Broken any speed records lately?

When Anne Giardini speaks, people listen.

A lawyer (QC) by training (UBC, Cambridge) she has also written a nationally-syndicated newspaper column. Mother of three, she’s president of Weyerhaeuser Canada. She sits on the board of The Writers’ Trust of Canada and the Vancouver International Writers Festival.

Word count: 475                               Reading time: Approx 2 mins.

In her spare time, she reads a book ‘every couple of days’ and, since 2005, has knocked out a novel of her own every three or four years. She is the oldest daughter of the late, great Carol Shields and grew up surrounded by literature. She knows a thing or two. This past week she addressed the North Shore Writers’ Association (NSWA) and kept us pinned to our seats.

Some of the wisdom she offered:

• If you want to be a published writer, don’t write for yourself. Show your work to friends and neighbours. Workshop it. Get feedback. (My qualifier: be selective whose feedback you take to heart. One reader’s meat is another reader’s poison.)
• Get out and meet people in the writing community. You never know where your contacts will lead you.
• Writing is about problem-solving. What problem is your story trying to solve?
• Put your work out there for external validation. If you’re writing a novel try to write at least one stand-alone chapter. Submit it as a short story to competitions and literary magazines.
• Read a lot. Write a lot.
• It’s not too late to start. A sixty-year-old member of Anne’s writing group launched his first book this year.
• When writing, heed the words of Emily Dickinson, Tell all the truth but tell it slant.
• Remember Michael Winter’s two dogs in the writing room. One is a puppy, beguiling and playful. The other is a dying dog that needs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The puppy is the internet. The dying dog is your novel. The dying dog needs your attention most urgently.
• Always read your work out loud before finalizing it.
• Be vigilant with your time management. Set high expectations. Make choices.

In respect to the last point, Anne admitted she has given up TV, movies, and plays in order to fit writing and reading into her demanding life.

Hearing her formidable schedule made me feel a little weary, which shows how different the writing experience can be. If she and I were in a productivity race, she would run the track a hundred times for every lap of mine. But that’s fine. There is a place in the world for both the tortoise and the hare.  

Where are you in the energy spectrum of writing and life? What have you sacrificed to make time for your craft? Do you look at people like Anne Giardini and think, “I can’t do that so I may as well not try?” Or do you accept yourself and what you can do with philosophical calm?

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Three Hermann’s Tortoises by Ranko

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PS Breaking news at the NSWA meeting: Anne made the first official announcement that her family are putting together a book on writing based on Carol Shields’s years as a professor at the University of Manitoba. The book will include personal anecdotes to illustrate the lessons, a la Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (one of Anne Giardini’s favourite books about writing).  

What's it all about?

I wrote my first thank you letter in either grade one or two. An aunt in England used to send me a book every Christmas, wrapped in brown paper and tied with thin cotton string. We didn’t have a lot of relatives and she was the only one who sent presents, so my gratitude was heartfelt.

Word count: 329   Reading time: 1-2 minutes

I never did meet this great aunt, this sister of someone married to someone related to my father. She was a stranger in a faraway land and I studied her neat handwriting and wondered at the magic that connected us. The annual event of her gift spurred a tradition that became a lifelong habit of letter writing.

This habit peaked when I moved to Australia in 1987. In those pre e-mail days in Melbourne and Sydney, I wrote 8 to 10 letters a week. Which leads me to wonder, why did I write so profusely? I’ll let Anne Lamott answer that: [I] was desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined moments come alive.  (Bird by Bird)

Long before written language evolved, people sought to record their stories, first in cave paintings and then, 10,000 years later, in petroglyphs.

Laying down our stories has been a part of human psyche for a long time. Maybe we do this because of the reasons articulated by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones, “[…] the secret ego truth is I want to live eternally and I want my people to live forever. I hurt at our impermanence, at the passing of time. […] I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home and it may be the only real home I’ll ever have.”

What are your memories of your earliest writing? What drives you to keep writing now? Do you know young people and what do you do to encourage their literacy?

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Painting of a bison in the cave of Altamira photo by: Ramessos

A Basket Full of Miracles

 Word count: 486                      Reading time: 2-3 minutes

When I learned to scuba dive in the Pacific Northwest, it wasn’t a laidback, warm water experience. The environment posed the biggest threat so I’d don my 40 lb drysuit, heft my 25 lb weight belt, and pick up my 35 lb tank. Then I’d start the long descent to the beach. Adrenaline lightened my load as I anticipated sinking into the dark, frigid ocean. After an exhilarating, sometime dangerous, dive I’d surface and have to haul all that gear back to where I parked.

As I picked my way across kelp-slippery rocks and up rough steep tracks, I’d tell myself not to look at the long stretch that separated me from my car. I’d get there, one step at a time. When did I forget that simple philosophy?

Over the years I’ve amassed a small collection of writing reference books. Trouble is I sometimes buy them, read a random chapter or two, and then file them. Recently, I’ve added a few more to the collection. Then I set them around the house like land mines: on a side table in the living room, on the mantelpiece, beside the bed and on my dresser – anywhere that I am likely to trip over them. They aren’t going back onto the shelves until I’ve finished them, cover to cover. The ones I’m reading (simultaneously) right now are:

• Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg – I love her theories of free writing for a more physical connection with the work and to unearth long-buried feelings.
• Reading Like A Writer – Francine Prose – I had forgotten her invaluable advice on how to get the most out of the hours spent lost in fiction. A must for anyone who wants to write.
• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers – Renni Browne & Dave King – I wish I’d read this years ago. It gives such a different approach to revising one’s own work.
• Steal Like An Artist – Austin Kleon – this is my latest and I’m reading it for a second time this summer because he offers grounded, often humorous, advice on everything from an artist’s social life to his or her financial management.

I found many treasures had been buried in my bookshelves for far too long. Now they are helping me as I revise my YA novel, due for release in Spring 2014.

So, just like I climbed up the beach with my scuba gear, one step at a time, I’m working through them, page by page. In fact it’s almost Bird By Bird. Thank you Anne Lamott. It’s amazing how much we can do when we concentrate on what is in front of us and stop thinking about the faraway goal.

What books are you reading to help your craft? Do you buy reference books, skim them, and then set them aside for another day? Are there any more books I should be reading?

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Scuba photo: Cathy Komar

Groundwork

 Word count: 220    Reading time: 1 min

As NaNoWriMo draws to a close, I’ve almost finished ploughing the field of my next YA novel. That’s right: I almost have a 50,000 word starting point. Or to borrow from Anne Lamott’s wonderful book Bird by Bird, I almost have a shitty first draft, a SFD. Emphasis on S.

That’s okay because I know the field needs more than ploughing. It needs harrowing and levelling as well. Revision is the harrowing and levelling of writing and I won’t start that for at least a month. What I will do is let it lie fallow so I can come back with a fresh perspective that allows me to see the plot lumps and the character weeds. Then I’ll read the whole thing, cover to cover, and try to sustain an attitude of confident optimism as I splash the pages with red ink. 

Before then, I have another field that needs attention. From January to October this year I rewrote last year’s NaNoWriMo effort many times. A YA novel, Lockdown takes place in Vancouver during a natural disaster. I believe it’s almost ready for harvesting.  

What’s growing in your paddocks? Are you working several crops at once? Do you rest your work? Or are you the mythical being who can produce a flawless tale in a single writing?

Photo by: Anna Fredriccsson