Avoiding the Shining
Unpublished writers are a desperate lot, scribbling obsessively into notebooks and clanging on computers, hoping to turn ink into gold. We spend long, lonely hours in universes of our own inventing. Every now and then we surface, notice with sad hearts that the world remains uninterested in our babies, and lower our heads to our spurnful lovers once more.
We fear the day we catch our reflection in the monitor and see Jack Nicholson’s cabin-fevered writer from The Shining staring back.
Keeping motivated, and sane, is not an easy trick, and we all have our strategies. Mine involves a disturbing level of delusion and dreams of grandeur. When I was living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in a writing funk I would get a coffee at the Elephant House and stare out the window at Greyfriars cemetery, running my fingers over the scratches in the wood table.
When JK Rowling was just Joanne, a single mother who couldn’t afford heating, she came here to meet with her boy wizard Harry. I was hoping some of the magic would fly my way.
My latest child, Black Snow, is a red-hot love story set amidst the icy ruins of the Halifax explosion, and it’s currently being read by the astonishingly handsome and erudite Lesley Choyce of Pottersfield Press. To while away the hours, days, months – has it been years? – until I hear back, and in honour of next week’s Halifax International Writers’ Festival, I decided to ask some of my writer friends why in God’s name they keep at it.
Kelly Boyce has been writing since she was eight – seriously for the last five years. She pens historical romances, and rises at the unwritterly hour of 6:30am to work on Brimstone, the first of a planned four-part (or more) series. Then, she heads to work. “I sit at a desk and shuffle paper,” is how she describes it, with as much enthusiasm as that merits. She’s won several writing contest, including the Toronto Romance Writers competition twice, catching the eye of a couple of editors.
“There’s nothing else I’d rather do,” she says of writing. “I want to make it a full-time career. The idea of spending the rest of my life sitting in a pod shuffling paper… that alone is motivation enough,” she adds, laughing, perhaps a little too long.
She also meets with writing friends in a café. They get drinks, a stopwatch is started, and everyone writes for 30 minutes – no breaks, not even to pee or get another cuppa. Then it’s time for a 10-minute break, and another 30 minutes.
I meet Bretton Loney and Christian DeWolf at a downtown coffee house. We don’t write, but we do talk about it. Christian is 21 and heading to a cabin in the woods for a year of writing after he graduates from MSVU.
Bretton, who’s not 21, has been writing 10 years, producing two unpublished novels, two published short stories and five unpublished short stories - including my favourite, The Disappearing Bus, about a #24 that accidentally diverts from Halifax to London, England.
He writes for three hours a session, three times a week, as life permits. He’s found life as a writer much more bearable since he started looking at the actual process of getting published – so he’s not just firing books into the dark, but taking aim first.
“I’m motivated by the fact that I am having small successes now and by the fact that I just love writing,” he says.
Christian writes every day, for a couple of hours. He describes it as “absurdist comedy fiction.” I’m not sure what that means, but absurd seems an appropriate word to describe any part of writing. He’s got one unpublished novel, Gray, under his belt and is starting his second one – Ghost Crime – soon. Asked what keeps him going, he doesn’t hesitate: “Tobacco products.”
After a moment, he adds personal satisfaction.
The cabin is in the woods of Parrsboro. The plan is admirably simple: “I’ll just try to keep away from as many people as I possibly can. I hope not to go insane. But if it happens, I guess that’s okay,” he says serenely. “As long as I’m happy and my body isn’t found a year later.”
“That’d help sell the novel,” Bretton observes.
First published in Metro Halifax, April 2 2008. (Photo by Beth Johnston/Metro Halifax)