An Interview with Roddy Doyle (Interview by John Dillon) April 12, 2013
Roddy Doyle has, you could say, a knack for timing. His work throughout his nearly three decade career as writer and more specifically novelist is often if not always parallel, indicative, or even predictive of the contemporary state of affairs. While the Abbey produced Doyle’s version of Gogol’s The Government Inspector, the International Monetary Fund arrived as if on time for the performance, and similarly, Doyle's novel The Van paralleled the thrill and excitement of the World Cup. He knows what’s going on—on the ground. One of the advantages he says of writing for Metro Éireann is that it has forced him “to stay awake and not slip into some notion that I know what street life in Dublin is like without having to venture out onto the streets.” The other likely reason for his good timing is his involvement in a community, whether through the non-profit organization Fighting Words or the many circles of friends and fellow artists—in part a consequence of so many of his works being made into films, plays, and now musicals. He is a writer who works with people.
It is almost as if he is writing a cultural history in real time. No easy task by any means. And for this reason, his work over the last two decades, which parallels the boom and bust of Ireland’s economy as well as the waves of immigration and emigration that accompanied those economic changes, is invaluable in making any sense of contemporary migration and diaspora. As part of the Open Door Series, he has written short stories for adult literacy and language learners. He has been a regular contributor to the multicultural newspaper Metro Éireann, in which his serial, short stories have focused on cultural encounters. And then there is Fighting Words, where primary and secondary students—some of whom were born in Ireland and others who have arrived from elsewhere—write creatively together. One payoff of his perspicuity is to make observations about migration that are as relevant now as they were for Henry Smart of Doyle’s The Last Roundup trilogy. This interview was conducted on the morning of November 6th, 2012, in the top room of Roddy Doyle’s house in Clontarf. It was sunny and cool and dry.
John: The first thing I’d like to talk about is the Fighting Words program, which you cofounded. Dave Eggers, in his TED lecture on a similar, non-profit program, 826 Valencia, talks about the practical benefits of improving writing skills. When you describe your program, Fighting Words, you stress also the creativity and imagination involved. Could you explain what you see or have seen to have been the value of storytelling particularly in relation to Fighting Words?
Roddy: Well, from my point of view, the easiest way to approach it is to contrast it with creativity in the schoolroom. And it’s not an inherent criticism of education or the education system, but because of the examination system, because of the school timetable—the bell ringing at every forty minutes for example—because of terms or semesters, because things are measured out in time as much as anything else, it flattens creativity. Or certainly it flattens the creative urge, to put it mildly. If you sit down to write a short story, for example, you don’t sit down with the notion I will write this in an hour and ten minutes and then hand it up and get a mark. Nobody writes really creatively in that way. People do—writers and other artists do—submit necessarily to deadlines. They normally have the elbow room within those deadlines to work, and deadlines are no harm as such, but what we try to do at Fighting Words is to invite particularly children and young people to see creativity as an open thing.
Schools—and I’ve actually seen it on posters in schools, so it’s official policy now—schools hammer home the notion that stories are about conflict and resolution, that the story must be planned before it’s written. We don’t necessarily think that that’s a good idea. Where is the magic? Where is the room for changing your mind? Where is the character that you didn’t anticipate becoming a main character and perhaps nudges the other characters aside, and it becomes a much better story because of that? So what we try to do then is to see the work. There’s that cliché “work in progress” which often isn’t a literal thing; it just means I haven’t finished it yet. But actually we like them to see “work in progress” in a very broad sense, that twenty-seven pages of mess can actually be ten pages of a glorious story.
