Writer: Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride is not a name I knew when YouTube's algorithm tempted my curiosity.  What she said, I found interesting - using Method Acting tactics for characters had crossed my mind a long time ago. I always go with those who justify my own ideas. Don't you?

 For what ever reason, give her a listen: 

I was about to add her to this post I was drafting, a grab bag for writers, when my curiosity pushed me to see what else there was about this woman. After all, I shouldn't use justifying my vanity as the only reason for putting her in a post. Yeah, well, I got my ears pinned back. 

I am pretty sure I heard of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, but the author's name did not stick with me.

 Here is what I found from a quick Google search.

Interview with Eimear McBride  (White Review, 2014) - a little history, a little about her writing habits.

Novelist Eimear McBride: studying method acting taught me how to write (The Guardian, 2025)

Making a person is no mean feat – especially in the absence of sex – and for a character-obsessed novelist, nailing it is everything. But when I started writing at the age of 23, all I seemed to possess was an increasingly urgent impulse in my head and an unaccountable blankness where I’d assumed the conduits of inspiration would be. The inner insistence began picking words and persistence required me to follow them up, but how to expand beyond those first fragmentary bursts?

Although largely ignorant of what producing fiction might require, I didn’t arrive at the page by myself. I brought Stanislavski with me. More precisely, three years’ training in his acting method at the then notorious and now defunct Drama Centre London, where I’d been taught how to make a person, from the inside out. Initially, I didn’t connect the worlds. Acting is action. Writing, words. Acting is necessarily collaborative, novels are not. Fiction tends to be made in private, while acting when all alone points to the psychiatrist’s couch rather than the silver screen. On top of that, method actors are regularly mocked for their seemingly over-the-top efforts to inhabit their characters; Robert De Niro’s 60lb weight gain to play the ageing boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull or Forest Whitaker learning Swahili for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. That said, whatever scepticism surrounds the method process, the proof remains in the performance and there’s no denying it often produces emotionally intense, even revelatory experiences for the audience. Naturally enough, I wanted to take that possibility with me.

***

Although Drama Centre taught me many things, the most important “how to” of this technique was introduced right at the start and drummed in until the very end. Even now I hear it being said: “Leave your instinct to judge at the door.” Which makes sense because characters, like people, are not constructed from moral positions. A character needs to be left alone to pursue their own ends. To hover above, directing attention to their flaws, is to make a mere puppet with no real life of its own. It cannot be filled with its own thoughts and repressed emotions or driven by irrational fears and self-sabotaging judgments. As with actors who delve no deeper than caricature, novelists who gloss over complexity for the sake of instruction make people no one else has ever known.

***

For example, I am neither Eily nor Stephen from my new novel The City Changes Its Face and my previous one, The Lesser Bohemians, yet the struggle against brokenness is something I understand. What it is to fail, to try, to need forgiveness, to want to be loved. It doesn’t matter if that understanding derives from other sources because once a shared truth is spliced – or substituted – into the fictional story, its logic will remain intact. Same goes for the girl from my debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, who refuses passivity even when the outcomes of her decisions prove carnivorous. Anyone who has ever had to survive their own bad choices, made on the back of unhelpful circumstances, can find examples to work from within. Or my woman from Strange Hotel who wants to let no one – even the reader – in, but who life happens to anyway. Identifying my own attempts at control, and subsequent helplessness at its loss, created enough imaginative energy that she could grow out in wildly differing directions from me yet remain credible in her own right. More challengingly, of course, this also applies to characters who have harmed and subjugated others, for example Stephen’s mother, or the uncle in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. I have never done what they did, but to write them I had to find the places of compulsion within myself. Make note of its insatiable selfishness and how easily it can run out of control. So, even in the terrible things those characters had done, there was something not alien to me.

Essentially, substitution is about employing a kind of radical empathy. Without empathy, art is nothing more than a flapping mouthpiece for whichever aesthetic, ideology or political point has been placed above the duty to truth. Little wonder then that the method has become so unfashionable of late; in direct opposition to the many locked boxes of contemporary society, which claim we cannot know each other, even in imagination, the method suggests otherwise. That when we allow empathy to lead us down uncomfortable roads and accept that self-knowledge does not always set the heart aglow, we can come to recognise and know one another, deeply, through all the imperfect humanity we share.

Oh, yes, I am beginning to really and truly like this woman's ideas. We could all stand to think about what she says here - even those not writers. 

 Her UK and American publishers: Faber & Faber and 

A podcast, The power of language: Eimear McBride on The City Changes Its Face, from The Writing Centre. Oh, yes, listen to this. She is quite amusing and down to earth, just in case the above might leave you thinking otherwise. Communicate on your own terms to tell the story you need to tell is my takeaway.

sch 10/17