The best-written Scottish novel of the century

Plus Ryan O'Connor on prose style

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—The best-written books of the year and century to date, by the best writers and literary Substackers.

—Julian Evans and Nina Shuyler answer our new questions on prose style.

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—‘Ye saw their sails and how the boat was tipping right over till it was going to capsize but it did not, it was just picking up speed because the wind was there and it was good, so they were all sailing great and the boys all shouting, and the men too. Go on Go on, Hold there’: the best-written previous winner of the Saltire Award for the Scottish book of the year (this choice is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century). This year’s winner will be announced on the 7th of December.

—‘in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed algorithm is king’: Ryan O’Connor’s discussion of prose style [from the Auraist archives]. Read an extract from his Scottish masterwork The Voids here.

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THE SALTIRE AWARD FOR SCOTTISH BOOK OF THE YEAR - THE CENTURY’S PREVIOUS WINNERS

Medea by Liz Lochhead (2001)

Clara by Janice Galloway (2002)

In Another Light by Andrew Greig (2004)

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (2005)

A Lie About My Father by John Burnside (2006)

Day by A. L. Kennedy (2007)

Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman (2008)

The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography by Robert Crawford (2009)

And the Land Lay Still by James Robertson (2010)

Mo Said She Was Quirky by James Kelman (2012)

Something Like Happy by John Burnside (2013)

The Scottish Town in the Age of Enlightenment 1740–1820 by Bob Harris and Charles McKean (2014)

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (2015)

The Bonniest Companie by Kathleen Jamie (2016)

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova (2017)

All That Remains by Sue Black (2018)

Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community by Kirstie Blair (2019)

Duck Feet by Ely Percy (2021)

Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean by David Alston (2022)

Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard (2023)

The best-written of these is

In the old place the river was not far from our street. There was a park and all different things in between. The park had a great pond with paddleboats and people sailed model yachts. Ye caught fish in it too. Ye caught them with poles that had wee nets tied at the end. But most people did not have these. Ye just caught them with yer hands. Ye laid down on yer front close into the edge on the ground. Here it sloped sharp into the water, so ye did not go too close. Just yer shoulders reached that bit where the slope started. Ye rolled up yer sleeves and put yer hands together and let them go down it. Just slow, then touching the water and yer hands going in. If ye went too fast ye went right in up yer arms over yer shoulders. Ye only went a wee bit, a wee bit, a wee bit till yer hands were down as far. Then yer palms up the way, holding together. If a fish came by ye saw it and just waited till it came in close. If it just stayed there over yer hands, that was how ye were waiting. It was just looking about. What was it going to do? Oh be careful if ye do it too fast, if yer fingers just move and even it is just the totiest wee bit. Its tail whished and it was away or else it did not and stayed there, so if ye grabbed it and ye got it and it did not get away. So that was you, ye caught one.

But they were quick, ye had to do it right.

Ye were having to watch it as well how yer body went, lying on yer front, if it was wee bits at a time ye were moving. And ye did not notice till ye slid right down and the water was up yer shoulders, oh mammy. Yer hands reached the bottom and ye pressed and pressed to push yer feet back up and if a big boy caught yer feet and pulled ye out or else that was you and ye went right the way in the water. That happened to people and men had to go in and get them. Daft wee b****r.

On the bottom was all slimy mud, broken bottles and bits of glass and bricks and nails and old stuff, everything. Prams and bike-wheels, and shoes, and then a man’s bunnet. I saw that.

One time I was soaking the whole way through and my maw was completely angry, how I was going to die of pneumonia or else diphtheria if ye swallowed the water. My da was home on leave and he gived me a doing. But I liked going to the pond. The men sailed their boats there and had races, and their boats were great. Ye saw their sails and how the boat was tipping right over till it was going to capsize but it did not, it was just picking up speed because the wind was there and it was good, so they were all sailing great and the boys all shouting, and the men too. Go on Go on, Hold there.

Old men as well, if their boat was going to win the race and they shouted their names if the boat had its name and they did. All had good names, Stormy Petrel and Sea Scout. Oh hold there Sea Scout.

I telled my granda. He would have liked it, if the old men were there too, he could have went with me and they had seats, people could sit in the seats and just watch.

