‘Writing a story is like having sex with a stranger in the dark’ – The Irish Times

The title is key to any short story collection as it unlocks the writers preoccupations. For this collection, the titular story Marching Season felt strong, but I primarily chose it because it refers to the Orange flute-band parades from April to August and is therefore contentious. Evocative and provocative. Marching Season is synonymous in many peoples minds with potential trouble, but is a joyous musical road trip for others. I love that one phrase can be so divisive and it sums up Northern Ireland perfectly in a year of Brexit and riots.

Marching Season is my fifth collection and that might sound prolific to some, but in comparison to the greats its paltry. The short story writers I admire were mentally fecund and make contemporary specialists such as Claire Keegan look like dabblers. One of the most exceptionally prolific was Guy de Maupassant who wrote a whopping two to four volumes annually of short stories, not to mention his novels. F Scott Fitzgerald died at 44 and still managed to have more than 160 short stories published. Among the Irish writers, William Trevor wrote 13 short story collections while the genius Mary Lavin superseded him with 19.

Kevin Barry considers very few of his short stories worthy of publication: I would say out of every 10 I try, one or two will ever get outside the door, but even bearing in mind that he may have said this in order to seem a perfectionist (and all of us writers are prone to self-mythology), it surprised me as Ive found the more you write, the more confident you become. Lets be honest if you were only 10 to 20 per cent successful in most jobs, youd be sacked! And why wouldnt you want to emulate the former masters of the form? To be prolific, you mustnt be too precious about your work.

The biggest question aside from choosing the title is how many stories a collection should include. Trevor favoured 12 and Lucy Caldwell favours 11, but Im not at all prescriptive. The mainstream school of thought is that collections should be slimline like poetry, as if to imply a rarified art-form, but Im all for a bulkier approach. Marching Season has 13 short stories, 13 being my lucky number as my brother was born on the 13th, as was my niece.

This connection is especially fitting as Marching Season is a family collaboration. When I was talking to Alan Hayes of Arlen House last year, I told him that my mum had been an artist. Alan loved the idea of an art/short story fusion, so this collection carries 16 of her paintings and memorialises her talent. The front cover is also personal as it was painted by a delightfully mad Russian artist I went out with in Prague.

As for the stories, most were written before Covid, but a few, such as Irish-Australian and What Happened to You, were written during lockdown when I kept dreaming of foreign travel. Lockdown made me talk to myself more but I often think the true recompense for a writers loneliness comes from the priceless observations that can only be made during solitude.

Sexual desire is a big theme in Marching Season in differing forms and permutations. Im fascinated by hedonism as a form of self-escape and my characters are often aesthetes and epiphanists. Dr Caroline Magennis recently made a tongue-in-cheek observation in Writing After the Troubles that I might be dubbed Belfasts pleasure laureate and, funnily enough, Ive often thought I should ask for sponsorship from Carlsberg and Durex! The opening story, The a, b and cs of Modern Living, commemorates the days when we could commingle freely in pubs, but one of the darker narratives, Life is Short and Fun Should be Had, centres on our lockdown reality of cyber-dating and the paranoiac distrust it engenders. Other stories are about the jealousy arising from a threesome, a controlling relationship, sexual confusion, youthful longing and a fantasy that goes wrong.

So far, so universal, but I couldnt call the collection Marching Season without dealing with the sceptred part of this isle. In the title story, a drag queen, Marcus, is alienated from those who march the Queens highway, prompting his last-ditch effort to belong. Portrait of a European City is based on a real incident where a Sinn Fin MLA attended an East Belfast art exhibition without local paramilitary clearance.

The story reflects the current culture wars wherein politicians use the arts for their own political gain and it also highlights the East as the current creative hotbed of Belfast. In the surge of new Protestant writing, its possible I can be tempted at times to out-Protestant other writers, but Ive never considered myself a mouthpiece for one particular side. For instance, The Night they Shot the Journalist is about republicans in Derry and is inspired by the murder of Lyra McKee. I dont need to be something to write about it; I just need to know and feel something.

Autobiography doesnt so much play a part in Marching Season as a leading role. Its the petits faits vrais that enable writing to soar. In Future-Proof Your Life (Step 7 of 10), I recalled my excruciating lapses of memory during a Tedx talk at Stormont. The best thing about being a writer is that you can write about your disasters until they become paradoxically more valuable than your achievements. Failure in life should always be mined for literary success.

I try to write every story like its my first and every line like its my last. Lasting work is what counts and real writers dont want 15 minutes of fame; we want 15 millennia of fame. Reaching my fifties hasnt made me a better writer, but its made me a more focused writer and theres nothing that concentrates the mind more than the sense of contracting time.

William Trevor called the short story an impressionist painting and an explosion of truth. To me, writing a story is like having sex with a stranger in the dark; you have a vision of what could happen, but you have to feel your way through it. Trevor also said that stories are concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness, and after Ive finished a story, Ill begin the delicate process of scoring out words, sentences or whole paragraphs. To return to Trevors analogy of the painting, editing is like rubbing out the pencil marks of the initial rough sketch. The final story should be an image, a little nebulous around the edges, but utterly transparent and transfixing at its core.

Ultimately, I see a short story writer as a prose writer with a poets soul, a metaphorist, a symbolist. John Banville made me laugh when he recently admitted that writing a novel is like wading through wet sand, at night, in a storm. Im glad to say writing Marching Season was no long sapping march through the sand. Because of the brevity of form, short stories are freeing to write and I stepped lightly all the way.Marching Season is published by Arlen House

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'Writing a story is like having sex with a stranger in the dark' - The Irish Times