For those considering the venture of writing …

This was going to be a lovely little newsletter about My Writing Life. I’d have told you what tea I drink, described the disreputable bathrobe I wear (it wasn’t always disreputable, but it is startling how little time it takes for a bathrobe to descend into a louche state). Instead, I find myself in the throes of tearing my hair out about the book I am writing right this minute, so you’re getting a little whinge about that instead!

So, here’s what happened. I was writing along and had arrived at about a third of the way through the book, feeling, I don’t mind saying, a little smug about my progress. Book fifteen, nearly in the can! (Of course, what hubris! The world is littered with books abandoned at a third of the way through!) Then, suddenly, the book kicked back. It said, shaking its head in disgust, “No, no no! you’ve got it all wrong!” I’m not making this up. It practically, almost, did say that out loud.

There is a precipitating event at the beginning  of this book upon which all of the action in the book hangs, and now I was being told, by the book, that it hadn’t happened that way at all. I gritted my teeth and tried to soldier on, but the book dug in its heels. I reminded myself, and it, that this is my book. I’m the one that makes stuff up. But it was no use. The book had ideas of its own, and it wasn’t going to budge.

I was forced to drop what I was doing and pace the streets, turning things over, listening to my brain saying unhelpful things like, “Nope. Nope. No, not that either.” And then when all hope seemed lost, I had one of those little light bulbs you see in comic strips . . . I mean, I saw at once that the book was right. And at that point the book, having won the day, put its hands complacently into its pockets and strolled to the nearest shady tree for a nap, leaving me with the wreckage. All the things I would have to shift to accommodate its little whims! I just know it will stroll back whistling tunelessly under its breath to stand over me every morning watching and saying, “Oh, don’t mind me.”

That is the writing life, as it turns out. I’m working on my fifteenth book and I’m not sure I could tell you how a book happens at all. I’ve always known that how a person writes is as individual as a fingerprint, but what I’m beginning to learn is that the ease or difficulty of a book for the writer is not, at least for me, based on how many books I’ve already successfully produced. It turns out some books seem to write themselves, and some behave very badly, like this one I’m dealing with now. And the trouble is, neither of these things is any guide to whether the book will be any good. They are all individuals and a law unto themselves. It was Canadian author Margaret Laurence, in discussing the mysterious process of fiction, who said “a writer, however experienced, remains in some ways a perpetual amateur.”

That has really come home to me. I thought my feeling of being always an amateur was because I was sixty-four when I wrote my first Lane Winslow, while Margaret Laurence was thirty-four when she wrote her first book. It turns out a new book is always new, it is always mysterious, each story will always be a struggle, because the people are new, and their motivations are perplexing and very nearly impenetrable sometimes. Their lives are often unlike anything I’ve experienced and I must try to understand them. In my books, my characters’ world of the late 1940s is not my own, and I must try to dwell there for a spell, and learn what it was like to live in a vanished time.

I believe the book and I have come to an uneasy truce about how it is going to go. I am to turn up five days a week and write, and I will do what it tells me. And I will not try to cross it by second guessing or trying to edit as I go. It’s how I respect the book and myself, and keep my end of the bargain. But I draw the line…I am not giving up my bathrobe! 

I’ll tell you about the tea and all that next time.

Wish me luck!

For now, I’m excited about my upcoming Christmas novella, a Lane Winslow prequel taking place in 1940, when our Lane is just twenty years old: A Season For Spies. Publication date is November 11. In the meantime, I always love hearing from you! Just go to the ‘contact’ section of my website, ionawhishaw.ca.