Hot Press Interview with Anne Enright

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but an equally apt saying might be you should never judge a writer by their books. Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s most well respected and critically acclaimed authors and winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her remarkable novel The Gathering. On the page, Enright is a literary stylist, and her novels are written using carefully crafted, nuanced prose. You expect her to be reserved and perhaps a little bit frightening, but the opposite is true – in person she's warm, funny and self-deprecating.

Along with the HP team of Niall Stokes, Stuart Clark, Craig Fitzpatrick and Royseven’s lead vocalist Paul Walsh, Enright was one of the judges of the Hot Press Alcatel Write Touch competition. She also agreed to do a live question and answer session at the winners’ award ceremony. It was a fascinating discussion, in which she talked about writing, winning the Booker, and the importance of the tab button...

Writers are often their own biggest critics and can spend hours working a sentence to get it perfect. How do you know when it's time to leave it alone?

There's a lot in between crap and fabulous, and the way you get there is by working your craft, by working your sentences. I can’t leave a bad sentence behind. It’s like a child on the road – I have to go back and pick it up and fix it. But that’s after years and years of working sentences. There is no easy answer: Valéry, the poet, said, a work of art is never finished, it's only ever abandoned. If you're working on a long piece and you can go back to it without throwing up, you’re not finished yet. You have to be so fed up with the thing. Journalism is a different gig – you’ve got a deadline and you can use that adrenaline, but I'm in a very slow industry.

They say first-time writers should write about what they know. Is that a cliché or good advice?

Well, the first book I wrote [The Portable Virgin], my mother said, “How did you know that?” You know more than you think you know. I tell people actually what you have to do is own what’s in your head. A lot of people spend a lot of time censoring what they know. I say this particularly to female writers – stop stopping yourself; you know what you know; and you know a lot more than anybody is going to allow you to. I can’t remember who said that you know all you need to know to be a writer by the age of eighteen and that’s one school of thought. I would work it differently now, in my fifties, but there you go!

What inspires you when you begin a novel – are you attracted by a particular character you want to explore or a story that you want to tell, or a combination of the two?

I’m really terrified by that question! There's a woman in Paris I met who is a psychoanalyst. She had a group and they sat around looking at Finnegan’s Wake and they were trying to find the first sentence ever penned in Finnegan’s Wake – the genetic sentence, the seed of the book. And if you asked Joyce where he started or whatever, that would be a difficult question for him to answer. I'm kind of terrified to go back and find those first words, you know. I don’t start anything – I’m just working on stuff. I just mooch around. I don’t start because then… wow! How do you start something? It’s too much – it’s like you have to have it all before you can sit down. I’m just tootling along. I write a bit of this and I write a bit of that and then I grow them a little before I start. I don’t crash in.

Can you tell us about your typical day’s writing?

I have a lovely life, but it's also terrible. I get up and I get nothing done. I'm working all day and I get nothing done. I do that 365 days a year and at the end of the year I have half a book. Then I do that again for the next year. I get nothing done. Nothing! All week I get nothing done. Then at the end of the second year I have a book. Clearly I am getting something done, but I'm working all the time and getting nowhere.

Some writers are able to get up and work from nine to five and treat it as a day job, while other people feel the need to get a thousand words down a day.

I do believe in a word count, but sometimes you lose words and that’s very dispiriting. You have to know that there's an end in sight if you're working on a long project. It’s like the longer you have to wait for something, the more uncertain it becomes. Even though you might be three quarters of the way in, that’s the time you think, “This is never going to happen.” So the further you get in, paradoxically the more anxious you feel about it. You have to remind yourself how much you’ve done. Mood management!

How important is winning a prize like the Man Booker in terms of sales and stature?

It’s very important to the world and it’s very discombobulating for the writing self, but it is very important in terms of marketing and publishing and securing your place in an industry. But you’re always working at that interface between something that’s incredibly personal and I think that’s been a feature of what I’ve been reading from this competition here – that what really lifts off the page is something that has commitment and heart and is in someway about self. I don’t mean mawkish, but a sense of enthusiasm, curiosity, energy – all of these things are very close to energy – all of these things are very close to your sense of yourself. It is quite hard to work that in a market context, you know, because you're taking something that's in some way precious and meaningful to you and hustling it. So winning a prize… yes I won a prize, and I’m better now, thank you!

