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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

Makin' Fire

10/22/2018

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Today, I’m wrapping up (I hope) what started out as a single post looking at the genesis of my first novel, intended as a single post but which, somehow, mysteriously, expanded into four… kind of like Topsy: it wasn’t borned, it just growed. (Aha! There’s your obscure literary reference for the day. The Great Unwashed may now wish to pause to consult Dr. Google.)
 
Annnnd we’re back. At the conclusion of my last post, five drafts after I began my novel-that-wasn’t-supposed-to-be-a-novel (see said previous post, please), I had a 186,000-word novel, and the question was, what to do with it? Embalm it and stuff it into a desk drawer? Well… no. Not an option, partially since I had deliberately ended the novel on a cliff-hanger and was already engaged in the process of writing the sequel, but especially because of… something else, which brings me to the point of today’s epistle: Why We Do It, the ‘we’ being writers and the ‘it’ being the attempt to bring our literary offspring into spiritus mundi, i.e. the often harsh and coldly uncaring world.
 
(This is not, by the way, the same thing as the issue of Why We Write. Nope. Not at all, although the two things are, in fact, loosely related. But Why We Write is actually a fairly simple explanation, so I’ll spare any neophytes out there the process of agonizing over it with a quick, tell-all reveal: we do it because we really don’t have any choice in the matter. It’s the same with any field of endeavour that engages our collective passion, really. Jocks gotta get out there on the field and physically grunt and sweat their hearts out, trying to kill the opposition in what George Orwell rather disparagingly called ‘war minus the shooting.’ (He did, I swear. Go consult Dr. Google again, if you don’t believe me.) Adventurers have to scale mountains or negotiate impassable swamps or other very uncomfortable and pointless activities. And so on. (Okay, okay, to be completely fair, I guess we have to admit that any creative passion may appear pointless to those who don’t share it.) Some people are born storytellers, and they just have to tell stories. If I’d been born a thousand years ago, I guess I’d have been a scop (verbal storyteller) singing for my supper around evening campfires about Beowulf or Things That Go Bump In The Night. Or put it another way: American author James Branch Cabell once chronicled a writer who cried out, “I am pregnant with words! And I must have literary parturition, or I die!” A little melodramatic, perhaps, but… yeah, I think that’s kind of the way it is with most writers. And Salman Rushdie neatly encapsulated why we keep working on our stories when he said that, if he stops labouring on a work-in-progress, it sulks. Oh, yeah. It surely does.)
 
Anyway. Why We Do It. Yes. Despite all kinds of encouraging blather that I see on social media about writers writing for themselves… well, we do, yeah, on one level, sure… but (and this is a caveat of paramount importance) no writer writes simply for his/her own self. At least, I don’t think so. Ars gratia artis is all very well, but as a philosophy, it’s the equivalent of comforting fairy tales we tell our children, like the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny and that all people are equal before the law and things of that ilk. Writers are no different from any other creative type, be they painter or actor or whatever, and the simple truth is: we want an audience. We want to share what we have created (preferably for money, so we can continue to create while indulging in minor things like eating and sleeping under a roof instead of a highway bridge, if you want to be crass but honest about it).  Although we write in solitude, we certainly don’t crave that as an ultimate goal for our literary progeny. I mean, who writes their magnum opus and then seeks to hide it away in a crypt somewhere? No, no, no: we want people to coo over it, just as they do with any newborn baby. And we want them to keep on cooing over it, even as it becomes a gangly adolescent and then a mature adult.
 
Several posts back, I wrote about the first time I gave a public reading of my work (in grade four, he said modestly), and to quote myself: The reaction I did feel was more akin to Tom Hanks in Castaway when he shouts exultantly, triumphantly, to the darkened heavens, “I… have… made… FIRE!” Yeah. I didn’t need Dumbo’s magic feather: I had my words. My words, people! Hear them! I am Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Uh, yeah… well, very possibly minus the slightly crazed youthful megalomania, I think that’s what any artist --- hell, any person --- wants: acceptance, appreciation and accolades of not only ourselves, but also of the fruits of our labours. I have made fire, indeed.
 
So there you have it. Why We Do It. The Three ‘A’s, we could call it.
 
(Should I be trademarking that?)
 
 
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The Final Origin

10/15/2018

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Ever noticed something very strange about the creative process? It’s definitely possible for creativity to spring from a contented, happy mindset, but stranger still how often the creative urge is inspired by unhappiness. So it was with my first novel.
 
