What inspired you to write Tales Frae the life o James Finlay Bruce?

I’ve always been interested in place, in history, in what people do.  In Northern Ireland there’s two great living history museums, the Folk and Transport Museum in Cultra and the Ulster American folk park in Omagh, they don’t tell you about history or culture, instead they show you it.  I wanted to write something that dealt with culture and social history, but I didn’t want this happening on that date and so on, I wanted to show you it.  The original idea was to write something about ordinary people and ordinary things, but it was to be read out loud, and the idea evolved from there. 

So how did the stories evolve?

The first story I wrote was “the Forge”.  I remember as a child going to Mosside with my Granny and Granda as they visited my (great) Uncle Davy.  In the shed at the end of his house was an anvil, as a child I was fascinated by it.  I think that stuck in my mind.  It was a tangible presence of the past in the present.  So I had this idea of telling a story about a blacksmith, it had to be in the present, but it also had to stretch away back into the past. 

So as I started working on this, I needed someone to own the anvil, and they needed to be somewhere, and they needed a personality.  So that’s where James Finlay Bruce came from.  He had to be older, but full of life, he wasn’t to be an odd character, but he needed to have skills, or memories, or ways that tied together the past and the present. 

Where Finlay comes from is important to me personally.  The Inver River and the Sixmilewater rise nearly beside each other, the Inver flows into the sea at Larne while the Sixmilewater, having flowed through Ballyclare and Doagh, flows into Lough Neagh.  I was raise in both these places, or as we’d say between them, Finlay literally lives between them, so he’s from both of them.  These places have made him what he is.  Once I had the person and the place other stories came to mind, so I kept writing!  I’ve plenty more stories that aren’t written up yet. 

Can you tell me about the book?

There are eight short stories, they are all about Finlay, and what’s going on round about him.  I suppose I was trying to tell you about Finlay, but I never had the intention of a linear movement from a beginning to an end.  The central theme is life and culture.  I think sometimes culture can come down to ‘trying to be’ and ‘being’.  Finlay isn’t a caricature of someone trying to be something, he needed to be realistic, which I hope he is. 

You used the Hamely Tongue for some of the dialogue, could you tell us about that?

I used the Hamely Tongue of Ulster Scots for Finlay, and some of his friends speaking, for him it would have been wrong not to speak in Ulster Scots. There is a huge class issue which I try to allude to, the generation below Finlay thought it was very common and wanted to have nothing to do with it, but it survived in the older generation, then a younger generation picked it up again, or at least understood and accepted it.

What surprised you the most writing the stories?

Jill, without a doubt it was Jill, she’s Finlay’s granddaughter. When I met Finlay at first I knew he had a family, but I didn’t know any of them. The first time I met Jill was when the Post Office was being robbed. I realised she was just like her grandfather. She was the bond between the past and the future. But she’s a very strong character, especially in the Post Office! I’m giving nothing away, but I can visualise this happening given her skill set, it isn’t artistic licence or imagination.

I didn’t work out Jill as a character, she just appeared one morning when I was writing.  In the story, “January 25^th”, that’s Burns Night, I had the idea for the social, but once I started writing Jill became the central character.  It was very odd writing about Finlay and Jill, it was like they already existed, and I was just finding out about them as I wrote! 

What is your writing process like?

I’ve a pretty rigid writing process.  Firstly it’s always in the early morning, the house is quite and your minds fresh, early morning is the best part of the day.  I had to learn this, for most of my life I tried to do things at night and hated the mornings, but through necessity I started to get up early and work early, and I realised I’m most productive in the morning.  During the day I’ll make written notes.  Then in the morning I write up the notes, but a lot of the time I adapt or just rift from them, so what I wrote and what I write could be very different!  Next I’ll edit something, but it is normally not what I’ve just written.  I need the work to settle, I have to get it out of my mind so that I can come to it fresh.  I’ve dyslexia so I use text to speech, normally Read and Write by Text Help which is excellent, it reads what you have written.  I’ll go over and over my work until it sounds right, but that’s much more than just removing mistakes, it’s about making sure that the writing flows, it has to sound right.  Sounding right is much more than good grammar and proper prose.  One of the last steps in my process is making a realistic e-book, I then read and listen to it via text-to-speech on my iPad, mentally this makes it feel like a real book and it is amazing what you can pick up on. 

What does the title mean?

Culture is about people.  I think a good comparison is stories about sports stars who play for big teams.  The story is always about the person, their upbringing, hardships, determination and so on.  But the story is about the team, the team is an institution, a community, a place, a history, a way of doing things.  Then the two stories seem predestined to merge into a single story.  The context makes the story of the individual bigger.  The story is about a person, so you have a person’s name, but the context is much greater, the individual is the context!  That’s what James Finlay Bruce is, it is a story about an individual but it is set within a context, and at times the context becomes the story.  You don’t mean to do that, but it just happens. 

NB I searched for interview questions online and then interviewed myself!

Tales Frae the Life o James Finlay Bruce is Available Here