The week of St Patrick's Day I reviewed a wonderful book called O'Shaughnessey, The Faerie Circle. Today I welcome the author and illustrator, Jeremy McGuire for an interview.
CC: First tell us a little about your journey to this point. How did you go from being a soldier to an actor then director to then write about leprechauns and faeries?
JM: It does seem a rather meandering path, doesn’t it? Yet, in retrospect, each of these things has contributed to who I am now. The experiences as a soldier did provide a certain discipline, but more importantly an experience of different cultures and beliefs. In the army I began to act and of course, that widened my experiences even further. You cannot enact the greatest writing in the world, embodying a wide range of ideas, and not come away altered in very profound ways.
Acting led directly into playwriting because there were stories I read that I thought would make excellent plays and I wondered why nobody had written them? Then I said, “Why not me?”
As far as leprechauns and faeries are concerned, I think that was the result of boredom. I had created this character in high school, a leprechaun called O’Shaughnessey, and when I was, as they say, between projects, I hauled him out to see if there was something, anything I could do with him. Turns out there was. And once you cross that boundary between the world of the five senses and that other imagined world, well a whole universe opens up.
CC: How do you think the backdrop of your life has helped you as an author and story teller?
JM: We all draw on our own lives; it is inevitable. We can’t help it. Even if we aren’t aware of it, we all tell our own stories. The difference is, in fiction we get to correct our lives. All the opportunities we missed in real life, we grasp in the fiction. Things we should have said, we say. It probably works better if we’re not aware of that, because we’d get all self-conscious about it if we were. But in writing as in acting the characters are, as Eugene O’Neill put it, “masks that reveal more than they hide.”
CC: You have written plays as well as stories & novels? Which one was easier for you? I have also written plays as well as stories and sometimes find that I tend to write more dialogue than action because of the script writing background. Did you find it hard to transition from one form to another and which did you start writing first?
JM: Dialogue. Definitely dialogue. Well, it is the most natural, isn’t it? All our lives we play out these scenes to ourselves either in anticipation of an event or to re-play it afterwards. We practice job interviews, first dates, meeting the Ambassador of Slobovia, all of these things, and it takes the form of dialogue. What is she going to say? What will I say? We are running dialogues in our heads all the time. Narrative is tougher. It requires you to get out of your head and observe closely what people do, where they do it, how they move, what they actually look like … all that stuff. Then you have to be able to pick out only those most important things that move the action of the story along and describe them with some accuracy and, it can be hoped, with some imagination.
CC: What is the most challenging aspect of writing? Most rewarding?
JM: Most challenging is finding the voice. It isn’t the same for every piece. The voice for the O’Shaughnessey books is that of an Irish storyteller, to be precise, the character of Father Duddelswell in the BBC series, Bless Me Father. The voice for the book I’m writing for the adult audience now, From All Things Evil, is, if you can believe it, Alec Guinness. Yes, I steal. I’m an actor. But as Michael Caine once observed, “Only steal from the best.”
CC: What comes first for you when you sit down to write a book? Plot or Characters?
JM: Oddly enough, that varies with each book. In the first O’Shaughnessey book, A Boy and His Leprechaun, it was the characters. I had the devil’s own time coming up with an action for them! Once I got the voice, though, the story told itself, “one thing after the other.” In The Faerie Circle, what came first was, the girl at the lake being taken by faeries.. I knew I had to find a way to get there. Plot very rarely is a factor. If you create the action, the plot will take care of itself. Action is a conflict being resolved. Find the conflict and you’ll find the action. Find the action and you’ll have the plot.
CC: Do you "cast" your characters using pictures or actors to help inspire you when you're writing?
JM: Well, as I said before, when finding the voice, I sometimes depend on hearing an actor telling the story, but characters come from life. First comes the action, the conflicts that has to be resolved, then come the characters, the agents of that action. Many of the characters are composites of people I have known, some are direct portraits, but those are few. You cannot transpose someone from life and put them into an action and expect a good fit. Alterations have to be made to fit what the character has to do, but yes, I can say I draw them from life. O’Shaughnessey, though, I must confess, even when he was invented so long ago, was based on the Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald. O’Sullivan was drawn from Pat O’Brien, the other Pat O’Brien from the 1930’s
CC: I know you also do the illustrations in your books. Do you have to switch mindsets from writing to drawing? Tells us a little about your process.
