CREATIVE WRITING

Debut novelist Roisin O'Donnell looks at making the leap from short story to full-length fiction with an idea that wouldn't let go

©Ruth Medjber

I t all started with a single word. In between lockdowns in 2020, I received a commission to write a short story for radio. I could write about anything I wanted, but my story had to somehow be connected with the word independence . We were approaching the centenary of Irish independence, and writers were asked to think about what independence meant to them, a hundred years later. This was at the height of the pandemic, with people confined to their homes, the media telling us ‘stay safe, stay home.’ I thought about the statistics I’d heard on the radio about the number of families in emergency accommodation, and reports I had read on the number of calls to Women’s Aid; most tellingly how these calls had dropped during lockdown and peaked immediately afterwards. I thought of what that meant, about those women who had been unable to call. Stay home, stay safe, we were told. But what if home was the least safe place you could be? What if you did not have a home? I thought again about that word independence . How is your independence impacted when you live with a partner who exerts such frightening level of control over your life? And when you’re forced to leave your home, how you find a way to regain control of your own life? So I wrote a story for radio called ‘Present Perfect’, about a woman called Ciara Fay who is living in a hotel room with her young children. At this point, it was over a year since I had written a short story. My days had become a whirlwind of teaching, lesson planning, paperwork and parenting. Returning to the page felt daunting, and I also knew this story was very different to anything I had written before. I spoke to a writer friend about this, and she told me, ‘don’t try to write the way you did before. Embrace what is new in your work.’