TSN turning point

Originally posted: November 27, 2019

One day in July 1984 biathelete Kari Swenson was abducted in the mountains. I heard her story the other night while making dinner and listening to the podcast Criminal. I was struck by Kari’s ordeal but also left thinking about craft because there is a lot we can learn about storytelling by paying attention to the facts of this story and its construction.

If you haven’t heard this episode yet, please have a listen because the rest of this post is one long spoiler. Then come back and we’ll take the thing apart like a clock and figure out what makes it tick so well.

Preface

Kari Swenson is bravery personified. To say nothing of tenacity and grit. She was shot point blank in the chest and had the presence of mind to save herself by slowing her heart down. And then, after it was all said and done, she threw herself into training and returned to competition. And Alan Goldstein was a hero. I was moved first and foremost by their courage and humanity.

But as a writer there’s a mercenary instinct that kicks in any time I encounter a well constructed narrative.

Three Act Structure

First, note the classic three act structure.

Act one introduces Kari and Alan and establishes setting. The action begins when Kari, the protagonist, heads off for a cross country run alone in the mountains. Next, comes the inciting event: meeting two terrifying men.

Act two is focused on the abduction and the search crew’s efforts to find her. The tension is rising, climbing toward the peak of Aristotle’s arc. Kari is chained to a tree. Alan, introduced in act one, bursts in to save her. Alan is shot and killed. Kari is shot in the chest. This is the climax.

Act three takes us through the aftermath. Kari is rescued and survives. Moreover, she trains hard and returns to competing in biathlons. The abductors are caught and sentenced to jail.

So far, so conventional right? As a story this one is perfectly satisfying.

The TSN Turning Point

But then comes the sleight of hand, that moment when the story surprises us with an unexpected turn of events that, in hindsight, was predictable.

In this story, the WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW moment, comes when we realize that a whole bunch of people have got the heroes and villains mixed up.

At first, I was outraged. A young woman is abducted and shot in the chest and a man is shot dead in the face and the murderers are valourized by the media and people all around the world. How is this possible?

But then as I thought about it more, as I remembered gender politics, and the Rape of the Sabines, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Freemen on the Land, libertarians, and the Cult of Cheeto Jesus, well in hindsight the public’s love affair with a couple of unwashed white male terrorists is par for the course. CAN I GET AN AMEN?

Conventional stories (Red is stalked by a wolf in granny’s clothing, then saved by a passing woodcutter and lives happily ever after) are fine. But the stand-out stories, the ones that stay with us, that we re-tell to our friends, and dissect in long shouty blog posts, those stories have something more happening. Which brings us to…

Stakes

Most stories have external stakes (will the protagonist get out of this alive?) and emotional stakes (will she thrive?). In Act Two the external stakes are front and centre. In Act Three the external stakes are resolved and now the emotional stakes become important. Eventually those stakes are resolved as well and we share that moment of elation when Kari gets pulled up to the podium by the third place competitor.

But exceptional stories, those ones that resonate far longer and make us really think (or in my case silent scream in my kitchen and now here on the internet) are the ones that have philosophical stakes.

What does society value - a young woman’s life or that of her abductors? Do we care more about the man who died to save his friend or the outlaws on the run? All through acts one and two, going into act three, I didn’t think basic morals (the philosophical stakes) in peril. I assumed Kari and Alan were the heroes and the two psychos who shot them were the villains. Bet you did too.

Then: surprise! Society is immoral. Oh wait…we already knew that.

If the abductors were black do we think for a second they’d have been valourized? What is broken in human nature that makes us root for certain evil men? What about the narrative of the wild west and the whole long arc of the western canon and pop culture and Barbara Walters? Who is to blame and also how and when are we going to put an end to this bullshit? One reason this story is so powerful is that we are left with more questions than answers.

Framing

There’s more architectural detail that I noticed in this story. Note that the story is framed by the present. The episode is bookended by present-day Kari looking back on this one episode of her life. That was a conscious structural choice the storytellers made. In one way, it deflates some of the tension. We know from the jump that she’s going to live.

But go back and listen to the first beats of the story. What do you hear? Breathing. Kari breathing. And shooting. Lovely foreshadowing. This is an intimate opening too, one that puts us right into her body as she talks about the athleticism involved in her sport, the importance of breathing. If this was a fictional story, I would say: note the attention to detail. Remember: character is king.

At the climax of the story, what was foreshadowed takes place. She’s in agony from the gun shot wound and realizes death is close. Here at the crucial moment, she returns to her training and slows down her heart beat. This ability to control her breathing, combined with her athleticism, is what ends up saving her life.

In conclusion

Three act structure + external and internal stakes = perfectly fine conventional story. Philosophical stakes + turn of events that is simultaneously unexpected and predictable = exceptional story.

There is an architecture to every narrative, an unobtrusive but vital structure that holds the whole story together. Learn how to spot it and your writing will improve. If you’ve got a story that could use some architectural assistance, I can help. I moonlight as a manuscript evaluator which means I give constructive feedback on works-in-progress. Character and dialogue, plot and structure, it’s all my jam. I’m taking bookings for the summer so get in touch for more info or a quote.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Originally posted: June 20, 2016

Here's some writing advice I got a few years ago about plot and structure: banish the words "and then" and replace them with "but", "therefore", and "meanwhile."

But is the idea of conflict and opposition. The good guy wants something but the bad guy stands in the way.

Therefore there must be an escalation of action and tension. The good guy does something to get around the bad guy but he hits a roadblock he must overcome.

Meanwhile suggests a parallel narrative, two plots happening in tandem. When one story hits a climactic peak, you cut away ("Meanwhile, back at the Ranch...") to the other.

Editor Tony Zhou explains in this video and if you still don't get it, check out his post on Vox.

Cathedral

Originally posted: February 15, 2016

And then there's Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, a book with more than its fair share of plot, "a gothic cathedral of plot!" At 800+ pages, maybe plot, erected on such an intricately designed scale with flying buttresses and gargoyles and stained glass, is necessity more than extravagance.

The Luminaries sat on my shelf for some time, sitting there like a door stop screaming "commitment." Then one January day, I was looking for a new read, something dense and hearty that might also help me break my online habit, and there was The Luminaries waving its hands, calling out: "pick me."

January seems tailor-made for mammoth reads. This is when - if you live in the northern hemisphere, at least - you want to crack open Middlemarch or The Byatt’s The Children's Book or the complete Sherlock Holmes. Cuddle up by the fire, tuck in to something substantial, and try to tune out the internet's siren song.

The Luminaries is set in gold-rush 19th-century New Zealand. A dead man is found in a cabin. A prostitute lies collapsed on the road. The richest man in town has gone missing. And on a night of torrential rain, a council of twelve convene a secret meeting. What is the thread that binds these things together? Eight hundred and thirty two pages later, you find out.

Catton adopts the 19th century Gothic as her style. Her narrator is all-knowing and arch, moving freely in and out of different characters' points of view. Everything is explained and very little is submerged. There are cliff hangers galore. In the role of the villain: an enigmatic man with a scar. It's the kind of page-turner that might have been written by a 21st century Wilkie Collins. All the suspense and classic story-telling of an earlier age with modern-day good sense (which is to say you find any simpering Angels in the House).

But perhaps this all sounds hopelessly outmoded. Haven't we moved beyond conventional plot and story-telling, evolved past the need for narratorial hand-holding? This reader has not! I found The Luminaries completely refreshing.

