'Writers who don’t obsessively polish their writing must be made to walk the plank.'

Rob Doyle's masterclass on prose style

Rob Doyle's third book, THRESHOLD, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury, and was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Doyle's debut novel, HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN, was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury and the Lilliput Press. It was selected as one of Hot Press magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016’, and has been made into a film starring Dean Charles Chapman and Anya Taylor Joy. THIS IS THE RITUAL, a collection of short stories, was published in 2016 to widespread acclaim. His AUTOBIBLIOGRAPHY was published to similar acclaim in 2021. He is the editor of the anthology THE OTHER IRISH TRADITION (Dalkey Archive Press), and IN THIS SKULL HOTEL WHERE I NEVER SLEEP (Broken Dimanche Press). He has written for the New York Times, TLS, Sunday Times, Dublin Review, Observer and many other publications, and throughout 2019 he wrote a weekly column on cult books for the Irish Times.

Last week we sent our readers the opening pages of Threshold, a novel we recommend to anyone tired of the saminess of so much contemporary fiction. Below we present Doyle’s uncompromising views on prose style.

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

When I was twenty I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which I’d been aware of as a classic in the sense that I assumed it would be fusty and arduous. And then the prose was immediately this incandescent, irrepressible force — of intellect, sensuality, cynicism, wit. I’d never read anything like it — I think it changed my brain, somehow. It wasn’t only the novel itself: Martin Amis’s introduction likewise exhilarated me. Amis would become one of my early style heroes. I’ve never gotten far with anything else I’ve tried to read by Nabokov — I tend to find his prose cloyingly ornate — but Lolita is style on fire.

Please quote a favourite sentence or passage from one of these and describe what you admire about the writing.

When I first read it, this pair of sentences from Martin Amis’s novel Money was a revelation in comic concision:

“Yeah,” I said, and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.

There isn’t too much to say here because all that’s good about the quotation is so self-evident. Above all, it’s funny, and, as Amis’s late friend Christopher Hitchens liked to remind us (he was quoting Clive James), humour is just common sense, dancing. It’s also a brilliantly economical means of conveying so much about the narrator, John Self — his greed, his bottomless appetite, his brusqueness, his laziness.

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

Not a chance. I haven’t read a single paragraph of prose that’s come out of AI that hasn’t repelled me with its insipidity. I don’t think artificial intelligence has anything to offer the game I’m in, which is literature. AI isn’t a threat to imaginative writers, but it is an aesthetic irritant (that’s what the initialism really stands for). The world is already deluged with dead language — inane, stupid, ugly, corporate — and I expect AI is going to multiply that.

What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Threshold?

I wanted to create a frictionless, sensuous, absorbing yet intense style that would bring the reader right up close to my consciousness as it experienced and engaged with the world; a style through which I could be alternately as philosophical, casual, candid, lyrical or brutal as I wanted to be in any given paragraph. I can’t tell you how much labour went into every single page of that book — the sheer amount of honing it demanded. It was a severe, exhausting effort to come up with a voice as seemingly casual and offhand as that.

How important is style to your characterisation and presentation and occasional dissolving of self? And to the reader’s immersion in your writing?

Style is crucial. In the case of Threshold — and my other books — without style there is no substance. The style is the substance. That book was written in a very intimate, candid, first-person, autobiographical voice which is also lyrical and freewheeling, relaxed and visceral, reflective and jocular. It’s the very opposite of a plot book. You’ve got the prose style on one hand and the intimacy of the author’s revealed consciousness on the other. Both of those elements have to be sufficiently vivid if you’re to keep the reader engaged — and they’re two sides of the same coin.

Did your editor suggest anything that improved Threshold’s style?

No. I wrote that book over about four years, which gave me plenty of time to relax into the style, to really feel at home in it. The book consists of eleven sections, most of which recount a journey to some part of the world, or else narrate the unfolding of some obsession or other (with psychedelic drugs, pessimistic philosophy, etc). Several of these had been published as standalone pieces in the literary journal The Dublin Review. The editor of that journal, Brendan Barrington, is a truly superb, truly rare editor, and working with him (in those and in other pieces I’ve written for his journal) helped my style evolve into the kind of writing you get in Threshold. But the book’s actual editors were quite hands-off: they felt it was ready to go and just helped launch it into the world, which sometimes is exactly all you hope an editor will do.

You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?