But they need the time and they need the ownership of it. They need that because a lot of kids who work in school rarely get the chance to really claim the story as their own. And as they go into secondary school very bright kids, ironically, doing English may never write fiction again, because it’s not encouraged in the schools, because it is harder to mark. It’s easier to get marks in the exam system for an argumentative essay—for arguing the case that Ireland is a great country, or Ireland is a terrible country, or Ireland could be a better country, all these things rather than writing a short story. So that’s what we do. I agree heartily with Dave because I do think it has a practical purpose. I see all decisions, particularly when they are on the page, as being practical decisions. They’re creative, but it’s a question of encouraging kids to use the red biro on their own work—not wait for somebody over their shoulder to make their minds up for them and take responsibility—but to take responsibility of their own work. And actually a lot of those little decisions—adverb out, adjective in—are very pragmatic decisions. I mean it’s a great way to go through life. And one of the reasons that we are where we are is because of the herd mentality. One bunch of lads does something so all of the lads had decided they had to do the exact same thing. I would have thought true creativity, true creativity encourages individual thought, and actually the crankiness in us all. You do it that way, but you can fuck off, I’m doing it this way. Which is in some ways probably how the Irish tend to do things themselves anyways.
J: I noticed that sometimes you have classes, in which the students are from all different countries and places and backgrounds.
R: That’s it—in the state schools you can almost predict, depending on where in Dublin they’re coming from, West Dublin particularly, but also the North side. The state schools particularly are a fairly accurate reflection of what the population looks like. It’s extraordinary. I never, even after all these years, find it less than exciting when I find Chinese kids, Filipino kids, Nigerian kids in a class of Irish kids, and they’re the Irish as well.
J: Beginning with a prompt which is performed by the students, the first thirty minutes or so is spent writing the story together, and then it sort of splits into each student or small groups of students finishing the story; do you think that writing the story together has any sort of cohering effect?
R: I think it has a relaxing effect on them. It’s a little bit of theater in a way—they create themselves. And we do this really, just to help them relax. We try to let them relax into thinking. I don’t like the notion that writing is fun, because eventually, if you keep on talking, this notion that everything is fun is bullshit. Getting to the end, coming up with a good ending is a pain, and it’s an anxiety, and it’s always an anxiety. Every writer would probably agree [that], at least usually, it’s such an anxiety trying to find a good ending, but you don’t actually get it unless you slog away. But it acts as a kind of, to use that awful phrase, an “ice-breaker,” and as a way of getting to know the kids a little bit—which ones are more assertive, which ones are less assertive. And a lot of them immediately get the point of changing things, because they can see it in front of them, and it’s not just themselves now, and it’s not private—for a while it’s a bit public, so it’s a good way to start.
J: I've attended a number of the workshops, and I noticed that it’s very creative and performative as well, from the skit to reading their stories aloud at the end. Much of your work, the novels and the stories, has also been converted into more performative genres, like plays, movies, and now a musical. I’m wondering, do you ever see the prose work as a seed or as a score for a future performance?
R: Never ever. It would be a big mistake if I did. This is the first draft of a novel that I’m nearly done going through the second draft of, and it has some of the characters from the early books, and if I thought Oh, there could be a film in this, it would be an absolute disaster. The structure, the layout, it is a completely different exercise, and I know because I adapted some of them myself, and it’s more than just whipping out the dialogue and pasting. There’s a lot more that goes on. It’s a bit like at one point, about twenty years ago, readings in books stores were very, very popular. I remember my third book The Van (1991) was the first time where I really kind of toured, and I did about two weeks in the U.K. in different Waterstones bookstores in different cities and it was really brilliant. The shops were packed, and I had a long passage in the book that made good public reading. And the next time I had another book, Paddy Clarke (1993), there were two good passages that made good reading. But when I was writing—and I can’t remember exactly, I think it was The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996)—I was thinking to myself at one point, Oh, this is the bit I’ll read, and then I thought No, no, this is wrong, this is wrong, I’m not writing this for performance, I’m writing this to be read, so I reigned it in. As it happened there is a chapter in that book that makes good public reading, but that’s not why it’s there. And it’s the same with, if I was thinking ahead, thinking, Oh, if I change this a bit it’d really look good on screen, it could go global, or something like that. But no, prose is prose.
J: I know that The Commitments is now being turned into a musical?
