Tag Archives: writing tips

Bad, Honest Advice on How to Write as a Young Parent

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心情不好

This 25 year old mother of two is me. Lazy butt had written precisely zero novels.

Enough people have asked how I managed to write two novels while at home with my kids that I thought I’d better craft an answer a little more thoughtful than “by being a crap mother.” Here it is, some very honest and probably very bad advice on how to launch a writing career while masterminding a large, young household.

  • Stop cleaning the house. This is done by a) quitting once conditions become sanitary without proceeding all the way to spiffy and, b) looking at your children the way our great-grandmother’s (and my parents) looked at their children: as a private workforce, a domestic militia of barely competent workers. Assigning one light chore every day and one heavier cleaning task on the weekend should do it.
  • Start mowing the lawn. Look, you’re not going away on writers’ retreats to the Banff Centre any time soon. That’s not the life you chose. But you do need to spend time  alone with your thoughts en plein air, and pushing a machine that drives conversation away all around the backyard is better than nothing.
  • Stay up. My creativity comes in all-or-nothing surges. During a surge, I tend to get about four hours of sleep during the night, maybe less. This isn’t a desperate attempt to make the most of the hours when my house is quiet (though it has that benefit). There’s simply more energy in my mind when I’m creative and it keeps me sleepless for weeks on end. Don’t resist it just because your family needs to get up in the morning. Squeeze a ten minute nap or two into the daylight hours even if it means taking the bus and sleeping away the commute (trust me, most of my university’s student population does this, even the sleep-drooler population). Staying up to write won’t be your lifestyle forever. Think of it as a grueling but temporary training regimen, like going for long, long runs leading up to a marathon.
  • Keep reading. I was badly stuck during the writing of my current novel. There was a difficult decision to be made, I didn’t have the confidence to make it, but until I did, the book couldn’t move forward. The solution was to stop writing for the rest of the day and read some excellent writing that succeeds in doing the very thing I was afraid to attempt. I opened a collection of short stories by Mavis Gallant, read until 1am, and went to bed stoked to take the risk I needed.
  • Don’t spend too long lying around miserable about not being Mavis Gallant. This was an unintended side-effect of reading good writing. It’s inevitable and understandable, just don’t let it go on for too long.
  • Talk to your partner about your book. His input may not make it into the manuscript but airing your story’s sticking points out loud with an attentive adult who wants you cute and happy is a helpful exercise. It also downplays any burgeoning sense of resentment he may have for a) the project that consumes so much of your attention, and b) the way you hog the lawnmower.
  • Share with care. I don’t mean to say you should make your partner to read half-baked early drafts. Don’t do this to your loved ones. They often don’t know what to say and it puts them in an awful position. Instead, use a professional writer-in-residence based in your local library, university, or other arty institutions. These real, working writers are waiting to read fifteen pages or so of your writing and give an impartial, informed assessment of how you’re doing and how it could be better. Their services are free and competition for their positions is fierce so you can usually trust they’ve been well-screened for things like being a jerk. But having said all this, if someone asks you to read their work, do it. You can take a lesson from the writers-in-residence and limit the amount of pages you’ll read, but say yes. Strictly speaking, I don’t believe in Karma but I make a cautious exception when it comes to lending my pickup truck and to helping other writers.
  • Distract. If you have kids at home during the day, introduce them to pastimes they can do by themselves in the same room as you while you sit still and say very little—things other than screen-time, which won’t make anyone happy in the long run. What could those pastimes be? It depends on the kid. For some kids, nothing will fill this bill and you’ll just have to let them trash your house while you get some work done, or learn to type with their heads wedged into the triangle formed by the crook of your arm and the edge of your desk (been there). If they are willing to give you a break, get them some Lego, craft supplies, Play-Doh, a load of siblings, a bunch of ironing to do—anything.
  • Be honest with yourself about other interests competing for discretionary time. If you can’t give up crafting, cake decorating, direct marketing essential oils, etc. in order to make time to write consistently, it might be best to wait until you are willing to make writing a priority. There’s nothing wrong with other pursuits, we just need to be realistic and at peace with how we choose to spend our time.
  • Don’t call your writing a hobby if you’re doing it as a serious artistic project. Don’t let anyone call it a hobby.
  • Go easy on people. People are who you are writing for. Don’t tell me it’s all for yourself, forever and ever. That might be how things turn out but that’s not the goal you have in your heart. Spending time with your kids, your partner, your extended family, friends, colleagues, strangers is part of writing. Nothing is more inspiring than life going on around you. This is an advantage mothers surrounded by people have over other writers. When I was working as a columnist for a newspaper in Fort McMurray staffed mostly by young, single newcomers to the city, a pattern emerged when these people would try to write columns of their own. They’d write a few articles on food they ate or television they watched and then their columns would usually fizzle. What they lacked wasn’t talent or voice or experience, it was other people. They were isolated, lonely, and in many ways creatively bereft. You and I, we are none of those things.