And make no mistake, Catton's characters are well-drawn and complex with flawed motives and inconsistent, deeply human, actions. Her scene-setting is on point. Themes of land appropriation and colonial entitlement, racism and inequality are handled with intelligence and empathy. Agency is found in unexpected places. (At one point a villain casts aspersions on the local prostitute, only to be reminded that as many men bare him a grudge, there are twice as many who love and would protect her.)

The Luminaries - which won a slew of prizes including the Man-Booker and the Governor General's - is immersive and sustaining. After a while I forgot the internet existed.

Lost the plot

Originally posted: February 10, 2016

Tessa Hadley has perfected a magic trick. And I want to know her secret.

She writes these novels - the most recent one is the excellent The Past - that break the rules of plot. Specifically the main rule that plot should progress in an Aristotelian arc. Characters are introduced. The scene is set. There is pressing conflict and tensions mount toward a peak. The handgun is shot, secrets are revealed, the story blows wide open. Then, climax discharged with, characters settle into a new normal and denouement eases into conclusion.

That is the formula. It's what readers expect, what keeps pages turning. But then along comes Tessa Hadley. And she's got no truck with any of that.

In The Past four middle aged siblings gather in the country home of their grandparents. Hadley tells the story through the eyes of the grown children and then, rewinding a few decades, from the point of view of their mother. Secrets are revealed, sure. There is a mystery, yes (the decaying carcass of a dog is found in an abandoned cottage) but it doesn't feel very pressing. There is a romance, yes. But it isn't very urgent. Doesn't this sound like the world's most boring book?

And yet, The Past is a compulsive read. I finished it in just a few days and then was sorry it wasn't longer (this, incidentally, is how I devour all her books and stories). What is it about Hadley? Her prose is faultless. She has a way of finding words for the things that are indescribable; her writing thrums with arresting moments of insight. And in her stories, character is queen. Her imaginary people - so flawed, so foolish, so endearing - continue to resonate long after the last page is read.

Is this the secret? Can conventional plot be replaced by insightful, well-crafted prose and pitch perfect characters? Are those three ingredients sufficient to propel a story forward? Somehow, I don't think it's as simple as following a formula. My suspicion is it's the exceptional writer who can pull this off, conjure story without plot. And those rare birds aren't giving away any of their secrets.

Upcoming events

Heads up about two upcoming events that I’m taking part in: one this Sunday and the next on Monday. Writers at Woody Point is re-broadcasting the conversation I had last August with Ian Williams about his Giller-winning novel Reproduction. It’ll be available on Facebook for 24 hours only, beginning Sunday at 7pm NDT. This session is free and open to the public. You don’t need a Facebook account to watch. This conversation was originally broadcast live in August 2020, during Writers at Woody Point 2020.

On Monday, I’ll be live on CBC Radio’s Cross Talk taking questions about writing from callers. There’s always a small possibility breaking news could bump me off to Tuesday but barring that, you can call in to have your craft questions answered at 709-722-7111 // 1-800-563-8255

Cure your writer’s block

Sometimes writing is a challenge. We sit at our desks, pens in hand or fingers poised over the keyboard and….[drum roll]…… NOTHING. I had a spell like this during lock down last June. With no where to go and no one to see, I had plenty of time to write but every day, I sat in the garden, and laboured away with limited success and much frustration. Finally, I remembered something important (the cure for writer’s block!). Writing is not the only work.

Reading is also the work

No book exists in a vacuum. A book is always in conversation with others on the shelf. Books that share similar sensibilities, books with overlapping locales and themes. Books that influenced yours whether because of plot or character or prose or narrative style. One thing I’ve learned to do at the start of a new project is to brainstorm a reading list. Books I need for research purposes and ones that might offer inspiration. So I gave myself a break, write very little and read a whole lot, coming up for air in between to put more books on hold at the library (ours had just opened for curbside pick up). Bliss.

Learning is also the work

Controversial opinion: MFAs are overrated. Certainly they are expensive. You know what’s free? Live recordings of Tin House Craft Talks. Writing is a difficult thing to teach well so on those occasions when an author perfectly enunciates some aspect of craft, it’s worthwhile to pay close attention. This lecture by writer Alexander Chee, on character and plot and early draft woes, was good enough that I listened to it three times, the last time with a pen in hand.

Chee, like me, is firmly in the character first, plot second camp. For him, character is destiny and he offers concrete suggestions on how to interrogate your characters until you discover (I’m paraphrasing here) the specific things that could only happen to them, because of a combination of who they are (fate) and the decisions they make (free will). In this way, you arrive at your plot.

When I’m advising other authors, I say you have to know two big things: what does your character want more than anything? How far will they go to get it? But you can’t jump to these questions first and expect immediate answers (trust me, I’ve tried). You work toward the big questions by figuring out all the other stuff. What family was this character born into or raised in? How many siblings? Was money tight? What about religion? First love? First heart break? Vocation? How do they portray themselves to the world? What are they blind to in themselves? How would their employer describe them? Their best friend? Their lover? Their parent? Who do they envy? Who do they pity? What about themselves do they hate most? Hide most? Chee recommends a number of exercises including subjecting your characters to the questions in a Tarot Reading. He shares Zola’s cue card exercise.

Chee’s lecture was also a timely reminder to slow down. To cultivate patience. Characters are a little like very good friends. Relationships are built over long stretches of time. No one shows you their skeleton closet right away and even if they do, it takes a while before you know them well enough to intuit the secrets they are reluctant to reveal.

And anyway, “the story of a life is not a novel,” says Chee. You dream up a life story, yes. But then, you must be intentional, picking and choosing what to reveal and in what order. Without intentional shape, there’s no propulsive drive, no taut rope leading the reader from first page to last. Chee’s craft talk got my mind whirling. Afterward, I managed to eke out something approximating a scene. Turns out this is also where inspiration comes from: other books, other authors.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

Character is king

Like everyone else with a Netflix account, I was obsessed with the first season of Stranger Things. The Stephen King font and creepy opening music, the retro 80s vibe, that nerdy kid with no teeth....all of it hooked me.

Lit Reactor were also fans and Max Booth III wrote a great column about what the show can teach us about characterization. Without giving away any spoilers, let me summarize a couple of the key points:

1. Don't introduce a character with a massive exposition dump, unless you want to bore your reader. Reveal your characters gradually; allow the reader to meet them over time through the course of the story. Think about how we get to know people in our lives...bit by bit over time, through what they say and do and how they look and how others interact with them. Why should characters we meet on the page be any different?

“Think of exposition as narrative calories. You’re only allowed 2000 of them per book, so you better spread that shit out or you’re going to get hungry awfully fast.”

— Max Booth III

2. Create nuanced characters. You can write a scene - as the writers of Stranger Things do - where two characters are in conflict but no one is really the bad guy. This, I think, is more often than not how conflict works in the real world. Both people act poorly. Or there is a misunderstanding and each person acts according to their narrow understanding of the situation. Heroes and villains are boring. Anti-heros are compelling. Villains who have endearing qualities, who can evoke even a bit of empathy, are more interesting.

3. Play around with stereotypes. Everyone expects the highschool Queen Bee to be a one-note bully. But what if she's not? What if she's deeply insecure about her dyslexia? Or is revealed to be heroic?

