Tim MacGabhann on Short Stories and the Anti-Plot Sentence
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Saints is your second book published this year, after your memoir The Black Pool came out in May. Before that you published two political thrillers, 2019’s Call Him Mine and its sequel, 2020’s How to Be Nowhere, as well as the long poem Rory Gallagher – Live! – From the Hotel of the Dead in 2023. What led you to publish a series of short stories now?
I haven’t had an idea since about 2007, so each book is really an attempt to do the formal opposite of the last book. Lenny Kravitz once said, ‘I could only have written “Are You Gonna Go My Way” on this particular guitar’, and it’s true: certain things invite particular volumes, particular pitches of emotion and their linguistic treatment. The short story is a very different instrument to the political thriller, the first-person political thriller is a very different instrument to the third-person political thriller. I think of them as different ways of articulating what are basically the same four concerns, which are the usual ones: friendship, love, desire and pain. Soprano, alto, tenor, bass.
I was fascinated by the volta that takes place about sixty or seventy percent into the first novel, Call Him Mine, where you realise that this first-person narrative has really been told in the second person the entire time. When I read that it made clear to me the fact that, actually, first-person, second-person, third-person, it’s all really one thing. Where did that come from?
Every novel is being addressed to someone. When I was doing a Masters nine years ago [the MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) at the University of East Anglia], one of the most interesting things Giles Foden said in a seminar was that, even if you’re writing in the third person, in that George Eliot-style, zoomed-out voice, every narrator is a person. Who are they? How do they know this stuff? Are they an archivist, are they God? Are they dead? Are they you? The reader may never know who they are, but you need to know who they are. I was writing in the first person, so I thought of lyric poetry, which is spoken in the first person but always addressed to someone. Sappho or Anacreon or Archilochus, they’re all addressing somebody, trying to resurrect an experience for another person. And so when I am writing in the first person I need to think not only about the fact that this character is in the novel, but also about who that novel is being addressed to.
One charge against the short story as a form is that they can begin to feel fairly repetitive: almost all contemporary short stories build towards some epiphany or significance or some broader point. Is there less opportunity for formal interest or experiment when writing a short story as opposed to a novel? Is the short story more formally constrained?
Writing in an upward curve that dies down, that’s basically the Joyce thing: start from the epiphany and work backwards. I think that manifests now as a kitsch, or an automatism, or as a teaching tool. The reason why short stories tend to sound the same is because those constraints are pedagogically useful, people can learn them. A friend of mine went to NYU for his MFA, and he was told, ‘Here’s the trouble with your stories, they write towards the conflict rather than beginning with the conflict.’ His stories followed an upward curve up to an epiphany, writing towards the central conflict and then dipping down. But if I situate the conflict right at the start, it means that I’m starting with the epiphany and working not backwards but forwards. So for me, when I’m writing a short story I set in motion about three different elements and then I think, What’s the most amusing to me? I might have an opening quarter to a third and then an end image, and I’ll think, How do I get the one to meet the other?
Is ‘amusing’ the aim, then? You mentioned those four ideas, friendship, love, desire, pain, but is your project with these stories the treatment of those four concerns in an amusing way?
The question is, can I surprise myself and potentially the other person? Maybe I don’t always manage it, but I’m definitely trying to see if I can surprise myself. I write four really boring drafts and then I’ll look for the three or four elements and the two or three ways I can recombine them. And then if I’m chuckling to myself, not at the jokes, but if I’m chuckling to myself and thinking, I didn’t know I was going to do that, then I’m onto a winner.
One of the surprises for me was that twist in the story [title redacted for maximal readerly enjoyment], when you realise one of the characters has been dead the whole time. I did a second take on that and I had to go back to see how you’d put it together.
I didn’t know he was dead until the last draft, really. It shocked me as well. I think in the draft before that he was German.
Do your stories change a lot from draft from draft, then? If you do four really boring drafts as you say, do they change a lot? Do you have many false starts?
I have to find something in it that’s exciting enough for me to get to the end of it. The first is just this awful march, and then for the second or third I ask myself, how can I actually make myself want to do this? But I always finish the false start, I always take it to the end. I know that this is the wrong way to be going here, but I need to figure out what the destination looks like if I make these certain decisions, and then go from there. It’s really laborious. If you did it in real life, like if you’d got lost in the street, that’s how you’d end up in Penge.
The stories in Saints are all linked together by this one room where Narcotics Anonymous meetings are held. Did you write the stories piecemeal and then bring them together, or had you always planned for this to be a set of interlinked short stories?
The collections I admire most are collections like Julianne Pachico’s or Olive Kitteridge. Another is Hawthorne and Child by Keith Ridgeway, which is a novel made up of short stories. I admire that book hugely, for its recurrences, different angles, its first-, second-, third-person narration. In Saints it’s just that one room that binds them somehow, whether they’re in it, or a family member, or a family member of a family member.
