In one of the biggest collaborations in Irish writing for years, Books Ireland editor Ruth McKee has gathered together some of the country's most talented authors, editors, publishers and creative professionals to create a resource full of insight and practical advice for writers.
The Irish Writers Handbook 2024: The Books Ireland Guide is out now and full of practical advice and insights into the writing life.
In an extract below, Niall McArdle explores writing for radio in Alive to the Senses.
I was once at a reading where a woman collapsed, probably from having to listen to the appalling poetry coming from the stage.
She was a victim of the Curse of the Poet Voice. You know the Poet Voice when you hear it. The dreaded up and down, sober, sonorous, somnolent tone that you suffer through in open mic nights. Ponderous. Important. Boring.
We put so much effort into the look of a sentence on the page that we can forget how it sounds when read aloud. John McGahern said it best: there's verse and there’s prose, and there’s poetry in both. A story needs to be alive to the senses. It is through our senses after all that we experience the world. All aspiring writers are told to always read their stories out loud, in part to catch artificial sounding dialogue: writing specifically for the radio requires a good ear.
Sunday Miscellany
I occasionally contribute essays to Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio – some humorous, some nostalgic, and I’m always aware of how they are going to sound when I record them. Listening to someone talking on the radio is an uncanny experience, both public and weirdly intimate. Sunday Miscellany goes out in the morning; I often listen to it in bed, my mind only just surfacing from the muddied depths of a confusing dream, cosy under the duvet and loathe to draw the curtains on the morning outside.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Listen to Winter Light by Niall McArdle
On Sunday Miscellany, be it a memory of a beloved childhood toy, a strange encounter while travelling in some exotic locale, or a loving tribute to a deceased pet, it’s the telling of the story that matters. Some can make me weep, others have me tumbling out of bed in laughter. The pieces that I enjoy are the ones where the voices that drift from the wireless are warm, comforting, quiet even when the story itself is not; a reminder that Sunday can be a day of rest.
Tone
Tone is everything in a story, perhaps the only thing that matters: everything else follows from it. We talk about a writer’s style or a writer’s voice – and what we mean is tone. It’s difficult to get right on the page, and in any event every reader will often conjure up their own idea of what the words signify and what the mood is as they read. Reading allows you to go at your own pace, to linger over the writer’s particular choice of word or a memorable turn of phrase.
Listening gives no such quarter. Listen to when your friend is telling you an anecdote or a joke. Listen for the rumble of their voice, the halt, the pause, the chuckle in their throat, the slight quiver if they’re getting emotional. Notice how you are held rapt.
Listening to a story on the radio brings many of us back to the bedtime tales and campfire ghost stories of our childhood. Think of a scary story you were told; was it more frightening to read about a monster or to listen as the storyteller mimicked their unearthly grunts and groans? Our distant ancestors sat around the fire, huddled for warmth, wary of the darkness beyond the flames, the storyteller’s voice filling the void. No wonder storytelling is such a powerful form. No wonder too the temptation when reading aloud to fall into the dreaded Poet Voice.
Rhythm
Too often when we read a book, we read carelessly, and too often the same happens when we write. Writing for a listener should alert you to the rhythm of a sentence, to its rise and fall. Long sentence or short? Is there too much alliteration? Or just enough? Word choice is crucial. Should a character yell or holler, giggle or titter? Read the following aloud:
"The bird swooped down upon me from the branch above."
I wrote 'branch’ rather than ‘tree’ because I want to echo the b in ‘bird’. Rereading it I realise that the ‘down’ is redundant and the line scans better without it. Without taking the time to read it aloud, I might not think about it.
I’ll rewrite that line several times before settling on "from a branch above me, the bird swooped," – which, when I say it, leaves the listener with an image of movement, rather than a now-empty branch. I might add something like "in a bristling whoosh of feathers" which is admittedly a bit ripe but touches on both your sense of hearing and touch. You might think I’m being precious, and I probably am, but if you’re not paying attention to the words you’re writing, then why even bother?
Francis MacManus
A couple of years ago I wrote a story, Vena Amoris that was runner up in the Francis MacManus short story contest on RTÉ Radio. This was the second time I had been in the competition, and in both cases I was blessed to have my story performed by an actor who got the tone right.
Vena Amoris is a story with a simple plot: a widower loses his wedding ring. I chose to tell it not from his perspective or from that of an omniscient narrator, but from the point of view of the ring itself. It’s a risky move and somewhat gimmicky. On the page it possibly comes off a little pat and corny, but I had a sense it would work on the radio (I wrote it specifically with the contest in mind), and I was fortunate to have veteran actor Eamon Morrissey read it so brilliantly.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Listen to Vena Amoris by Niall McArdle
Critically, he caught the story’s tone: exasperated, sad, befuddled. I’m conscious of repetition of phrases, both the power of it when done well and its weakness if done badly. Repetition is a writer’s tic of mine. To avoid it in Vena Amoris I plundered the thesaurus. The ring in my story glimmered, shimmered, shone, glinted, gleamed.
It could also talk of course, but only to the listener sitting quietly in their kitchen or by the fire or tucked up in bed, hanging on every word, a child once again.
The Irish Writers Handbook 2024: The Books Ireland Guide is out now - find out more here.
