Q&A with Greg Flynn

“My Daily Undoing” by Greg Flynn is a short story that wears heartache on its sleeve. From the starting line, we knew we were getting into something heavy, and we were taken by the story of devotion and loss that unfolded. One of our very own fiction editors, Rachel Walshe, had the opportunity to speak with Flynn about his writing and provide us with some more insight into his craft.

In terms of your own practice, what is it that gravitates you towards the short story over a novel? Or is there a reason? 

I’d always wanted to write but I never let myself. I only began in my thirties, about three years ago. I’d love to write a novel but with work and everything else going on in life I just couldn’t commit to something longer. So, I started small. I’d write a page of prose, just for myself. It was a kind of escape, and it could have been anything. Sometimes it was only a few sentences, or a scene. Most of it was garbage, to be honest – but it was fun, you know? And because it was just for me and no one saw it, that was fine. 

Over time those little fragments started to turn into short stories and that form suited my life, for two reasons: one was a time constraint thing. You can finish a short story without losing years of your life. When you’re working full time as a corporate solicitor and trying to be a good husband and a good son and all the rest of it, you can’t realistically say: “Right I’m gonna spend six hours a day writing a novel.” That just isn’t going to happen. 

But it wasn’t only practicality. I also fell in love with the form itself. I remember reading Young Skins (by Colin Barrett) and there was something about seeing a place and people you recognise rendered on the page in such a literary, precise way. Between Barrett’s work and the stories of Wendy Erskine, Claire Keegan and Donal Ryan, I suddenly realised how powerful short fiction could be. It made me think: “short stories are so cool.” You can do so much in such a small space.

So short stories started out as the practical choice, but they very quickly became something I genuinely love. 

I think it’s really interesting you mentioned economic factors. The short story, obviously in and of itself, is a form that deserves its place in the literary canon. But I do think the economic factor (that you can work on them while working another job) is something people don’t talk about, or at least I haven’t heard. Finding the time to commit pen to paper, or finger to keyboard maybe. 

Yeah, I think the economic reality of writing is a big part of it, and it’s something people don’t always talk about openly. It just takes time, and the truth is, a short story is something you can realistically work on in the margins of a busy life. You can draft it, revise it, polish it, all in a part-time way. That just isn’t really possible with a novel, at least not for most people who are working full-time.

One of my friends is writing a novel at the moment and she’s at about 150,000 words in but she’s still not finished. Even when she does finish, the editing process alone will be a massive job. That’s just the reality of the form. In some ways I’m jealous because I’d love to have the time to disappear into something that big. But in another sense, I don’t envy her either, because it’s an enormous undertaking.

The other thing about short stories is that they’re an incredible training ground for craft. Because the form is so condensed, everything is heightened. You have to learn rhythm, pace, compression. There’s very little room for error. I’ve written fifty-odd stories at this point and honestly most of them are dreadful. But that’s fine – that’s how you learn. What’s great about short stories is that they let you fail quickly and clearly. You can try something ambitious, realise it doesn’t work, and then move on to the next one.

With a novel you can allow yourself a bit more air—you can wander, digress, explore. Not always, of course. There are incredibly tight novels too. I read The Vegetarian by Han Kang recently and that book is just a series of punches to the gut. But generally speaking, the short story demands an intensity of language and structure that feels almost poetic. In that sense I sometimes think a short story is closer to poetry than it is to a novel.

For me, language is a huge part of the attraction. I love unusual prose – an unexpected adjective, a sentence that has a kind of muscularity to it. That probably comes from my own relationship with reading. Despite being a lawyer now, I actually struggled a lot in school. I’m dyslexic and I couldn’t read until I was about ten. So, I came to reading quite late, and I think that gave me a slightly unusual relationship with it. I don’t skim. My wife skims if she’s reading a really gripping book because she wants to get to the end faster. I physically can’t do that. I read every line. In some ways that’s been a gift, because I absorb every beat of the language. For me writing isn’t only about story – obviously story matters – but sometimes I’ll defend a piece of fiction that other people are unsure about and say, “Yes, but did you hear the sentences?” Because sometimes the sentences alone are worth it.

I actually haven’t heard the comparison between short stories and poetry. Even there, when you said, “Did you hear it?” You’re very minute then in how you focus on your writing? 

