I write at the kitchen table. Having
lived in small apartments, this was always an act of necessity. Since those
days I’ve moved to a larger place but the kitchen table just feels right. There’s
something utilitarian about writing where you eat. What does a writer need
besides a flat surface, a laptop, time, and their imagination? (One could add
‘a bank account with unlimited funds’ and ‘a cup of strong coffee,’ but those
just enhance the latter two necessities). These days the table sits in the
corner of the living room. There’s a tall window that lets in some light and
offers a view of the tangled iron fire escape in the courtyard of my building.
Like many writers, I
thrive off of routine. Unfortunately, being a sessional language teacher means
never knowing what my schedule is going to be, so my writing days morph from semester
to semester. My chosen career path has its ups and downs, but I accept this
precarity in the knowledge that at least I’ll have time for the work that feeds
me creatively. Luckily, this fall I have a contract that gives me mornings:
wake up at 6:30am, matcha tea with breakfast, prep my class to get it out of
the way, brew some strong coffee, then write, write, write.
As precious as
writing time is, I do spend a disconcerting amount of it staring out at the
fire escape. Thinking time is a necessary part of productivity, of course, but
this is also when it’s easiest to jump over to social media and waste countless
minutes scrolling through the newest
#Canlit drama. I’d like to say I have boundless willpower, but if it weren’t
for the app, Self Control, I’d be a
total slave to social media. Sustained attention is simultaneously the most
valuable and least coveted resource we have as writers in the digital age. Without
it we’re basically drifting rudderless in an ocean of distractions.
Forming a world and populating it with
the characters I’ll be living with, and through, for months to come is the most
energizing stage for me. I like to go to bustling coffee shops to work during
this period, surrounded by the stimulation of human interaction. Some may be
inclined to consider novel-writing to be a form of escapism, but I tend to see
it as the ultimate engagement with my perceptions of the world. The realities we
weave are only as nuanced as our ability to comprehend the one we’re living in.
As an exercise in radical empathy, the novel demands a deep dive into
perspectives and realms of knowledge that are not my own. I spend hours at my
table watching YouTube videos of lady truckers giving advice to other lady
truckers about life on the road, reading about signs of dehydration in cattle, or
taking notes on Charles Koch’s Market-Based Management® system for a high-level
executive inhabiting my pages. For a Lunaapeew character in my current project,
I interviewed Brent Stonefish, a friend-of-a-friend-of-my-sister’s from Eelünaapéewi
Lahkéewiit (formerly Delaware nation at Moraviantown) near Chatham, Ontario. The
interview was recorded, transcribed, thematically analyzed, and then Brent
kindly confirmed the thematic analysis for me, correcting any errant details in
my perception of his responses. We’ve maintained a connection throughout the
process of writing my book, and become friends along the way, which has been
truly gratifying. Not every character requires such an intensive methodology,
but getting things right is a responsibility I don’t take lightly, especially
when it comes to writing Peoples who have traditionally been so misrepresented
in Western media and literature.
Then, of course,
comes the actual writing. I used to get first drafts down into a notebook, but
spontaneously shifted to typing them directly into my laptop for this project.
I guess this was an attempt to speed things up a bit, bring my process into the
21st century, but it’s completely backfired on me. I’m spending more
and more time ‘getting things right’—rewriting, reworking, and moving things
around—before moving on, whereas the notebook functioned more as an initial sketch
that allowed me to progress without obsessing over every tiny detail.
Regardless, what I have moving forward feels more solid this way, and I’m too
stubborn to revert back to my old approach, at least at this point.
Of course, writing a
book is nowhere as linear as I lay it out here. Breakthroughs have a way of
popping up on the metro, or in line at the grocery store, or in dreams. New
characters emerge unexpectedly mid-draft, or things I didn’t realize I needed knowledge
of spark a new round of research. And I haven’t even mentioned the inevitable editing
stages, or the process of working with sensitivity readers that this book will
require. These are waiting for me once the project is a more complete, living,
breathing entity; a fallible organism animated through hours of secluded
labour.
In a time of
rapid-fire communication and the expectation of constant creative output,
writing a novel feels a little ridiculous. Who would willingly take on a
project with no clear end in sight? There’s a hint of masochism in the
unabashed embrace of slowness, the dedication to progress that can only be
described as glacial. (I’m a slow
writer at even the most prolific of times. The fact that my current novel takes
place entirely in a traffic jam hasn’t helped my perception of the process).
When it comes down to it, there is no
typical writing day, just a consistent surrendering to what needs to be done, and a faith that you will one day get to your
destination.
Dean Garlick is a novelist living in Montreal. His
first book, The Fish was published in
2010 on Anteism Press and translated into French on Les Allusifs in 2015. His
novella, Chloes, was released in
2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment