A matter of emotion
Quite a few entries are coming in for our June competition now, including from Ireland.
We are always delighted to have Irish entries because that is a part of the world that has continually produced fine writers down the years.
Many Irish authors have managed to produce some truly compelling work, combining sound literary technique with an ability to try out new things.
Underpinning it all is a capacity to evoke emotion and trigger feelings and sensations in the reader. That is true of many Irish novelists and it is certainly true of many of Ireland’s short story writers.
Emotion is something of which some writers are wary, preferring to produce work without revealing too much of themselves.
However, for many other writers, there cannot be fiction without a sense of themselves in it. In the novels I write, there is always part of me peering through, my fears, my hopes, my aspirations, my take on life. It may not say ‘and this is me’ but it is there all the same. For me, writing has to be a deeply personal art.
Of course, it is not all autobiographical - many writers, myself included, write characters and scenes which we find abhorrent and use language and ideas with which we might not agree but which need to be there because they reflect the world about us.
However, in there somewhere are also tantalising glimpses of what we really think of the world and that is certainly something which comes through time and time again with the truly great Irish writers.
John Dean