5 Unforgettable Writing Lessons from Claire Keegan’s Fiction Clinic

Jack Cameron Stanton on quick writing lessons after attending Claire Keegan's fiction clinic.

It’s banal to deny it: at every writing workshop there’s that tense beginning where everyone is sitting with their notebooks politely open with the date and heading at the top of the page, waiting for the mentor to say something that forces your eyes to drop to the page and scribble the first note to self. The first thing Claire Keegan said, with her booming Irish twang, was ‘I adore paragraphs and working on the text in front of me—not being a writer.’

For anyone who agonises over their text, it’s comforting to hear these words from a writer who has written three books, Antartica (1999), Walk the Blue Fields (2007), and Foster (2009), and won awards including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, and revered by The New Yorker.

I’ve attended countless writing workshops throughout my university studies and also more broadly in Australia’s writing avenues, but nothing compares to Keegan’s method of frank scrutiny. The class is intimate, ten of us in total, and we had all submitted 3,000-word manuscripts two weeks in advance and were required to mark them up with structural and line edits before arriving.

Over the two days, Keegan used our manuscripts as examples of lessons in how to write (or more often, how not to write). Here are five of the most affecting pieces of wisdom she left behind.

Trust Your Reader’s Intelligence

‘All good writing is suggestion; bad writing is statement,’ Keegan says. It’s a redressing of the good old ‘show, don’t tell’ mantra. The opening sentence of Keegan’s mesmerising Foster does a better job summarising this tip than me: ‘Early on a Sunday, after the first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from.’

What this sentence infers is the protagonist may not be taken home by her father ever again, while also highlighting that she is venturing into the distant unknown by travelling to her mother’s origins.

‘Simply write what happens,’ Keegan says, ‘Be careful about coming in between the reader and the text. Show more, give more, leave the analysis.

‘If a character says “I love my daughter” you are showing the reader that the parent has failed to show that love.’

The Art of Fiction is the Art of Making Pictures

The first time it happened was painful: Keegan invited us to read a workshopper’s manuscript line by line and count the pictures. The first page went by and no one called out.

Use this edit strategy on your writing; if you are not making pictures with your words, then you are probably telling or recounting or using cerebral observations. The reader can’t see any of those things. What can you actually see?

Exaggeration

 ‘Exaggeration is deadly,’ she says, ‘there’s nothing that will kill prose like exaggeration. ’If you’ve read Keegan’s sparse, economic, and double-entendre writing then you’ll see she’s suspicious of exaggeration and melodrama. ‘If there’s a “woe is me” moment’—Keegan illustrates this expression by slapping her palm on her forehead and leaning back in agony— ‘cut it out.’

Quoting Carver, Hemingway, and Chekhov, she implores us to scrutinise these non-melodramatic writers to see how detailed and rich fiction can be without heavy adjectives or emotional laboriousness.

Paragraphs

Many fundamental rules of paragraphs are frequently forgotten or disobeyed in creative writing, but they shouldn’t be. The mechanisms are simple: start with the general and end specific. Keep one emotion per paragraph, spend longer in the scene, and don’t cut the moment short.

Loss

At the core of every great story is loss. We should be able to ask the character, ‘if you could do that again, would you? The answer should be no. That’s a good sign.’ Tension is a fear of loss. Anytime you feel as though something you say or do will reveal something, that’s tension.

You can find more information about Claire Keegan’s Fiction Clinic and writing lessons to be had here.