Marian Keyes: 'Weaving comedy into a darker story is something that needs a lot of care'
BY Katie Smart
2nd Nov 2022
Marian Keyes is one of the most successful Irish novelists of all time. Her debut novel Watermelon was published in Ireland in 1995, where it was an immediate runaway success. Marian went on to write further books on the Walsh family, such as the iconic Rachel's Holiday as well as a host of other novels including Anybody Out There and Grown Ups.
Marian is known for her unforgettable characters, and for expertly writing about serious topics with humour, warmth and the lightest of touches. We spoke to Marian about her approach to crafting characters with believable romantic and familial dynamics as well as what it was like working on our new five-week online course: Writing Fiction with Marian Keyes.
When did you know you wanted to be an author?
When I came out of rehab at the age of 30. Up until then I’d never had any sense of where I belonged in the world. A few months before I ended up in rehab, I’d started writing (really quite odd) short stories, out-of-the-blue.
In retrospect I think the desire to write emerged from a primal urge to stay alive: I was so desperate and just wanted to die. But I was very proud of the short stories. They weren’t enough to stop me drinking, though and four months after I’d written the first one, I went to rehab.
Six weeks later, when I rejoined the world, I felt differently about a lot of things. I was a lot more optimistic and clear-headed than I had been. Life seemed full of infinite possibilities. I knew the pleasure I’d got from writing short stories and it was something I wanted to take further.
You’re known for handling serious topics with honesty and a sense of humour. How important is humour to you when you’re writing? Do you have any advice for budding writers who want to weave comedy into a darker story?
Humour is a non-negotiable for me although I know that my more recent books aren’t as funny as the earlier ones. This wasn’t a decision I made but a change which has happened very gradually. I don’t know why, but there we are.
Weaving comedy into a darker story is something that needs a lot of care. The very last thing that should happen is that the issue or the people affected by it, be made light of. I rewrite a lot, crossing back and forth over the line of Too Comic? Or Just Humorous Enough?
Never use comedy to punch down. Avoid obvious targets and cliches. Don’t staple a veneer of comedy onto your novel; instead let the humour spring from the characters, their internal voices and their dialogue.
Comedy can be woven into a novel by having characters who are specifically there to provide light relief – Helen Walsh is my secret weapon in the Walsh novels. Well, Helen and Mammy Walsh. Their plain-spokenness seems to amuse people.
This may sound strange, but introducing a funny thing that happened to you in real life, rarely works. So many aspects of a Real Life Funny Event can’t be reproduced, e.g. the tone of voice the original story was related in, the facial expressions, the body language.
Not every character and voice in your novel needs to be comic. When everyone is funny, it ends up feeling that no-one is funny.
There are many different types of humour; a character can be variously eccentric, witty and dry, fond of oversharing or very innocent. Using a variety of these characteristics, making sure that each is congruent with the character who embodies it, is good.
But remember that writing comedy isn’t for everyone. It doesn’t belong in every novel. So feel free to jettison it if you feel it doesn’t serve you.
Rachel Walsh is one of your most beloved characters, what called you back to continue her story in Again, Rachel over twenty years after the publication of Rachel’s Holiday?
I don’t know, is the honest answer. I never ‘decide’ with my logical head what to write about. It happens at a different level, more intuitive. Suddenly I find myself interested by a particular issue or an idea for a character starts to rise up in me. (This isn’t as mystical as I might be making it sound. It’s just that like everyone, I’m taking in huge amounts of information from the world, most of it at a subconscious level. I don’t know what happens in there but clearly some of that information strikes a chord and makes its way to my conscious head as an ‘idea’.)
Honestly, I’d never had any intention of writing a sequel to any of my books but a storyline arrived in my head and I knew I wanted to see if it would work for Rachel and Luke. But it’s not that Rachel was or is any more beloved to me than any of the other characters I’ve created. In fact, I’d tried to write a sequel to Watermelon (which is about Claire Walsh) in 2016, but that didn’t work.
Romance sits at the heart of your stories. What do you think makes a character a compelling love interest and a partnership that readers will root for?
It’s all about characterisation. The two people have to be created in great detail and have some degree of likeability before readers can be convinced to care, I think. (I feel tragically old-school insisting that fictional characters, especially women, have to be likeable. Even though the gender-political implications are obvious to me, I find it impossible to make a person I don’t like my main character. I have such admiration for writers such as Louise O’Neill who have no fear of writing not-likeable heroines.)
Something that I wish I’d known about 13 books ago is that the men in my books should be written with as much detail and nuance as my female characters. I was quite black-and-white about it: men were either terrible people or ridey saviours.
It’s only in the last three or four of my novels that I’ve given my Leading Men that kind of attention. So don’t be like me! Create fully-rounded male characters from your very first book. You need to see your plot from the perspective of your male characters, and you need to know several of their flaws.
You also explore the power of familial love and have created large casts of characters, such as the Walshes. Do you have any advice on creating believable supporting characters and writing about family ties?
Everybody matters, even the characters with the smallest parts. You don’t have to spend as much time getting to inhabit them as you will with your main characters, but treat them with respect. Give them an identity. It can be quite broad-brush but no other character in your novel can be like them.
Dialogue is a large part of giving a character a distinct identity. Consider how they construct a sentence, the slang they use etc and make their every appearance in the novel be consistent. You should be able to isolate every one of their appearances and see that they’re all in alignment.
Almost every family is dysfunctional but the flavour of their dysfunction varies from family to family. For example, the Walshes are very enmeshed with each other, over-involved in each other’s lives, clearly the five sisters and Mammy Walsh depend on each other a lot. But not in a ‘respectful’ way – they’ve discarded any need for tact. That’s how it is for them.
But the family in Grown Ups is very different: there are a lot of secrets and a lot of power imbalances and it’s all done politely. Basically, Jessie’s money is what gives them their cohesion.
You can create any kind of family and you get to choose their kind of dysfunction. It can be as dull or as dramatic as you like but you must do it with conviction and consistency.
You like to read a range of genres from romance to crime (and everything in between) – why do you think this is important for novelists?
To be honest, I don’t read for anything other than pleasure. I’m brutal about it – if a book isn’t doing it for me in the first 50 pages, I abandon it. But an unexpected bonus of reading outside of my genre is seeing all the different ways writers write, everything from prose to plot. For example, the romantic relationships in crime novels are usually depicted in a different way to the ones in my novels and I like that! I find it interesting and sometimes helpful.
Even the novels that ultimately disappoint me are helpful – I try to analyse what I feel the author did or didn’t do incorrectly and take note of it.
We’re so excited about the new Writing Fiction with Marian Keyes course. What was your favourite part of creating the course?
Thank you, I LOVED doing it. I think the part I enjoyed the most was trying to dispel the idea that writing is a magical, mystical thing. It’s very empowering to discover that writing fiction is 95% hard work, that the moments of wild inspiration are rare. It takes away a lot of my own fear when I remember that all I have to do is show up at my desk and try and keep trying to write words that actually convey my feelings, that it will take time and I’ll feel frustrated and like a failure but if I keep at it, the words on my screen will eventually be what I’m actually trying to say.
Courage, mes braves! You can do it!
Write the story you’d love to read – with inspiring advice from the one and only Marian Keyes.