Writing in a brief interlude between a pre-festival workshop with Alistair Macleod and the official opening of the Ullapool book festival tonight. Two hours with the author of No Great Mischief and Island. There was a lot of practical advice and some revelations about how he personally writes. The fact that he has the last sentence of a story set as some sort of homing beacon (my metaphor, not his, but I think true to what he meant), generally by the time he has gotten half way through. And the advice that if you don’t care deeply about your work ‘it won’t be any good’. In a way just an obvious thing to say. We could all tell ourselves that. But I swear that when he spoke, by heart, the last sentences of a whole list of his stories there was a near breaking emotion in his face – as if the ecstacy and the sadness of completing each story was there for him again. Maybe something else entirely – who can say for sure, but that’s what I thought I saw. When asked if he thought that with No Great Mischief he had given the gaelic peoples on both sides of the Atlantic ‘the book they had long yearned for’ – he laughed and said he wouldn’t dream of being that pompous. And quite unlike a demuring politician - I was sure he meant just that.
David
