First Writes: Séamas O’Reilly
In this Q&A, we throw some questions about ‘firsts’ at debut novelists. This month we feature Séamas O’Reilly, author of Prestige Drama, a comedy about dramatising tragedy in which a famous American actress, who arrives in Derry to star in a Troubles-set series, goes missing
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What’s the first book you remember reading as a child? I have extraordinarily strong memories of reading Funnybones by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Any time I read it to my own kids, I experience a genuine Proustian rush, right down to remembering the feel of the cold, dappled, false-marble tabletop in my childhood kitchen where I sat and read it, my hair still wet and fingers still pruned from a swimming lesson.
What was the book you read that made you decide to be a writer? The first proper, seismic leap in my recalibration of what a book could be, and experience of knowing I wanted to do the miraculous things its writer did, was The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. I read it when I was 12 and it blew my head open. All the rules and constructs of fiction that I’d read up to that point were utterly discarded and I knew I wanted to do whatever it was he was doing. I have not yet proved successful.
Which debut publication had the most profound effect on you? Arthur Mathews’ Well-Remembered Days is probably the single funniest book I have ever read and one of the most joyously re-readable. Where other books offer a sensible chuckle every chapter or two, this pummels you with exquisite gags at a rate that makes you realise you’ve been short-changed by ‘funny’ books your entire life.
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up on a writing day? Literally anything other than writing. The one good thing about writing days is that, all of a sudden, every tedious admin task in your calendar suddenly holds an unbreakable appeal. Ninety-nine per cent of all meetings I’ve scheduled, magazine pitches I’ve made, invoices I’ve chased and tax forms I’ve filed, have been in those first few blissful hours of avoidance that precede my writing days like a stalking horse.
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What’s the first thing you do when you’ve stopped writing for the day? I go for a run so I can untangle the horror and dross of a bad day, or ruminate pleasantly on a good one. I tend to overthink, so invariably by the time I’ve stopped running, I’ll have convinced myself my bad day was actually a session of unmitigated genius, and my good day was an insult to literature that will have the book police abseiling down the side of my house and through my window to cart me off to prison.
In a parallel universe where you’re the tyrannical leader of a dystopian civilisation, what’s the first book you’d burn? 12 Rules For Life by Jordan Peterson, or any other book that passes inane life lessons and reactionary conservatism off as a revolutionary manifesto.
What’s the first piece of advice you’d offer to an aspiring novelist? If you’re writing anything over 2000 words long, read your work aloud, preferably into a microphone. You’ll catch false notes, crunching sentences, clanging dialogue and repetitive descriptions. It’s the best way I know of improving the stuff on the page you can no longer see because you’ve gone snowblind. It doesn’t involve showing it to anyone else and it’s gloriously, blissfully free.
Prestige Drama is out now published by Fleet; picture: Ciara Burke.