Minding Your Language
Guest post by JOHN O'DONNELL
With the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025 being open for submissions until the end of June, I’ve invited some great proponents of the short story to offer their insights on the form.
Today’s guest post comes from John O’Donnell, a writer whose work I greatly admire. His new collection, ‘Mr Hoo and other stories,’ is forthcoming from Doire Press in 2026.
A fragment, at first: snatch of a tune, an impromptu tableau, a half-heard - or misheard – conversation. Something snags; what was that? Maybe you make a note in the little notebook we’re told to carry round with us, or in the Notes section of your phone. The next day you look at the note, and see the image, hear the line, the voice, again; it will not go away. So, you open up whatever it is you write on, find a blank page and put down the note, or a version of it, and after that, the first word that comes into your head. And then the second word. And so on.
Congratulations. This is inspiration (or one form of it, anyway). However, Thomas Edison’s wearisomely familiar adage that ‘genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration’ means that even if you are a genius - and especially if you’re not - your work has only just begun. Graham Greene suggested that when writing his ‘entertainments’ the hard bit was thinking up the idea; the rest, he contended, was like filling out a crossword puzzle. Well, fine: if you’re Graham Greene. For the rest of us it’s not so easy.
The first thing you have to do is, as William Faulkner said, ‘Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.’ You can’t make a statue without a lump of clay to begin with, so load it on, as much of it as you can bear for as long as you can. You may find it easier if you resist the temptation to edit as you go at this stage, since the risk of doing so is that you will end up with a finely honed opening sentence, and not much else. Even if you can sense that there are already little infelicities creeping in, don’t worry; like a plane circling before eventually coming in to land, you’ll catch them on the second or third or fourth pass.
There. You have a first draft. How does it look? ‘All I have is a pile of paper covered with wrong words’ said Dorothy Parker. Yes, maybe; but it is only the start. As Jane Smiley says, ‘Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist’. So now what?
‘It is a writer’s job to look after his sentences,’ said John McGahern, ‘nothing else.’ Although the context of this pronouncement was a challenge thrown down at a literary conference at which writers were urged to display political commitment – a role which McGahern rejected – the observation also contains sound technical advice.
As part of the process of rewriting, you may find it helpful to write out each sentence on a new line, as if it were a line of a poem. Using that technique makes you focus more closely on what each individual sentence is doing: is it pulling its weight? Does your story really need it? Is it clear? Does it contain redundancies or repetitions? Read it out loud: is the music of the sentence right? (You won’t learn this from reading it in your head). Changing even one word will alter the rhythm, perhaps requiring other words to be moved around or changed as well.
You may chose next to look at your work paragraph by paragraph. The detective writer Margery Allingham (for whom the thriller was ‘a work of art as delicate and precise as a sonnet’) said that she wrote every paragraph four times: ‘Once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.’ Again, each paragraph has its own ecosystem, so even small changes will necessarily effect the overall balance. Again reading aloud can help: how does it sound?
And then? Ultimately it is about the individual word. McGahern again, recounting his early years as a writer: ‘Words had been a physical presence for me for a long time before, each word with its own weight, colour, shape, relationship, extending out into a world without end.’ So how do you choose the right one? There is no easy fix, no short cut. Perhaps it helps to think of each word as being one of those little coloured slides we used to view on screen via a projector (before PowerPoint). Essentially, editing involves holding each word you are considering using up to the light to see how it will work before you put it down. It is slow and at times difficult, but if it was easy everyone would be doing it. You may find using a thesaurus of assistance; likewise a good dictionary. As well as suggesting alternative ways of saying things, the process of consulting another source gives your brain a break from what’s in front of you (provided it doesn’t become an excuse for not writing).
In the end, though, it is your story - and yours alone. A good first reader or editor may later help you express with more precision what you meant to say, but no one will put more into what you write than you do. ‘You are all your work has,’ says Maeve Brennan. ‘It has nobody else and never had anybody else.’ Only you can nurture it, and care for it so as to give it the life that it deserves. It’s up to you to mind your language. Good luck.
John O’Donnell’s work has been published and broadcast widely. Awards include the Irish National Poetry Prize, the New Irish Writing Awards for Poetry and Fiction, and the RTE Francis McManus Short Story Award. He has published five poetry collections. His collection of short stories ‘Almost the Same Blue’ was one of the Sunday Independent’s Books of the Year. Rainbow Baby, a radio play, was broadcast on RTE’s Drama On One and won a New York Festivals Radio Award. His debut novel, ‘Second Skin,’ was one of the winners of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2024. A new collection, ‘Mr Hoo and other stories,’ is forthcoming from Doire Press in 2026.
The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025, judged by Irish author Nuala O’Connor, is open for entries until June 30th, 2025.
Thanks for standing up for the vomit draft—savior of the sanity for all writers. Excuse me now: I have 5000 words of vomit to edit down to a story…..