4. Character is King. Above plot and setting and scene, there is character first and foremost. Nothing makes me more perplexed than a character who acts in an inauthentic way; this is what happens when characters act in service to the plot. Ask yourself: is this really what this person would do, how they would feel? And be honest! Sometimes the plot as you originally envisioned it has to change. My advice: Create complex interesting characters and then follow where they lead.

Character, first. Then: plot

Character is foundational to stories. If you’ve hit a road block in the plot and aren’t sure what happens next, the solution can be found in your characters. Over at Glimmer Train (RIP) MFA director Josh Henkin explores the link between plot and character. Like me, he argues that plot is discovered by interrogating character: "My graduate students often tell me they have trouble with plot, but what they're really telling me is they have trouble with character. I remind my students to ask themselves a hundred questions about their characters. Better yet, they should ask themselves a thousand questions, because in the answers to those questions lie the seeds of a narrative." This is a truth I know and yet somehow often forget. When you're stuck on something, go back to character.

An important caveat when it comes to characters: beware accidentally writing a rotten egg.

ps. I offer a manuscript evaluation service. If you have a draft that is in need of feedback, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

Character alignment

Originally posted: March 18, 2016

A podcast I love is Imaginary Worlds, a show about "how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief." Even though I'm not a sci fi/ fantasy nut, I'm  hooked on this show. Mainly because it gets at what I am interested in: story telling and fiction-making.

The most recent episode, on the topic of character, is especially instructive. Good versus evil and all the shades (six, to be exact) in between.

The Three Types of Evil

1. Evil but law-abiding: a character like Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter books whose uses rules as a way to enact her cruelty but would never act outside of the law. Remember: Umbridge was never a Death Eater. But maybe only because that was "illegal."

2. Evil but neutral about the law: a character like Voldemort who cares nothing for laws and institutions and definitely does not mind killing even loyal followers when they cease to be of use.

3. Chaotic Evil: an anarchist villain whose only motivation is upheaval. The Joker!

It's a valuable exercise to think about character in this more in-depth way. Beyond morality, how do your imaginary friends interact with the law? Kirk and Spock are both good but one is law-abiding and the other will happily bend the rules. And that difference is where the conflict in their relationship lies, it's what makes the dynamic between them rich. Or consider Marvel heroine Jessica Jones who is actually good but wants so desperately to be neutral, a lone wolf. The conflict in the show then becomes Jessica Jones versus herself. Of course there's also a dastardly villain but this internal battle of woman vs. herself is the true emotional heart of the story.

Go listen to Imaginary Worlds to hear about the rest. The episode is called "Why they fight" and it runs 23 minutes.

Rotten eggs

Originally published June 17, 2020

You know when you’re baking, cracking eggs into a bowl and one is rotten? This happened to me once: the green and grey ooze slipped between my fingers, the sulphur turned my stomach. A bad book is a rotten egg. That stink, it lingers. When I say bad book I don’t mean purple prose or dud dialogue. When I say bad, I mean dangerous. Recently I had the ill luck of what seemed like a carton, a rash of rotten eggs.

Crimes against fiction: an incomplete catalogue

There was the historical fiction wherein the only Indigenous characters were dead, their ghosts floating around. The book where every female character was either a virgin or a whore. (The writer is a misogynist, I texted a friend. That’s it. That’s the review.) And the YA I can only describe as a smorgasbord fit for a glutton for punishment. The cast included a predatory gay man, a gay kid whose sexual assault was a weak plot device in service to the straight protagonist’s betterment, and a one-note single mother with a neglected child (Black, natch). By contrast, the two-dimensional trans character was a relief. At least the kid didn’t get killed or beaten up. The whole mess, slap-dash and badly written, reeked of what it likely was: a cishet author trying to capitalize on #trends and a publisher asleep at the wheel. Or worse: rotten egging the author on.

Then came the novel about two urbanites - a Black transgender woman and a bi-racial man - who, on a whim, take a cycling holiday in rural Spain. Naturally, the author is an old white guy. And like Lionel Shriver delivering a keynote in a Sombrero, every beat of his book twanged false. From the conceit of the trip to the characters’ ease on the trail to the cringe-worthy rap lyrics to the way the man repeatedly thought of his best friend as if she was a man. Trans women are women. The end. If you’re going to write about characters who are nothing like you, do your homework. Google hiking + Black and traveling while trans for a start. I get it. The book was an elaborate troll, the literary equivalent of Black face. Hint: if you drip contempt for Black and Trans people in real life, it’s going to show in your fiction. What’s amazing to me is a publisher (in 2019!) gave this pathetic temper tantrum a platform.

The heart breaker was the book by an author whose work I’d previously enjoyed. For 200+ pages it had me. Excellent prose. A propulsive plot. An Indigenous point-of-view character with a redemption story arc. But if you know even one true thing about the way Indigenous people are treated, you’ll guess what came next. The Indigenous character, the only one in the book, was murdered by the white protagonists who drugged him first to make it look like he was drunk, then set the building on fire, so that after he burned inside everyone thought he’d caused the accident. It was played off to the reader as a mistaken case of “self defence.” This is why Indigenous authors get up in arms when settlers write about them. THIS IS WHY. Because it’s not enough they are being murdered by cops and civilians in real life, writers must kill them on the page too. Look, I’m sure the author’s intentions were good. But you can’t be ham-fisted about Indigenous justice. You can’t prioritize plot twists over politics, not when the real life stakes are so high.

What’s the harm? It’s only fiction, sure.

In this, the year of Our Lord twenty bloody twenty, I can’t believe I still need to spell this out:

1. The unrelenting imagery of dead Indigenous people in fiction desensitizes us to their deaths in real life so that we don’t hold killers or governments or oil and mining companies accountable, so we don’t demand justice.

2. Trans people are still fighting for basic equality because society refuses to recognize their genders. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Books that get this twisted, books featuring characters who confuse their best friend’s gender, are piling on to the problem, preventing trans people from having basic human rights.

3. Perpetuating the myth of the predatory gay man makes straights hysterical about their children’s real life teachers or the man next door.

Reading is a powerful education/ miseducation tool. Through a story, we step into someone else’s body and experience the world as them. And if we go gallivanting in Spain with two Black characters, one of whom is trans, who don’t at any point fear for their safety or get dirty looks or hassled at the airport then when the Black and trans people in our lives or on the news tell us about the bigotry they experienced, we are less likely to believe them.

Readers trust authors

But…but…I hear someone say. Yeah, you there in the front, Satan’s Advocate. I hear you arguing readers aren’t stupid. They know fiction is imaginary. Sure they do. That must be why readers assume every debut novel is autobiography, why people keep asking if I was an immigration lawyer. That must be why the husband of an author I know got dirty looks after she published a story about an affair.

A couple of years ago, I was at a literary festival watching an author read a passage from her novel. It was a sex scene between a woman and her Indigenous lover. He was described in animalistic terms. There may even have been references to bestiality. I was sitting with a group of Indigenous authors. I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me. I can’t begin to imagine what they felt, hearing this white lady read this passage and knowing that everyone else in the packed theatre (mostly other white people) was hearing it too. We were all made complicit then, in that display of settler arrogance, as we listened to yet another incarnation of the Noble Savage fever dream. Afterward, at the signing table, readers came up to the author and asked “So is this accurate? Is this what life is like in the North?” “Yes,” she said, and blithely scribbled her name in their books.

Tell the truth

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.”