I believe in excellence, in high standards. I don’t quite have that Martin Amis drive to act as guardian of literary culture, fiercely protecting the English language from degeneration and misuse. If others are content to write badly, that’s their business (unless I’m reviewing their work, in which case it’s my business too). But I do believe in good writing, and I’ll second Samuel Johnson’s dictum: what is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. To go back to what I said earlier about Threshold: an unbelievable amount of work — intellectual labour, concentration, endless revisions and fine-tuning — went into each section of that book. In my arrogance, and borrowing from Nietzsche, I liked to think that I crammed more into each of that book’s eleven sections (which are fifteen or twenty pages) than other writers put into entire novels. The point being that I expect that kind of effort from myself — and so I expect it too from anyone who’s going to put their name on books.

What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?

I think my countryman Kevin Barry said it well: voice simply means the writer’s personality as it manifests on the page. That’s all it is. Understood this way, each writer is in a sense condemned to their voice. It’s not something you can choose or get away from. Of course, you come to your own voice by discovering, studying, imitating, and otherwise engaging with other voices that touch something inside you. But all you’re really doing is discovering your own personality, and how to get it onto the page.

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?

I don’t know if musicality in language can be taught, but I do think it can be learned — at least, I learned it, and I did so in the time-honoured manner of sitting at the feet of the masters. In other words, by reading and rereading those writers whose language set my mind afire. When I was learning how to write (a process which took years), I’d study passages I admired, picking them apart to figure out how they worked, what was going on in the rhythm, the syntax, the vocabulary. As an autodidactic student of literary prose, I was less interested in analysing, say, plot dynamics or the construction of character than I was in questions of style: how a writer achieves a certain tone, a certain effect. To me, great writing is akin to magic — a sorcery of language, a rupture in the mundane. As for whether or not I have to work at achieving this effect of musicality in my writing: I have to work at it like a motherfucker. I’ll read and revise each passage a hundred or a thousand times while bringing it as close to perfection as I possibly can. Of course, the initial spark of writing — the first words you put down on a page or type onto a screen — are important, and in very rare and happy cases what comes out first time doesn’t need all that much revision. But that’s the exception: most of the time it’s work, work, work. Really, to sum up everything I’ve said so far: the key to good writing is a certain amount of talent, and a vast amount of hard work.

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

I never used to read my stuff out loud, but these days I increasingly do so. I hope that doesn’t indicate a deterioration in my capacity to concentrate, but reading a passage out loud is a helpful way of noticing those awkward repetitions, unintended rhymes, and other stylistic infelicities that retard the flow of good, clear, sonorous writing. Sometimes, when you rely exclusively on ‘the inner ear’ (to quote Martin Amis again — he really was a good teacher as well as a great writer), you can miss these little glitches even when you’ve read a passage multiple times. You have your blindspots, and reading aloud helps to sound them out.

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 haven’t, but I have, on rare occasions, woken someone up by reaching for my notebook and writing down some sentence or insight that’s occurred to me in the dead of night, fearful that it will have vanished by the morning.

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. Do you agree with this?

I agree with this absolutely! Whenever I’ve taught classes or seminars in creative writing, I’ve tried to drill home the point that ninety-five percent of writing is editing. Anyone can just blurt out words onto a page, and this kind of blurted out writing may well have about it a spark — or more than a spark — of vitality, beauty, brilliance. But unless you’re Jack Kerouac — or perhaps especially if you’re Jack Kerouac — that first blurting out will then require a massive effort of editing and revision to turn it into real, forceful, precise, characterful writing. I’m not suggesting that anyone should edit all the vitality out of the writing that erupts from them naturally. I’m saying they should edit the vitality into the writing, till it’s as sharp, potent and (to use Virginia Woolf’s preferred adjective) incandescent as it can possibly be.

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

I might headbutt my screen in frustration, but never in boredom. Really, for all the hard work it entails — again, truly hard, truly exhausting work! — I find the process of editing raw prose into real writing endlessly exhilarating. It’s the very opposite of boring. To see rough, undifferentiated language transform into writing as I work it and whip it into shape excites me. It turns me on. I don’t mean making spontaneous, natural language seem ‘literary’ in some artificial, life-sapping way. I mean making the language come alive, making it light up the page.

Is this headbutting business why so few writers obsessively polish their writing?

It could be, but either way I’m glad you’re asking these questions. Writers who don’t obsessively polish their writing must be made to walk the plank. Why are they in this game? They’re lazy, and we’re intolerant of laziness. Literature is like the military: shape up or get out. However, I’m not saying that all kinds of literary writing should take the same amount of time. We don’t all have to write the way John Banville used to claim he goes about it: one sentence per day. Some kinds of writing take longer than others. For instance, the novel I’m writing now is quite polyphonic: there’s a whole spectrum of voices and ranges and registers going on. Some sections are written in a looser, less obviously ‘literary’ register than, say, the chapters in Threshold or my nonfiction book Autobibliography. I wrote these sections quite fast, in draft form at least, but even then I’ll revise them obsessively till I don’t hear any false notes, till I’ve eradicated as many lapses and snags as I can. In the same novel-in-progress, other sections were more arduous and painstaking to write even in their first drafts. Generally, I find that the more cerebral, intellectual and refined a voice or character is, the more effort it requires to write.

