Naming

We rode Green Mountain Road through the Penticton Indian reserve yesterday. The road winds and climbs gradually and the vegetation changes every few kilometres, through the dry hills dotted with sagebrush, past open, swampy meadows, along a creek, running fast with all the rain we've had and then into forest. Wildflowers everywhere and I thought of Maggie and her obsession with naming the flowers she sees. Not surprising, I guess, that it's an obsession I understand.

I saw flowers yesterday whose names I didn't know. This yellow one is a Columbia lily (I found out). The red one, below, is a Scarlet Gilia, which I've never seen (that I can remember.) I thought at first it was a columbine. I also saw blue flax, brown-eyed susans, yarrow, lupines, wild roses, thimbleberry, corn flowers, mountain avens and forget-me-nots. Knowing the names tells me that I know this place. It's like knowing the street names of a city, or knowing which restaurants you can still get breakfast at on a Sunday at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Early July, I can look for the Columbia lily on this side of Green Mountain Road.

A tree is just a tree

It's almost as difficult to write about nature as it is to write about sex. One person's sexy is another's disturbing. Or dull. Or saccharine. Or ridiculous. I like Michael Ondaatje's writing, but some of his descriptions of sex just make me feel his pain. Like this one from The English Patient: "Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other."

It's the words that are the trouble. Cloying or crude, there seems to be no middle ground. Descriptions of nature, too, seem to veer too easily to cliche. The moon is always a pale wafer, trees are towering, rain slants, sun beats and sand sifts. It's tough to capture it without resorting to verbal acrobatics that call too much attention to the writing.

Writing in restaurants

My niece emailed me a link the other day to Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling. Then playwright Dave Sealy called it "an excellent set of guidelines" on Facebook, so I had a closer look. I like this kind of thing, for some reason. It gets me wondering about what my own set of rules would include. The first rule would be "always be suspicious of rules."

But I like their rule number eight: Finish your story, let go even if it's not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time. I sometimes get questions from people who are working on a book. They want to know how to get it published. My advice is "finish writing it." No one will publish an idea, even a fantastic one. If you're Margaret Atwood, you might get a nice advance for an idea, but you'll still have to write the book. That's why rule number 7 is also good advice: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front. I like to have a general idea of an ending when I begin writing. That way I can write towards it. While writing Shelter, my ending changed because the middle changed. But not much.I knew the core of it from the start.

Rule number eleven is Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you'll never share it with anyone. When I'm revising, I leave home, leave the computer, leave the familiar. I take a thick pad of yellow newsprint and a medium ballpoint pen and I head out. Sometimes I go for a drive, a productive place for me. Sometimes I go to the Bench, my favourite lunch spot in Penticton, or the Elite, a pretty good breakfast place downtown and a good place to stare out the window. David Mamet (king of dialogue) has a book called Writing in Restaurants. In the title essay he says, "In a restaurant one is both observed and unobserved. Joy and sorrow can be displayed and observed 'unwittingly,' the writer scowling naively and the diners wondering, What the hell is he doing?" Being in a public place does something different to my writing. I take the section I want to revise and I start over. I write anything, stuff I'll never use. Writing on the yellow pad frees me up, makes me feel less committed. One sentence leads to another. I have faith in that.

In The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio & Dorianne Laux, there's a chapter called "Stop Making Sense." I'd add that to my list of rules. Too much control over your story takes the fun out of it. I once had the pleasure of meeting with Timothy Findley to talk about a story I'd written. He asked me a question about something in the story. When I couldn't explain it, he said, "Someone once told me there are always chairs tipping over in my writing. I can't explain that either, but it must mean something." My unconscious mind understands things I don't. At 2 a.m., at 7 a.m., my unconscious trips along, throwing up dreamlike associations that I try to trust. 

That's why I disagree with rule number two:  You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different. Maybe they're different, maybe they're not. If I pay attention to what's fun for me as a writer, it's usually the same as what I like as a reader. I just heard a CBC interview with the band, Rush, who have a new album out. They talk about trying to live up to big ideas, constantly reaching, trying to push yourself. It has to be fun.

Good places to write

This good place is by the Chilcotin River in Farwell Canyon.

 I've started a new blog called Good Places to Write (after trying to do it as blog page and then realizing you can't keep the old posts). I'll invite writers to contribute their favourite places to write. My first guest writer is the funny and talented painter and poet Brenda Schmidt. Brenda often writes about nature, as do a lot of my favourite poets. But she does it in a way that is never dry, always quirky and unexpected. Her insights are sharp, often lonely. Her photographs and paintings are amazing, too. I hope you'll check out her post.