And that is the awful truth of how I do it.

 

 

If Looks Could Kill: Why My Characters Have No Eye Colours

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In preparation for an upcoming multi-author book event, I’ve been reading novels outside my usual range of Can-lit and literary fiction.  The atypical reading choices I’ve been making have been eye-opening – literally.  So far, what’s struck me most in my venture into crowd-pleasing commercial fiction is the diligent reporting of characters’ eye-colours.

Maybe everything I know is wrong but for me, all on its own, the colour of a person’s eyes determines nothing about how they experience life.  Okay, I admit my blue-eyed family may do more than the average amount of squinting in bright light.  And if I ever produce a brown-eyed child while married to my fellow blue-eyed husband, it would add some horrible drama to our home-life.  But most of the time, iris pigment is not the crucial narrative factor a random sample of Western pop-fiction might lead us to believe it must be.

Mentioning eye colour in literature can be a nice touch — like writing at length about a sunset or the ocean or whatever. (Writers can get away with a lot in the name of world-building.)  And in the right context, eye colours can be important story elements.  In Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade, Judy Garland closes her eyes and tests Fred Astaire’s devotion by challenging him to remember her eye colour.  Even as a kid watching the old movie on TV with my mum, I knew this was an important moment.  It advances the plot, reveals something about each of the characters, and it’s hecka sweet.  Well done, 1940s film-makers.  Look at you, making eye color genuinely relevant and letting it arise organically from the narrative.  That’s how it’s done.

The same could be said for any detailed description of characters’ looks.  Descriptions can work to propel the story, motivate actions, explain character traits.  But sometimes they’re dumped into a story apropos of nothing.  It’s as if we’re driving along an icy street and someone yanks up the parking brake and we’re flying in a circle for a moment, calling out eye and hair colours, spinning out of the true direction we’d been traveling.  Or it’s like the story has deteriorated into a junior high school Language Arts lesson and we’re now outside the narrative reading a “character sketch.”  At their best, character sketches are just exercises meant for the writer’s purposes.  They’re notebook scribbles, not even first drafts, and certainly not good reading.

I hope all of that sounds technical and reasonable.  Here’s a personal reason why I write without bothering to explain the minutiae what everyone looks like: I don’t care.  I honestly do not care what people look like.  That’s not to say I’m any less shallow than anyone else – I care far too much about how people smell – but it is to say that when I’m choosing what to pay attention to, a person’s looks aren’t all that compelling.

When I’m acting as creator of a book-world, I let everyone look the way readers want to imagine them.  That’s done by forgoing physical descriptions I don’t need for plot and thematic reasons.  Giving up the creative control that comes with dictating everyone’s colour palette is worth the sacrifice if that’s what it takes to keep physical traits from interfering with everything else I’m trying to say.

Describing a human being’s looks – even a fictitious human being’s – is actually not like describing a sunset.  It might feel idle and innocuous but it’s not.  Sunsets don’t come with politics.  People do.  Spelling out physical descriptions can introduce prejudices and tropes that distance readers.  If that’s what an author wants (and sometimes it is), carry on, I guess.  Descriptions also run the risk of fueling male gazes and other sources of negative stereotypes. They can end up assuring readers certain appearance-based prejudices are right and fair.  I have a revulsion to abetting that.

In the novel Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland deliberately withholds the information that the narrator, a woman, is overweight.  He allows the reader to discover her through what she does and says and only later introduces what she looks like.  The delayed fat-reveal is brilliant.  I was surprised at how it affected me.  I am not a fat-shamer.  I’m not fat myself (she rushed to say) but during my most intensive baby-raising years I was a bit of a chubby-chick.  It runs in my family.  I love fat people.  I understand on a deeply personal level that they are not lazy or greedy or bad.  And it meant I was shocked at how my vision of Coupland’s character unwittingly changed for the worse after I read she was fat.

To add another layer of complexity, Coupland’s narrator challenges the reader, saying we must have been able to tell she was fat before the reveal, as if something so fundamental must have been visible all along.  Of course, it wasn’t.  Her looks don’t make her any less human or relatable as a character.  But it’s only through withholding a physical description and showing us our own reactions to it that Coupland demonstrates the depths of our appearance-based prejudices and how easy it is for writers to be complicit in maintaining them.

By the way, Judy Garland’s eyes – they were brown.

 

Reconnaisance at Someone Else’s Book Launch

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Here’s one more insultingly obvious pro-tip from a newbie novelist: the first book launch event you ever attend should not be your own.  For once, I didn’t wait to learn this bit of wisdom the hard way.  My novel’s release date is Aug 3, 2013 – just 86 days from now.  There isn’t much time left for me to get familiar with promotional literary events before the author in the fabulous arts-chick shoes standing behind the microphone winds up being me.