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

To answer the first part of your question: I’m reluctant to say fiction writers should or shouldn’t do anything except write well, which they’ll best achieve by being ruthlessly true to their own instincts. To answer the second part: I suspect that this mutation is something that happens naturally, and it’s not something I really object to. After all, readers and writers exist together in the same world, under the same systems of technology and mediation. I don’t want the contemporary writing I read to be dumbed down, but I do want it to be contemporary. Consciousness and experience are shaped by technology, so it seems natural to me that today’s writers express themselves in a manner recognisable to their peers. I tend not to appreciate writing that’s particularly retro. Style naturally changes, shifts, evolves and mutates over time. There will always be exceptions, but I think it’s uncontroversial to say that sentences have gotten shorter over the last few decades. You could write like Henry James in the 2020s, but you’d be writing as if from another time.

Mark Fisher railed for years about the demise of what he called ‘popular modernism’. In her Auraist interview Adele Bertei spoke of the increased conservatism across our century’s mainstream arts, and a corollary in contemporary prose is, we believe, the Replicant Voice. Does mainstream published prose now tend towards insipid conservatism and even automatism? In books shortlisted for major prizes, are overall prose standards falling or rising?

Honestly, I haven’t got a clue. One of the things that seems to happen when you’re a few books into the game — at least, it’s something that’s happened to me — is that you pay less and less attention to what your contemporaries are up to, becoming hyper-focussed on your own unfolding endeavours. I’m not saying I’ve given up reading contemporary novels — I hope I never do — but I don’t keep up with prize shortlists or feel any great rush to read the latest craze. If it still seems worth reading a couple of years or a decade down the line, I might get round to it then.

I do have a sense that we’re balls-deep into an era of conformism, timidity, auto-surveillance and auto-censorship. I’m certain that writers who pander to the online mobs are doomed to a crashing banality, no matter how many books they might sell. Hostility, suspicion, waywardness, withdrawal, contrariness, solitariness — these are questionable traits for a citizen, but useful ones for a writer.

Generally speaking, there’s so much in the culture that annoys or angers or exasperates me. But all this rancour is fuel for my work. I’m sure there are plenty of writers out there who are violently and passionately working against the drift of the times, going hard to create beautiful pages and amazing books. We might have to sift through a lot of dross to find them, but they must be out there.

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

I see all living writers as enemy combatants to be feared, outmanoeuvred and vanquished, so I tend not to admire them — or if I do, I pretend I don’t. I’m only joking (to a degree), but I am wary of tossing out one of those favours-for-favours lists beloved of the slick literary politician. With that in mind, I recommend only myself (as accomplished a stylist as I’ve ever had the privilege to be), my partner Roisin Kiberd, and our various writer pals. All the rest aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. But wait! I recently had a totally overwhelming experience reading a novel: The Kindly Ones, first published in French in 2006 by Jonathan Littell. I’d known about this notorious book for years, but it took me a long time to find the stomach to read it — for good reason. It pulled me into an airless and terrifying hell and inflicted real psychic harm on me — which does nothing to dispel my conviction that it’s a towering, satanic work of literature. The style is terrific — torrential and detailed, highly readable, philosophical and muscular. The novel is the fictional memoir of a Nazi holocaust perpetrator detailing, without contrition, his experiences during the Second World War. A thousand pages of this — sensational in every sense. Other than that, lately I’ve mostly been reading poetry: notably, Ted Hughes and Louise Glück.

Which publishers put out the most stylish writing?

I had a look at some of your earlier posts and I saw one of the writers you interviewed celebrated NYRB Classics. I wholeheartedly second this endorsement. It’s not like I’ve read more than a fraction of what they’ve published, but it has often struck me that many of the vital discoveries I’ve made as a reader in the past fifteen years or so have been NYRB Classics reissues of half-forgotten gems. As for contemporary novels and books, I don’t really have favourite publishers, only favourite books and authors.

And lastly, to your stylistic pet peeves. Do you have any that Auraist readers might not have heard before?

I don’t really think in those terms. I’m so greedy with my reading time: I only want to read what delights and fascinates me, and often this means retreating from the bleeding edge of the contemporary into great books from the past or into my own swerving, eccentric fascinations. If I’m not enjoying a book, I usually stop reading. Life’s too short, and shorter by the hour.

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