'The Maeve Binchy Writers’ Club, valuable lessons from a living Irish legend

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CAHIR O'DOHERTY,

Irish Voice Reporter

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Maeve Binchy

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There was a time in the distant past when Irish novelist Maeve Binchy, 69, was not an internationally famous best-selling author. She remembers it vividly.

Before she started writing the books that set her up for life and made her a household name, she was a hardworking London-based journalist struggling to keep a roof over her head and her marriage together.

What she discovered early on in her career was that there was no magic formula for success as a writer, no more than there was a formula for success as a career woman or wife. You have to learn by doing, she discovered, which means making mistakes too, inevitably.

But with a little willpower and a good deal of perseverance you will be able to one day write the book you’ve always meant to, she counsels in her inspirational new book The Maeve Binchy Writers’ Club (Knopf Doubleday).

With contributions by other noted Irish novelists and publishers like Marian Keyes, Carol Baron and Norah Casey, Binchy has written a clear eyed and unpretentious guide to the three essential steps -- getting your own story started, getting it finished and then getting it to the market.

If you are the sort of person who scribbles story ideas on the back of your Bed, Bath and Beyond receipts, or if you often file away snippets of conversation you’ve overheard on the subway, then this is the book for you. There’s enough encouragement between these covers to provide your Con-Ed needs for a year, so it may be the only guidebook you’ll ever need as an aspiring writer.

Binchy is as famous for her personal warmth and good humor as she is for her best-selling books, probably because she understands the struggles that we all face while looking for the silver lining in things.

Not that she overlooks the darkness there can be in life, far from it, but she retains her sense of humor and her hope at all times. So the very same principles that made her famous are also to be found in this book.

The important thing to realize, she says, is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn’t really matter where you were born or how you grew up.

What you will need is some sort of discipline and plan. Like getting up at 5 a.m. three times a week, for example. You may hate it -- she assumes you’ll hate it -- but if you’re like most people you’ll be too busy any other time.

What helps most, Binchy suggests, is the idea that you’re not alone. You’re not the only person staring at a blank page or screen and asking yourself if you’re mad to even attempt this. You’re not the only one who gets eaten by self-doubt before, during and after the process is complete.

But there are things you can do to stave off the worst and focus on what you set out to do in the first place. In this regard, Binchy, who has produced book after book for decades, really knows what’s she’s talking about and comes into her own.

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