Oh yeah, absolutely. For me the sentence really matters. I’m always trying to land on something that feels right; something with the right musicality for the story and for the character’s voice. In that sense I’m probably quite obsessive about it. I’m very rarely happy with my sentences. I’m constantly tinkering with them. But every now and then one lands the way I hoped it would and that’s a thrill. 

I had a piece workshopped this week and I was quite unsure about parts of it, but I thought, this is how you learn, just put it out there and see what happens. And interestingly there were a few sentences that people in the workshop singled out and said, “This sentence is incredible.” That was reassuring, because it made me think: okay, my ear is working. That instinct is pointing me in the right direction. Keep going. 

Ideally, I’d love every sentence to operate at that level, though of course that’s impossible. Not every sentence has to knock you sideways. Some of them need to be simple, almost utilitarian. They’re doing the work of carrying the story forward. Even those sentences contribute to the rhythm of the piece. There’s an ebb and a flow to prose, a kind of beat underneath it, and I think a lot of writing is about learning how to hear that, to listen to it.

On “My Daily Undoing”, I know you don’t say the time period, or the location but I felt it was a very recognisable snapshot of a particular Ireland. 

Yeah, that’s interesting because something similar actually came up in a workshop recently about another story I’m working on. There’s often this sense of a place that feels very recognisable in my writing, but at the same time it’s slightly undefined. Almost everywhere and nowhere at once.

I think that probably comes from my own background. My dad’s family are from Mayo, while my mam’s side are from Dublin. I grew up in Kildare, on a farm just outside Maynooth, but the area itself has four different farming families who all moved there together from Mayo in the 1950s. So, in a strange way it was like this little pocket of Mayo transplanted into Kildare. At All-Ireland time it’s just wall-to-wall Mayo flags. But then my mam was a diehard Dub, Northsider, so I also spent a lot of time in Dublin growing up as well. My childhood was sort of split between these different places – the city on one side, and then this slightly uncanny Mayo–Maynooth hybrid on the other. I think that’s probably where the sense of place in my stories comes from. In some ways I feel a bit placeless myself. The settings that appear in my head often feel like a strange fusion of places I knew growing up, almost like an alternate version of Ireland where Kildare and Mayo have been blended into the same landscape and sit alongside Dublin.

That said, it’s not always like that. I had a story published last year that was very clearly set in Dublin, with specific street names and everything. But quite often the stories drift into that more ambiguous territory, where the place feels familiar, but you can’t quite pin it down. I like that space.

I know you gave the backstory there but, in your writing, does this nameless place open you up to a certain kind of freedom or do you consider place in your writing? 

I probably go one of two ways with place. Some of the stories I’m working on for a collection are set in Italy and they’re quite specific, because they came out of particular experiences I had there. When you name a place like that, I think there’s almost an obligation to be truthful to it – to get the details right, to respect what the place actually is. And sometimes that’s really important because the real location is part of what the story is about.

But in other stories I prefer the place to be a bit more fluid. If the setting is unnamed, it gives you a certain freedom. You can shape it more, almost the way you would shape a character. And in some ways that’s what I’m trying to do either way – the place becomes part of the emotional atmosphere of the story. It can be harder to do that when the place is something very real and recognisable, but sometimes it’s exactly the right fit. It depends. 

That said, it’s not usually a conscious decision. I rarely sit down and think: “this story will be set here”. Most of the time a story begins with an image or a character rather than a plan. With “My Daily Undoing”, for example, the idea came from something very small. My wife and I were driving up to Northern Ireland one day and I saw a house on a hill beside the motorway. I imagined a man up on a ladder painting the gable wall. That image stuck with me, and suddenly I had this idea of a man who had gone slightly mad with grief, painting what looks like blood on someone’s wall – though it isn’t really blood. The character appeared before I even knew who he was. I still don’t know his name.

What was unusual about that story was that it’s the only one where I knew the ending before I started writing. Usually it’s the opposite. I know how something begins, and then I just wander through the aftermath to see where it goes.

It’s interesting that it was the end that came to you first. Was it hard then to find this nameless character and the story to accompany it?

Yeah, it was actually much harder than I expected. I assumed that knowing the ending would make the story easier to write, but it had the opposite effect really. Finding the character and the path that would naturally lead to that ending was difficult.

