{"id":524,"date":"2022-11-07T10:44:27","date_gmt":"2022-11-07T10:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.edgehill.ac.uk\/shortstory\/?page_id=524"},"modified":"2023-09-28T11:01:44","modified_gmt":"2023-09-28T10:01:44","slug":"2022-shortlist-lucy-caldwell","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.edgehill.ac.uk\/shortstory\/2022-shortlist-lucy-caldwell\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucy Caldwell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Lucy Caldwell was shortlisted for her collection, Intimacies<\/em>. She was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels, several stage plays and radio dramas and two collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for \u2018All the People Were Mean and Bad\u2019, and she has also won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Canada and Europe) and the Edge Hill Readers\u2019 Choice Award. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize \u2013 for her novel The Meeting Point \u2013 and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For you, what is the most difficult aspect of writing?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The part when you\u2019re not. The first time it happens is the most terrifying \u2013 you\u2019ve finished something and you feel you\u2019ll never write again.  It does come back again, and you develop the muscle memory to know that, but it somehow never gets easier.  Sometimes it lasts for weeks, or months \u2013 a couple of times, for me, it\u2019s lasted well over a year.  If I\u2019m not writing, I don\u2019t feel fully alive.  I love that first tug of an idea \u2013 the sudden, unwarranted interest you feel in something otherwise quite random.  Quantum physics \u2013 mystical prayer \u2013 the history of Ulster Scots in county Antrim \u2013 techniques in Venetian glass-blowing \u2013 the \u2018light as a feather, stiff as a board\u2019 game traced back to Pepys \u2013 these are just some of the recent rabbit-holes currently evidenced on my desk.  I love the feeling of having a secret world inside \u2013 I love that most of all.  I love the rare moments when you hit a seam of gold \u2013 when the words just come and the hours vanish.  I love when the story pushes everything \u2013 to-do lists, emails, household tasks \u2013 helplessly aside, as if they were never important anyway. I love the first wild and reckless draft of something, where you\u2019re writing to find out, to feel the shape of it. I love the technical aspect of subsequent drafts, honing, finessing, balancing. It\u2019s hard when a story\u2019s not going well, but there is a grim satisfaction in trying to make it work\u2026 And the first time you see your story published, in the world \u2013 the thrill never goes away.  The conversations, the unexpected connections with readers.  Each stage has its own rewards. But the wait for the next thing to surface, the dreary time over which you have no control \u2013 that is by far the most difficult part of all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an assumption that the first story in a collection should be the strongest or the most accessible\/entertaining, that it should act as a hook. What are your thoughts on this?   <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m always so intrigued to see how other writers structure their collections. Sarah Hall \u2013 a writer I love \u2013 does this, bookending her collections with knock-out stories. But when I was putting my first collection together, I took my cue from Kevin Barry\u2019s collection Dark Lies the Island<\/em>.  It begins with a slight \u2013 in terms of word count \u2013 and playful story called \u201cAcross the Rooftops\u201d. It\u2019s about an afterparty, and the build-up to a kiss which \u2013 in the brilliant and chilling phrase \u2013 \u201cdoesn\u2019t take\u201d. The story is about everything and nothing \u2013 it works perfectly as an amuse-bouche to the collection.  That\u2019s what I\u2019ve tried to do with my collections since \u2013 to open with something that sets a tone, or startles into attention, but leaves you somewhere to go, leaves space for a mysterious cumulative force to build towards the final stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Out of all the characters in your collection, which one would you like to spend more time with and why?<\/span><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the years I was writing the stories in Intimacies<\/em>, I did a lot of travelling alone with babies or young toddlers \u2013 or both.  I breast-fed, co-slept \u2013 so it was impossible to leave them even just for a couple of nights, as I tried to take part in book events or literary festivals and keep my creative self alive.  By that logic, the helpful stranger in \u201cAll the People Were Mean and Bad\u201d would never be unwelcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you had to write a manifesto for writing short stories, what would be your first declaration?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A short story has almost nothing to do with a novel: don\u2019t be deceived by the fact that they\u2019re both prose forms.  A short story has much more in common with a poem or a play. For me, even more than either of those things, it is a spell: a series of rhythms, of images, to conjure a feeling, an emotion, an atmosphere\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of description, how do you decide what to put in and what to leave out?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Description isn\u2019t just a stage-manager talking us through the set \u2013 it\u2019s atmosphere, pace, character, mood.  So it depends completely on the tone of the story \u2013 on its mood \u2013 on its narrator or protagonist and their state of mind \u2013 all of its own precise and mysterious demands.  I think I tend to be a taker-outer \u2013 I hone things right back to what feels essential.  But I also love Toni Morrison\u2019s description of her process, where she talks about adding layers, colour, making things brighter, deeper, more textured, draft after draft.  Sometimes the slow work of an edit is just that, and my recent stories have been getting longer, more complex.  For me, more than anything, it\u2019s a tonal thing \u2013 I listen and listen and see where it\u2019s moving too fast, where it\u2019s skimming over and needs to eddy and swirl, where we need silence, or where it\u2019s stagnating, and I rework the rhythms accordingly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After finishing a story, how do you feel? Do you celebrate?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I\u2019m close to finishing the first draft of a story, I will probably be working right up past the moment when I should have left to collect the children from school \u2013 in which case I won\u2019t be celebrating, but frantically grabbing football cards and snacks and inhaling a banana for my own missed-lunch as I leg it up the hill and try to ground myself \u2013 children sense and hate it when you\u2019re more absorbed in another, imaginary world. Then there\u2019ll be the first finished draft of a story, which may be a dozen drafts in, but which feels solid enough to send to one or two of the writer-friends who are my most trusted readers.  The draft that takes in their notes and thoughts \u2013 and the draft that I send to my long-term editor, Angus Cargill.  After his edits, when it really does begin to feel finished, I read it and read it and read it and read it \u2013 over and over, non-stop, obsessively, on my computer, on my phone, for as long as I can, reading for a word or a punctuation mark that I might yet change, but mostly reading it to feel how it works, reading it while I can \u2013 because soon it will begin to close over, and after it\u2019s closed over, I\u2019ll never be able to read it again.  I might have to approve copy-edits to it, I might be asked to talk about it, or to read aloud from it, but I\u2019ll never again be its reader, and I\u2019ll be inured to any magic it might ever have had.  So \u2013 weirdly \u2013 finishing a story often feels like a loss, rather than cause for celebration.  Or an occasion to apologise, yet again, to the partner who\u2019s temporarily lost you to the story\u2019s terminal velocity. It\u2019s always far easier to celebrate with friends when they have finished a new story \u2013 and I am very good at that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, I tell a lie. I finished a short story the other week that had eluded me for years. Before sending it off to anyone, knowing, finally, that it was basically there, I went out and had a vegan sausage roll and a tin of fizzy wine on the beach.  Perfection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucy Caldwell was shortlisted for her collection, Intimacies. She was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels, several stage plays and radio dramas and two collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for \u2018All the People Were Mean and Bad\u2019, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2257,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-524","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLucy Caldwell - Short Story Prize<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.edgehill.ac.uk\/shortstory\/2022-shortlist-lucy-caldwell\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lucy Caldwell - Short Story Prize\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Lucy Caldwell was shortlisted for her collection, Intimacies. She was born in Belfast in 1981. 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