Gertrude Stein gets rejected

Gertrude Stein, 1935

Gertrude Stein must have been delighted to inspire this creative rejection letter.

Writers have to have tough skins. Even to share my new manuscript with my husband, I have to take a deep breath and be ready for pain. He's honest and I need honest. He's not a big lover of fiction, so he's impatient as a reader. That's why I like having him as my first reader. Also, I trust him.

Revision notes for my current novel.

Criticism can sting.  In my experience, when it stings the most, it's because it hits the mark. When I was working on the 54th revision of Shelter (or something like that), my agent, with her trademark candour, said, "The middle 80 pages is boring." I blanched, I denied, I agonized, but the thing is, I knew she was right. But you can't just re-write the middle 80 pages without also re-writing the pages that follow them. There was nothing to do, but get down to it. Ditch the hitchhiking trip to Vancouver, forget that well-read cowboy they met along the way, lose the parade down Hastings Street, all those carefully researched details that sidetracked the real story. But I sort of like re-writing. Usually, at least, I get the sense that I'm getting closer to what I meant to write. This is a photo of my bulletin boards beside my desk, with notes for the revisions I'm doing now for Sing a Worried Song, my current work-in-progress. I did a chapter-by-chapter "chart" so that I can keep track of what happens when. There's also a timeline and a map of Bridget and Joseph's farm.

Starting out

Beginnings are hard to write. I must have written and re-written the opening of Shelter twenty times at least. I write an opening, then I go on and write the rest of the novel, but while I'm working on the rest, I re-visit that opening many times, trying to get closer to something that captures what the novel is really about.

For a high school English class, my son is reading A Tale of Two Cities, with that famous opening about the best of times and the worst of times. No writer could get away with that now. Long and rambling, it starts with that wide, wide view, slowly narrowing. I'm not even sure I like it. But it got me wondering about what I do like.

I like the opening of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451: "It was a pleasure to burn." So simple, startling and incongruous that it immediately makes me curious. But an opening is not just about a good first sentence. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day starts more subtly, with a distinctive voice that puzzles me and draws me along. I'm currently reading John Steinbeck's notebooks written for his editor about his novel-in-progress, alongside the manuscript of East of Eden. Steinbeck's openings are slow and meandering, winding through the landscape of the Salinas Valley. When I begin on the first page of a Steinbeck novel, I know I'm entering that world and I'll be there for a long time. I like that feeling.

I've re-written the opening of Sing a Worried Song, the novel I'm currently working on, maybe ten times. It's getting closer.

Is it sad?

I feel like I've written about this before. It''s an obsession of mine, the question that many potential readers of Shelter have asked me, before reading: Is it sad? They don't like sad, they say. I try to be honest. I don't think Shelter is a sad novel. Sad things happen, but what life is free of sadness, even a young life? I remember my son's first experience of real, deep sadness, the kind that wouldn't go away in a few minutes. It was when he was about eight and one of his beloved cats, who he had grown up with his whole short life, died, presumably of a heart attack, while curled up in her favourite spot on his bed. I tried to tell him that as sad as it was, it was good to feel so deeply about something he had loved so dearly. I still tell him the same thing now, when he's sixteen. I believe he gets that. That's why he loves some profoundly sad songs that sing of experiences he's too young to really know yet. (He's in the next room right now listening to Mumford and Sons' Broken Crown, loud.)

To me, there is a beauty in sadness. It interests me. When I was writing Shelter, I used to go to my desk and turn up a Mozart Piano concerto, No. 17, something my grandpa and dad both loved. The album I have belonged to my grandfather and was passed down to my father and then to me. Alfred Brendel is on piano. (I can't find a link to the recording I have or I'd post it). I've heard other performances, but this one is special. During the andante movement, the music builds and builds to this tender, trembling beauty and then breaks in what seems to me almost like a sob. But it's a joyful kind of sob, of someone overwhelmed with the beauty of his world. I feel the same thing some early mornings on the shore of a small BC lake I love. The water is so still, the surface a skin of light and shadow. I think, I could have missed this. I will miss this.

A woman in India

Potter in Jaipur

I returned from my second trip to India a couple of weeks ago. On the plane home, a young woman got on at Frankfurt and asked me where I'd been. She told me about her plans for a big trip to India next year. She was full of questions about what it's like for a woman to travel alone in India. She was 21, excited, and scared, too. Probably a sensible way for a 21-year-old woman to feel about travelling anywhere.

It's not easy to travel in India, and it's probably less easy for a woman travelling alone. I'm old enough to have slightly younger Indian men call me "aunty" (which is an affectionate term for an older woman. I answered, "Who are you calling aunty, uncle?") and younger women call me "Amma" (which technically means 'mother' but is a term of respect something like Ma'am). I wonder if it was partly my age that kept me from being harassed, beyond the normal annoying questions about nationality and offers from touts at the tourist sites.

But I'm not naive and I know that my age can't protect me from a certain kind of contempt towards women who presume to take the same privileges as men, a contempt that is not unique to India. So when an autorickshaw driver took me on a long and winding tour through the crush of metal workers and mechanics shops in a dingy part of Varanasi, I looked out and saw only male faces and I felt nervous. Another day, walking in Mumbai, I found myself leaving the busy streets full of women shopping. Suddenly, there were no more women, just men smoking and gossiping in clusters on the sidewalks. I turned around and walked back the way I came.

