Anne Enright

How did you become a writer? I didn't become a writer, I just wrote. And I wrote from an early age. I wrote bad poetry at 16, I suppose. I’m still writing bad poetry, actually, but in The Wren, The Wren. (Well, not badpoetry. People have been very kind about the poetry in The Wren, The Wren.) I was the sort of person that people in Ireland thought should become a writer. So I think becoming a writer was a kind of arranged marriage. But I'm very happy in it.

Name some of your writing influences. It took me decades to own the fact that James Joyce is a huge influence because he gave permission to writers to do whatever the hell they wanted. Whether you're looking at the Joyce of Dubliners or the Joyce of Finnegan's Wake, the development there is amazing. You can pick a point in his writing and imitate that for a while and see where it gets you. Are you going to be like the Joyce of Dubliners? Are you going to be like the Joyce of A Portrait of the Artist? Or are you going to push out the experimental boat and work language harder and have more fun and try and see what happens when you splash around a bit like he did in Ulysses.

And I had one of those great English teachers, a guy called Theo Dombrowski, in a school I went to in Canada. He was very ironic and very engaged and a wonderful teacher. He left more red ink on your essay than there was blue. He interrogated your punctuation. He made jokes in the margins. It was like having a conversation. He had a really lively classroom, lots of debate, lots of fights. I mean, we fought over literature. It was great fun and I adored him. All his students adored him. He’s still a friend.

What are you working on now? Nothing apart from some nonfiction. I'm looking at the wonderful writer Sigrid Nunez and hoping to write a long piece about her. And I have various fragments collected over the years about the idea of travel. Something called Flight Paths. I have these title ideas that I return to between books. They don't always come to fruition, but they make you realize that you have something cooking on a distant back burner.

Have you ever suffered from writer's block? You see, I don't do writer's block, I do procrastination. I would have three things on the go at once and I work on the thing I shouldn't be working on. Which is sometimes a novel because I'd have a short deadline and I'd say, no, I'm going to work on my novel instead. I avoid pressure by working on something else.

What's the best writing advice you've ever received? “Use the five senses in every sentence” is a good one. And early in my career, somebody said, “You've got too much white space between your paragraphs.” That was a revelation to me. If I moved all the words a bit closer together on the page, it started to flow more. Interesting, because my work wanted to fragment. I had to knit it together a bit more. So watch the white space. Also, if you're doing dialogue, it should be different lengths. It should be ragged at the edges. Unless you're Beckett. And you aren't Beckett.

What's your advice to new writers? A lot of people look for external validation and for  ideas to come from outside themselves. The answer to your problem is already on your page. Stop thinking about the critic or the public. Stop second guessing what people want to read. So my advice is always to turn back to the page, back to what you’re doing already. Honor what you've got in front of you.

Another thing I often say is that no one has any confidence, so the fact that you don't have any confidence doesn't make you special. Put all of that in a box and stick it under the bed for later.

What sort of reactions have you had to your writing advice? People are always looking to be rescued from the blank page, so when I refuse to rescue them, they look at me kind of blankly. Yeah. Disappointment. The fact that I can't wave some magic wand and make it happen for them is disappointing. But I think you have to empower yourself.

Anne Enright is the author of eight novels, most recently The Wren, The Wren. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives in Dublin.