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.
(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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