People often ask me how I get writing done. I have a full time "day job," like a lot of writers, and I also have the regular pleasures and duties in my life that call me. I've found two things that really help me get work done. The first is simple. I get up when my son gets up for school and I start writing as soon as he's out the door. In the morning my head is slightly foggy, still halfway in the dream world of sleep, a semi-altered state of consciousness that seems productive for me. I usually write until about noon.(It helps that my day job allows me to set my own schedule, more or less) Sometimes I have other obligations before then, but I try very hard to keep that morning time slot clear. I also try not to check my email first thing. Email is a great time-sucking, soul-destroying distraction that can lead me off into all kinds of directions and before I know it the day's half gone and I've accomplished very little of any kind of work. Not that I have strong feelings about it! Recently, I read that many companies are trying out a zero or minimal email model as a way to boost productivity. 

The other thing I do, and this comes back to the Good Places to Write blog, is go on writing retreats. These can be formal, juried retreats run by arts organizations for a minimal fee. I'll post some of these. But sometimes, I head out somewhere on my own, somewhere far enough away from home, preferably without email access, but not expensive. I consider $50-$75/day not too expensive. I might just take two or three days. If I can find a week somewhere, I'll do that and look for a cheaper weekly rate. The change of scenery is good for my writing and I almost always manage to write about a normal month's worth of work in those few days. (don't forget it can be used an as expense on your taxes).

Look for the trees

That's my canoe, on one of the most beautiful lakes I've ever seen. Scientists are discovering that being surrounded by nature is good for us. Dr. Esther Sternberg talks about this on CBC. Does it have to do with the calming influence of blues and greens or the comfort of patterns that we recognize in nature? Whatever it is, an "unscientific study" (below) suggests that some of us have more access to that calming influence than others.
How to spot income inequality from space: look for the trees

Singing and Writing

A few years ago, I started taking singing lessons from a very talented and gentle teacher named Tracy Fehr. I'm not one of those people who are told, "Oh you have such a beautiful voice, you should really take up singing..." Quite the opposite. Well, maybe not quite the opposite. No one ever told me my voice was bad, but I assumed it was. Although I knew I had a good ear for music, I grew up in a household where the family refrain was "The Greenslades can't sing." I'm not sure where this came from. Both my grandfather and my father loved music. Both could carry a tune and were partial to opera. My father had an enormous collection of CDs and albums; it was an obsession for him, almost as all-consuming as his obsession with collecting books. Sunday mornings our house reverberated with the sounds of Mozart's Horn Concertos or Beethoven or Schubert, his favourites. My mother would sometimes turn it down a bit, saying, "I can't hear myself think." At the time, his music habit was on par in my mind with his cigar-smoking habit, one of the annoying things my father did that I couldn't wait to escape.

When my grandfather died, I inherited many of his record albums. Alone in my own apartment, my favourites became Mozart's piano concertos, music I listen to now to help drop me almost automatically into the world of my writing. I think my father would have made a fine tenor or baritone in a church choir, something he would have loved. And I've discovered, with Tracy's help, that I have a serviceable alto voice. My favourite singing is when I have the harmony part with my soprano friend, Heather. We both like old, sad songs, full of round "o" words like home, road and gone and "ah" sounds like night, wild and mine. These are good, open words to sing.

Singing has led me to pay attention to the beauty of plain, serviceable nouns and verbs in writing. When I'm editing, I go through my writing and strike out extraneous adjectives, articles and prepositions. Plain words are evocative. Moon, ripple, rise, pool. I don't want to fancy them up. I like the rhythm of them in my sentences. 

Der Duft des Regens

I received the advance copy of the German edition of Shelter in the mail today. The cover is quite different from the other editions. And the title translates as Scent of Rain. Interesting, because the original, working title of the novel was Hard Rain. Yeah, it came from the Bob Dylan song and yeah it's a bad title; that's why I came up with another one. Titles are hard. I like multi-word titles, like  the title of my friend Sean Johnston's book of poetry, The Ditch was Lit Like This. That is a fantastic title, in my opinion. I also like By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

But Shelter started to seem to me the only title for this novel as I wrote it. In fact, I hadn't quite realized what an obsession the theme of shelter is to me. It's true I have recurring dreams about dwellings, which should have been the clue. Usually I'm in a dilapidated dwelling, a house, an apartment or a makeshift camp in some abandoned building. I'm often trying to fix a leaky roof. Sometimes I'm hiding in an attic. It took me most of my adult life to recognize how important security is to me.

The headings in Shelter, which some reviewers have complained are obvious or unnecessary, (and I can't say they're wrong exactly) worked for me as guideposts as I wrote. Food, Water, Fire: the other three survival necessities, after shelter. But it was interesting to me as a writer that, without even thinking about it, the Food section was full of references to meals and eating. The water section, too, had rain and rivers and the most primal experience of water, the womb.

It's a strange experience to let go of your book and let someone else give it a title. And to not be able to read the translation. I did work with the translator, Claudia Feldmann, and the questions she asked me were so nuanced and meticulous that I felt confident in her work. (She asked me, for instance, about the expression "horseshoes up the whazoo" and what the "bodily function" reference was in "Ginger #2").