— Oscar Wilde

There is a contract we enter into when we read a story. The author assumes authority; the reader suspends disbelief. Using the tools of craft we train the reader to trust us, to accept every word on the page. Fiction shapes the way readers understand the world, thereby influencing the world itself. We have a responsibility then to tell the truth.

The truth is not a tired trope or a dangerous stereotype. The truth is something you discover with humility, research, empathy, and the wise counsel of Subject Matter Experts (or as some people call them, Sensitivity Readers). When you don’t tell the truth—

Sorry. Let me rephrase that.

When you lie.

When you lie and claim that Black people are as safe as white people in all spaces. That queer people enjoy the same privileges as straight people. When you stubbornly insist a woman is a man. When you perpetuate the idea that the only good Indian is a dead one or a Noble Savage. When you tell these lies in black ink, with the authority of the printed page, you are either incredibly irresponsible or an asshole. Take your pick. And in telling these lies, you are making actual people’s real lives more difficult, more fraught, more dangerous.

How to do it then, how to write from outside your perspective? Glad you asked.

Bury your tropes

Originally published: July 1, 2019

Recently in a fiction workshop someone asked the question every sensible writer dreads: how do I write characters who are outside my own personal experience, who are not white/ straight/ cis? I say that every sensible writer dreads this question because in my experience the ones who steam roll right in with more bluster than caution are morons. And their lazy attitude is doing everyone - their readers, their characters, and other writers - a disservice.

HUMILITY

Begin with humility, I told the group in my workshop. Your ignorance is an uncovered manhole and if you’re not careful, you’ll topple in. For example, do you have just one gay character in your cast? Does the character die? Does the death happen soon after the character finds love? I’m not psychic. Your character is a trope (google: Bury Your Gays). This is why we must begin with humility. Because, to quote a certain blustering steamroller, of the known unknowns.

RESEARCH

What we are striving toward in our fiction is truth. Accuracy, veracity. And how can you paint a realistic portrait of, for example, a non-binary character, if you are cis? Without humility, without research, without knowledge, guess what you’ll do? You’ll make that character magical. Or die. Or both.

Friends are a great resource. I’ve been helped along the way by so many of mine. For example, In Indonesian there is one word for temperature hot and a different one for chilli hot and these words are pedas and panas and non-Indo speakers can never remember which one is which and this is such a fantastic nugget that I was like a child on Christmas when I used it in a story. And also the contraction “Indo” is wonderful. How was I ever going to know that on my own? (That story, by the way, is called Lord of the Manor and it was published in The Dalhousie Review.) So step two: have a diverse group of friends. But that’s really just life advice.

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition.”
- Daniel Kahneman

Devour books and articles and whatever you can get your hands on to help you understand the worldview and background of your character. Read other fiction featuring characters like the one you want to create. If your character is Muslim, please read books written by Muslim authors. Seek out interviews with the authors of these books. A while back I was listening to Jen Sookfong Lee on the podcast Can’t Lit. She was talking about naming her Chinese characters and the importance of choosing names that could be pronounced by Chinese parents. I immediately filed that nugget of knowledge away for later. (Thanks, Jen)

Sensitivity readers are professionals you can hire to steer you clear of those manholes. Remember the known unknowns!

A STORY

Months ago, while was casting my new novel, I created this fantastic character called Emmanuelle. She’s a 13th-generation Nova Scotian from an evangelical family with a minister father (hence her name). Em is a teacher and an extrovert. She’s got a rowdy group of friends who come to her apartment and sit around painting their nails and watching Survivor (this is circa 2001). I know her apartment, the bo-ho chic furniture and wall hangings, the sticky kitchen floor, the triangular rainbow sticker just beside the peep hole on her front door, the humid bathroom with its patch of black mould by the tub that always returns no matter how often it gets scrubbed away. I have an image of Emmanuelle too, tall with very dark skin and tight curls that spray out the top of her head like a fountain. She is wonderful. I know her so well I can hear her voice, deep, a little husky, a singer who might break out in jubilant song at any moment. She sang in her church choir for nearly two decades and though she threw over faith when she came out, she still loves all the old gospel hymns.

But then I was plotting out the book and because Em’s not the main character, because she’s a semi-minor actor who is there in service to the main character (as all the characters are of course), the plot dictated that she had to die. And at some hideous point I realized what I had been about to do. Kill my only lesbian character. Worse, kill her in order to trigger an emotional epiphany for the straight dude. (That’s two tropes, by the way) I was in Vancouver having dinner with Dina Del Bucchia. I told her my dilemma. I probably had my hands over my head, quite possibly tugging on my hair. Dina was kind but the verdict was unanimous. So now I’m back to the drawing board with the plot. Because, I want to be fair to my characters and one gay character getting killed in a book full of gay characters is fine but what I was doing was diving face first into a manhole.

KNOW YOUR TROPES

Here is what happens. Gay and trans characters die so often in fictional stories, we see this plot point repeat over and over, and then it becomes a cliche that’s lodged into our brains as fact. (The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about this cognitive bias in chapter five of his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.)

Then when we straight/ cis writers sit down to write a gay or trans character we unconsciously reach for whatever information we have and up comes this tired refrain, which we don’t even realize is a trope, and we unthinkingly, unconsciously, repeat it on the page. It is a self perpetuating cycle. This is the danger of writing from outside of your own experience. Without caution and care, without humility, without research, you will perpetuate a lazy cycle that does everyone a disservice, most of all the community of real people who you are trying to recreate on the page. And then if your ego is fragile because you’re a special snowflake, and someone calls you on your bull shit, you’ll dig your heels in and yell: “Political correctness has gone too far! Don’t tell me what to do! This is fiction and I’m a writer!” And the rest of us will be over here, eyes rolling out of our damn heads.

And let’s pause to think about this trope for a moment. Why are all these gay and trans characters dying all the time? Is it because the rest of us have a deep buried hatred of them and are enacting mass murder on the page because we can’t do it in real life? Think on that and tell me if you still feel good about knocking off your only trans character.

I don’t know if Em will make an appearance in this book I’m writing because I’m reworking the plot. But she’s in my head now so she’s bound to turn up somewhere. I’m not killing this particular darling. I’m saving her for later.

MANHOLES TO SKIRT

It helps to know all the ways you can unintentionally fuck up. I brainstormed a few tropes to get us started. Please chime in, in the comments, if you know any others. I am still learning just like everyone else.

The magical/ wise old black man

Related: the magical Indigenous character

Indigenous characters who are described in animalistic terms. Please. NO.

The predatory lesbian (Who invented this nonsense - religion? hysterical men? all of the above?)

I love Apu Nahasapeemapetilon and in my opinion (not every brown person’s opinion) he works because The Simpsons is a show full of tropes. That’s the whole gag. But if there’s only one brown character in your book and they are driving a cab or working at a 7-11 and have an accent then you have FAILED. Fifty points to Slytherin if said 7-11 guy dies.

The white saviour

The token. You know how on TV shows the token black or gay or brown character has all white/ straight friends? Yeah. That’s not a thing in real life.

In fantasy stories: the good guys are white, the bad guys are black. (Chandler Bing voice: Could you be more racist?)

Adorable asians. RO Kwan writes about this stereotype playing out in real life so have a read and take care with your descriptions.