JM: It's symbiotic. They both happen at pretty much the same time, each feeding the other. I sketch what I have conceived as a narrative, but if in the process of drawing I discover something that will affect the narrative I will change the writing. The process goes all the way back to my acting career; the first thing I did after getting a role and reading the script was make a drawing of the character in real life and put him into motion. It was my way of almost unconsciously discovering the character in me and at least getting the physicality. Costume designers in particular appreciated the drawings since it gave them a concrete visualization of where I was going with the character. I do the same thing in my writing. I have, by the time I am working on the first draft, a drawer full of sketches that I have used to visualize the characters in action. Only a select few of them ever make it to finished illustrations.
The first book was done in pen-and-ink, but the second in in pencil. In my public readings, I also like to demonstrate how the illustrations are drawn. I will hold up a pencil, a standard #2, and ask, "What do you think this is?" Usually the answer is the obvious: "A pencil!" I then go on to say, "If I were just a writer, I would agree, but to an artist, this is also a modelling tool. Imagine the paper is a slab of soft clay; by handling the pencil like a modelling tool, I can cut into the surface and carely shape the clay into a picture. I often hear people say, 'But, I cannot draw a straight line.' Well, my dear hearts, neither can I."
I will then start to lay down a series of smudges from which a portrait of O'Shaughnessey emerges, all without drawing a single line.
CC: When you sit down to start a new book do you begin with an outline or synopsis or do you just go with the flow?
JM: It depends. There is no one way to write a book. Sometimes, I go with Poe’s notion that a writer has to know where he is going in order to get there. Other times, I have found great success in improvisation, at least in the beginning. The Faerie Circle is made up of many different scenelets that came to me at different times and I wrote them down. Each one was a single action. I joined them together like pearls on a string to make up the final book. Of course, I mostly knew pretty much where in the story they would occur when I wrote each one, but not all the time. Above all, you cannot dictate to the story how it will present itself to you. Each one is different.
CC: How much does reader reaction mean to you as an author?
JM: While I’m writing? Not a lot. It means a great deal now that it’s finished. Being a storyteller, I do envision the audience out there “beyond the footlights,” but they are never that clear. I let the story tell itself and I write down what happens. Generally, if I am writing for an audience of children, I will imagine a group of children around me as I tell it, but it’s very general. It makes me speak in a voice that can be understood by children. I do not, however, write down to them. I don’t mind if they have to crack open the dictionary on occasion or ask their parents what a certain passage means. I think it is important to stretch them.
CC: What inspired you to write O’Shaughnessey’s stories?
JM: As I said, boredom, Looking for something to do. As Moira McCarthy says in the book, “You must cultivate boredom… It’s boredom that makes us create to keep ourselves alive and interested in life…’Tis in the silence that magic is found.” Now, some people call that meditation, but I call it boredom, the empty space, the vacuum waiting to be filled with…what? We don’t know, and that’s the greatest of all gifts, the not knowing. There’s where creativity lies. Once I remembered the character from my youth, and I gave him a human to react to, the seed of the story was planted.
CC: How much research did you do for your book and how much ended up in the finished product?
JM: Research? Enough. No more. If there was something that popped up as a result of the action, I would have to research that pretty fully. (Thank God for the Internet!) But sometimes I fudged. For example, there are few if any mountains in County Roscommon, Ireland. But I wanted Maeve, Queen of the Roscommon Faeries to live there and be part of the story. I also wanted the McCarthy farm to be on a mountain top. So, I put a mountain in western Roscommon, you know, kind of nudged it over from County Mayo. In fiction, very often, facts are agents of the action as surely as the characters are. Now, I would not allow Queen Elizabeth I to marry the King of Spain in a historical novel, but in a fantasy, anything is possible.
CC: Which character in this book most resembles you?
JM: Oh, I am Bobby Mahoney. No doubt about that. It’s highly autobiographical and all true. Okay, except for the leprechauns, the flying hat, the Ban-Shee ,the Fortress of Death or the Court of Finvarra under Knockmaa. Other than that it’s all absolutely genuine.
