Many years ago, thanks to a relative who knew him, the novelist, short story writer and playwright Eugene McCabe read the draft of an early short story of mine. It was my first serious pitch at seeing a story through from start to finish.

I was still a student at Maynooth University and the year was 1977 - I was studying in the Library during the long barometric summer when Hons students bent their heads over books - and a swallow had become trapped in the vaulted space of the Russell Library. Myself and a male student friend worked together most mornings, leafing through books, taking notes, memorising. Outside in the sunny Kildare air a small plane droned overhead most days, while within the library the swallow flew lower and lower, its shit spatters less and less as exhaustion and hunger took their toll and one morning it was found stiff and dead on one of the long desks.

The boy I knew well. He was from the same town and in college we used occasionally meet in his flat for Camembert (stolen from the supermarket), white bread and a coffee. He fascinated me. He was urbane and well read, had published his own prodigious first novel, he was attractive and yet there was something unbridgeable between us. Later that summer, back in our home county one afternoon, he told me he was gay. We had met by the lake to talk books and life, and sat on the jetty dangling our feet in the lapping water. It made complete sense. Other things fell into place too that might have been a signpost had I been aware enough, among them the fact that his mother had burned all the copies of one of his first books on grounds of obscenity.

The thing is, the network of language that allowed discussion of anything more diverse than the binary was non-existent back then, but I became intent on writing a short story that would incorporate that summer of study, his revelation by the lake, and my feelings about the revelation.

But hang on. What were my feelings, other than acceptance and what I thought was understanding? And this is precisely what Eugene McCabe focused on when he wrote back to me. He described the atmosphere and setting of the story as ‘sublime, convincing, very compelling’ (I was always good at that), but he enquired about the speaker in the story. What did she really think when her friend revealed that he was gay? What did she really understand? How did it affect her, or did it affect her and if so in what way? I seemed to have avoided that, he added.

I’d managed to completely skirt the issue of honest feeling and therefore when the boy in the story revealed something integral to his nature at what should have been the emotional peak of the writing, I shimmied away from recording how a young woman (like me), versed only in heterosexual relationships in the late 70s, might really feel.

And therein lies the key to any story we undertake to write. Emotional truth must lie at its heart, no matter the slippery byways we take to get there. For example, Chekhov’s married character Dimitri Gurov in Lady with Lapdog took a few slippery risks until his heart opens to the truth about his feelings for the also married Anna Sergeyevna, not alone when they meet in the resort city of Yalta, and after their affair he realises he is in love for the first time in his life, but afterwards, when he returns to his home city. As a result, Dimitri realises the duplicity of his emotional life until now, and is forced to make some kind of decision. The important thing is that something changes in the course of his life and that of Anna Gurov. Or is about to. And when the story ends, the reader knows that the couple are on the brink of what Dimitri describes as ‘a new and splendid life’, even if they have to wait to secure it.

In the case of my first short story, there was no inner revelation, no moment in which the speaker realises that something has changed in her life by the boy having confided in her. She and the he part after meeting by the lake, she is still surprised by what he told her even if it makes sense, but nothing impinges on her life and on her ideas about love - which was really what this story was about - and she concludes that he will probably have to spend his life outside of Ireland, exiled because of his nature. The swallow in the university library probably played a metaphoric role of some kind, as in freedom worn down by entrapment.

That was the lesson Eugene McCabe taught me. And later on, reading Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor , Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor - classical writers I believe every short story writer should turn to occasionally - I realised that the authority of a good short story depends to some extent on the question of revelation, illumination, and sometimes justice.

Do I follow through on my own advice? Mostly, I hope. Not always, I am certain. The short story form is as experimental as any other form, and the question of subtlety can sometimes override the question of illumination and revelation. Nor do those two words infer it has to be smack-bang-wallop drama either and as writers we need to be patient with our work and to ignore the very forceful clang of identity politics unless they totally suit the disposition of our work and natural instinct. Kate O’Brien’s wonderful novel The Land of Spices was banned in Ireland in May 1942 on account of a very subtle reference to two men, as follows: ‘She saw Etienne and her father in the embrace of love’. In today’s literary world, this would scarcely register as anything more than a touch of queerness. Yet I believe all writers on the spectrum from heterosexual to LGBTQI+ will encounter social and cultural repression. And believe it or not, that includes heterosexual artists. Life and our censorious fellow creatures ensure that the true and authentic stories of ourselves in solitude and aloneness will always be subject to some repression. Everything in the world urges us to get out there and be tribal in our enjoyment, to be with the crowd, to welcome as much distracting noise as possible to prevent an inner life. But it’s in our inner lives that the great stories of the imagination find root. And it is our job as writers, regardless at what stage in our careers, to counter repression and to re-tell it in an emotionally honest way through our stories.