Enlist Me – By Katherine Fawcett

I love lists.

• Writing them
• Reading them
• Discovering them
• Inventing them

But: does list-writing make one a writer?

• No.
• Yes.
• Maybe.
• Who’s asking?
• What kind of list?
• B-list at best.

If writing is writing is writing, then list-making must count. And if it counts, I must be prolific. Why, I write every day

• Shopping lists
• to-do lists goals
• wish lists
• lists of things I want to do
• places I plan to go lists
• lists of possible baby names
• resolutions
• resolutions I have broken thus far
• daily calorie lists
• lists of two-letter words and q-without-u words, for Scrabble

My lists appear on

• envelopes
• napkins
• the backs of receipts
• school newsletters
• inside book jackets
• phone bills

Although my lists are not clever top-10 lists like David Letterman’s, or fascinating fact-filled lists like Harpers Index, or quirky but useless lists like “the top 10 currencies no longer in circulation,” I don’t just make lists listlessly. Creating them is like quilting my life. And discovering other people’s lists is a secret joy. Like the faded list, in loopy handwriting, of “Appetizer Ideas” I found in my grandmother’s cookbook:

1. Broiled grapefruit
2. Melon ball cocktail
3. Sea food cocktail
4. Pastry snails
5. Dried beef rolls
6. Silver dollar hambugers
7. Bacon wrap-arounds
8. Herring-Appleteaser
9. Savory mushroom dip
10. Hot cheese puffs

Or the:

• Halloween costume ideas list in my brother’s yearbook.
• “Boys I’d kiss” list in the back of my sister’s drawer.
• “Super-powers I Want” list in my son’s math book.
• Anniversary Gift List in my husband’s wallet

Making a list is not only one way of organizing one’s thoughts—it also stimulates the imagination. The vertical nature of a list draws the reader’s (and the writer’s) eye down, rather than across the page. I believe this encourages reading between the lines.

simply
because
there
are
more
lines
to
read
between.

I found lots of reading between the lines in this fictional “List of Chores”:

Daily:

1. Make bed.
2. Pick up clothes.
3. Feed bird.
4. Take fresh water and scraps to Dad.
5. Unload dishwasher.
6. Sweep kitchen floor.
7. Do homework.

Weekly:

1. Vacuum bedroom.
2. Clean bathroom (yes, scrub toilet!)
3. Shovel attic floor.
4. Check status of Missing Person’s Report (on-line is fine).
5. Mow lawn.
6. Change Dad’s bandages.
7. Recycling.
8. Clean bird cage.

Lists of all kinds stimulate my imagination, give shape and order to random thoughts, and help me cut through writers’ block.

Lets face it: what writer doesn’t secretly hope she might one day see her own name on a Best-Seller List?

Being strange and writing by Penny Buswell

I likea challenge when reading or writing. When I was nine I read the whole of Dahl’s Matilda in one weekend, standing on my head. It’s a great book – even upside down with a headrush (and couch textiles imprinted on your face). Ever since then I’ve been contrived with my literary habits. I went through a phase of writing with a purple feather quill and after that I wrote only in intricate calligraphy – until my grade 5 teacher vetoed it.

These days I write on my laptop, initially with the screen turned off, to avoid censuring what I write. My most personal thoughts are freewritten in a journal. There I can dispose of overly emotional or petty thoughts without bothering anyone else. I write the very worst parts in Teeline shorthand.

I have some writing rituals that help me concentrate. The main ones are that I need headphones (no music), I like to be alone and I have to chew Stride Spark B6 B12 vitamin Kinetic Fruit gum. I start with two pieces and then pop another in when the flavour fades. The gum ball gets bigger and bigger and it gets easier to blow bigger and bigger gum bubbles. I like the SNAP noise when they pop and the suction sounds when I chew them in my molars. After a couple of hours the gum chewing gets furious and so does the typing. The faster I type, the faster I chew, SNAP-ing bubbles as I reflect on the next sentence. SNAP SNAP. I thunder on through.