SEMINAL

Last Fall Tom was reading a book by John Updike. I don’t know which one because it’s not important. Tom said: It’s about a man who leaves his pregnant wife for a younger woman. Uh-huh, I said, bored already with this predictable bit of masturbatory fantasy certain male authors seem keen to replicate. Then a few days later, Tom reported that the book had taken a dark turn. Let me guess, I said. The wife goes nuts and kills the baby? Tom was amazed by my psychic abilities. How did you know? he asked. Have you already read this book?

LOL. I’ve read enough books by male authors, particularly of a certain vintage, to know that some (#notall but #toomany) men are lazy and incapable of writing realistic female characters. To them women = hysterical, doe-eyed, back-stabbing, dangerous, sex-pot, BOOBS. They get pregnant and either terminate the pregnancy in some back alley way that results in death or they throw their babies off a cliff because…I don’t know??… bitches be cray, I guess. Or more likely because on some fundamental level these men believe we aren’t responsible enough to care for children and therefore shouldn’t have the right to decide what happens inside our uteruses. Yeah. Suck on that nasty thought for an hour.

We have a running joke in our house about these seminal authors and their jerk off fiction. It’s also the subject of ridicule all over the internet. If you’re a man writing about a woman, DO BETTER. My pal Jamie Fitzpatrick is a great example of a straight man who writes convincing, complicated, wonderful female characters so I know it can be done. It probably helps if you respect ladies and believe we are equal members of society. Once again, just some basic life advice: don’t be a raging asshole.

BE SPECIFIC

Specificity is the soul of strong writing. Real life is specific and your fiction should be too. Every time a light-skinned brown actor plays a south Indian on screen, an angel in heaven dies. Skin colour isn’t something you just slap on a character like height or glasses. Skin colour is specific. People from north India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have lighter skin than anyone from south India or Sri Lanka. Even in Sri Lanka, there are significant differences. Tamils are darker than Sinhalese. Burghers are even lighter. Some could pass for white. And why does it matter? Because shadeism is real and pernicious and you have to know the character’s skin tone if you’re going to know the most fundamental things about them. By the way, if you don’t know what shadeism is, you have no business writing from the point of view of a brown character. Go do some homework. Ask your loved ones who are brown (not strangers or acquaintances…please don’t force strangers to teach you things you could learn on the internet). Hire a sensitivity reader.

AGENCY

Recently, I was sharing the stage with another brown author and the moderator asked her the following question, AND I QUOTE: “I was surprised by your book because your characters are from Iran but they didn’t seem oppressed.” This is the kind of bullshit non-white writers have to deal with but that’s a post for another day. Please don’t be like that ignorant moderator. Remember that everyone has agency and all your characters should have some degree of it too. This is really important, especially when you are writing about characters who come from communities that have been sidelined in the western canon. Making characters passive to their fate is lazy writing. Find where their agency lies and explore it on the page.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Diversity on the page begins with diversity off the page. Are all the radio programs and podcasts you listen to narrated by straight, cis, white people? Ditto the books and essays and magazine and online articles you read? What about television and movies? What about the people in your life? Diversify your life and you’ll find it easier to bring that richness to the page.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here. I teach a single session online workshop on writing from outside your perspective (it’s called Writing Who You Don’t Know. Get in touch for more details or a quote if you are interested.) Meantime, here’s some further reading:

In Appropriate: Interviews with Canadian authors on the writing of difference edited by Kim Davids Mandar

Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging

At Book Riot: 7 Manholes to skirt

At The Belladonna: a run down of some familiar tropes

At Midnight Breakfast: an illustrated guide

At Lit Hub: a wonderful essay by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda

Write who you don’t know

Originally posted: December 4, 2020

The Canadian Press interviewed me about every blowhard’s favourite topic: authors writing outside their perspectives. How do we create characters whose identities (skin colour, class, sexuality, gender, disability) are different from our own? Is it possible to ace the job and should we even try?

When the request came in, I almost turned it down. Despite what certain dinosaurs might like to believe, this isn’t a straight forward subject. It’s complicated and nuanced and too often dismissed as censorship. (As if there’s a giant mute button Brown people can press to silence writers we despise. HA HA HA. WE WISH.) I wasn’t about to let some unknown reporter twist my words to serve the Old White Man Agenda.

But my publicist assured me the journalist was sensible so I gave her quite a bit of my time and I’m not sorry. You can read the piece here. I was glad to see the article included interviews with other authors including Kim Davids Mandar who edited In | Appropriate, an excellent collection of interviews all about this subject. If I was the head of an MFA program, I would make the book required reading.

This Fall I’ve run two online workshops on “Writing Who You Don’t Know.” The first was for a small group in Alberta and the second for about 70 writers from all over the place including the US and the UK. The turnout at the second workshop was shocking, especially given it was Saturday morning and a number of west coast heroes rose before dawn to Zoom in. But then again, maybe it’s not so surprising. This is difficult work, tricky to pull off. Traditional how-to manuals offer no guidance, too little attention is paid to the subject in classes, and the homogeneity of the industry ensures there’s no sober second thought. Then some poorly written, trope-infested book comes out, the Internet pounces, and all the fragile snowflakes whine about how they will never again win a Booker just because they are straight white men (oh, for a mute button).

All to say, I’m here to help. I’ve got a one-hour workshop and a two-hour workshop, both test-driven and well received. And listen, if you’ve been following me here for any length of time, you know I’m not a charlatan. I’m a thorough and meticulous researcher. I put together thoughtful workshops that give attendees food for thought as well as practical craft advice. If you belong to an organization that would like to host an online workshop, get in touch for more details, references, and the price.

Welcome

New year means a new website and some new projects. First up: this semester I am the (virtual) Writer-in-Residence at Memorial University. In this role, I’ll be teaching four stand-alone craft workshops. They are free, online, and open to anyone, anywhere and you can register for them now. I’ll also be popping up here and there on line and on the radio so keep an eye on the events page.

To kick off the residency, I dropped into the State of the Arts video series for an interview with Lisa Moore. Elsewhere on the internet, I had the great pleasure of interviewing authors Xaiver Campbell and Alexander MacLeod for the Sparks Literary Festival. You can watch both videos below. (We taped these in person sessions when Covid cases in the province were near zero, there was no community spread, and life was much more free and easy in St. John’s. Sigh).

In print, I wrote a column for Maclean’s on the new Netflix series Bridgerton. It’s in the February issue and available online.

This website is very much DIY and still a work in progress. If you’re wondering what’s happened to all the old blog posts… some are here and some will be showing up in the next few months. If there’s a specific post you want, leave a comment and I’ll dig it up if I can. Three of the most popular posts are now housed in the new resources section.

Join Lisa Moore for an interview with Sharon Bala, the 2021 Writer-in-Residence at Memorial University's English Department. And don't forget to check out Sh...

Poetry police

Originally posted: January 25, 2021

During the Inauguration, National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman stole the show with her poem “The Hill We Climb”. I watched the ceremony the same way I read my reviews - breath held, jaw clenched, and squinting - because remember the confetti canon and the armed terrorists who stormed the capitol? Luckily, it was fine. No one got assassinated and I had the privilege of witnessing Gorman’s performance in real time. It was a tour de force and 99% of the millions who saw her agreed. But you know…there’s always the one per cent.

The next day, a fellow author posed a question on Facebook (I know, I know): I'm not a poet, they said, and asked the experts to weigh in. Was Amanda Gorman's "poem" any good?

