Spill paragraphs onto the page - Donal Ryan on the short story
Our competition judge shares more of his short-fiction wisdom
We’re almost into the home stretch of the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026, and the entries are pouring in, but we want to see more, because we know you’ve got a gem or two stored up, just looking for the right home. Imagine getting your work read by a writer of Donal’s calibre and reputation! Six finalists will share that privilege. I was fortunate, in the 2024 All-Ireland Scholarships Creative Writing Award (Public category), to have my work not only read by Donal, Roddy Doyle and Marian Keyes, but to picked as the winner. I can assure you, there’s no better feeling, so send those stories our way!
Meanwhile, read more of Donal’s thoughts on the short story below, followed by my own humble musings!
Start in the first person.
This solves many technical issues that can stall your flow. Use a voice that’s clear to you. The French novelist Olivier Adam puts it very succinctly: finding a character’s voice is like tuning a radio - it can be a struggle to find the exact frequency but when you do, all you need to do is listen. After doing this for a while you’ll start to find your own voice, and then you’ll start to find some confidence. Don’t get too much, though. Too much of anything can kill you.
Get your first draft down nice and fast. Someone far cleverer than me said recently that your first draft is “you, telling yourself the story.” Perfect. Pretty it up afterwards. I spill paragraphs onto the page as they occur to me and rewrite them and rearrange them and delete them until something recognisable as a story starts to take shape.
Don’t get tangled up in exposition. Don’t over-describe any character or situation or scene. Impose strict limits on yourself. “I will describe this character’s appearance in 50 words, max.” Then strictly enforce your own limits, arbitrary as they may sometimes seem.
Don’t let your story be strangled by its own plot. Keep your narrative clear. If your ending occurs to you at any point, write it down. Sometimes, your ending mightn’t occur to you until you’ve started your last sentence. Don’t sweat it. Stories come to life sometimes and act like seven year olds. They’ll do their own thing no matter how upset you get with them. Then they’ll settle down to sleep and look beautiful and perfect again.
Donal Ryan
When I imagine Donal sitting down to work on a story, I see him gazing out the window to a beautiful, sunlit garden, his mind swelling with brilliant ideas. He chooses his moment; when the tide is at its highest, he opens his laptop and begins to write. Soon after, a perfectly formed story emerges one hour later, needing no further work. Donal reclines, satisfied with what he has achieved, and resumes his writerly pose. If he was a smoker, this would be the point at which he would light his pipe!
This is a total fantasy, of course, based on my reading of his work, but said work has been through many drafts and edits before it arrived under my eyes, so what I’m seeing is not what he started with, but the final polished version. It’s not fair, then, to compare his final version with my bare-bones beginning. Donal and his peers are as human as the rest of us, and though we may marvel at their work, the truth is that during its initial phase, they have to do what we all do, and get messy with it.
The process Donal describes above is pretty much how I work. I spill the paragraphs, get the story down any old way, and then move things around and cut the heck out of it until it takes on a pleasing shape. I can’t do edits on a blank page, but by setting aside the desire for perfection in the first draft, I can get something on the page that I can further develop. The character’s voice emerges through this process; if it doesn’t, it may indicate that I’m working with the wrong character, or writing in the wrong person, or that I’m just not there yet with the concept of the story. Everything (including writing this article) is an experiment, and if one attempt fails then I will have learned one more way in which the story doesn’t work. It’s an iterative process, and next time - to borrow from Samuel Beckett - I’ll fail better.
A blank page can be intimidating, but really, it’s an invitation to throw words down in any old fashion. Maybe they’ll work, maybe they won’t, but by getting words down, we will have unstuck ourselves and learned something new.
It’s not about finding the rights words at this stage.
If you don’t have any words to throw at the page, try writing your name over and over. I guarantee you, it won’t take more than a minute for other words to come out, to form sentences and then a paragraph. Another good tool is to write a list of words, say ten to fifteen powerful descriptors for your character or the opening scene, or for any part of what might be your new story. The point of these exercises is to break the judgement spell, and trick the mind into making a start.
The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 is open for submissions until June 30th, and we feel hugely honoured to have twice Booker-longlisted and multi award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan as this year’s judge.
Donal Ryan has long been one of my literary heroes, and I’ve been most fortunate to meet him, and to have him read some of my work. His short fiction and novels are among the finest works ever produced by an Irish writer. He has published seven number-one bestsellers, plus a short story collection. He has won many awards for his work, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award, and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for many more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award.
He was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016.
In 2021, Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.
Donal is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.
We can’t wait to see what you have for us!
That’s excellent advice from you both and how I do it. Get the story down. Find the voice and what it’s about as you go over and over it. The story never really changes in the editing but what it’s about nearly always does. I don’t start in first person tho. I’ve written a book in the 2nd person, stories in the 1st person plural, diaries, notes, letters etc. You can start in any of those forms and still find the voice, the about.
this is great advice--thank you for breaking it down.