R: Yeah, it will be on stage this time next year—late October next year in the West End, London. So the whole thing starts rolling; it’s like an ocean liner really. Once it starts rolling, it just keeps going, so, yeah, it’ll be fascinating to watch. And I wrote the, what they call “the book”—it’s a bit confusing because it’s based on a book, so it’s easier to call it a script—but I wrote the script as well, so I’ve already been heavily involved. We workshopped it and stuff like that, and then there’s the anxiety of wondering whether it will ever go on. And now it is going on.
J: It’s exciting?
R: It will be particularly exciting, and I think I’ll finally relax when I see that the tickets are on sale. Then I’ll know it’s a fact. I’ll be involved in the rehearsals. I don’t know to what degree. I’d imagine there will be a lot of rewriting as we go deeper in. Once you’re on a stage or a space the same size as the stage, you’d have to do the tweaking and the changing, maybe adding lines, maybe taking away lines. It will be very exciting—a bit frantic, but I’m looking forward to it.
J: Just to shift a bit, I think since 2000 you’ve been contributing to the monthly, then weekly, now fortnightly magazine, Metro Éireann—have readers ever contacted you with feedback or responses to the pieces?
R: Very rarely, very rarely people—children respond much quicker. I receive regular letters from children about my children’s books. I’ve had inquiries about the rights to individual stories, and one of them was actually nominated for an Oscar—a film directed by an American woman called Steph Green, which was a story called “New Boy.” It’s now in the first collection of The Deportees (2007), so that was a nice experience. But I just now and again would get some sort of response, but this morning nothing springs to mind.
But I really have enjoyed writing those stories. They’ve been a great little side exercise. I’m always working on a novel. I can’t think of any time—other than sometimes under pressure or deadlines—of setting a novel aside; I’ve always been either actually writing a novel or thinking about writing a novel, and if I had to be more particular about what I do, as opposed to being just a writer, I’d call myself a novelist. But I do like doing other things on the side. I really enjoy writing short stories and by that I mean real ones. I’ve only recently started writing what I would consider real short stories—by recently, when you get to my age, ten years is recent. But the experience of writing these stories which I sometimes see as little novels, almost little skeleton novels, has been terrific. I’d be wandering around, just walking or on the bus, and I’m often thinking about ideas for those stories, and something hits me, and I think Oh, that’ll fit into a story, and it’s really helped me stay awake and not slip into some notion that I know what street life in Dublin is like without having to venture out onto the streets. So it’s been a terrific exercise.
J: For The Deportees and the short stories, what sort of research do you do, if any? Do you, for instance, keep a notebook?
R: I always keep a notebook. I’d have one in my bag. I have one downstairs in the kitchen. I’d never go anywhere without some sort of a notebook. The stories come from different sources really. There’s one of the more recent ones, called “Bandstand,” and it’s about a homeless Polish man living in a tent in Phoenix Park. And that came out of an article I saw in The Irish Times. And it got my imagination going. An article that coincided with the [economic] bust, and now this man is kind of stranded; he arrives just at the wrong time with not enough English—a university degree, but no English. He’s kind of stranded and stuck, and pride won’t let him go home. That’s where that came from. I’m trying to remember, did I have to do any formal research with the first story, “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner.” I really liked writing the story—immediately liked writing the story. It’s told more or less from the point of view of a middle-aged Dublin man. So that, to me, in retrospect, was a wise way for me to start because that’s what I was. And gradually then as I became more confident with it, the younger African man comes into the story; but I think it might be chapter five or four before he arrives and then: What will I call him? Where in Nigeria is he from? What was his sister’s name? And in the story, there’s a food they’re eating that reminds him of a food from his home. Then I started asking the editors—the then editors, there’s only one now, Chinedu Onyejelem—of Metro Éireann: Where in Nigeria does he come from? I don’t want it to be Lagos; where does he come from? Abel Ugba, who now works in the University of East London, suggested Kaduna. And I wanted a food that might remind him of home that wouldn’t be on their table but that the Irish food would remind him of it, and he can explain it, and he gave me that. And then what was his sister called, and he gave me that. So there have been occasions.