I grew up knowing that what one was supposed to do is write. As I child I heard my mother clacking away on her typewriter most days. (She wrote two travel books and some articles) I think it annoyed me as a child as it was an activity she preferred to taking a stab at parenting, but the idea that what one did was write was ingrained in me from the very beginning. Also, I loved books, and as a child was reading considerably ahead of my age for as long as I can remember. A big part of my childhood involved being on the road with my mother for the better part of 13 years, driving from Canada to Mexico, where we lived fall and winter and I went to school, or Mexico to Canada for the summer and my mother kept awake by having me read to her. Still today, I associate the long open road with stories.
In my 30s I wrote a sort of grade 8 level novel about time travel which never saw the light of day, but it was good enough serve as a portfolio to get me into the UBC creative graduate program when I was in my 40s. I was much the oldest person in my year. I wrote a very successful children’s picture book that was eventually remaindered after about 20 years, and then just poetry because I could do it in small snatches of time and this was published in various literary journals. My Master’s thesis was a book of short stories, some of which were published in journals. After that I went silent for 20 years because I was busy teaching and being a high school principal. By the time I began to write Lane Winslow I was completely convinced no one would want to publish my book, so I self-published under a different title. Here’s where my luck turned. I had been driving around like an Amway salesperson with books in my trunk and I was amazed to find people were loving the book. The wonderful indie bookstore, Hager, in Vancouver couldn’t keep them in stock, and finally someone actually called a publisher they knew to describe the book. He didn’t do that sort of publishing, but he knew someone who might…and within a year and a half, that first book, and a second, were bought by my current wonderful publisher, Touchwood Editions.
I want to say something about belief and writing. I truly believed that being a published author would never happen for me. Even the successful children’s book didn’t convince me. And yet I never lost the deep conviction that I ought to be a writer. And then one day I was reading something and I thought, "I can write at least this well!" And in that moment the internal dialogue switched from “It’s the sort of thing that can only happen for other people” to “Why not me?” Everything changed after that. It sounds a bit like magical thinking, but I just didn’t doubt myself in the same way after that, and because it happened at about the time I got a publishing deal, I have the rather romantic notion that my change in attitude is what caused it all to happen.
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| Book 1 review HERE! |
Your writing spans a wide range - short stories, poetry, a children's book, and the Lane Winslow murder mystery series. Do you enjoy one more than the others? How does working in diverse genres help to hone an author's skills?
I think almost all types of writing support one another. When you write poetry and short fiction, you know that every word matters, and so you learn to write cleanly without excess, so that the story or the image comes through. This is a great thing to carry into longer fiction. The only thing about being away from a type of writing for a while is that you lose the groove. I used to write poetry very regularly so I was in a flow with it. Now, when I am almost exclusively writing fiction it is not as easy to get into that swing for the other forms. I’d say right now I most enjoy writing the Lane Winslow books.
However, I do have a relationship with essays that I find intriguing. Someone might ask me to reflect on something, or write a piece for a crime blog, or an essay about writing itself. This process for writing a ’thought’ piece is very extensive for me. First draft, followed by many, many re-workings of the piece till I think it really reflects what I am thinking. This can take a couple of weeks. All of that for something under 2000 words. It is much more arduous than writing fiction, but I appreciate how it hones my thinking and expression. This in turn, also helps long-form fiction. You are constantly moving toward clarity.
What inspired your Lane Winslow series and the characters that fill it? When writing book one, did you have any idea it would become a ten title series?
Lane Winslow herself was inspired by my mother, (though I almost immediately left many aspects of my mother behind as I began to write). My mother was a spectacular person; brilliant and multi lingual, and as a young woman extremely beautiful, and all her life was ridiculously courageous. I discovered just before she died that she’d engaged in intelligence work ahead of the start of WW2 where she and my father lived in South Africa. I suspect she continued after the war got going, but she tended to poo-poo it as being nothing, and really told me very little about it. Her father was a spy through both major wars, and I learned recently that besides her father, 2 of her 3 uncles worked for MI6. She didn’t seem to get along with any of them, including her father, which I have found very intriguing to explore in the books.
As I began writing I immediately moved the time line back to 1946, an intriguing time to me, as everyone is beginning to come out of the complete and utter disruption of war, and asking themselves what life is about now, and who they are.
I should talk about the use I make of flashbacks…they have two functions. One, to provide clues that the reader can carry forward, either about the details of the background to the crime, or something about the character that explains ‘current’ action. The second is to take away any necessity of ‘explaining’. The explaining I mean is when the writer wants to unload a bunch of facts to the reader, with this sort of wording: “X had always hated her aunt, and at Christmas that year had decided to have her revenge”. etc. I’ve never enjoyed reading this sort of background information dump. I like to be in on the action, and I want my readers to be as well, so rather than do all that explaining, I want to take you to that awful Christmas Day, and show you what X does.