My Uncle Billy had a model yacht when he was a boy. He got it off somebody whose da worked in the docks. It was not a toy. Model yachts were real boats and they sailed good. It was just they were wee. If ye could have made a wish and shrunk to a Tom Thumb ye could have climbed aboard and put to sea for treasure islands. Then if ye were getting chased, ye could hide anywhere ye wanted. It would just be a thing like a cat or a dog, ye would have to be careful then, if they caught ye, and ate ye. Or if it was a mouse, they dragged ye into their hole, oh mammy.

Our old house had mice. My maw and me and Mattie were going to have breakfast and there they all were on top of the kitchen table and up on the sink and the draining board, piles of them. My maw went potty and started greeting. Me and Mattie scattered them and chased them but we could not catch them and did not know what to do. My maw was shouting in a high voice. Ohh ohhh!

We went and got my granda. He was not going to come but then he did. My grannie said it was just silly to climb up all the stairs, he would have no breath. Aye I will. That was what he said. I am going.

He made it a laugh. It is a big safari hunt. So then he gived me a joke. How far we going son?

Safari’s the kitchen granda.

Our house was three up on the top storey. My granda stopped at all the landings on the way up to get his breath back. When we went into the house he knew where the mice were all hiding. My maw went away out the room. My granda showed us. Oh there behind the chair. See in that shoe. Oh look at the side of the cupboard.

Then he done something, then we had shoes in our hands. We sat waiting for them to come out and when they did ye were to bash them, and if ye got one it was great. They were just wee things, and when they were there ye saw how wee they were, a bit of body at the top, then just with their tails. Ye held the shoe at the ready and had to be quick and ye had to get them the first time. Matt was good at getting them. My granda sat on the chair and telled us what to do. Then there were wee wee toty ones. They did not even run so ye just bashed them. My granda said they were babies. But ye were still to bash them, ye were not to let them go else they were going to grow up and it would be a plague of them, so ye had to do it and ye did not want to because if they were just wee and they were babies, but ye had to.

My granda had two cats that were mousers, a big one and a wee one. After we got the mice that was what my granda said, Oh I should just have brought the cats, the cats would have gobbled them up. I was not thinking.

The cats were there in my grannie’s house. The wee one lied on the floor near granda’s feet. If I went there the cat crawled under granda’s chair. He did not like people except my granda. But I could pet him. My grannie did not. The wee cat went to her but she never petted him. Except she spoke to him. Oh what are ye wanting now?

The big cat was a friendly one and rubbed against ye but it stayed in the front room all the time and was down by the window or else on grannie’s bed. The sun came in the window on her. But if ye kicked out the wee cat the big one came in. My granda done it. He just said, Oh I have had enough of you. Away and kick him out son.

So I done it. The cat did not like to go. I just took him. Cats do not like cats. My granda said, They like people better.

What about dogs?

Dogs do not like cats.

Do cats like dogs?

Some cats. Dogs are worse than people, that is what cats think.

Cats do not like anybody, said my grannie, they are just selfish besoms.

Oh we are all selfish besoms, said my granda.

No we are not, said my grannie.

Aye but if they are mousers.

Granda said about me getting one but it was my da, he did not like them. My maw did not either, she said they could be dirty. Where had their paws been? Ye did not know except it was dirt, cats were always in dirt. So were dogs.

My granda was great. If he came to the pond with me, he would have liked it. Some boys had poles and men let them steer the boats on their course and they walked round the banks. The men set the sails then launched the boat in a certain way, just pushing it out. They knew where it would land and telled the boys. If ye did not know people ye just followed a boat ye liked. Some boys chased ye, others let ye stay. They did not listen if ye asked them a question. Ye could never get too close to a boat and they never let ye sail it.

Uncle Billy’s boat got lost, else he would have gived it to me. But my granda said it was all just toys, how in our family it was real boats. He ran away to sea when he was fourteen and telled the Captain he was fifteen. He was in the Merchant Navy same as my da except my da’s job was better. My granda was just able-bodied. My da said they were ten-a-penny.