In my last two posts (I’d include a hyperlink, but they’re right before this one, for crying out loud, so I think you can manage that little feat of dexterity without my help) I’ve told some of my writing story. I actually began it with today’s content, but as I’ve explained, the whole thing morphed into something longer (“this tale grew in the telling,” aye, thanks, Professor T) --- which isn’t a bad thing. But here we finally are, so sit back, boys and girls, and attend.
 
It was spring 2006… and raining in the city by the bay… uh, sorry; I was channelling Raymond Chandler there for a second… I actually didn’t/don’t live in any city by the bay. Anyway, I’d changed schools the previous autumn to teach senior high English, having taught junior high for over twenty years. With my then-principal’s retirement, I thought it a good time to move to senior high, where students would hopefully be confused on a higher plane. Yay me.
 
Unfortunately, the excitement didn’t last. My new school proved… well, rather than get too colourful, let’s try and stay professional by simply stating that the administration and I turned out to have fundamental, irreconcilable differences of opinion as to what constituted good pedagogy and a soundly run school. It didn’t take long to reach that conclusion, either --- I knew within a month or so I’d made a major mistake in coming there --- and I quickly slithered from enthusiasm to puzzlement to concern to outrage. By spring 2006, my morale was rock-bottom --- particularly after a pretty intense back-and-forth between the principal and myself while the entire department watched, slack-jawed, heads snapping back and forth like spectators at Wimbledon as the principal and I (we unintentionally, or perhaps more accurately, subconsciously, sat at opposite ends of the table) lobbed verbal sallies at each other. I came away with my worst suspicions confirmed; the inmates were running the asylum, this was the Mad Hatter’s tea party I was prisoner at, and what the hell was I to do now?
 
(Part of my problem, so my ever-patient wife informs me, is I’ve always had crystal-clear convictions on the rightness and wrongness of things, and more importantly, find it very difficult to let things I can’t change merely slide off my mind like water off a duck’s back. Nope. I have this insane compulsion to periodically open my mouth and lead the Charge of the Light Brigade, while people around look on with either amusement or admiration --- perhaps both, it’s not always easy to tell. Haro! For God and Saint George! Dulce et Decorum Est! and similar battle cries.)
 
Well, by autumn 2006, I’d found myself another school, just in the nick of time to preserve my sanity --- but that isn’t the focus of today’s epistle: it’s what happened in the short term --- no revelation to anyone who knows me even a little: I coped with my feelings by writing about them. Quel surprise!
 
Not long after the Fateful Meeting, I was sitting at my classroom desk one day, wishing desperately I could get out of that awful place (instead of doing what I should have been doing: marking --- argh, the bane of any teacher’s existence) and found myself staring at the exterior wall. Part of it contained moderately large windows, but another part was simple blank wall. And I idly began thinking… I wish there was a door in that friggin’ wall… a door leading away from here into… into… I dunno… some place with a whole helluva lot more magic… and enchantment… a better place…
 
Ah, ‘tis true: from little acorns do mighty oaks grow. Or something to that effect. Because that very evening I began chronicling such a scenario. I remember the opening words with crystal clarity (although today, they’re on page 17 of the novel --- needed a teensy bit of establishing background, dontcha know): [he] grasped the doorknob, and with a quick, almost convulsive movement, turned it. Then it… well, it proceeded from there.
 
Now, as an epic fantasy author, I’ve never been particularly enamoured of the hoary old writer’s aphorism write what you know, but I guess it was apt enough, at least to begin. Because that was me I was writing about, going through a door where there shouldn’t have been any door, escaping my troubles to enter a brave new world that had, to paraphrase Will, such creatures in’t.
 
But here’s an interesting thing: I had no particular intentions of writing a novel; I was just engaging in a little writer’s therapy, as I had done numerous times before… writing about my frustrations instead of doing something foolish in the real world --- a more socially acceptable response, you must admit, to handling the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (paraphrasing Will again). So I wrote.
 
Apparently, though, the therapeutic value was far greater than I ever imagined, because, rather like Pooh and his honey, I wrote and wrote and wrote and… only when I reached the point where I had amassed 14,000 words did I stop and think: whoa, wait a minute. What’s going on here? What’s evolving in this process?
 
I went back and read what I’d written… finding, to my bemused pleasure, it had turned into a pretty interesting story. The central character had acquired a name --- Rhiss, short for Rhissan --- and I liked what was going on. Okay, I thought, let’s keep going and see where it goes.
 
So I did. And about another 188,000 words and change (and some seven or eight years) later, had a first (bloated) draft of what had become Gryphon’s Heir. Four drafts, and much editing and Murdering of Darlings after that… it was waaay leaner, but contained far more story… and was publishable. Maybe we can talk about that process another time…
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More Origins

10/8/2018

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I have a confession to make, not a big one in the overall scheme of things, just a tiny one: I intended my last post to be a personal writer’s origin story in terms of how my first novel came to be… but somehow, it morphed into something else entirely: a journey much further back in time, a recounting of my first public reading of my writing.
 
(Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, not at all. In fact, it’s a really good lesson for anyone who counts themselves a writer. Lillian Hellman said, “Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.” Ain’t that the truth, Lil. Which is why I think plotters --- writers who go into often meticulous detail outlining/planning stories --- should neither get too attached to those outlines nor too bent out of shape when characters refuse to be hemmed in by artificial constraints or slavishly bend to a writer’s arbitrary whims, instead heading blithely off on their own and leaving said writer scratching his or her head, wondering what the hell just happened. That, by the way, is a glorious, to-be-savoured moment in writing, not something to fear… because it means characters have come alive and aren’t wooden marionettes in your hands anymore. Now, I don’t think it means you have to do a Victor Frankenstein, shouting maniacally, It’s alive! It’s alive! while cackling like a madman. But it is something to be celebrated.)
 
So I still intend to recount how my first novel came about… but first, I want to continue the thread from my last post, examining how a writer emerged from the chrysalis of childhood/adolescence. I mentioned searching my personal archives, finding the piece that gave rise to my first public reading as an author. I found quite a lot more writing, too --- you can see some of it in the accompanying picture. There were more pieces from elementary, and a battered red pocket notebook containing a list of story ideas. (I’m actually rather proud of that notebook; I didn’t know it at the time, but much later, I read that Roald Dahl kept a notebook of story ideas, so I figure I’m in pretty good company. And I did it as a kid, I note smugly --- the dates in the notebook place it to when I was all of twelve years old.)
 
I was a voracious reader of science fiction, beginning with Arthur C. Clarke following my introduction to him when 2001: A Space Odyssey was released as mind-blowing film and novel in 1968. But when I was twelve, a new genre entered my life: epic fantasy. I read The Lord of the Rings the summer between ending elementary and starting junior high. And was totally, completely, enthralled. Although I don’t remember clearly why I picked up my copy of LOTR --- an all-in-one volume of the entire tale --- I’m a little embarrassed, because my strong suspicion is I was hooked by the fact this was a Really Big Book. I’m even more embarrassed to admit I hadn’t read The Hobbit yet --- my mother had previously bought me a copy, but for some reason that today I find unfathomable, I (gulp) couldn’t get into it. (It wasn’t until after I’d read LOTR that I went back and read The Hobbit. Oh, well. I’ve heard adolescence described as a time of transitory psychosis. QED.)
 
So, here’s the question: what makes someone want to write, to be a writer? Joss Whedon has said whatever makes you weird is probably your greatest asset, and while I don’t know whether he was being facetious, I think there’s definitely something to that. My weirdness, if you want to call it that, was, I think --- from a very early age --- an intense desire to create. One of the primary ways I did that was with words and stories. My imagination soared far beyond the confines of the drab mortal world I found myself in, to other times, other worlds. (I was a pretty fair master builder with Lego as a kid, too, but that belongs partly to a different creative area of the brain.)
 
Famed science fiction author Frederik Pohl maintained that speculative fiction writers were all toads as children. I’m not sure I really want to go down that road, but am prepared to admit I was not particularly athletic as a kid, with very little interest in organized sports (though I do remember playing soccer a lot in elementary, and football with my neighbourhood friends). I wasn’t very competitive as far as sports went. A lot of it just seemed fairly pointless and rather… well, rather needlessly Neanderthal, truth be told. I was tall, skinny, pretty introverted, wore glasses from grade four onwards, consistently spoke and wrote with a vocabulary well above my grade (something that didn’t always endear me to my fellow students) and found a lot of their games rather pedestrian, especially when stacked against the brave new worlds people like Clarke and Tolkien were showing me. In short… yeah, okay, I was probably something of a toad.
 
But by the time junior high rolled around, I was writing in earnest. I wanted to create those brave new worlds, too. Hell, I needed to. Another well-known SF author, Robert Silverberg, wrote about one of his protagonists living in a world he hadn’t made and didn’t especially like, and… I found I could relate to that. So I wrote. Words are powerful, dontcha know. Looking back, much of what I wrote was heavily derivative of what I was reading at the time, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing per se: it’s part of the process for any writer finding his or her own voice --- as long as you eventually stop being derivative and do find your own voice.
 
And that, more or less, brings us (finally) to the genesis of my first novel.
 
Next time.

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An Origin Story

10/1/2018

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“When did you first realize you’re a writer?”
 
I was asked that the other day by one of my scholars, bless her inquisitive little heart, and it was among the easiest questions I’ve ever been asked by a student.
 