I wrote ‘Better’ first. I wrote it as a memoir piece and it didn’t work. And then I wrote a couple of the Diego ones, but very badly. They all started out in the first person, but I changed them to third because I was sick of that. I always knew I was going to come back to the forensic cleaner, Lucio, but I didn’t know how. I had Diego, Lucio and Alejandro, who had been in an early draft of Call Him Mine. I had these guys hanging out, I knew these things about them, and I thought, How do I make them collide? Diego’s death was by far the most autobiographical writing I’ve ever done, and I include the memoir in that. His whole way of behaving, his whole way of thinking, the fact that he’s from a provincial town, goes to the capital and has a shit time, he’s me. He’s like a photograph of me, he’s closer to me than the memoir. He’s like my Stephen Dedalus.
What comes first? Is it the particular idea you’re exploring, or the voice, or the two characters who are colliding? Nabokov said writing begins with a ‘throb’. What’s the first throb of these stories?
It’s always the first-person voice. I start to assemble lines that all seem like they belong together somehow. Then I start to read them, and conjoin the lines, and soon I realise that a full person is saying these things. Then I’ll bring two or three people together. Three is the optimum. I’m really bad at doing scenes with more than two people, which is a real problem. I always try to challenge myself to get to a maximum point of tension around three characters. And then I’m like, Well, what would happen if I put this and this one together, oh that’s shite, oh hold on, but what about this and this together, that’s better. They’re like my little repertory of actors in my head, improvising together.
You mentioned Joyce previously. Is he an ‘influence’? Are you into him?
Purely formally, Joyce is always there, because of this epiphany thing where he puts the conflict at the end. He gave us the template for that. I hate Chekhov, though. I just really, really don’t get it.
What about Chekhov in particular? The stories or the plays?
I just don’t get almost any of it. I like the one where the guy’s on the boat and then he dies, that one’s amazing [‘Gusev’, 1900]. But the rest I don’t get. People laugh at this for a number of reasons: one, because it’s so obtuse and two, because I love everyone who writes exactly like Chekhov. It’s like hating Talking Heads but being a massive Franz Ferdinand fan: I like the stupid version.
My favourite short story writers tend to be contemporaries like May-Lan Tan or Wendy Erskine. They’re just reinventing it, those two. Especially those two.
In the story ‘Satellite’, Alejandro thinks of his own traumatic visual memories as ‘bad head pictures’. One of the things that recurs throughout all of your work is the patterning of visual phenomena or ‘bad head pictures’ that torment your protagonists. You mentioned chuckling as you’re writing, but how difficult is it to write about these violent images, like the ‘reddish mash’ of a murder victim’s face? Does the violence or the torment ever begin to feel heavy?
They feel heavier before I’ve written them, I think. I think by the time they get written I’ve winnowed them down to enough of a psychic likeness that they can be expressed. It takes a long time to be able to articulate some of it. I think that laughter is just the relief of articulation.
The Irish Independent said that the second novel, How to Be Nowhere, was ‘begging to be adapted into celluloid’. As well as other things like ideas, thoughts, feelings and sensations, how important is the visual in your work?
I start off with smell. Smell is usually the most important one. Smell and physical sensation. I have such an obsequious terror of losing the reader’s attention, so I am just constantly thinking to myself, How can I remind them of their own physicality while they’re reading this? And even me, because it’s not going to get written if I’m not paying very close attention. You have to be careful not to do too much of the visual over the other four, because it can start to feel abstracted. The visual is important but you have to grapple with that importance so that it doesn’t dominate.
When I wrote the first book I was watching about four films a day, and then with the second book I was reading more than I was watching. I watched an awful, awful, awful lot of films in a very short period of time quite a long time ago, and they’re still percolating down. Action films especially because they spend so much money on them, so every second counts. Michael Mann pays such close attention to such strange things in all of his films. Like in Thief [1981], James Caan’s character never uses contractions, so subliminally that gives him this Homeric scale. He’s Julius Caesar by the end of it.
You’re writing about Mexico from an apartment in Paris. How far do you identify as an ‘Irish’ writer? You’re never really reduced to that in the promotional materials for your books in the way that other Irish writers might be.
It’s a grapple. I debate it all the time. I suppose I’m Irish when it suits me. Sometimes I wish I was pigeonholed more as an Irish writer, because then I’d make more money… But really I would like to be thought of as an Irish writer a bit more. When I was younger I hated the idea, I felt really suffocated by living there. After the crash it was a very bad place to live. The magazines we have now are wonderful, and a lot of them were around at that time, but they exerted less of a force over contemporary culture. Even though we had a lot of very good writers, it felt quite fallow. I was really keen to get out.
The prosperity times never quite felt real to me. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And the weird thing with the prosperity times was that there was a very self-congratulatory provincial celebration going on. I love Seamus Heaney very much; I love Eavan Boland very much. But those two simultaneously raised the bar absurdly high and dropped it absurdly low for the people who came after them. It was so easy to just celebrate place and the old village water pump or whatever, these sort of cod versions. I feel like we started to re-colonise ourselves into talismans of a weirdly upholstered provincialism. I was just aching to get out.
