Daniel Woodrell: Love What You Do

Daniel Woodrell (right) is probably best known for his novel Winter’s Bone, although really you could pick any of his novels and make a reasonable argument that it is his finest work. Or was his finest work, as we should probably say now, given that Daniel passed late last November – although, as with all the great writers (and Daniel Woodrell was most certainly a great writer), he’ll never truly be gone so long as his novels are still read.
 I was lucky enough to meet with Daniel way back in 2012, when we were interviewed together for the Mountains to Sea Festival in Dun Laoghaire, when I took the opportunity to interview him for the Irish Times. To wit:

Back in September I had the very great pleasure of reading alongside Daniel Woodrell during the Mountains to Sea Festival in Dun Laoghaire. Even more enjoyable was the couple of hours before the event, when we sat down for a chat over some lunch, conducted an interview for the Irish Times, and then sat around some more, talking books and writing and whatnot.
 He’s a good guy, Daniel Woodrell. Understated, funny, with no affectations. The kind of quietly spoken that comes with carrying a big stick – or in his case, a big, big talent. I liked him a lot. And then, last week, after the interview finally appeared in the Irish Times, I received an email from him to say thanks, he liked the piece. A classy touch, and a pleasant surprise, but not really surprising, if you follow my drift.

 Naturally, it was that afternoon that sprang to mind when I first heard of Daniel’s passing. And while I – like many, I’d imagine – immediately resolved to go back and reread some of his novels, what has stuck with me ever since was what he said when I was concluding the interview with the standard question about advice for aspiring authors. Daniel thought for a little, then said:

‘Make sure you love what you do, because that might be all you get out of it.’

 Sage advice if you’re working on a novel, because if you don’t love your story and your characters, you’ll probably end up hating them over the course of a 100,000-word marathon, and that’s a scenario that rarely ends well.
 But that advice also applies to the bigger picture. Like most writers, I don’t earn a huge amount of money from my fiction (and by ‘don’t earn a huge amount’ I mean that most of the advances for my novels over the years just about paid my mortgage for that month). And that’s okay, from my point of view, because I didn’t start out writing fiction with any great plan to make a living from it – back then, if I’m honest, my main ambition was to write books that other writers would like, the idea there being that if other writers liked it, it was probably a decent book.
 It wasn’t until the brutally isolating days of the Covid pandemic, when everyone was shut up at home and baking banana bread and talking about mindfulness, that I belatedly discovered what writing truly meant to me. Writing was and always had been my form of mindfulness, I realised, my way of (partly) self-medicating for mental health. I didn’t just love what I did, I did it because I loved doing it, and because – imperceptibly, day after day after day – the process boosts my self-esteem, gets the synapses fizzing and the serotonin bubbling up nicely.
 ‘Make sure you love what you do, because that might be all you get out of it.’ No arguments here, Daniel, except to say that that ‘all’ contains multitudes. But you knew that too.