I had cousins at sea. One was in the Cadets. I was wanting to join. My maw did not want me to but my da said I could, it was a good life and ye saved yer money, except if ye were daft and done silly things. He said it to me. I would just have to grow up first.

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RYAN O’CONNOR ON PROSE STYLE

What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?

I’m not quite answering your question here, but I might as well begin at the beginning. When I was around five, my father bought me The Life and Times of Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, in a charity shop. Old school western-novel style prose. No doubt it was awful, but I remember I loved it back then. Then there was Robert Service, this was poetry, not prose, but only a few years later I was drawn further toward the possibility of what words could do, lured on as if in a dream after reading The Spell of the Yukon and The Shooting of Dan McGrew. Doggerel some called it, but I loved it. Honestly, seven years old and I was hooked on words just like young George in Waits’ and Burrough’s Crossroads gets hooked on those magic bullets –– heavy as lead. I mention those two and that song, as every time I hear it I go right back to those Service poems. I came to hold Burroughs and Waits very close, still do, and I immediately recognised that old western-novel prose and something of the spirit of Dan McGrew in the work of both. But I digress.

When I was twelve years old, I’d often stay with my older brother and his girlfriend at their flat in Edinburgh. They were both avid readers and there were always lots of books lying around. To me, dropping in from the small-town life I was desperate to escape from –– half-lived halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh –– their lives seemed an endless stream of books, bread, and good wine that sprang from the deepest life-affirming well. And it was in that flat, a strange, damned, holy little place, where I really discovered my love for prose and began to understand just how important it would be in my life.

The flat they rented was beautiful, but very small. A one-bedroom, top-floor flat adjacent to the Tron Kirk that looked directly onto the High Street. Climbing the old stone stairs of its close had something akin to crossing the deck of a ship in pitching seas about the spirit of it. You know, uneven stone stairs that lean out and twist up and up and feel like they’ll never end. A sensation enhanced once inside the flat, where there wasn’t an even floor to be found and tennis balls would regularly roll from one side of a room to the other without external agency. It was low-ceilinged too, had thick lime plaster walls, and though due to the angle and pitch of the stairs you were further from the ground than seemed plausible or necessary, it had a beguiling interior, like you were close to the earth in an old cottage in a wild, remote place.

There was little space for books, not for the number they owned, and certainly not for them to be neatly arranged on shelves. There were bookcases, plenty of them, crammed with unordered volumes in every room, including the bathroom. But for the most part, the books remained in the boxes they’d been packed in to move there. Or they were piled against the walls like huge lexiconic buttresses throughout the flat.

I mention all this by way of an explanation as to why there were many books in which I first enjoyed the quality of the prose. And yet for the many books, I remember little of the details of the writing itself. The disorder of all that literature had more than a touch of the enchanted in that old Edinburgh flat. There was something darkly magical about it, so that I’d go from pile to pile pulling this book or that from another sliding, collapsing tower, or dig another folio from another box, reading a sentence here, a passage or page there, until I was surrounded by words. I’d stay for a few nights and rather than choose one book and stick with it, I’d travel on and on. The names that come to mind are Gore Vidal, Vladimir Nabokov, Dennis Potter, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Marguerite Duras, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, WH Auden and William Blake. I’ve since spent longer with all the writers mentioned, but back then I ran through them and didn’t linger long. They were the early years.

A deep joy really hit after discovering WB Yeats’ A Vision and Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka, when I was around fourteen years old. Exactly how and why I discovered A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writing of Giraldus and Upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka and Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe by chance – within months of each other, and at such a young age, remains a mystery to me. A mystery I’ve no wish to unravel the truth of, but one which I’m eternally grateful for. For in discovering those two books, I discovered what it was to dream in the land of words and ideas. But perhaps most importantly of all, I discovered what it was –– to reach. To reach for some ungraspable thing, or as the unnamed narrator lives out in The Voids, what it is to dream the impossible dream.

To be honest, I probably didn’t have the foggiest about what was going on in either book, but that didn’t matter. I knew they were dreaming and reaching, and of course they were writing it all down and I could feel it. Without doubt, I felt the beauty and wonder of their wild, and many will say, crazy, foolish, deeply flawed, reaching and writing. Nevertheless, I could feel it, and I loved how it made me feel. And from that point on, for me, in my practice, writing became entwined with feeling and discovery, dreaming and reaching.