CC: Your story has several paranormal elements. If you had one of their abilities which one would you choose?
JM: Being a Walker Between Worlds, being able to go back and forth between the Five-Senses-World and the Invisible World. I understand there are those who can do that, can part the veil of glamour and see into Faerie, but I am not one of those. The person who Moira McCarthy was based on could, but that was a long time ago.
CC: What do you hope for your writing career in the next few years? Any goals that you have yet to obtain that you have set for yourself?
JM: Most of them. But primarily I want to keep writing. There are more stories in me and I’d like to have the time to get them out.
CC: Who are your favorite authors?
JM: At the risk of boring your audience, I have to go back to the nineteenth century. I adore Dostoyevsky and Chekov from Russia, and the American Mark Twain. Let’s see, who else? Poe, of course, and Walt Whitman whose poetry I equate almost with holy writ. And, as long as we’re talking poetry, I cannot neglect to mention Yeats and Elliot. Of twentieth century novelists, J.D. Salinger stands out. He wrote beautiful books.
CC: If you could spend the day with one person (someone in history, a favorite author, a public figure, a character in a book, etc.), who would you choose and why?
JM: Mark Twain. Hands down. I’m not all that certain he’s like me, but I’d follow him around anyway just to drink in the irreverence and the humor. Say what you like, if we want the truth, we have to depend on the humorists to give it to is. Twain was the best.
CC: I follow your blog and absolutely love your posts. Where do you get your ideas for your posts? Are they planned out in advance or do you just sit down and start writing?
JM: Everywhere from politics to the smallest observation. The fact that it is so hard to get a really good hamburger these days may develop into a history of the burger and its adulteration by the fast food chains. On the other hand, some events in the news might move me to look past the surface to examine what the fuss is really all about. I take Moira McCarthy’s observation to heart: “When crockery comes to grief, it’s not about what it’s about.” Whatever they say it’s about, if the voices are raised in anger and if violence occurs, it’s not about what it’s about. To find out what it is about requires some thought and a historical perspective. One article may take a month or so to write, others only take an afternoon. It depends.
CC: Your blog post on New Year’s Eve and the various calendars made me wonder, what is your opinion of all the 2012 hype?
JM; Not worth worrying about. If it’s going to happen, there isn’t a lot we can do about it, although I will be slightly annoyed that I put all that money into my 401k and didn’t have a good time with it.
CC: Loved the “Broke *** Christmas” post. In your end note you warned not to challenge you at Trivial Pursuit. Besides that game, what are some of your favorite games?
JM : That’s it. The only game I’m any good at. I’m not really a game-player.
CC: Finally, I know you are working on the third book on O’Shaughnessey, what's up next for the characters?
JM: The Faerie Circle centered on Margaret’s realization of her power once she got out of her own way. The next book picks her up at a very dangerous time for those who have the sight. She’s eighteen years old and, because she spent a year in Ireland, is only going into the Senior Year in high school when her summer with Moira McCarthy is over. In The Faerie Circle, the leprechauns describe how humans lose the sight as they get older and one, O’Sullivan, observes, “’Tis the fallin’ in love that is their downfall.” She has already gotten some flack from a boy at home because of the Sight and she’s tempted to give it up.
The third book is called “The Changeling” and is a love story. Michael McCarthy, Moira’s son, returns from Galway to take over the farm and because he understands people who see faeries, even though he cannot see them himself, and because he is safe, Margaret falls in love with him, and his mother, Moira McCarthy, encourages them for her own reasons. Soon after they form a romantic attachment, Michael is replaced by a changeling, a shape-shifting faerie who is sent by the Fir Bolg to use her love to steal her power and give it to them. If anyone has ever been in a relationship they thought was the answer to all their prayers only to find out they were attached to a changeling they didn’t really know who stole their power, then they will understand why I am writing the third book. It’s geared toward young adults at about the same age as Margaret.
Jeremy, Thank you so much for joining us today.
Be sure to check out his
website and if you would like a MP3 of him reading the first chapter of The Faerie Circle, email me and I'll send it to you.