In terms of the technicality of putting flashbacks in…it’s not so much a question of ‘putting them in’ as the realization that the reader needs to know something about this person or situation that happened before, and so that’s the next thing your write. (Indeed, as a ‘discovery writer, so do I!) I’ve been a little undisciplined about how I fit them in the past, but a good rule is if you are in the ‘present’ of your story, and Meg has just closed the door on her lover, it’s a good time then to go back and learn something about what happened to Meg when her father left when she was nine, or whatever it is. That makes the transitions smoother. One of the comments reviewers and readers have made is that even my minor characters are richly drafted…these sorts of flashbacks help because you get to experience the character in a full and very human situation.
How does the writing process work for you? Do you schedule a time every day, work madly when inspiration hits or ?
I’m not a big fan of ‘inspiration’. I’m pretty disciplined. I sit down every morning and write, trying to get between 1000 and 2000 words a day. I am, as I said, a discovery writer, so I mostly don’t know what I’m going to write or learn on any given day. I was an educator so I still follow a five day a week schedule, though if I miss a week day, I definitely will pick it up on the weekend. I won’t say I don’t have inspiration…I do…there was a scene that came to me one day during the writing of the third book and I was nearly breathless when I thought of it, and had to write it at once, but mostly the ideas pop up as I’m writing, so I’m more or less continuously entertained. I did have the experience when I was travelling in Europe for a month just now, and I wasn’t writing at all, of realizing something I was doing in my 12th book was all wrong, and it would be so much better if I replaced a character I’d introduced with a different one. I guess that’s a kind of inspiration. A nuisance sort of inspiration, since I’ve spent the time since I got back re-writing the damn thing!
What I enjoy most is definitely what I think of as the heart of creativity…that discovery as you’re writing that the story is unfolding and blossoming before your very eyes. I so much respect my brain’s part in this process. I have a rule never to ‘erase’ anything as I go along, even when I think it sounds ridiculous, because, the next day I might read it and find it’s brilliant and the key to everything. If I erased every time I had doubts my brain would soon walk away saying, ‘fine, you do it!’. I’m not someone who pre plots, and I think, as Stephen King suggests, plotting is antithetical to creativity, at least to me. I would die if I had to write from plot point to plot point. Instead what I have is a daily experience of a real sense of creating something, of really being with my characters and learning about them as they negotiate their lives.
There’s always a bit of a struggle for discovery writers to draw the whole thing together, I think, but even that can be fun. The editing process is pretty extensive in my case. I have a very thorough Beta reader who really helps me see what has to be dealt with, and of course, the substantive editing process once it goes to the publisher. I think the most difficult is when one of them tells me I have to move a whole scene to another part of the book. I see at once they are right, but it’s an incredible task because you have to rewrite all that came before and after to accommodate the change.
But even solving a difficult problem that an early reader has pointed out can be intriguing because it becomes a real problem solving experience.
I use a lot of historical material in my books and the research is always wonderful. It can involve anything from reading journals or memoirs of the period, to visiting museums to see the artefacts I’m writing about. I love history (I majored in history in college) and any excuse to go into a war museum, or restored building is thrilling. I’ve also been helped by the most wonderful people; the Sinixt Elder who spent hours with me on my book Framed in Fire, down to people who are experts on how printing was done in the past, or are experts on vintage motorcycles.
I haven’t found time for painting so much, but I still try with faltering success to keep up a sketching practice. I’m pretty visual and I love art. My husband and I go to art galleries and museums wherever we travel, and he is an artist. I love walking and listening to audio books. I walk my 10k steps every day, and am never happier than when I have a really fat book to listen to. I’m a huge Dickens fan and his books can run to 30 hours. As well, whenever we can we go on long-distance walks in England of a week or more. I also love cooking. I am actively intrigued by the process of preparing food, and the chemistry of baking. In the summer I grow my little container garden and am inordinately proud of it. And of course to line my brain up I do a couple of hard sudokus a day. Also a massive fan of soccer. And still sing badly for my little band.
I’m excited about the next book, Lightening Strikes The Silence, where Lane is confronted with the dangerous artifacts of the war they’ve just put behind them right in King’s Cove. I’m also excited because I’m introducing an absolutely remarkable historical British Columbia figure into the fictional action, Dr. Masajiro Miyazaki.
I have a very short quote I heard presented at a professional soccer game yesterday as part of the MLS creed, and I think it encompasses my philosophy of everything, especially in these times: “Everyone welcome."
But for a proper meaty quote, this is one of my favourite quotes of all time…a bit long winded, but Carl Sagan had a way of illuminating what is magical in the universe:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
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