However, to finally answer your question more properly, the first books I read where I fully enjoyed the prose in a deep sustained manner were, among others, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Knut Hamsun’s Pan, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and Joseph Roth’s Legend of the Holy Drinker, all of which I read between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. For the record, I’ve never been to university, have never attended any form of writing class or workshop, and have never been part of any literary scene –– I’m entirely self-taught. Which many will say is mighty goddamned evident in my work! The point is, I read a lot and I read widely from a fairly young age because chance or perhaps providence brought books my way and I fell in love with them.

Of course, I’d be delighted to quote from any of the books mentioned above, but on this occasion, since style is important to Auraist, it seems fitting to choose Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. A stylistic tour de force, employing ellipses, exclamation marks, and a Colonel Kurtz-like clarity of purpose and thought, to fuel a relentless morse-code delivery that hauls the reader through the horrors of the first world war, French colonial Africa, America, and the working-class suburbs of Paris, with a freewheeling dark energy.

Céline might have turned into an utter shit of a human being, that’s a whole other conversation, but the manner in which he maintains voice and energy throughout the novel is a stylistic masterclass.

I could probably quote from any page of Journey, but I’ll go for a few paragraphs from the opening pages:

It so happened that the war was creeping up on us without our knowing it, and something was wrong with my wits. That short but animated discussion had tired me out. Besides, I was upset because the waiter had sort of called me a piker on account of the tip. Well, in the end Arthur and I made up. Completely. We agreed about almost everything.

‘It's true,’ I said, trying to be conciliatory. ‘All in all, you're right. But the fact is we're all sitting in a big galley, pulling at the oars with all our might. You can't tell me different! . . . Sitting on nails and pulling like mad. And what do we get for it? Nothing! Thrashings and misery, hard words and hard knocks. We're workers, they say. Work, they call it! That's the crummiest part of the whole business. We're down in the hold, heaving and panting, stinking and sweating our balls off, and meanwhile! Up on deck in the fresh air, what do you see?! Our masters having a fine time with beautiful pink and perfumed women on their laps. They send for us, we're brought up on deck. They put on their top hats and give us a big spiel like as follows: “You no-good swine! We're at war! Those stinkers in Country No. 2! We're going to board them and cut their livers out! Let's go! Let's go! We've got everything we need on board! All together now! Let's hear you shout so the deck trembles: 'Long live Country No. 1!' So you'll be heard for miles around. The man that shouts the loudest will get a medal and a lollipop! Let's go! And if there's anybody that doesn't want to be killed on the sea, he can go and get killed on land, it's even quicker!” ’

‘That's the way it is exactly,’ said Arthur, suddenly willing to listen to reason.

But just then, who should come marching past the cafe where we're sitting but a regiment with the colonel up front on his horse, looking nice and friendly, a fine figure of a man! Enthusiasm lifted me to my feet.

‘I'll just go see if that's the way it is!’ I sing out to Arthur, and off I go to enlist, on the double.

‘Ferdinand!’ he yells back.

‘Don't be a cunt!’ I suppose he was nettled by the effect my heroism was having on the people all around us.

It kind of hurt my feelings the way he was taking it, but that didn't stop me. I fell right in. ‘Here I am,’ I say to myself, ‘and here I stay.’

I just had time to call out to Arthur: ‘All right, you jerk, we'll see’—before we turned the corner. And there I was with the regiment, marching behind the colonel and his band. That's exactly how it happened.

We marched a long time. There were streets and more streets, and they were all crowded with civilians and their wives, cheering us on, bombarding us with flowers from café terraces, railroad stations, crowded churches. You never saw so many patriots in all your life! And then there were fewer patriots ... It started to rain, and then there were still fewer and fewer, and not a single cheer, not one.

Pretty soon there was nobody but us, we were all alone. Row after row. The music had stopped. ‘Come to think of it,’ I said to myself, when I saw what was what, ‘this is no fun anymore! I'd better try something else!’ I was about to clear out. Too late! They'd quietly shut the gate behind us civilians. We were caught like rats.

