Anthony Doyle

I always loved writing stories at school, and have always written poetry, but I only started writing fiction in earnest ten years ago, with my children’s book The Lake Ran Dry, published in Portuguese. I haven’t stopped since, and I’m almost completing my third novel now. So it’s been a busy decade.

There were several that really left a deep impression on me: C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but also Peter Benchley’s Jaws. I can clearly remember reading those as a kid/young teen, and being utterly mesmerized. When you read a good book, a little film runs in the back of your mind at the same time, and those books were extremely visual. Interestingly, it’s the images the books conjured that I remember the most. I still read today, though not as much as I’d like. There are times, especially when I’m writing, when I won’t read any fiction at all, only nonfiction. But in-between projects, or when I’m not making any headway, I’ll devour several novels in a rush.

That’s an interesting question. I moved to Brazil in 2000, but I left Ireland in 1995, so I’ve been away a long time, and that makes it very difficult to write about Ireland. I also find it a little hard to write about Brazil, because it feels as though I should be doing it in Portuguese. Unfortunately, I don’t think I could write a novel in Portuguese, though I might give it a try one day. So, when it comes to writing, I’m kind of between worlds, and I tend to write out of imagined spaces as a result. My novel Hibernaculum is set in 2049 in a largely imaginary San Francisco. A new novel, Jestor, is set all over the place: London, Cairo, Miami, the Rio de Janeiro coast, Medieval Europe…It’s liberating, but you also feel a little adrift. Brazil is a hugely diverse country, which is great in terms of flavor and character input. You’ll find Brazilians of African, Middle-Eastern, Japanese, German, Portuguese, Italian and Indigenous descent all mixed in together, and the culture reflects all their many influences.

It all depends on the idea. Some ideas lean towards poetry, others towards fiction, and they are very different creative processes, involving separate skillsets. I’ve often found that poetry is twenty percent writing and eighty percent editing. Explosive at first, then you spend ages chipping away at it. (I have a 40-page book-poem which I’ve been tinkering with for 15 years!) Fiction is different. There’s a lot of process management that goes into writing a novel. I think that’s why I came to fiction later in life, because I didn’t have the necessary competencies when I was younger. A novel takes discipline, planning, and patience, not just talent or creativity. You need to know how to research, too, because that’s an essential part of it. Novel-writing is a construction project, while a poem is something you chisel free from a single block of idea. Translation’s different again, because you’re retracing someone else’s steps, and have to be as true as possible to the author’s style and intentions. It’s reproduction and transformation at the same time, which can be tricky.

I can safely say I learned how to write from translating other people’s work. Translation has been a school to me. In a way, it’s like those painters you see reproducing great works at art galleries. They’re learning through reproduction. Translation is like that too. Translation means taking a text in one language and rewriting it in another. But literary translation is about taking an author’s text in one language and transferring it to another language in that author’s style. So it’s reproduction of content and form, to the extent that that’s possible. You learn a great deal from doing that. And it was through translation that I finally acquired those other competencies I mentioned before—planning, discipline and patience. It’s great training for a writer.

When my daughter was little, my wife and I took her to a ranch hotel in the countryside. It was a long drive, so we had to come up with all sorts of things to keep her entertained. I made up a story about a little girl from the Brazilian drylands who liked to swim in a nearby lake, but when the lake dries up during a drought, she decides to go on a long journey across the mountains to find the sea. It’s an allegorical tale about growth and change. My wife liked the story and encouraged me to write it. It was the first time I managed to finish a fiction project. I’d started many stories and even novels before, but never finished anything. That was the first time, and it was then I realized I could actually follow through.

My publisher, Devil’s Party Press, handles fiction, but a lot of the writers who publish with them also write poetry. The press has an online journal and does some annual anthologies, and a number of us had published poetry in these. It was then that Dianne Pearce had the idea for the collective. She said you’re all poets, but we don’t publish poetry, but if you want to club together and work on each others’ books, we’ll publish them. The first of these, Break in the Field, by Ellis Elliot, came out just this month. It’s a beautiful book about her relationship with a son with special needs. I’ve just finished proofreading another Old Scratch volume by author/poet/artist Morgan Golladay. It’s a wonderful book about North Mountain in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. I think it’ll be out next year. So it’s a great mix of poets working in different styles and coming from very different places. I wouldn’t say the collective has influenced my poetry per se, but it has definitely encouraged me to keep writing poetry. Poetry can be a thankless endeavor, but seeing other poets so engaged with the craft reminds you why we all started doing it in the first place. The Old Scratch collective plans to start receiving submissions from other interested poets eventually. If anyone is interested in the group, the website is https://oldscratchpress.com