Fortunately, the closest publisher to me geographically – Edmonton’s NeWest Press – held a “spring spectacular” this week.  They collected three of their authors and one poet and brought them into the city for readings and signings of their newly released books.  It was a perfect opportunity for me to sneak into the literary scene and do some reconnaissance.

I started by plotting.  What I needed was a pair of wing-people.  I convinced these two.

Emily MacKenzie and Allan Taylor -- you know, from the Hunt and Gather blog

Emily MacKenzie and Allan Taylor — you know, from the Hunt and Gather blog

This is my extremely helpful and supportive brother-in-law and my baby sister.

[You mean the nursing professor sister? No.  The millionaire business tycoon sister? No.  The ultra-marathon runner sister? No.  The Edmonton slow-food lady sister?  Yes, that’s the one.  I am gifted with lots of gifted sisters.]

NeWest was holding the launch in a downtown coffee house housed in a restored brick building.  By the time we arrived, it was humid-warm and crammed with people and hot beverages.  Its name – Roast – couldn’t have been more apt.

The only place left to sit was in a dim, empty corner.  This was exactly how I had pictured myself here – dark and peripheral.

As we waited for the readings to start, I kept accidentally making eye contact with a lady sitting along the wall perpendicular to me.  I’m awkward and silly so I kept making sure I politely turned away every time we looked at each other.  But if I’d checked my Twitter feed at that moment I would have found this:

@JennQuistAuthor hi, I’m sitting at the next table over #creepytweets

The message was from one of my Twitter/blogger buddies, Laura Frey.  She was the woman I kept looking at across the crowded room.  I’d never met her in person and I was too stupid to recognize her until later when I overheard her name.  This is fairly typical.  Sometimes we joke (because brain injuries are hilarious, I guess) that I have prosopagnosia – brain damage that makes it hard to recognize faces.  I probably don’t.  It’s the kind of disorder that usually only comes on in survivors of horrendous no-helmet motorcycle accidents.

The time came for us to stop whispering in our corner and start listening to the readings.  The first was poetry from Jenna Butler’s Seldom Seen Road.  Her work is set on the central Alberta prairie but it isn’t the usual  western Canadiana.  In the selections she read, there was a longing and loneliness that didn’t just arise from the physical struggle to subdue a harsh landscape while maintaining human relationships.  It rose instead from the decline of the communities that had originally been built on the land.  The first wave of prairie settlers is ebbing away as their posterity rejects their way of life.  And the second wave of settlers, like Butler and her family, is arriving without a script for how to connect themselves to the crumbling social and physical landscapes left behind.

I hadn’t heard of Butler before the launch but the second reader was someone I’d already been admiring on the Internet.  She’s Rebecca Campbell, author of The Paradise Engine.  I know it’s sexist and vapid to comment on a woman artist’s appearance but I have to mention how impressed I was by Campbell’s height.  There’s nothing I’ve seen on her website to reveal the fact she’s at least six feet tall once she puts on shoes (yes, I asked her).  Her book was the one I used my launch party budget to bring home.  The section she read – a gorgeous picture of a Cold War kid’s night frights over nuclear war – could have been a narration of my own childhood.  Campbell writes about crows and Apocalypses – things I love.

Marguerite Pigeon – yet another author I’ve stalked on the Internet – read from her central American thriller Open Pit.  It’s about a hostage taking and a fictitious open pit gold mine.  This was the book Emily brought home after Pigeon tantalized us with a crafty cliff-hanger ending.  Em and I are going to trade books once we’re finished reading – which, knowing me, will not happen soon.

The fourth reader was novelist Corrina Chong.  I’ve quoted her insightful ideas about the influence of authors’ realities in their fiction in an earlier post.  Any girlie-ness that might have been implied by her pinkish book cover is offset by pencil sketches of squid in all their tentacled loveliness.  The selections she read from her book, Belinda’s Rings, felt a lot like real family life to me – especially real life with a demanding little boy who needs his caregivers to be everything and nothing to him all at the same time.  She nailed it – nailed it right to my Goodreads to-read list.

Roast was roasting and my home was over 100km away so we didn’t stay very late into the night after the readings were finished.  I got to meet a few people but not as many as I wanted before my wing-people and I stepped out into the fresh-enough inner-city air.

On the sidewalk, with Emily and Allan, I indulged in lamenting my missteps.  When I groaned at myself for demanding to know how tall Rebecca Campbell is Emily said, “It’s okay.  I figure as long as you’re still talking, it’s all good.”

And for my first outing, maybe she’s right.  The mix-and-mingle concept is not a big part of my current skill set.  Maybe it never will be.  Under the high wooden beams of the old coffee house, maybe we were all just a bunch of bookish writer-types lurching out of our comfort zones, trying to recognize each other’s faces from tiny Twitter and blogger head-shots, forgiving each other for not being as smart and shiny in person as we are in print.