Reflections - Anthony J. Quinn

Anthony J. Quinn was the first guest writer for Island of Many Voices, a joint project between Dublin UNESCO City of Literature and The Linen Hall (Belfast), facilitated by Fiona O’Rourke. He reflected on the experience of the first meeting with the participants.

Fiona’s questions and those that followed from the writers were invaluable in terms of helping me chart my writing journey from journalism and crime novels to memoir, and I’m very grateful for the insights the discussion generated. Some of those insights I had not fully articulated before, especially the preoccupations that persist across my writing in different genres. I’m thankful for the care and attention of those questions, and how receptive and thoughtful the writers were. They really pushed me to think about why I ended up writing a memoir.

Over nine novels, I’ve been investigating hidden links, unreliable witnesses and the aftershocks of betrayal and violence in the rural communities of the border counties. Memoir requires a similar set of conventions or tools, only applied inwardly, without the protection of fiction. My last novel, Turncoat, in particular, left me at a point where fiction and invention could no longer contain what I was circling – the anxiety felt by an eleven-year-old boy witnessing the violence of the Troubles. In a way, I’d been allowing detectives and informers to carry those questions of silence, betrayal and guilt on my behalf. Crime fiction gave me the confidence that storytelling can bring order to chaos and wring out emotional truths, and that confidence helped me confront the story of my own family and the community I grew up in. The difference was that this time my family and I were in the frame, unreliable witnesses to the past.

I hope these reflections and the discussion itself, prompted so carefully by Fiona and the audience of writers, will be of some use to the participants in negotiating their own creative paths. It’s perfectly fine to circle our memories and experiences for years, even decades, waiting for the time and the genre that will allow us to approach it with courage and honesty. One of the most reassuring things that emerged in our discussion is that no writing is ever wasted. All attempts and detours into different genres are a way of learning the conventions and writing skills we will eventually need when the truth has to be told.  

I’m going to finish with a few top writing tips that arose in the discussion, and which I’d like to share again. My top tip to writers tacking memoir is to focus on a concrete object that contains emotional weight, and write from there. In my case, it was the bullet of a gunman given to my family. I wrote about the sensation of it in my hand, what my mother did with it, where it ended up, and how often it and the gunman returned to my thoughts over the years. Let objects do the work, and don’t worry about explaining – trust that meaning and symbolism will accumulate around your chosen object.  

My top tip to crime fiction writers is to take a landscape you know intimately and explore what secrets it might be hiding. In my own fiction, I can’t write about a place unless I’ve lived there and learned its moods. Next, imagine a crime that feels as though it could only have happened in that landscape. Setting is the groundwork for fiction and if you write about a place you know well, then that landscape will supply mood, character, tension and even plot. Finally. place a character at the margins of the landscape, emotionally and physically, and consider what boundaries or thresholds they cross as they move through the terrain. Borders of all sorts do a lot of work in my stories – they unsettle characters, make them less predictable, and test their identities. Let the setting act as antagonist and the story will begin to reveal itself.