Because, you see… well, always.
 
Ever since I learned to write, anyway… printing first, of course, and then, in grade three, initiated into the Deeper Mystery of cursive handwriting --- which in a few more years will, I think, serve us old farts as an unbreakable code immune to the prying eyes of younger generations, because none of them can decipher its graceful curlicues and swoopings. And then, of course, along came… the computer.
 
I spent an entertaining hour viewing my archives while prepping this, because apparently, I’ve saved --- through initial packrat-itis, then sheer inertia --- much of my writing from distant adolescence… and even before. (Note to self: really, really need to cull it before departing this mortal plane --- which I ardently hope isn’t soon. But some of the archive is way beyond embarrassing --- journals written in high school, for example --- and I’d like to know precisely who the hell wrote them, because it sure can’t have been me. Can it? No, no. Must have been an evil doppelganger. It brings to mind Morgan Freeman from Shawshank Redemption, calmly intoning, “I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone, and this old man is all that’s left.” Yikes, getting morbid. Let’s get back on topic.)
 
So. Archives. Yes. I found just the thing: a piece from grade four that I have clear memories of, for two important reasons. My teacher, the redoubtable Mrs. Mitchell, whom I fondly remember (depending on her mood) as a cross between Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagall and Julie Walters’ Molly Weasley, gave us what, nowadays, we call a writing prompt: “I used to be the handsomest book in the library, but look at me now!”
 
Hmm. Not bad, Mrs. M, not bad at all. Books, libraries… great topics and a command dealing with time’s inexorable passage. What to write? Well, the clear implication was that the book in question had fallen afoul of ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,’ as Will says. But that seemed a little too obvious, so I cast about for a slightly different angle.
 
Eventually I turned it ‘round by crafting a very simple tale --- this was grade four, after all --- that made the book a document of great historical importance: the diary of Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. So yeah, the book had seen better days, but avoided that culling I ominously mentioned several paragraphs back, the one that may be the fate of my journals one day. I threw in a little history about Sir John’s life and untimely passing --- didn’t know about his prodigious drinking problem or role in Canada’s residential schools disaster, so didn’t mention either one. It was just a little innocent, youthful patriotism, and I recall feeling it went down on the page rather well, all things considered. Like a fine… well, not a fine wine, not at that age, but a fine… root beer. Just not as fizzy.
 
Apparently, Mrs. Mitchell thought so, too. She gave it an ‘H’ which, for some unfathomable reason in the Dark Ages of my education, was a mark even higher than an ‘A.’ The coveted ‘H’ was almost never given out… but I got one. Yep. Sure did. That’s the first reason it sticks out in memory, all these years --- hell, decades --- later.
 
The second reason has to do with what she did with my writing. No, I didn’t get a lucrative publishing contract; even Mrs. Mitchell’s near-godlike powers did not, it seemed, extend quite that far. But I got something just as good to a ten-year-old wannabe writer: publicity.
 
We had a full-school assembly, grades one through six, every… hmm, was it Wednesday or Friday? I think it was Fridays, but am prepared to admit there may be one or two details of my long-lost childhood that have vanished into the mists of time. Anyway. 400-500 kids, plus teachers. All in the gym for half an hour of stuff ranging from religion (everyone said the Lord’s Prayer), politics (everyone saluted the Canadian flag and said --- I swear these were the exact words --- “I salute the flag, the emblem of my country. To her I pledge my love and loyalty”), and entertainment… classes singing songs, dramatic presentations etc. You get the drift. Why do this? I suspect it was nothing more complicated than group socialization --- How To Properly Behave In Public Gatherings. Perish the thought we should try to do that with kids nowadays. Oh, I’m sorry… was that my outside voice?
 
Anyway. Mrs. Mitchell, God bless her, evidently thought my little epistle worthy of presentation at an assembly. And I was to present it. Little ol’ grade four me. Now, looking back all these years later, the curious thing is I wasn’t terrified. But nope --- standing before that vast sea of freshly scrubbed faces, some younger, some older --- not even a teensy bit. I don’t know why. The reaction I did feel was more akin to Tom Hanks in Castaway when he shouts exultantly, triumphantly, to the darkened heavens, “I… have… made… FIRE!” Yeah. I didn’t need Dumbo’s magic feather: I had my words. My words, people! Hear them! I am Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
 
Well, okay, maybe not quite that. I was many things as a child, but honestly don’t think megalomania was in there. But all writers want an audience. Even a captive one.
 
So, as Southey said in his epic poem Battle of Blenheim, ‘twas a famous victory.
 
Yeah. *Starry-eyed sigh.* My first public reading.
 
I was on my way.
 
 
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    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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