This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Shelia O'Flanagan is an Irish author of over 20 novels and short story collections. Her new novel, The Things We Never Say is published on the 20th June. Here she tells Novelicious why it was Maeve Binchy's collection of short stories, Dublin 4, that changed her life as a writer, and gave her the confidence to find her writing voice.
The book that changed my life is Dublin 4 by Irish author Maeve Binchy. At the time it was published (around 1982) I was writing lots of short stories and beginnings of novels but I was very pessimistic about the chances of ever having anything published myself. I could see that I was a storyteller and not a literary writer which made me feel inadequate about my writing. Additionally, I lived in Ireland and couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to read anything about the dreary and unglamorous place it was back then!
That changed when I picked up Dublin 4. It’s a collection of 4 short stories all set in an upmarket suburb of Dublin. It was the first time in my life I’d read anything set in contemporary Dublin and the first time I’d read a book in which topics like infidelity and unwanted pregnancies had been written about with sympathy and understanding. Maeve has a way of drawing you into the dilemmas her characters face and making you empathise with them, even those you don’t particularly like. But the most important thing from my perspective was that I realised that it didn’t actually matter where the stories were set or how literary they were, because all fiction is about life, and finding your own voice as a writer is the most important thing.
Dublin 4 changed my life because – even though it was about 15 years later before my first novel was published – it gave me the confidence to keep on writing the way I wanted to. Maeve Binchy is best known for her novels, but I will always cherish that collection of stories as the book which freed me up and inspired me to write my own.
Shelia will be hosting an afternoon tea at The Abbey Hotel in Bath on Friday 5th July – call 01225 461603 to book.