If we might think of irony as the discrepancy between expectation and reality, then the opening pages of Journey are amongst the finest examples of situational irony I’ve ever read. Rarely have I seen the pointlessness, absurdity, and vanity of war and the herd mentality of nationalism, so ruthlessly exposed and with such economy, precision, humour, and style, as in those opening pages.

Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?

I don’t believe so. For me there is something essential in lived experience that seeps into the essence of creativity, a force derived from it that reaches the deepest place within a word, and then another word and another until a sentence is driven into the world, rather as Dylan Thomas expresses in The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I believe we need that lived experience to fuel the force that as Dylan would have it, Hauls my shroud sail. And that without it we’d be dumb to tell a weather’s wind/How time has ticked a heaven round the stars. Does that answer that in some sort of roundabout way? I hope so.

What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of The Voids? How important is style to your characterisation? And to the reader’s immersion in your writing?

The principle issue I felt I had to address was how to make the reader stick with the narrator from the beginning to the end. The Voids is a novel in which the central character, the narrator, is either drunk or on drugs on practically every page. I was acutely aware that this could turn many readers off and bore them from the get-go. So, I had to find a way to take hold of the reader and keep them with me. I wanted to drive the narrative forward as if in a wild hallucinogenic dream. Thus, style, or finding the correct style, became essential to addressing what I believed was the main issue the narrative faced. I attempted to overcome this issue in three ways, by imbuing the prose with naked honesty, by keeping the prose alive with colour and movement, and by shooting it through with ritual and religion.

The Voids isn’t and was never intended to be social realism, it’s not a state of the nation book addressing the problems of drugs and alcohol. The narrator, believe it or not, is not an alcoholic or drug addict, certainly not in the strictest sense, and he’s certainly not looking for redemption. The fact is, he sees beauty where most see tragedy, and glory where most see degradation. And he believes deeply that the lives of those he encounters are lives worthy of being lived, loved and celebrated, regardless of how they are bound by circumstance to live them, or how they might in fact chose to live them. That ostensibly strange life choices can provide an existence as valid as any other.

Essentially, The Voids is a religious book in which the narrator deliberately uses drugs and alcohol as a vehicle to reconnect with the spirits, the angels and the demons, he encountered in childhood. And these angels and demons aren’t the products of intoxication, they’re very real, and only through dismantling the fabricated architecture of the world can the narrator see them again. He’s exiled and uses drugs and alcohol in much the same way as certain indigenous cultures in south America use psychoactive substances in divination, or the úlfheðnar, elite Norse shaman-warriors, used plants with psychoactive properties in shamanistic ceremonies and rituals.

The up-shot: I somehow had to feed all this into the very marrow of the style. If I didn’t quite manage to achieve either the style or outcome I sought, well that’s down to a failure of craft on my part, for which I’ll hold my hands up. But one thing I can guarantee is that the prose in The Voids came straight from my heart and was written in blood. It's a deeply autobiographical work and I lived in and through almost every moment contained within it.

Did your editor suggest anything that improved The Voids’ style?

In all honesty, no. I was very lucky in that respect. I was initially signed to Scribe by Philip Gwyn Jones, who went on to take over at Picador, but continued to be, and remains, a supporter of my work. One of the last pieces of advice he gave was not to change a thing or compromise on the style of The Voids. I was doubly lucky in that my new editor, Molly Slight, was equally supportive and attuned to what I was trying to achieve. This remains the case. I’m in an incredibly privileged position where I have such a supportive and talented editor who also happens to be the Publisher at Scribe. A position I’m very grateful for.

You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so? What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?

Voice is essential in my writing. And for me, the most essential quality voice in writing must possess and convey, is honesty. A voice without honesty is a hollow voice, an empty voice. Voice is the truth of any book, its essence. Voice is you. Now, this honesty, this voice, can only be transmitted via the words we chose. In this sense, both voice and honesty are inextricably bound to prose. That is why the quality of my prose matters greatly to me. I believe you must never be afraid to say what you have to say. Dishonesty is the enemy of the prose I strive to write. I try to be as honest as I can in my writing and do so through my prose. I’m also someone who believes deeply in the beauty of the flaw. In the majesty of imperfection. To work such contradictory qualities into your style and make it sing, you have to work damn hard, and you have to be damn honest.

Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Can musicality be taught? Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?

This question brings to mind the opening page of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer:

This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse … To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

Can musicality be taught? I’m not sure it can. Ideally, you’ll have a little knowledge of music in the first place, and then much like voice, you must go out and discover it, experience it, live in it, you must want to sing. Of course, once you know how to sing and have found a song that you want to sing, there is still a hell of a lot of work to be done. In this sense, though I believe an essential element of it comes naturally, I’ll regularly spend days working on a single sentence at the editing stage to iron out the bum notes and work more musicality into it.

Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?

I do read it out loud. It’s part of a process of living with my work. I like to, I must, live with my work. Get inside it and walk around in it, much as one would do when exploring a house for the first time. It’s akin to urban exploration and psychogeography, only here the ruined churches or hidden tunnels are sentences. For my sentences to achieve the resonance of spirit that I’m searching for, it is necessary for me to try to get inside every one of them. Reading aloud is one of the ways in which I attempt I do this.

Have you ever read your work out loud with someone waking up in bed beside you? If so, please describe their facial expression at the time and this event’s long-term impact on your relationship.

I’ve never read my work out loud and had someone wake up beside me, not that I can recall anyway. On the other hand, I can recall numerous times I’ve read my work out loud while in bed and the person lying next to me has fallen asleep, even started snoring. Those relationships didn’t last long. Eventually I learned it was prudent and certainly more fruitful, not to read my own work while in bed with someone. Subsequent relationships have lasted a little longer, as I’ve instead read out, say, E.E. Cummings, or if I was feeling particularly carried away, Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress! Though only a little longer, since sadly I retained a penchant for reciting poetry I’d written while drunk. And yes, that’s both poetry that I wrote while drunk, then later, recited while drunk.

I feel I should mention an occasion that’s become renowned amongst an old group of friends. Though this doesn’t involve my work, I once read Ginsberg’s Howl in its entirety to a group of six friends of mine one evening. When I commenced, everyone was full of wine and Friday night and excited by the prospect of me reciting this seminal work of American literature, which of course was written as a performance piece.

I struck out so well, I had the best minds of my generation (or at least the best as far as I’m aware within a mile radius of Kensington Gate, Glasgow in 1990), enraptured. But by the time I reached ‘Rockland/in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the/door of my cottage in the Western night’, I swear I looked up and every last one of them motherfuckers had fallen asleep in their chairs. And at least three of them were sitting on dining chairs. It’s not so easy to fall asleep on a dining chair, you know. That takes some wild level of unimaginable boredom.

I remember I stood up and looked at them for a while, all still fast asleep. I felt like the sole survivor of some literary suicide pact. I lifted the tone arm from the dead wax of the record it had been stuck at for some time, then poured myself a large glass of red wine and stood by the window in a kind of glorious, lonely silence. In a way, I was proud of my achievement. Bastards.

George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Does this strike you as correct?

Who am I to argue with George Saunders? If it works for him and his multitudinous students, great. Personally, it doesn’t work like that for me. I happen to love the editing process and believe it’s incredibly important, but for very different reasons. It’s certainly not where my literary voice emerges. That emerges directly from my life; it’s never chiselled out later from the prose I am writing.

I’m reminded of what Denis Johnson said about Under the Volcano. I believe he said it was the only novel he’d ever read that he wouldn’t edit a word of. Both Johnson and Lowry were master stylists who edited and redrafted their work many times over. Both also possessed unique and wonderful voices. Voices that I fancy weren’t cut and shaped in the editing room but rather sprang from the lives they lived.

Having not read GS’ proposition in his substack and in case notions of voice are being conflated and confused here, perhaps I should add, I do agree that in the editing process you’ll find the voice of individual characters in your work and make choices that will make these characters unique to your vision and style. But I don’t believe that a writer will find his own voice there. Furthermore, and importantly, I believe that a writer who embarks on the editing process will be unable to find a convincing voice for their characters, without having first discovered their own voice.

