Write Smarter with Kate Durrant

On this week’s Write Smarter Blog, I am delighted to introduce you all to my guest, journalist and award winning short story writer Kate Durrant. A regular contributor to RTÉ Radio One and BBC Radio Two, Kate is also a columnist with Irish County Living within The Farmers Journal. Her fiction and creative non-fiction has been widely published. She was awarded the 2024 Fiction Mentorship from the Munster Literary Centre and co-hosts the Natter podcast with author Michelle McDonagh. She recently signed with Marianne Gunn O’Connor for publication of her first novel.

And now for that best-selling novel

We’ve all got a book in us… right?

Well, no. Personally, I don’t think so.

I do think we all have a story to tell. But sitting down to write 90,000 words that may never see the light of day takes a particular kind of dedication – or madness.

Life is busy, and for most of it we can suppress that urge to write that rises from time to time.

But it’s always there. Lifting its annoying head when you hear about a former classmate whose third book is coming out next month, or when you visit your aunt who still has the poem you wrote in second class framed on the kitchen wall.

“You always were such a lovely writer.”

But as fast as the nudges keep coming, the excuses come faster.

I don’t have the time… the children need me… work is so busy…

So many different ways of saying, I’m scared to try, and even more scared to fail.

But the other voice, the one that believes in you, reminds you of the article you read about Edel Coffey who wrote most of her first book in the car waiting for her children to come out of school, and the writer you know who drags herself out of bed every day to write through chronic pain.

For many of us, as we get older, life gets quieter. Those of us with children discover, to our surprise, that, yes, they can live without us (once we can Revolut them occasionally, of course) and unbelievably the companies we work for will survive without us too!

For me, reaching fifty on the cusp of a pandemic gave me time to think about what I would regret not doing. What would I look back and say, I wish I had tried?

And so, in the space given by the lockdown, and the courage given by being a little older, I started to write.

Writing as a dog (hello Ivy!) on a page I managed for a charity gave me the freedom to say what I wanted. People loved that dog, giving me confidence to think that they might like me as a human too.

And they did.

So spurred on by people’s kind words (and people are terribly encouraging) I began.

An early riser, there was a slot on RTE radio I loved and thought I might have something to offer to. After numerous rejections, and even more submissions, I sweatily recorded my first broadcast Covid-style under my duvet, contributing for four years before the show finished, while simultaneously recording in a similar space for BBC, which continues to this day.

Radio columns aside, I decided to see if I could find a place in print media too and since 2023 have also enjoyed a regular column in Irish County Living in the Farmers Journal, allowing me to share a diary of my best and worst days with many others living similar lives who seem to find themselves in my words. What a privilege!

Radio and newspapers aside, Ireland is rich with opportunities for aspiring writers and, while I could paper the walls of my bathroom with rejection emails (and it’s a big bathroom) they spurred me on to improve my writing until my pieces were accepted – and they always were.

But as my late dad used to say, ‘much wants more’.

So here I am, having achieved writing success beyond my wildest dreams but is it enough?

Of course not.

It will never be enough, because the dream of the novel remains. Not for money or fame, but to prove to myself that the niggling voice inside me wasn’t foolish, just patient.

Because I don’t want to be the woman who tells her grandchildren, “I nearly wrote a book once.”

Do you?