This is a writer whose work I have long admired. Their latest book is currently sitting on my coffee table. I wasn’t expecting the professional hit to come from inside the house, you know? Critique is one thing but imagine someone solicited opinions on your book by derisively calling it a “novel”? I waded into the comments to find out what the poets were saying.

Those Himalayas of the Mind

“people need heroines… it just gets trying to see sentimentality elevated to art”
“Well, the problem is, people will now think, oh that's what good poetry is. When it isn't.”
“it is what a lot of people would LIKE poetry to be. Feel-goodish stuff.”
“can we expect anything different from officially sanctioned and mandated poetry?”
“It is a speech, not a poem.”
“will soon be forgotten”
“the whole thing was a lie… and stank of currying favour…Makes sense that she has presidential aspirations.”
“If she sticks with it, maybe, MAYBE, depending on more factors than I can name, she will write a poem….I want to be generous to her, so I can sincerely say, you had a lot of feeling there, Amanda, if you like, if it gives you something you can't get anywhere else, just keep going.”

Oh, you thought that one was comically bad? I saved this gem for last (formatting: mine):

“I did not like the poem.
She was using words that should not be in poems.
It's more a rockstar performance than art.”

The House of Poetry

At last check there were 300+ comments and most of them were not of this ilk. Savvier poets pointed out that what Gorman wrote and performed was indeed a poem, of a type classified as occasional poetry, that it comes from traditions of spoken word, slam, and hip-hop, all of which are meant to be experienced live and in the moment, not read off the page like narrative and lyric poetry. My favourite was the commenter who prosaically declared: “The house of poetry has many rooms.”

The poets who move between rooms are a generous lot. They were offering up a hell of a lot of free educational labour and I’d like to believe some of the grumps took note and learned something. But, as one persistent commenter made clear, over and over: hope is for dupes and liars. So more likely they stayed stubbornly put in the draughty old wing, sucking on their sour grapes.

Just so we’re clear: Amanda Gorman is a Harvard graduate. Her unpublished poetry collection is a bestseller. None of this derision matters a whit to her success. But some of these writers, I imagine, are teaching and mentoring less fortunate emerging poets. Is this the level of arrogance and ignorance they bring to those encounters? Easy to see why so many young writers, especially writers of colour, feel disillusioned with traditional creative writing programs. Because often this kind of critique - which has more to do with who you are than the quality of your work - is a hell of a lot more subtle and insidious. The burn is baked into the subtext and you can’t quite articulate why you feel the criticism is destructive rather than constructive.

So it’s instructive to consider what the critics found triggering. Gorman’s ambition, for one. How dare she? (Once at a party, while I was out of town, a cranky old poet snarked about my ambition to my husband, and then asked him not to tell me what she’d said. lol)

The laziest critique in the world is to ridicule what you don’t understand. Gorman’s spoken word influences are foreign to her detractors so they dismiss her art as a speech. A stump speech. She’s just gunning for the Oval Office, after all.

Powerful people have elevated her to Capitol Hill and put a microphone into her hand. It must be because she’s young and they can bend her to their will, use her as a mouthpiece of the state. The trigger here is agency. Who gave her that? Let’s pretend we can take it away.

The hope in Gorman’s poem is belittled by people who, conveniently, have no idea what it’s like to be a Black woman in America facing down a climate catastrophe that’s going to plague her long after the rest of us are dust. Gorman’s hope is an act of resistance, not a folly of youth. It’s also the burden of resilience that’s foisted on Black people, and women, in particular. The poetry police are shockingly unimaginative.

And then of course there are art’s perennial twin questions: is this any good and who gets to decide? For too long a homogeneous cabal have been the arbiters of taste. But now the times, they are a changing. The house of poetry has built new wings. And some of the old guard are….well old and scared, it seems like.

The Myth of Zero Sum

Gorman is a triple threat - young, Black, and a woman. I’m sure every bitter poet on that Facebook thread would balk at the insinuation that their dislike stems from racism. Fine, that’s their truth. Here’s the incontrovertible truth: Black women are rare in poetry workshops. They’re almost never students or teachers or included in the canon. Because the whole damn institution is racist. And when you are part of the institution, some of that stink sticks to you. You must be vigilant about hosing it down (yes, me too. All of us). But if you don’t pay attention, you won’t even notice. It’s 2021. I can’t believe I’m still having to spell this out.

It’s hard out there for a poet. There’s no fame, no fortune, entirely too little respect. When you are part of a marginalized group and the podium and shelf space is limited and the publisher says: “we love this book but we’ve already got an immigrant novel coming out this year” (lol. true story) it can be complicated to witness someone else’s success. It’s easy to mistake the game for zero sum. It’s easy to denigrate the perceived competition, especially when you think the competition should be more marginal than you. It’s the same ugly psychology that drives the anti-immigration sentiment in immigrant communities. I paid my dues; why should this new guy have it easy?

Here’s what many writers of colour have figured out: we’re better off working together than against each other. Constructive critique is necessary. Envy is not. So we indulge our sour grapes in private. Then we get the fuck over ourselves and cheer for the home team.

What you know

Originally posted: June 30, 2016

I once adjudicated a junior short fiction contest. Young writers ages 12 -20 submitted their stories and essays and I was given the monumental task of picking winners. When I told a couple of teacher friends that I was doing this they told me to expect cutting. Cutting is important, my teacher friends said. Teenagers always write about characters who cut themselves.

I didn't read any self harm stories but there were some common themes: New York City, spies, zombies, violent crime, and the tragic deaths of healthy young people. The body count was high. Everything about these pieces felt familiar. Maybe a little too familiar. I was a teenage writer once, pouring all my imagination and purple prose into page after page on WordPerfect. My stories were invariably about teenagers on an island, being picked off by a serial killer (spoiler: the killer was one of the teenagers). I knew nothing about deserted islands or serial killers just as I suspect most of these young writers know little of spies and violent crime. What I wanted to say to all of them was: never mind all this; write what you know!

Because here's the thing: there was a lot of talent in these pieces. Evocative scene setting, beautiful turns of phrase, and endings that surprised and thrilled me. But a lot of it was overshadowed by the emphasis on high-stakes plot. Occasionally, a glimmer of some real truth, some messy uncomfortable human emotion, shone through and that's when I got interested.

The problem - I think - is when we are told to write what we know, we think: what I know is boring; no one is going to read that. My advice is more specific: focus on the real feelings and emotions of which you have intimate knowledge. Interrogate those areas of your life which are most painful, most awkward, most cringe-inducing. And then write about those things.

Write about being bullied. Write about feeling inadequate. Write about being abandoned by your friends in the cafeteria. Write about failure. Write about loneliness. And then if you want to set the story in New York City, by all means. Or make your characters werewolves. Have them join MI5. Send them to Saturn.  If your writing is driven by real emotions and feelings, if writing makes me you feel unsettled and deeply uncomfortable, then the setting and characters and plot will matter very little. Because the things you invent will be secondary to the emotions that you know. 

I'd like to go back in time and give this advice to myself: You'll never be this age again. And when you're older you won't have access to the intense, complex emotions you have now. Write this stuff down.

It's low stakes (emotionally) to construct a high-stakes plot that is removed from the reality of one's own life. But when you make yourself vulnerable, when the act of writing feels high-stakes to the writer... that's when the story gets real, gets interesting.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

Required reading

In my study, a corner of shelf space is devoted to how-to manuals, books I read with a red pen and highlighter in hand. These are my life savers, the guides I return to whenever I'm floundering.

Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway - the closest thing to a creative writing text book you can get and fully worth the price tag.

In Appropriate edited by Kim Davids Mander - This collection of interviews with Canadian authors tackles the question: how do you write from outside your perspective and should you even try? This is absolutely essential reading for anyone who is trying to conjure characters whose ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and/ or disability are not their own.

Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and About Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging - And this one is essential for everyone in the publishing industry especially crucial for settler/ immigrant authors who have Indigenous characters in their work.

From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler - immensely helpful when I was first starting to work on The Boat People. Butler advocates a system of imagining individual scenes, jotting them down on cue cards, then once you have sufficient cards, organizing them into an outline. And then putting pen to paper to write a first draft. I fell down on the outline part but being able to take each scene as they came, one at a time, really made the prospect of writing a first draft less overwhelming.

Aspects of the Novel by EM Forster - short and sweet, illuminating for readers as well as writers.

How Fiction Works by James Wood - teaches you how to take apart literature as you would a clock so you can understand what works, what doesn't, and most importantly why. Wood taught me how to read like a writer, critically and carefully.

Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer. This book is a delight.

Confession: I’m not a fan of Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s amusing but was maybe too rudimentary for the stage I was at when I first read it.

Pay attention to your boredom

Originally posted: February 19, 2016

Podcasts are like opinions these days; everyone seems to have one. One of my favourites is Startup (the podcast about what it's like to start your own business). It's hosted by former NPR/ Planet Money guy Alex Blumberg and it's fantastic. If you haven't already listened, go have a binge.

“The first draft always sucks. Things want to be bad... the only way to get that stuff to be good is with editing.”
                                                           — Alex Blumberg

I was listening to this episode one evening and it stopped me short. Blumberg talks about how he and his team create their podcasts, how every second of tape is obsessively edited to catch and hold the listener's attention, to educate as well as entertain, and just how much effort goes into making that happen. Skip ahead to about 21 minutes in and listen to what he says about editing. If you're a writer, it will 100 per cent resonate.

"The first draft always sucks," Blumberg says. "Things want to be bad. Talented people with great ideas still produce horrible stuff and the only way to get that stuff to be good is with editing."

Let's savour that for a moment. Things want to be bad. The only solution is editing.

A few beats later, he says: "pay attention to where you are confused, annoyed, bored. A big part of editing is paying attention to your boredom."

If you listen to the episode, you'll see that much of what Blumberg and co. do in their edits is straight forward deletion, skipping past the verbal diarrhea, straight to the good stuff. And this is much of what I do in my edits too. Delete. Delete. Delete. Sentences, words, scenes, whole characters and subplots. Delete. Delete. Delete.

Originally, there were 50 extra (boring) words and the start of this post. Delete!

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

Underwater writing

Originally posted: December 7, 2016

Years ago, I took a master class with Sarah Selecky. The class was tiny. Five of us students plus Sarah around her kitchen table every Monday night for five weeks. I learned a lot in that month - how to critique other people's work, for example, and by extension how to think critically about my own. But the most important skill Sarah taught me was underwater writing.

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Submerge yourself fully in the scene. Smell, taste, hear, see, and feel every detail. Are you there? Are you squirming? Is it hard work? Good. Now write from that place; write from within the scene. Don't write about the scene. Don't write in circles around the scene. Don't hover above. Write from inside.

“Don’t be deceived by well crafted sentences that write around an experience. Write the experience. Don’t write about it. Write from within it.” — Sarah Selecky

How do you know if you're doing it properly? Watch for the red flags. Abstractions are red flags. Don't say Romeo and Juliet are in love. What does love mean? How does it manifest for these characters? Show us the specific emotions and actions.

Efficient language is another red flag (ditto: cliches). Words like happy, angry, and impatient have become a kind of short hand, so shopworn as to be skimmable. Don't tell us a character is sad. Show us the rapid blinking of the watery eyes. Let us feel the slump of the shoulders. Conjure melancholy without using that word.

The word "something" is another flag. Like efficient language and abstractions it is a first draft placeholder. But in the revisions, you must articulate what the something is.

Don't trust the word suddenly. Cross it out. Make the action feel sudden.

Once you get the hang of it, cliched and lazy writing is easy to spot. A more pernicious problem is beautiful language. "Don't be deceived by well crafted sentences that write AROUND an experience," Sarah told us. "Write the experience. Don't write ABOUT it. Write from WITHIN it."

This is the toughest part of writing. Articulating every emotion and action, that's slow going, gruelling work. It's the real reason writers are tortured and turn to hard liquor. Writing is drowning.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

The sanity thief

Originally posted: February 18, 2020

2019 got off to a rocky start. For reasons I still can’t fully articulate, I fell into an anxiety spiral in the first half of the year. It felt like one of those Escher paintings where you’re climbing stairs to nowhere that never end.

It began during a quiet period, when I was home and not travelling, not even really doing much book promotion, supposedly stress-free. That’s when the anxiety crept up. All stealthy like. Like a bank robber. To steal my sanity. And for a long time I didn’t realize it was even anxiety. Or rather, I knew I was anxious but also, I thought I was dying. Because these are the wholly rational thoughts anxiety produces. You. Are. Dying. Now.

Helpfully, my best friend pointed out that mortality is the human condition. We’re all dying, Shar, she said, then grinned at her own cleverness because she’s perverse like that. We were having cocktails at Sassafraz after one of my events and I told her I was putting those words into my next book as revenge.

Sometime in the spring, I realized I wasn’t actually dying. Or at least, not right this second and not any faster than any other mostly healthy person my age who occasionally eats kale and zones out in spin class. There was nothing much wrong with my body except a screw had come loose in my head. So then I cast about for the cause. Objectively and subjectively, life was grand. What can be wrong when all your professional pipe dreams have come true? What can be wrong when you have a nice life with people you love in a safe country with free healthcare? What is there to be anxious about?

I’m having a mid-life crisis, I group texted my friends. It’s fucking tedious. Six months and I’m getting it out of my system.

Turns out, I’m the person who gives her midlife crisis a deadline. I’m also the person who does her homework. I took up meditation (Calm is a really excellent app by the way). I began each morning by thinking of three nice things from the day before. I read a bunch of research articles about anxiety and had a long, long chat with a friend who is a cognitive psychologist. I went to one deeply unhelpful and condescending therapy session. I took all my bad feelings and channelled it into my work. I wasn’t totally sure any of these things were getting me closer to a solution. I still felt like an anxious thrumming ball of awful.

And then, one day in September, when I was coming to grips with things and feeling genuinely better, I was listening to Rebecca Traister talking about her book “Good and Mad,” how its unexpected success had lengthened her book tour and how stressful that was and how the fall out was intense, irrational, anxiety. Hello. What’s that? Anxiety caused by book publication? DING DING DING. And yes, let me just acknowledge this is peak first world/ fortunate author problems.

Tom, my doctor, some other people probably, had suggested that perhaps it was publication and publicity and the whole whirlwind of the previous year that was to blame but until I heard another author mirror back my experiences, it was impossible to believe a good thing could cause bad feelings. As Daniel Lavery likes to say, life is a rich tapestry.

This week I was listening to John Green, whose fourth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, went super nova in 2012, talk about his own success and its resulting fall out. His issues, like his success, are so much more intense than mine ever were, but much of what he said, about the bad that comes married to the good, was familiar.