So are prizes a good thing?

Prizes are good for the industry. There's this feeling that we’re at the end of days – journalism is dead, there’s no money in literature. There was never any money in literature when I started out, but there was a sense you could at least get good expenses from journalism and that’s now draining out of the industry and the pay is not the same as it used to be even ten years ago. You write because you need to write, because you want to write, because you have something to say or because you like hooking into other people’s minds.

How do you feel about writing blogs, or writing for free for online newspapers?

I never used to write for free. I never did because I felt it was like a river that was just flowing past you, you couldn’t hold it. I needed a cheque of some small description to make me feel like I had written something that was contained in some way, you know, that was a commodity. That sense of endless flow you get from blogs does worry me a little bit – one of the challenges of writing is to give things a narrative shape and a sense of closure, that click of satisfaction that comes from the end of a well-written piece – and that’s hard to achieve in a blog because there's always tomorrow. I think blogs are great and writing is good for writing, always, but you are going to be challenged to form things and shape things and the online stream is not necessarily the best place to learn about shaping. You wouldn’t find as you live or die on the interweb, that a nice looking page really matters. People have worked their photographs really well! But I want to get a bit of separation between the paragraphs, a bit of indentation going – that thing with the arrow at the side, you know on the keyboard? That thing! You’re supposed to separate out your ideas. That’s my big tip – use the tab button!

A lot of female writers, no matter what their genre or subject matter, get stuck with a chick lit tag and a pink cover. Women journalists get asked to cover subjects like fashion whether or not they have any interest in them.

I hate talking in gender terms because it's so sweeping, but people don’t like to be disliked and girls more than other people hate to be disliked. Putting yourself out there is a kind of a way of attracting envy as well as everything else, and it’s awful, it’s really awful – “I was trying to do something really well and now people don’t like me because I did well” – and that’s something you have to get over.

Reading horrible things about yourself is something you might have to get used to.

Yes, I find a glass of wine helps. Hard drugs if you’re Googling yourself at 3am!

Do you read reviews?

I do. Some writers claim they don’t, but you find during conversation that they’ve read the same reviews of their work you’ve read. I do read them but the problem I have with reviews is that I very seldom learn anything from them except how the book is placing in different markets. You realise it's not an educational experience. There are a couple of reviewers I read and say, “Oh I never realised that about my work.” That’s interesting. But most reviews don’t tell you anything you didn’t know, or they don’t tell you anything at all. It’s really odd! There are very few journalists that work within people’s contradictions. People want one headline, and everything simply described – this is what this is. But something that shows the contradictions... A lot of journalism is about putting people in their place. I like to wriggle out of that. I think it’s all about angle of approach. Do you start at the beginning of a piece? Come in at the middle and see what happens then.

Anyone who wants to write has to be fond of reading and enjoy different kinds of writing. What writing do you enjoy?

I could never write non-fiction until I read Christopher Hitchens’ early work, an essay on booze and fags which was about how drinking killed writers but how cigarettes were really good for them. I had never read anything like it before and I went, “Oh yes, I could do that!” You get fed by other people’s words. Hitchens turned into a terrible old fascist in his old age, but when he was young and annoying people, or annoying the right people, he was a terrific stylist. It's hard for me to find non-fiction writers I enjoy. A lot of American work is very rinsed and perfect and that doesn’t stir me. Joan Didion would make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck!

What are you working on now?

I’m working on something and I don’t know how long I’ve been working on it, but I will be finished next July. It’s a longer book and I’ve done about 66,000 words and I have about 44,000 words to go. It’s about family. It's about siblings. They are very far apart and grown up, but they have to come back and sort out the mother. They're very distinctive separate individuals, and they have to fit back into being a family.

Any final words of advice?

All advice is annoying. My mother used to say, “Write what you know,” and that was always very annoying. “Put in the work” – that’s very annoying as well. “Be true to what you believe in” is slightly less annoying but it’s kind of pants in a way. I do like the advice, “Never use a long word where a short word will do.” And if you get into a complicated situation where you can’t explain it, just explain it. If you can’t get from A to C because B is the problem, don’t bother with B, just go!