Absolutely fundamental. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be locked out of Dostoevsky, or Martin Heidegger, or the Greek philosophers, or Carl Jung, or the poetry of Rumi. A childhood without the Grimm brothers! A disaster. History is largely a tale of translations. The Rosetta Stone, for example, has had a massive impact on history and culture. It practically unlocked the mysteries of hieroglyphics and the ancient Egyptian world. The translators that worked on that stone probably didn’t get paid very well, if at all, and nobody knows their names (I think), but they couldn’t have imagined the relevance of the job they were doing at the time. Translation doesn’t just bridge cultural gaps, it makes those gaps visible in the first place, which is just as important.

Translation’s my day-job, so that side is pretty much carved out. I try to write as much as I can in my free time. Most writers have to balance work and writing, and it’s not easy. It can be infuriating, in fact. Sometimes you feel really inspired, but have no time. On other occasions, you have time, but no inspiration whatsoever. So the planets really have to align for writers with full-time jobs to get anything done. As for balancing poetry and novels, I try to keep several projects on the boil at any one time, and I flit back and forth as the mood takes me. If the fiction hits a speed bump, I’ll turn to poetry, and if that runs out of steam, I’ll turn back to fiction. So there’s usually something happening.

People will often tell you to focus. Pick one kind of art and devote yourself to that. I’m sure that works for some people, maybe even most people, but it was never like that for me. So my advice would be this: if you feel pulled in different creative directions, try to explore them and see how they play off one another. Maybe it’s in that multiplicity that you’ll find your true creative vein. I would also avoid trying to shoehorn yourself into molds that suit the market. It can be tempting to try to force your writing this way or that in order to boost your chances of getting published, but I think we have to follow our own paths, even if they're not what’s in vogue. It’s not a matter of not ‘compromising for your art’ or anything, it’s just that authenticity shows through in the end, and you’ll be a lot better at doing what feels right to you anyway.

Trying to get published can be disheartening. There’s so much rejection. So it can be a long and soul-destroying grind with no guarantee you’ll ever get anything out of it. So ask yourself this: if a little angel came down right now and told you that you would never publish a single page of anything you wrote, would you continue to do it? If the answer is no, then maybe writing’s not for you. But if the answer is yes, keep going, because you know you will anyway. I felt a whole lot better after asking myself that question and finding the answer was “yes”.

Real-life experiences certainly filter into my writing, but not in a way that anyone would be able to recognize individuals or situations. Some fiction writing is barely disguised (auto)biography, and that’s fine, but it’s not something I feel comfortable doing. I try to avoid copy-and-paste fictionalization, and I won’t go anywhere near a bandwagon. I prefer to boil situations and people down to essences and then build those back into new and unrecognizable situations and characters. After all, it’s what those influences represented to you in the first place that matters.

Read and learn about the most varied subjects. Characters need worlds, and world-building requires a wealth of detail, so the more you have at your disposal, the richer your fiction will be when you write it. I also try to keep innovating in terms of style. If a sentence comes too easily, it could probably be a better sentence. I try to keep building my vocabulary, and looking for new ways to say things. It’s important to prospect for new wells of symbolism and imagery, so I try to read up on things I’m not particularly interested in. Wonderful language can turn up in the most unexpected places.

Unfortunately, it’s still early days in terms of feedback, as I’m only starting to get my work out there. But who knows? I sincerely hope something I write can have that kind of impact on someone. I suppose that’s what it’s all about.

I have another fully-completed novel, Jestor, though I’m not quite clear on where that’s going to find a home yet. I have a poetry book/chapbook in the works through Old Scratch Press. It should be out in 2025/26. I’m currently finishing a young-adult sci-fi murder mystery loosely based on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It’s almost there, and there’s a possibility of turning it into a trilogy if all goes well. I’m also finishing a children’s book project I’ve been working on for years now, on and off. The current title is The Book of Unusual Mermaids.

The site was recommended to me by my publisher, Dianne Pearce. I’ve had a really positive experience with it overall. It’s full of great resources for authors, and you get to see what kind of work people are doing. Writing can be a lonely task, so having somewhere to go where you’ll find hundreds of others in the same boat is very important.