In most of my other stories, I don’t know where I’m going. I usually start with an image or a voice and then just follow it to see what happens. There’s a kind of freedom in that because you’re discovering the story as you go. But with “My Daily Undoing,” I already knew the destination, and that meant the whole challenge was figuring out how to get there in a way that felt earned.

It actually made me realise something about how I tend to write. With the exception of that story, whenever I know exactly where something is going, I struggle to reach it. I seem to work better when the story unfolds a little more organically. Which is also part of why the idea of writing a novel slightly terrifies me. I am excited to write one, but a part of me feels like you probably need to know where you’re going – otherwise you could be writing forever. At the moment I’m very happy wandering through short stories and discovering them along the way. But there will be a novel, at some stage. 

Well working backwards from that image of the paint on the gable wall, finding characters like Murtagh. Or I felt so sorry for Cathy.

Yeah, Cathy is a really unfortunate character. I do feel sorry for her, especially because I genuinely like her. I think there’s something in my psyche about how easy it is for people to neglect the ones they love. That’s something that seems to surface in my writing quite a bit.

And then there’s Murtagh. I’m a big believer in positive masculinity and raising men to be good men, but there are certain types of masculinity that are just corrosive, and Murtagh represents that. I don’t really know where he came from, to be honest. He just sort of arrived fully formed as this pretty awful person. In some ways he’s almost a portrait of what not to be. That said, I tried not to make him a straw character. I’m not a big believer in the idea that people are simply good or bad. I think most people exist somewhere on a spectrum. So it would feel lazy to write him as nothing more than a villain. But at the same time, he is a pretty bad guy, and I didn’t want to soften that just for the sake of balance.

That’s one of the strange things about writing characters. It might sound a bit woo-woo, but you don’t really get to choose who they are. They arrive with a certain shape to them. And if you try to tinker with that too much – if you try to make them nicer or tidier than they really are – you end up forcing the story into something it isn’t. And that can rob the life out of the story altogether. 

One of the things that really stuck out to me was the three different fathers, the last one being the most tragic because he never actually got to be a father. Was that intentional or did it come out with the writing? 

I’ll be completely honest; I can’t really take any credit for that level of structural symmetry. Nothing in the way I write is that carefully planned. When a story works, it can look incredibly deliberate from the outside, but a lot of the time it feels more like you’ve uncovered the story rather than designed it. Maybe some of it is happening subconsciously, but it certainly wasn’t something I set out to engineer. Looking back at it now, though, you can see that Cathy is failed by three different men, and each of them fails her in a different way.

There’s the narrator, who is probably the most tragic in some respects because he never actually gets the chance to be a father at all, as you say. He’s not a bad person, but he’s complicated too. There’s a selfishness and a pride. You get the sense that he’s young and a bit naïve, and that this moment could potentially derail his whole life. There’s obviously some responsibility there too, but it’s more complicated than simply assigning blame. Likewise, his father is this decent, good-natured man but he doesn’t really have the agency or the force of personality that the other two men have. He’s passive. 

And then there’s Murtagh. What worried me most as I was writing was that he’s so clearly the worst of the three. He’s someone who has consistently behaved badly and refuses to take responsibility for the failures in his own life. But unfortunately, there are people like that in the world, and I didn’t want to pretend otherwise.

Earlier you mentioned that while writers often feel affection for their protagonists, you also believe people exist along a spectrum rather than being purely good or bad. When you’re writing antagonists or more difficult characters, how important is it for you to feel empathy for them?

That’s a really interesting question. For me, empathy is probably the most important thing in writing characters, even when they behave badly. I don’t necessarily have to like a character, but I do have to understand them. If I can’t see the world from their perspective in some way, then they’ll end up feeling thin or caricatured on the page.

I don’t really believe that people exist as purely good or purely bad. Most of us are somewhere in between, and the interesting part of fiction is exploring where people fall along that line and why. Even someone who does something cruel or selfish usually has a story they’re telling themselves about why it makes sense. As a writer, I think you have to be willing to enter that space and take it seriously, even if you ultimately disagree with them.

At the same time, empathy doesn’t mean excusing behaviour. A character can still be responsible for the harm they cause. But if you approach them with curiosity rather than judgment, they tend to become much more human. And when a character feels human, the story usually becomes more powerful.

So, for me it’s less about defending a character and more about trying to understand them. Once you do that, there’s a chance you might have a real story, that you’ve done the work.