I guess my point is, I believe we write with the flame of our voice already deep within us, and it’s this light, which glows more brightly in some than in others, that illuminates the unnamable at which we toil.

How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration and boredom at the miniscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?

There have been so many times, but it’s never been out of boredom, not at all. It’s a fight, at times it can get pretty wild, but it’s a fight I love and relish because of that.

Should fiction writing adapt or not to all the nonfiction people read online, much of it written in the characterless bloggy style established decades ago? Do you see fictional prose adapting to the reduced attention spans that apparently result from heavy internet use?

It’s not that it should adapt. In many instances it simply will adapt, or at least reflect the reduced attention spans that result from heavy internet use. And sometimes this will work, other times it won’t. Which is no different than it’s always been, is, and will continue to be. Regardless of the climate or the reason, there will always be good and bad books. But to be clear, I certainly don’t think fiction must adapt, that it has a duty to adapt in order to confer some notion of relevance or whatever. Fiction, or the writers of fiction, should do what they must do, and do it well, without grace or favour to anyone or any fashion at any time.

Whether or not the publishing industry thinks fiction should adapt is a whole different matter. After all, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed algorithm is king.

Name some contemporary writers you admire for the quality and originality of their sentences, and describe what’s accomplished and original about them.

Honestly, there are so many contemporary writers that I admire. So, instead of spreading my admiration thin, I’ll go all-out on one writer and one book.

Michael Winkler and Grimmish. Why? Very simply – I love the writing; in fact, I adore the writing. It’s fearless, but this isn’t some pugilist’s swaggering fanfaronade, this is true fearlessness – it wears its heart on its sleeve and what a heart it is. One tattooed with doubt, tenderness, vulnerability, joy, sadness, tragedy, and beauty, the mundane and the monumental, the profane and the religious – and laughter, it’s incredibly funny.

Yes, it is a book about boxing, but then it’s not about boxing at all. It’s about pain, yes – but cosmic pain. For me, everything in Grimmish is tinged with the cosmic. It’s about life and death and everything in between. It’s about storytelling. It sounds on the face of it that it may be hyper-masculine, but it’s not at all. It abides with grace in violence – much like William Blake abides with violence in his poem The Tyger. I don’t think Coetzee was correct when he said, ‘It’s the strangest book you are likely to read this year.’ Or that another writer was correct when he said, ‘It does things with fiction that I barely thought possible.’ There are countless strange books out there and many of us know what fiction is capable of and indeed many writers have walked similar roads before. What makes Grimmish unique, what makes it one of the most special books that I have read in a long time, is that very few writers ever manage to pull off such fiction -- or as Michael Winkler would say, exploded non-fiction -- with anything close to the beauty and brilliance Winkler has in Grimmish.

Which publishers put out the most stylish writing?

Fitzcarraldo Editions. Sublunary Editions. Dalkey Archive Press. And of course, Scribe! To name but a few. There are many independent publishers out there publishing great work at the moment.

And lastly, to your stylistic pet peeves. Any peeves specific to prose in literary fiction or Scottish fiction?

These aren’t stylistic, but general.

A lack of effort put into the editing process. My editor had to tell me enough was enough. That I was way beyond the deadline for final edits. And I KNOW The Voids still needed MORE editing.

Which leads me to writers who claim they don’t write their books. That they are merely earthly conduits. That they sit down, and the spirit moves through them, and hey presto, there’s a novel on the way to their editor. Listen, I believe in angels and demons as much as the next person. But that strikes me as a hustle with which you absolve and anoint yourself in the same breath. I believe in taking complete responsibility for what I’ve written. There are no excuses. It’s not delivered to me in a trance. Love is offered and blood is spilled for every line.

Particular to Scotland, writing that reinforces mawkish, reductive Scottish tropes. This concerns not only the stories we chose to tell, but also, and even more importantly, how we chose to tell these stories. Coming from a Scottish writer who wrote a novel with a narrator who consumes an abundance of alcohol and narcotics, I accept I'm open to accusations of literary cant. Nevertheless, I believe we need writers that are willing and capable of producing work that explodes Scottish literature. And following from that, we could do with more, any, literary awards that celebrate such work.

Oh, and lists. I can’t abide lists.