Colm Tóibín

I mean, it wasn't that I was waiting for the idea for them.

I had it already, but I hadn't done the work.

So I had to sit down and really, really work on three stories in the book.

That's true.

Yeah.

You know, in a novel you always know that you can go into backstory, you can explain the past, you can deviate, you can have someone stop for a drink.

Mm-hmm.

But in a short story, really everything has to move in a certain direction.

It's like shooting an arrow.

But if the reader knows that or thinks that or sees it happening, then you lose the reader.

So it has to look, it has to, use the word dreamy again, it has to look almost dreamy with no dream.

It has to be wide awake.

And for that to happen, first of all, actually the thing I discovered in the end really was the longer you leave an idea without writing it, right?

Say the opening paragraph or the opening page, the longer you leave it,

the more likely it is to be good because you've thought it through all the time.

It comes into your head at various times and you're fully, you're seeing it in full.

With that opening of the book, it's a story called The Journey to Galway.

I had the opening page on my laptop

It's basically taken from the diaries of Lady Gregory, her son.

It was the subject of Yeats's poems, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, and In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.