorgeously conversational, conspiratorial tone he often uses. Magic.
Writers like Emma Donoghue are able to switch tones so brilliantly and deftly, but in her novel Room in particular, the child’s voice is presented in a tone that resonates with the actual frequency of the human heart. So much so that my heart nearly stopped a few times while reading it. She’s a genius.
How can aspiring writers avoid haughtiness but still write with authority?
Haha, haughtiness can be a problem. The haughty rarely break through, though, without commensurate talent. The best writers I know are mostly unaware of just how good they are; they’re worriers, procrastinators, second-guessers.
From where do we derive authority? From certain belief? From faith? From experience? I’ve spent my life learning, and I’m good at certain things, but I consider myself an authority on nothing. The creative life, I would say, is best lived as a quest for the truth of things, in a state of wonder.
The one stylistic quality you can never overdo is clarity. Do you agree? If not, please describe some sentence-level blurrings you’ve employed, and why.
YES, YES. It’s so important. I’ve probably blurred things in this very interview, because I’m aware that people reading it might be in search of some wisdom or insight and I’m afraid of sounding didactic or know-it-ally. All I know for sure is that I know very little for sure.
I do like a nice bit of ambiguity at times, the lovely irony to be found in self-deception, like when Bobby Mahon, my hero in The Spinning Heart and Heart, be at Peace, introduces himself to us with the statements that he wishes that his father would die, and that he fantasises about killing him.
Do you have any stylistic advice specific to literary fiction?
Just that your style will reveal itself as you write. Write and write until it feels right.
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’m always staggered when people point out to me that my characters use incorrect grammar. Someone told me that they threw my book across the room when a character said ‘I would of’ instead of ‘I would have.’ They didn’t seem to realise that I knew that ‘I would of’ is incorrect. That’s not trivial, though, it’s just downright ignorant. I find that many members of the grammar police suffer from delusions of intelligence.
I agree with Nabokov about the paragraph openings, though. And repeated pronouns can be overbearing, as can ‘he said’, ‘she said’, etc. Hard to avoid at times, though. I’ve been criticised for overly long sentences with ‘and’ repeated too often, and I accept this criticism. I can see how for some readers it’s like Chinese water torture.
Eradicating accidental alliteration, rhyme, and repetition of prefixes and suffixes from an entire book can take hundreds of hours, and might leave the writer with permanently blotchy eyes, unsightly facial twitches, and no love life. Would it be worth it?
Yes, I think so. It’s work best done paragraph by paragraph, though, so you’re not landed with a mountain of extra homework at the end.
How close did you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the minuscule nature of the prose issues you were working on in HEART, BE AT PEACE, and what were those issues?
It was a surprisingly issue-free process. The characters’ voices were clear in my head, as were their stories. Surprises when they came felt like gifts – Kate’s pregnancy, for example. I was delighted for her.
But the language didn’t present too many problems. I think perhaps I’d solved them in the writing of my early novels. The main issues then were getting out of my own way, disappearing from the sentences, so that the character’s perspectives at all times had primacy.
Is this headbutting business why relatively few authors obsessively polish their writing?
I guess it might be. I urge students to be careful about syntax, grammar, punctuation. Sentence and paragraph structure are important. Details like vocative commas are often scoffed at, but they make a difference to how your submitted work will look to a commissioning editor, how they’ll perceive the seriousness of your intent.
Has the democratisation of culture via the internet and Tall Poppy Syndrome led to crafted artistic beauty being viewed as unduly elitist? Can you think of any other cultural or societal developments that make writers reluctant or less able to craft exceptional prose?
Well, it can be demoralising, frustrating, and sometimes rage-inducing to be casually dismissed by online critics, or any kind of critic, when the critics’ motivation is clearly envy of your perceived success. A fellow Irish novelist once declared that I’d been living on ‘literary Easy Street’ during his ‘review’ of one of my books in a UK broadsheet. HAHAHAHAHA!
Another Irish ‘crrritic’ accused me of being ‘too virtuoso’, whatever the f**k that means. I tried to ask him once but he ran away. None of that stupid horrible stuff would have any effect on my commitment to my sentences, though. To paraphrase McGahern: Look after your sentences and f**k the begrudgers.
What do poor stylists most lack: guidance, accurate self-estimation, or something else?
I think sometimes writers find it hard to step outside of themselves even momentarily, in order to scrutinise their sentences objectively. You have to kind of wrench yourself apart sometimes, and look back at yourself and your work with a cold eye.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell aspiring writers about prose style?
Let the story come out line by line as it comes out. John Boyne advised my class once to let their subconscious be a step ahead of their conscious minds. Your style will develop itself. We all use language in a singular, individual way.
Also, I think we should allow ourselves to emulate our heroes. Vonnegut said it takes ‘five years to write them out.’ My friend, the writer and polymathic genius Julian Gough, reckons it’s more like fifteen.
Name a book published in the past year that you admire for the quality and originality of its sentences, and describe what’s accomplished and original about them.
David Park’s Ghost Wedding is an extraordinarily beautiful novel. Without pyrotechnics or any kind of showiness, David wrings the utmost from each sentence. Belfast is described thusly:
‘This is a city that harbours the memory of fire in its scarred heart, that even celebrates through fire, but it is always fearful of what it brings.’
We’re running a series on the best-written novels of the 21st century, and the best-written works of nonfiction. Could you nominate one or more of each for us?
Fiction:
Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh (2020)
Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor (2002)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (2007)
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (2003)
Grace, Paul Lynch (2017)
Non-fiction:
The Black Pool: A Memoir of Forgetting by Tim MacGabhann (2025)
Donal Ryan's prose is celebrated for its lyrical quality, deep empathy, and authentic portrayal of rural Irish life, often exploring themes of community and human resilience through multiple perspectives. His debut, The Spinning Heart (2012), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Guardian First Book Award. Other notable works include From a Low and Quiet Sea (2018), also Man Booker longlisted, and The Queen of Dirt Island (2022).
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