Sheila Armstrong on publishing short stories

Offering insight into various creative processes and advice towards aspiring and emerging writers, here’s a quick-fire interview with short story writer and novelist Sheila Armstrong.

Sheila Armstrong is a writer and editor from the north-west of Ireland. She is the author of two books: How To Gut A Fish (2022), a collection of short stories, and Falling Animals (2023), her debut novel. Her writing has been listed for the Society of Authors Awards, the Kate O’Brien Award, the Irish Book Awards, and the Edge Hill Prize. She is an Arts Council Next Generation Artist.

Sinéad: Can you talk us through your first publishing experience?

Sheila: I think my first ever published piece was in The South Circular, a small journal set up by Aoife Walsh, now commissioning editor at New Island. She was very kind to me but I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The story was terrible, but there were themes in there I’d come back to again and again. I was in my early twenties and thought that being a writer was something you either were or weren’t; I’d no idea of the work involved to get from the desire to the reality. But I learned! This was in 2012, so it took me exactly a decade to get a book out into the world. Everyone can be a writer, it’s the ones too stubborn to quit that become writers.

Sinéad: You started with short stories before publishing your debut novel—did you find this publishing strategy to be helpful?

Sheila: Short and dense is how I tend to write – even my novel is a bunch of short stories cellotaped together. Unfortunately, short stories don’t tend to sell books. My agent approached a few publishers with my collection but nearly all of them wanted to see a novel first. They said they’d consider that and then maybe publish the stories afterwards – lies! My current publisher were the only ones that said: short stories first, novel second. And I’m so grateful they had enough faith in me to trust that I would produce a novel. I had been scratching at the door for so long that I was desperate to get something out into the world.

Sinéad: What does an average writing day look like to you?

Sheila: I don’t have an average day, really. I only function at a zero or a hundred. I can’t mentally multitask – I’m either doing my freelance day job or writing full tilt, not both at the same time. But I love the freedom of it, that I can wake up and potter around without having to be at my desk by 9 on the dot. I tend to be the most productive in the evenings, after dinner, when sensible people are winding down. So much of my writing time is spent staring at the wall, fighting with frustration, doubting, arguing – and that’s before any words go on the page. I’m not a fast or prolific writer; it’s slow and difficult work as I tend to redraft as I go.  

Sinéad: How do you go about the early stages of writing? Do you spend a lot of time researching and planning, or do you go straight into putting words on the page?

Sheila: Not an ounce of planning is involved. I start with an image or a sentence and go from there, feeling my way into it. I have to write my way into a story to figure out what it’s about. Sometimes I have a vague idea where I’m going – I knew what the end scene in my novel would be from an early stage – but mostly it’s just stumbling forward. I research as I go, in a kind of frantic way, diving down rabbit holes and collecting little details that propel me on. You have to be curious as a writer, curious about other people and curious about the world around you.

Sinéad: How do you manage the pressures of the industry, what with deadlines and changing trends?

Sheila: I worked in publishing, so deadlines are fairly sacred to me. I know that an author missing a deadline passes a huge amount of stress down the line and I don’t want to be the cause of that. I think that’s the most important thing about dealing with the industry – be sound unto others, and others will be sound unto you. Bend when you can, and stand firm when you need to. Writers have a tendency to be grateful for every breadcrumb we get, which means we don’t always advocate for ourselves. But it is a business and we are the product, so we need to look after our own best interests – while being fair and realistic. Trends pass me by. I can only write the way I write, and you can only write the way you write. By the time you catch up with a trend the industry will have moved on.

Sinéad: Can you give any advice to writers who are submitting their works?

Sheila: Patience, patience, patience. I have a reminder on my phone that pops up daily with those words. I have a tendency to fire off something before it’s ready or to react to a situation without thinking it through. Everything in publishing moves incredibly slowly. Take the time to do another draft, to wait another week for a response, to sleep before replying to an email.

Sinéad: And on a more general level, any advice for aspiring or emerging writers?

Sheila: I used to try to be a jack-of-all-trades writer. I didn’t really find my groove until I started leaning into what I could do rather than forcing my writing into a shape it didn’t want to be. Letting go of how you feel you should be writing can be really freeing. If you have a real grá for first person POV, or descriptive writing, or twisty plots, then write that way. The same goes if you hate those things. I hate writing dialogue – so I just don’t. But it’s a conscious decision I’ve made, rather than a deficit. ‘Good writing’ isn’t some objective, quantifiable standard – people experience the world in different ways, and our writing should reflect that.