A good bubble is satisfying, it fills out evenly, then tears and slowly expires. During a productive morning I’ll have seven or eight pieces of gum in my mouth, which blow such large bubbles they grow as big as a baseball. A beautiful petally peach baseball that looks like a deflated jellyfish when it pops.

Sometimes the bubble pops badly and sticks to the skin all around my mouth and I gurn wildly as I try to scrape it all back into my mouth. My skin feels sticky. Then chomp chomp chomp, I’m writing again and the pile of gum papers is growing.

Seeking Sanity from Angie Abdou

By Claire Piech

I’ve never gotten along particularly well with my characters. No matter how much I try to coax them into complexity, to elicit cautious sympathy or even love-hate, they refuse. They sit there stubbornly on the page, tongues hanging out of mouths, defying any form of literary prodding. I’ve done everything to get a different reaction from them. In one of my darker moments, I caught myself yelling at my characters, threatening to dump my laptop into a bath full of water if they didn’t shape up soon. Another time, I was so fed up with their laziness that I started killing them off, one by one, until nothing was left except for a story about objects sitting in a house, doing nothing except aging. It’s not that my characters are missing a motive or that they have nothing interesting to do. It is instead that they consistently fall into that black hole of literary missteps – stereotypes.

Seeking sanity, I turned to Angie Abdou, guest author at the 2011 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, for advice.

Piech:  What, in your opinion, is the most essential ingredient to creating real characters that are believable, complex, flawed and authentic?

Abdou: Empathy.

Piech: Out of all the characters you have created, who is your favourite?

Abdou: For some reason, Fly from The Bone Cage jumps into my head when I read this question. I’ve always liked him – probably because he’s the most selfless of my characters. He cares about his friends. He’s not solely motivated by his own selfish desires. Most of my characters tend to be a lot more ego-driven than he is.

Piech: Do you find there is a common trait to many of your characters?

Abdou: My characters are all looking for a way to find meaning in their lives. They’re often at a crux where their identity is fluid. They tend to be somewhat isolated and have trouble making real connections, even with the important people in their lives – their identity and interactions have a performative quality to them.

Piech: How have the characters you have created for your stories changed over the last 10 years?

Abdou: You stumped me here. In some ways, my characters haven’t changed all that much. I am interested (and have always been interested) in deeply flawed characters who often make bad decisions but hopefully readers root for them anyway, simply because they’re human. My characters tend to be on the verge of transition – in Anything Boys Can Do that transition had to do with relationships, whereas in The Bone Cage and The Canterbury Trail the transition has to do with the looming responsibilities of adulthood.  In that way, my approach to characterization hasn’t changed.  As to the way I go about creating those characters, I hope I’m getting better at it… And will continue to get better at it as I grow as a writer.

Piech: In The Cantebury Trail, you write about a fictionalized version of Fernie. Was it difficult to create believable characters living in a town where you also live?

Abdou: The Canterbury Trail (especially its approach to characterization) stems more from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales than it does from the town of Fernie. Chaucer takes the main types from Medieval society and has a representation of each – the praying class, the fighting class, the working class, a woman, a teacher, upper class, lower class. The pilgrimage gives him an excuse to put together all of these people who would never normally associate. He starts with types and fairly clichéd representation, but the pilgrims (ideally at least) grow out of these types and become individuals. This approach lends itself very well to Fernie where there are clearly defined (and often referenced) types: the ski bum, the red neck, the hippy, the developer. I wanted more than one in each group to help me let them become individuals rather than types. For a pilgrimage, I used the mountain equivalent – a big powder day in the backcountry. I didn’t find characterization in this book difficult at all – I had great fun with it. Now that I put it like that, FUN is probably a key ingredient in writing most novels.

Piech: Did writing The Cantebury Trail leave you with any epiphanies about writing that you didn’t have beforehand?

Abdou: People who like The Canterbury Trail praise its fairness to all of the different groups and claim that it presents events evenly from each perspective (rather than favouring the nature lovers or the coal miners or the developers). I did work hard to get inside of each of these perspectives, which put me places I’d never been before… And that always involves epiphany.

Piech: What characteristic would you say contribute most to your success as a writer?

