“There’s nothing mysterious about your prose style,” says the author Kevin Barry, “it’s a direct projection of your personality”. Many writers – myself included – find this out the hard way. Good writing is true and authentic, it reflects who you are.
For a long time, I subconsciously tried to be someone else on the page. I anglicised my Northern Irish accent; I feigned a kind of seriousness, perhaps in the hope I’d be taken seriously. But the more I attended writing workshops and read books on the craft, the more I realised my work paled beside my personality.
