On Passion

     Passion is a truly misaligned word. Maybe understandably so. I mean, it's possible to be passionate in a good way (when playing a piano, when acting in a stage drama, when confessing your love to someone), but there're also bad times to be passionate (when assessing a crisis, when speaking on the phone to your bank, when trying to get bumped up to first class), and so I suppose it makes sense that you either love or hate passion. It's really not something to feel meh about, is it now?
     Recently, a friend sent me a link to a blog he kept while courting his future wife, their marriage, the difficult process of trying to get pregnant, pregnancy, and then becoming a dad. He sent me a link for several reasons. Dads love reading about dads, we're old friends, and the whole thing was tied in coincidence linking the birth of one of my kids to his meeting his future wife. (I love that sort of thing. Remind me I need a blog on "On Coincidence.")
     When he sent me the link, he reminded me to go easy on him because he's "not a writer." Well, not to get too semantic on it, but isn't he? He wrote something, does this not make him a writer. True, he may not have had the flourish and the flare of someone who crafts prose for a living, but he had the sharp, meaningful language of the convicted.
     It had a passion, and it was beautiful. It was written, as they say, from the heart and I found it wrenching and tugging and felt. It was wonderful.
     Writing well matters, but writing something potent like that matters that much more.

   

500 Unsolicited MSs?!

Found this interesting. Can't imagine what sort of a writing world we would live in if we had more people capable of delivering feedback this often.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/kate-taylor-when-amateur-writers-had-professional-reality-checks/article26144621/

Inspiration

         It's interesting for me to talk with other writers or students of writing about what they do when struggling with the thing that for the sake of argument we'll call Writer's Block. The symptoms are various. It can be a complete inability to put pen to paper, finger to keyboard. It can be frustration with the way the material is coming out, even though it may be coming out in reams. Or it can be a writer who has successfully completed a work having trouble moving on to the next thing.
        The advice I have received and give is when you're feeling like you can't write, that's when you need to write the most. Getting past the difficult, unproductive times increases the frequency of the rich times, and by getting through those low patches you show that you won't quit no matter the circumstances. After all, writers write.
         One thing I always encourage my students--or any blocked writers--to try are the many, many activity books out there. There's an entire market for books about writing by writers (or other artists) in the vain of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. For myself, some of my best idea have come from tasks in these texts. They're fun, they're simple, and they keep you going. Often, just having someone put a task in front of you to write about, a "What if" or a "Can you" is all the jumping off point you need.

On Voice

     One of my favourite stories about an author finding his voice is Hunter S. Thompson. Now, take his sordid addictions, suicide, and altogether racy persona out of the equation (if one actually can), Thompson could write. Certainly one of my idols. I've heard many times how he used to take F. Scott Fitzgerald's work and write it out on a typewriter word for word, just to feel the rhythm, the cadence of that old great's work. Spend any time with Gatsby and you can see why: every sentence of that thing is honed to perfection. Despite being a pretty sparse text, it's deservedly revered as a work of genius. And it's interesting to note that Thompson was writing amid a time and life of vice and emulating someone who did the same.
     In the film Finding Forrester--a staple in my writing classes--William provides a writers-blocked Jamal with a sample of his own work. He advises Jamal to write the words until he finds his own. This proves the antidote to the disease.
     It's a delicate thing, finding the voice. More than once I've seen a great young writer stumble across, say, The Catcher in the Rye and nearly everything they produce for a while after sounds like it's being narrated by Holden Caulfield. It's much worse case with kids mired in the bleak cliches of graphic novels or the putrid prose of Suzanne Collins.
     The balance is in inspiration rather than imitation. The biggest influence of the voice of my fiction is Yann Martel. I don't try to write like him. I don't try to make the tragic slightly humorous in an observant way, and I don't pepper it with study of every realm of the existential. But what that man may be the best of his generation at is the twist in a sentence. He writes the most quotable work since, well, since Hunter S. Thompson. Language rich in observation, in parallel structure, in taking the familiar--the potential cliche--in wording and turning it back on itself. So many of his lines stand free on their own merits, not only when contributing to an overall narrative.
     My voice doesn't resemble his. It's like how you retain your Canadian accent while travelling abroad: you hear the lilting of the local tongue in your head, but what comes out of you is still all your own.

Nobel Prize Ignoring Literature: Globe and Mail Article

Found this fascinating. Yes, it's from a very American perspective, but the discussion of college and MFA courses depriving a readership of true literature is an interesting one, as is the discussion on European prizes and American readers.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/the-nobel-prize-as-a-snub-of-creative-writing/article21150354/

2014 Can. Lit. Nominees

I'm always interested in what books get nominated for our awards, and it does appear that we've hit a sort of Renaissance for Canadian Lit. The titles alone (Oil Man and the Sea, for real!) are awesome.

Governor General: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2014/10/governor-generals-literary-awards-2014-the-finalists.html

Giller: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2014/10/scotiabank-giller-prize-2014-the-shortlist.html

Past The Block

I don't believe in Writer's Block per se. Never have. I do understand that there are times we are less inclined to write, sure, and I believe that there are times when the writing is not as good as it could be, should be. But I believe that a writer writes, and even if it's a steaming pile of crap we--figuratively--reach into that steaming pile and retrieve something worthwhile. Even the most unproductive of ventures can produce something as long as you're writing.

I've been having a bugger of a time writing well for the past sixty-two days. I'm a teacher and summer is often my most productive time, and yet this summer was one of the worst for new and good production. I was half way through working on edits to a book I've been done for a months but hasn't clearly come out of the editing stage. It's my finest work so far, with two distinct narrators whose stories meet in the end. I'm very proud of it, and of them. One of them is named David and there's no denying he's a barely-veiled version of myself. David's narration is first person, in fact written in journals while he travels across Europe on a quest to decide whether his life is any longer worth living.

I loved writing David. I loved it because it was so easy. His voice was so similar to my own voice that I really just had to fictionalize events and react to them as I knew I would react to them. He borrowed my voice, or so I thought. In reality he stole it, and I have solved the issue with my blockage.

I'm struggling with this last edit. Life has got in the way, yes. And I find that every time I sit down at my journal to write in my voice, or at my computer, the voice I hear in my head is mine, but the fictional me I have poured into this character. I can't write in my voice because I haven't put David to bed.

As I said, I love that character. If I am able to publish his tale, he and I have a bit of time coming with even greater intimacy than when I was writing him. And, frankly, he and his voice will be attached to me for the rest of my writing career and probably my life, as they appear to be one. I'm fine with that. Now. Once I became fine with that I understood that to take my voice back from David, I needed to finalize his story, to put that book to bed.

It came as a great relief. I mean, the stress of having to finish and hopefully publish that book remains, but now I know what's been in the way. It was a singular experience. I have never heard of any writer who felt they couldn't write because their own creation had robbed them of their voice. But knowing, I know what to do to be past it.