BP: Tell me a bit about your writing process.
BB: When I was writing my first collection, I’d come from years of writing for television. When you’re writing for television, and this is the difficult thing about writing for television, you’re always thinking of money. If I’m writing something for TV and I decide my character is in an airport, then I have to think, are RTÉ going to be able to afford an airport? And then the amount of people in the scene, every single person in the scene is an extra that needs to get paid.
So when I wrote my first book of short stories, I was like, fuck it. I can have Éamon de Valera turn into a giant, weird, globule, maggot creature that’s given birth to Michael Collins’ children because he’s got Holy Mary’s womb in his bowels. I don’t have to think about whether RTÉ will let me or whether they can afford it, I can just fucking do it. So my first collection was very much ideas-focused. This recent collection is much more literary, I’m thinking more about the internal workings of the characters.
BP: We’ve talked before about how important the concept of flow is to your writing process.
BB: Flow is essential to my process. It’s a type of controlled dreaming. The thing with flow is it’s incredibly joyful and happy. We all get flow when we’re tiny kids and we’re playing with Lego. When a three-year-old is playing with Lego, they’re not thinking about, whether they’re going to make something good or make something bad. They’re simply doing Lego. If I sit down and decide I’m going to write a great story today, I won’t get anywhere near flow. For me to experience flow, I have to go at whatever I’m doing in a really playful, fun way and once I get to that place, everything comes through.
I used AI a bit this time too. If I had the first draft of a story, I’d fuck it into AI, and what I’d say is “analyse this story using the Hero’s Journey”, “analyse this story using Jungian psychology”, “analyse this story using…Lévi-Strauss!”And AI will give you a kind of dogshit interpretation of it but that dogshit interpretation it spits out can cause me to think about the work in a new critical way.
Topographia Hibernica by Blindboy Boatclub is out today from Coronet.