While I was staying at Nrityagram, a dance community outside of Bangalore, the dancers were preparing for a trip to Egypt. They received instructions from their hosts about how to dress: no bare arms, no shorts, no cleavage. It was going to be hot. They grumbled about what to bring. Why is it a woman's job to protect the sensibilities of oppressive cultures everywhere? This morning I read this article about modesty on The Feminist Wire. The concept disgusts me, too. And I don't believe that modesty protects anyone either. 

Woman selling spices in Jaipur

One night as I was reading the Bangalore newspaper, which was full of stories about rape, like all the Indian newspapers are these days, an Indian woman and I got into a discussion about how relatively safe the streets are in various parts of the world. Is India more dangerous for women than other places?Are the streets in Canada or the US safer? I don't know. And that's the thing. You never do know.

India again

I arrived in India just over a week ago to do some research for the novel I'm working on now, tentatively called Sing a Worried Song. Though it's mostly set in rural Manitoba, its frame story is in Bombay in 1970, a time when many European and North American hippies were drawn to India by its spiritual allure.

When Indians hear that it's my second time in India, they ask me, "So what do you like about India?" And so far I've found that I don't really have an answer. It's so maddingly chaotic at times, trying to cross the street is suicidal, and trying to find my way around (I have a terrible sense of direction) is so frustrating it's (almost) funny. For instance, in Mumbai, I was looking for a certain restaurant and as I walked, I passed some artists who had their work displayed for sale on boards. I saw a beautiful pen and ink sketch of an elephant trunk that I knew my friend Diane would love so I thought, I'll stop here on my way back. Five minutes later, I passed the same drawing. No, it wasn't a print. It was the same damn drawing and I'd somehow made a complete circle. Yeah, well that's what I've read about people who are lost. Eventually, they will always circle back to where they began. I was hungry and hot, so I gave up and ate somewhere else. My only salvation is the autorickshaw drivers who can always find where I need to go, if I can't.

I think what first drew me to India was the books I read, by Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, and also Forster's A Passage to India and the crochety traveler, Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar. I wanted to see some of it for myself. I love the food, the music, the colours, and the fact that even amid the chaos, there is great beauty. But that could be said about many places. I'm in the countryside in the south right now as I type this, listening to the rumble of an approaching thunderstorm, and the birds going crazy as the sun goes down. The sky is the red ochre hue of the earth here. The crows cackle like monkeys. I still can't put my finger on what it is about the place.

 

Sita's wise counsel in the Ramayana

I've been reading Arshia Sattar's translation of Valmiki's Ramayana, published by Penguin Classics. At nearly 700 pages, it's a bit intimidating. But once into the story, it's hard not to be swept along by this story of the virtuous prince Rama, exiled to the wilderness by a greedy stepmother. His wife Sita, used to a life of luxury, insists on accompanying him.
She warns Rama about the weaknesses that arise from desire. One of these is inflicting violence on others simply because of "the proximity of weapons." I feel for her as she warns Rama that "like dry fuel bursts into flame when it is near a fire so too, a Kshatriya's passions are ignited when he has a bow at hand."
Americans, South Africans, listen to Sita's wise words.

Questions for the Blog Tour That Ran Itself




I'm participating in a kind of old school chain mail experiment (via Internet), where writers answer questions about their next writing project. We each tag five more writers, who you'll meet at the bottom of this blog, and they tell five more and so on. There are no cumulative cash rewards, unfortunately, and no promise that passing this along will bring you good fortune, but just in case it's bad luck to break the chain, here goes. I answer questions below on the novel I'm working on now. And below that, you'll meet some new writers who you can visit.

What is your working title of your book?

Sing a Worried Song. It's a line from an old blues tune called Worried Man Blues.

Jaipur, India flower merchant- FG

Where did the idea come from for the book?

A few years ago I read, or heard, a little snippet of a story about a woman who had traveled to India and been so affected by what she saw on her taxi trip to the hotel from the airport, that she holed up in her hotel room for two weeks, unable to leave it. She was paralyzed by culture shock or some kind of profound terror. That story stuck with me and, over the years, whenever I thought of going to India, a place I find myself drawn to, I thought of the woman in the hotel room. I suppose I worried it would happen to me. The idea grew from there. I wonder...What if...?

What genre does your book fall under?

Fiction



Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I can see Evan Adams (Thomas Builds-The-Fire in Smoke Signals) as my character, Joseph. He needs to be about 30, but he looks younger than he is. I'd also love to meet him. He's not only an actor but a physician. Talk about a Renaissance man.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
I actually dislike talking about my books before they're finished. It's a bit of a superstition, or maybe just a suspicion, that if I talk it out, I won't need to write it. But I did agree to this chain interview! So here's what I can safely say: It's a novel set in rural Manitoba and Bombay, India in 1970.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

My hero, Denise Bukowski, represents me.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It's still in progress, but my last novel took about three years, if I disregard the original draft that I wrote ten years earlier.

Below are links to some of my favourite and talented writers you can visit:
Anne McDonald
Sean Johnston
Nabina Das
Alix Hawley

Message for tagged authors:
Rules of the Next Big Thing

***Use this format for your post
***Answer the ten questions about your current WIP (work in progress)
***Tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:
What is your working title of your book?
Where did the idea come from for the book?
What genre does your book fall under?
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.
Be sure to line up your five people in advance.