Quite like Joyce, really. Wanting to get out.
It was all so bleak and busy and tiring. In the months before I left I had this mantra: I just want to go where it’s sunny and the fruit is cheap.
You’ve published two books this year. How are you so productive?
The secret is to write two hundred words a day as soon as possible after getting up. If I get more than two hundred, that’s a bonus. If I don’t, it’s enough. The minimum is the trick. Once I hit two hundred words, I can either stop or I can continue for a couple of hours maybe, but the minimum daily word count is absolute: between getting up and going to bed, two hundred words. These days I’m a bit more in control of my time than I was when I first began, but when I was working jobs with really long hours [MacGabhann was, for many years, a freelance reporter in Mexico] or jobs that had parcels of hours throughout the day, I’d make sure that two hundred words had been squeezed in somehow. The habit pushes other stuff into shape around it. By 12pm or 1pm, I can be available for my loved ones. I do prioritise it, but I’ve never wanted to be that selfish creator. All the fun stuff happens when I’d rather not be working anyway.
Why don’t you write criticism?
I’m not very good at it. I either zoom out too far or I zoom in too close and I start talking about phonemes or something. I’ve published a couple of academic papers. But I can’t do the cut-and-thrust stuff. I don’t think I have enough sense of what’s going on, apart from my own opinion on what’s going on. And no one wants that, right? My opinions are crap. I think Kenny Powers is a genius.
But you are doing a PhD now, also at the University of East Anglia. What are you writing about?
It’s a theory of the anti-plot sentence. Every sentence has an inherent forward drive, because language unfolds temporally forwards. Even in poetry, the downward vertex suggests a temporal unfolding. The relentless forward action of time makes its way into the plot of the sentence, so how can you frustrate it? How can you conceal it? How can you frustrate your reader’s expectation? How can you delay the point of desire? How does the subject relate to its object with the mediation of a verb? Does the subject appear early, does it appear late? Does the object appear late? Does the object appear first? These things are just ways of taking the story of the sentence and its plot and then working them against each other. Plot, for me, comes from psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis you’re trying to tell a story but also not tell it. So I take Tristram Shandy, then some sentences from Finnegans Wake (which actually aren’t all that syntactically radical, just semantically radical), and then Beckett’s trilogy. Beckett underwent psychoanalysis, Sterne is a proto-analytic figure, and then Joyce is like ‘I’m better than that!’ and tries to do it by other means, until Lacan catches him in the net of the sinthome. The anti-plot novel is, for me, a way of inverting everything I’ve done up to now in theoretical terms.
What’s next for MacGabhann? Finishing the thesis? Or another two books out in time for Christmas?
The drawer is very full. I have a satirical novel called Ape Poem about Irish literature and a second collection of short stories that are all set in Ireland, or about Irish people, or Irish-born people, or people who are not from Ireland but live in Ireland. I have a political thriller that’s written in the third person, that’s a big chunk. I wrote that last summer. I’d spent eight years on it and then last summer, I was like, Let’s have a big go on that. And I’m publishing a book of poetry in February with Banshee Press, that’s been remarkably fun.
What’s so fun about it? We’ve talked about plot and forward propulsion and momentum, and while the lyric poem does, as you say, have a forward logic to it, it does tend to take a moment in time and slow it down. What are these poems like?
No plot, all vibes. I wanted to just explode the noir atmosphere and not have it tied to plot at all but just have it be this floating cloud. I’ve re-written that collection a lot. Some of the poems in it are ten years old, and when you write a text over ten years there are so many shifts in your knowledge, your technical ability, your vocal interests, your textual interests. What was fun about it was that I got to think about how the words were serving themselves rather than earning their place in a sentence or a plot. I was able to let sound and colour and linguistic texture dictate my decision-making, and that was great. It was like language in its pure form, because the desire of a sentence, the desire of a subject, when we plot them they go in lines: diagonals, up and down, whatever. But if you leave a linguistic desire to sit and amplify, the poem can be a place where you can just slow the fuck down.
And you’re able to produce this level of production on just two hundred words a day?
Yeah, pretty much. It might tick up to eight hundred or it might tick up to twelve hundred on a really, really good day. If I’m alone in Serbia for a month on a fellowship or something like that, there’s nothing else to do. I don’t need to be out and about. If the weather’s miserable, I can just say, Yeah, I’m going to write five thousand words today. And I’ll do it, you know? But it’s a two hundred word minimum every single day. And that just built up, it just started to make room. It just started to push aside other requirements and became my life.
But how do you sustain it materially?
I’m just very good at filling in forms.
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Tim MacGabhann is an Irish writer who divides his time between the UK and Mexico City. His first two novels, Call Him Mine and How to Be Nowhere, were published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Other fiction, non-fiction and poetry has also appeared in The Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review, The Tangerine, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review and The Rialto, among others. He is currently at work on a PhD with funding from CHASE at UEA.
Joseph Williams is reviews editor at Critical Quarterly.
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