Abdou: Work ethic – I’m a hard worker, whether I’m running, swimming, teaching, writing, or whatever – I just like to work. That’s lucky for me because hard work is essential to being a writer.

Piech: Do you have any advice for beginner writers?

Abdou: Don’t quit your day job. Really. If you’re looking to get rich or famous, lottery tickets would give you better odds. Write because you love it, and write what you want to write. Of course, there are tips that can make you better at it and, therefore, make it even more enjoyable – but for those you have to come to my workshop.

To learn more about developing believable characters, attend “How to Create and Push Around Your Characters” with Angie Abdou at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival from 1:15 to 3:30 p.m. Saturday, October 15, 2011 in the Aava Hotel Boardroom 1. 

Beginner’s Guide to Self–Publishing

So you’ve written a book…now what?

After seven years of researching, writing, editing, rewriting and agonizing, I finally gave all 95,000 words of my completed memoir to my writer’s group for feedback this year.  Done. Check that one of the life’s to do list. However, writer’s block has now morphed into publishing block. What do I do with this mass of words given that I know nothing of the publishing world?

I googled. I googled writing organizations in Canada. I googled Canadian publishers. I googled how to get published in Canada. One article in particular laid out an appealing plan of action. Decide if you want an agent. Cross reference publishersweekly.com with agentresearch.com to find agents that are accepting new work. Compose a query letter and send it off to as many agents that fit your genre.

Twiddling my thumbs got about much as some agents can take up to three months to get back to you so I read through The Writers’ Guide to Canadian Publishers and shortlisted eight publishers interested in my genre. As an emerging writer, I needed to write a submission complete with marketing plan to send with my query letter to the publishers. My submission was seventy pages and took me one month to write.

The replies I have received from agents so far have been professional and helpful and most of them have indicated that the publishing market is very tight. I am somewhat hopeful that one of the smaller publishers will pick it up. The reality may be that I must self-publish. It is the way many first-time authors are going.

Self-publishing is also complex and somewhat mysterious. Vanity press versus traditional self-publishing. E-book option versus print only.  How to finance the venture…So many questions.

Local author Sara Leach has tackled many of these questions, after self-publishing two children’s picture books. She will be giving a workshop at the Whistler Writers’ Festival this October on writing picture books, and having gone through the process, she will be able to shed light on what has been a learning curve for me.

~Sue Oakey

Pretty pictures, we do them too

Madeline Sonik writes a letter to herself about Grit

This is a letter to myself—a letter to myself ten years ago—when “grit” was something I found in unclean spinach or scrubbed from washbasins with an old toothbrush. I didn’t know I possessed it then, although I suppose I always had. I’d been writing since I was a teenager, writing every day—a journal entry, a poem, a good joke I’d heard. In my twenties, just before I married, I religiously wrote down all of my dreams. I knew nothing of the world of dreams, but mine had suddenly become vivid and I thought they might make good stories some day. After my colicky daughter was born, I wrote headings in notebooks with red ink. She’d cry for forty-eight hour stretches then fall angelically asleep for four. Through the toughest times, I could only manage a sleep deprived scrawl: “Must write!”  I envisioned putting it into a plastic baby bottle and casting it out to sea.

Over the years, there have been many times when I couldn’t envision ever writing again: the death of my mother, my partner’s kidney failure, my brush with cancer four years ago. It’s taken the greatest grit, not to struggle against these times, but to allow myself to suffer them—to willingly sink into the muddy underworld—to rediscover again and again that the most enduring and rejuvenating fountains of creative life have sprung from reservoirs I’ve found in some of the grimiest, grittiest gullies of despair.

~ Madeline Sonik

 

Madeline Sonik is a teacher, writer and editor. Her work has been published extensively in journals, magazines and academic anthologies. Her latest book, Afflictions and Departures, is a collection of vivid and compelling first–person experiential essays. Her earlier books include Stone Sightings (poetry), Arms (a novel), Drying the Bones (stories), and Belinda and the Dustbunnys (children’s novel.) She has an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Education, both from UBC. She teaches at the University of Victoria.