All this to say, if you are an author on year two of an even mildly successful book, feeling crappy for no good reason, it’s not a mid-life crisis. It’s not a catastrophic illness. It’s success. This is what it feels like.

And also! Importantly! It will pass.

There be dragons

Originally posted: July 8, 2019

One Saturday a few months after The Boat People came out, I was at my local nursery, pleasantly hung-over, and feeling optimistic about the fact that this time I would for sure keep the new basil alive (spoiler: I did not). It was one of those sunny, hopeful mornings. And then, while in line, I made the mistake of checking email.

There was a message from a reader. The subject was in all caps, angry and accusing. The message itself was a dissertation, in length, if not quite in cogency. How do I hate your novel? Let me count the ways.

It wasn’t the first or last time a molotov cocktail has landed in my in box. But this one got to me. Something about the timing and the all caps subject line calling me a lazy writer was shocking. It felt so personal and mean, an attack on not just my writing but my whole weekend. I began to shake, right there in the nursery, surrounded by ferns and succulents and other people buying ficus plants. Instinctively, I put the phone away. I blamed myself for being the dumb ass who checks email in line. Good writers don’t distract themselves from the moment. They pay attention. Watch. Store the real world up for later. I vowed to stay off email until Monday. I thought about my new plants, how I was going to spend the day outside, potting and writing. I stopped shaking. I paid, made chit-chat with the cashier, carried my purchases to the car, congratulated myself on being so well adjusted. And then a woman came running out of the nursery waving my wallet.

Now, a year later, I can laugh about it but in the moment that reader’s anger was de-stabalizing to my work, to my ability to focus. I remembered this email the other day while reading Scaachi Koul’s excellent piece about a YA author who stalked a Goodreads reviewer. Yes, you read that right. This author got a bad review, lost all common sense, hunted down the reviewer, and showed up at her door. Let this be a lesson to all of us published authors: Goodreads is not for us.

Before my book came out, I used to be a regular lurker on Goodreads. Whenever I finished  reading a book I really liked, I would go online to see what other readers were saying. My first Goodreads review was a one-star. It popped up while I was still working on the manuscript. Disturbance in the matrix? Break in the time-space continuum? Either way, my days on the site were over. 

Goodreads is for readers. It’s for honest critique and dialogue and yes, sometimes, vitriol, about books. It’s for people who hate the synopsis and rate it one star. It’s for readers who want recommendations. For readers who want to keep and share to be read lists. It’s a democratizing force that bypasses the traditional gatekeepers and allows a wider range of books to gain traction. It’s for book lovers and bloggers. It’s for marketing departments. It’s for trolls (because the whole internet is for trolls). It’s a lot of things for a lot of people. BUT GOODREADS IS NOT FOR WRITERS. It’s a free internet so go on there if you like but I’m telling you right now it’s a mistake.

Because what are we on this earth to do? Write. And there is a limit to how many beatings one’s own ego can take before it begins to impact your work. And trust me, there are enough beatings to go around. There are hideous reviews that can’t be ignored. There are readers who itemize your failures via email or at a book club or event. There are rejections. Prizes you lose, lists that snub you, shops that don’t carry your book, loved ones who won’t read it. Trust me. Enough beatings. You need not go looking for more. And while I’m on the subject, for the love of god, stop googling your name. Get rid of that google alert. Leave it to your mom/ lover/ agent/ editor. GO BACK TO WORK.

Gripes

Originally posted: December 7, 2018

Rebecca wrote this dark comedy of a blog post recently and I was all “SING IT, SISTER.” It’s about the indignities she has endured in her years as a writer. Rebecca has been writing and publishing longer than I have so she’s had to grin and bear more, but I share indignity #4 on her list.

Anyway, like Rebecca, I had mostly wonderful experiences in my debut year as an author and I know I’m incredibly lucky to even be a writer and have work published but there are also moments that make me want to shake my fist. Please enjoy some dark humour…

In March I adjudicated a short story competition. Reading stories and choosing the winner was a pleasure but then the organization tried to scam me out of my payment with the old “the cheque is in the mail” routine. It was not in the mail. Not even after I sent several emails. And then there was radio silence and I started to get seriously concerned. Fortunately, the organization was the PEI Writers’ Guild and I have an acquaintance from PEI. She intervened and then the cheque really was in the mail.

In April I took part in the book club at my local museum (The Rooms in St. John’s). People paid $15 each to attend. The evening was a delight. We had a really big and wonderful audience and the interviewer was fantastic. But the payment took months and several emails on my part. If I don’t pay the plumber within 30 days he charges interest. But some organizations seem to think writers don’t deserve to get paid on time. Anyway, good thing our province has a toothless Status of the Artist legislation, huh?

An organization asked me to give a key note speech at their event. Key note speeches take time, effort, and stress. I wrote back a very polite email (which I put a lot of thought into) where I laid out why I couldn’t work for free, how to get in touch with my agent and negotiate a rate, and then listed a couple of other much cheaper options for how I could help them out. Think I got the courtesy of a reply? Nope.

A group of writers asked me to teach them a private workshop for free. LOL.

FOR REAL THOUGH…WHY THE HELL DO PEOPLE THINK I WANT TO WORK FOR FREE? FOR THE RECORD: I DO NOT.

Once I was on a panel where all the authors were asked to prepare a 10 minute reading. One of the authors yammered on for about 25 minutes while the other author and I stared dolefully at each other. Finally the moderator cut him off (he hadn’t even gotten to his reading yet!). Then we did a Q&A and he kept trying to hog all the air time. Who am I kidding? Of course this happened more than once. And to paraphrase Rebecca, it’s not all male authors of a certain age but it is ALWAYS male authors of a certain age.

Writers are forever being picked up at airports and driven places by strangers. Sometimes it’s innocuous and you make pleasant small talk. Just as often it’s a bloody nightmare. Once, I got into a fight with a driver about “Hilary’s emails.” I hope he wasn’t expecting a tip. In New York, a driver with a Spanish accent complained about “Muslim foreigners.” He didn’t get a tip either. Once, soon after the miscarriage of justice that was the Coulton Bushie trial, a driver talked about why “Indian boys” deserve to get shot.

Hello older man I’ve just met. Please remove your hand from my upper back. Please stop taking every opportunity to randomly touch me as we stand at this registration table making awkward small talk while we wait for our name tags. I’m going to stand waaaaaay over here now and go out of my way to avoid you for the rest of this literary festival.

At a big event, in a room of 500 people where everyone had a copy of my book but most of them hadn’t read it yet, a woman stood to ask a question and shamelessly gave away the ending while the rest of the audience shouted her down. (Not the first time it’s happened either.)

Nasty emails from readers. Yes, really.

I agreed to take part in an event with another author. After the arrangements were made and plane tickets were bought, I found out it was an unmoderated conversation. For an hour. With an author I had previously met once for five minutes in an elevator. I happen to like this author very much and I think the feeling is mutual but it’s really unfair to make authors act as their own moderators. Promoting your own work and moderating a conversation are two very different skills and it’s impossible to move back and forth seamlessly. Fortunately, there were only 7 people in the audience.

Once after I’d given a 45 minute speech that I’d spent a very long time researching and preparing, a man in the audience said: “I haven’t read your book but let me tell you why everything you’ve just said is problematic.” LOL. When it was my turn to reply, I very politely eviscerated him to audience applause. Come at me, bro. But you best not miss.