It Never Gets Easier: Antanas Sileika to himself ten years ago.

You were working on a big novel with big themes at the time – art and the meaning of images in the twentieth century, and you thought once you had this book written and published, everything would be OK. You could even die in the knowledge you had leaped over some new bar.

And in the end, the reviews across the country were very good indeed.

Then you worked for three years on a novel that washed out. It’s still in a drawer now. You showed it to three people and decided it was not good enough.

It was harder to start again after that than at any other time in the novel-writing game.

Only moronic self-help strategies, such as listening repeatedly to Stan Rogers’s song, The Mary –Ellen Carter (whose chorus is “Rise Again”) managed to sustain you.

It was an exceptionally dark time, made worse with a son as a front-line soldier in Afghanistan while I wrote about death in another war zone.

I kept writing. It was a struggle, but in the end it worked out OK. The young man survived and the new novel was written and again, most of the reviews are pretty good.

Here’s the message to my younger self and to others in this pursuit – one thinks of publishing books as a high jump. Just write that one book, just get over that bar and everything will be all right.

But that image is wrong. Writing novels is closer to jumping hurdles, and those hurdles go on to the horizon like the railroad ties in Gordon Lightfoot’s song.

~ Antanas Sileika

Alma Alexander maps out the topography of the writer’s life and plants the ultimate trailmarker – Never Surrender

When you first start out on the writer’s journey, you’re excited. Full of energy. Full of strength. Full of hope. That is as it should be, at the beginning of any journey, of all journeys – everything is still to come, still ahead, and all you have is eager anticipation.

You might be writing for yourself, or for a handful of dedicated readers, at the start of it all. And that’s the first quiet level stretch of the road, and it’s perfectly easy going – if you want to describe it in terms of walking terminology, it’s an “easy hike”, up to a point. You are carrying a light pack. Your feet are fresh, you are rested, and you think you’re making good progress.

It’s when you get lulled into this frame of mind that you suddenly realize that the road has been climbing slowly for some time, and that you’re getting out of breath, and that night is coming on, and you’d better find a place to stop and sleep – but there often isn’t a comfy inn available just when you want it, so you spend a night, several nights, lots of nights, sleeping out in the rough, just you and your sleeping bag and the stars.

You’re still climbing.

You get to a certain point, a plateau, and you stop for a breather – and the world looks wonderful. The sun is shining, you’re in a high meadow and there’s flowers in wild profusion all around you, you might start to glimpse other walkers and they’re friendly and they’ll wave back at you if you smile, and there might even be a friendly inn along the way where you can lay your weary head and count on a hot breakfast in the morning. This is where you are when you sell something, when your words are published, when somebody reads you, when somebody actually seems to enjoy reading you.

Occasionally there’s a squall (somebody hates your stuff) or a bigger storm (rejection # 30 arrives in the mail…) but on the whole you’re still on the road, and yes, it’s still climbing, but at least it’s still a reasonably smooth walk, and although your pack seems to get heavier with every stop you make (this is a trip on which you accumulate baggage…) you can handle it.

You get to the first peak – a book’s sold! You’re at the top of the world, looking down on creation! You could not possibly be any happier! – and then you look ahead, a little. And realize that the road just got steeper. And more treacherous. There’s a sheer cliff now, on one side, and a steep drop-off on the other. And the road is narrower now, and all those other walkers to whom you’ve been waving and smiling all this time, they all want to be on the road at the same time as you, and sometimes it feels like there isn’t enough room, and occasionally you hear a cry as somebody loses their footing and falls off the cliff to the rocks way way way below you. But you’re on the road, and the only way is up, and you grimly shoulder your pack and soldier on.

You hear word, from up ahead, that others have done well. That they have found their place, built their palaces, are living in rooms with a view. Or at least that is the rumour. You don’t seem to pass many of those mansions on your trudge up the mountain (although sometimes you think you glimpse one, a long way away, but it’s hard to tell anything about it from that distance).

You reach the peak, and you start to breathe a sigh of relief – perhaps you can rest now, deservedly, and surely there has to be a way to get a new pair of shoes to replace the ones you’ve begun to wear out on your feet which are starting to hurt…

And then you realize that up ahead there are only more mountains…

At some point in a writing career we all hit it – that point of “what’s the use of going on? It’s just more of the same. And everything good I have ever heard is just a whisper in the wind…” The dark night of the soul. The moment when you look at your writing and you cannot see a purpose in it, or any redeeming value, and you ask yourself why anybody would want to read anything like that at all, and wonder why you’ve ever found it difficult to accept or believe that you have maybe a hundred and seven readers out there and twenty of them are your relatives, or your very best friends, or they married you before you were “famous” and now have a vested interest in keeping the faith, as it were.

But here’s the thing. The sun rises beyond those mountains. Every day. And if you wake up in time to see it, you can see the dawn break on the forbidding rocks, and they are washed in shades of rose-pink and gold, and it’s all QUITE beautiful. And you find a pair of shoes – they aren’t necessarily new, or particularly pretty, but they are sturdy and will serve – and you shoulder your pack, and you start up again. Because this is a road that you cannot bring yourself to leave, if your heart is truly set upon it (it’s VERY easy to abandon if it is not, actually) and once you have set your feet upon it there is no real turning back. If you look over your shoulder you will only see things you’ve already left behind – been there, done that – and they will hold little allure for you. It’s that new sunrise that will, every time.

There’s a well-known parody movie which has brought forth an iconic quote – from Galaxy Quest, “NEVER give up. NEVER surrender.”

It’s okay to have a dark night of the soul. Many of us have had them. Many of us have them regularly, in fact, and learn to recognize their coming, like the arrival of a bad headache. But if we are writers, we are not permitted to languish in that night for long. Only until the sun comes up the next morning.

If you believe in this writing part of your soul…never give up. Never surrender. And always keep your face turned to the sunrise.

~ Alma Alexander

One more letter. Sara Leach spells GRIT

To Sara Leach
Year: 2001

Dear Sara,

You don’t know it yet, but within a few months you will begin writing the first draft of a children’s novel. Soon after that, you’ll read that it takes ten years for a writer to get published. That will seem like forever. You’ll want to give up.

Don’t.

Ten years will slide by as smoothly as your daughter sneaking chocolate from the cupboard. Besides, it will only take eight.

So, in the meantime, keep typing those two pages a day. Take every professional development opportunity you can, even the workshops that you think won’t teach you anything. There’s always something to learn. Sign up for the Writer-in-Residence program. Attend workshops. Join a critique group. The advice you learn there will be as good as anything you hear anywhere. Read one hundred books in your genre. Learn to recognize what makes a winner. Read everything Donald Maass writes.

Trust your instincts. Orca is the right place for you, even though they’ll turn you down the first time.

Revise. Revise again. Read some more. Revise again.

Keep writing. Because publication is exciting. It’s rewarding. But it is only one step in the process of creating and learning. That’s why you’ll keep at it. Because you love the process. And the process is what writing is all about.

Sincerely,
Your future self.

Waiting – a poem

Two poems were commissioned for the Poet’s Pause sculpture sites in Alta Lake Park last fall, through a juried selection process in the third annual Poet’s Pause Poetry Competition.

Poet (and late bloomer) Mary MacDonald authored one of the poems.

WAITING

Not wanting to miss you

I came early, well before dusk.

I walked out to the dock first

took off my shoes to cool my feet

lay down face to face

with fishes leaping

and a mother duck six ducklings following

Was there seven a month ago?

I saw a heron fly low

over the marshes and I

Took it to mean good luck,

I take my seat at last

by the grassy fen,

Dragon flies blaze on bulrushes and

heart pounding suddenly like a

bowstring with anticipation,

The evening air cooling.

I pour the tea,

Wait unwearyingly for the moment of the

sun dropping down behind the mountains

and light dimming to twilight

and the mist rising off the lake

until it is neither day nor night

But the in-between.

I know you will come.

Beside me

there is a chair waiting,

Part memory part distance.

There is always a place for you here.