… I’m writing a novel.

After fifteen years of NOT writing it. I’ve taken it up again. Committed myself to organizing my life around it until it’s done. Because it’s big, my novel. It’s big and ambitious, and takes organizing-around.

Just now I stopped, went downstairs and made a cup of tea. At an impasse.The next question is: Why? Why did I stop? Why am I starting again? I don’t want to go into it. It’s a long story – too long – and I’m sick of telling it, even of thinking about it. Maybe it’s enough to say Things got in the way. Things with a capital T. I mean the material world: people needing me, and my own need to establish a home and some way of – as Dorothy Parker once said – keeping body and soul apart.

I remember walking along College Street at St.George, one day in about 1993. It was fall and the leaves had almost all dropped off. I looked up at the yellow brick façade of the Koffler Centre as the thought came to me, fully formed: I can’t do this any more. I can’t keep applying for grants and working part time or working for a while and stopping in order to feed my commitment to this novel. I need to stop now, and don’t know when I can start again.

Not that I stopped writing. I did write. Like a drowning person gasping for little bits of air I wrote, in whatever form I could find, my thoughts and feelings about life as it clamorously unfolded in those days. The refrain in my mind was: keep going. Keep writing, anything you can. But fiction was impossible. It required something that I did not have, at that moment, and would not, for the foreseeable future, have again. What was that thing? “Time” is the short answer, but there’s never enough time. The reality was more complicated than that.

On the bookshelf to my left, the first thing I see when I turn my head is By Heart, Rosemary Sullivan’s biography of Elizabeth Smart (HarperCollins, 1992). I reached for it just now because I hoped to be lucky enough to find a quote that I dimly remember, a quote that would speak to the dilemma I found myself in, fifteen years ago. No problem. Seems that back when I first read the book, I inserted a marker at a place which struck my attention. The bookmark is a piece of cardboard, a curved, irregular shape with perforations along one side. It is, in fact, torn from the top of a Kleenex box. That says a lot about my life, back when I first read the book.

The quote is from a section about The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals, a meditation on motherhood and writing which Smart created late in life. Sullivan writes:

The tradition of fiction … ghettoizes reality, turns it into story; Elizabeth instead distils under great pressure lived moments … as a poet might, to probe them for meaning. If Virginia Woolf insisted women writers needed a different syntax, Smart might insist that they needed to shatter the safely constructed boundaries between fiction and reality. (331) 

Yes. That’s the crux of what stopped me, back in the early nineties, from working on my novel. Something about that separation, that hiving off of the fictional world was impossible for me back then. I had to keep an eye on Things, could not leave them alone for long enough to construct a parallel universe.

My life has changed. Things can be left to take care of themselves for a while, and I've been able to go back to my novel again. The first chapter I wrote was pure joy. It was as if I’d met a beloved person I had not seen for fifteen years and had finally settled down for a really good, long-missed chat. Then it got harder. The whole stew thickened, and I found each morning sitting down to work was fraught. Ringing in my mind, overpowering the voice of the unfolding story were the reasons why I should not … could not …. must not, do this. So much had to be cleared away, even to make a start. One day, I turned off the computer, picked up my journal and wrote my way to what was really going on.

Fear. For me, presenting a fantasy world is in some way more revealing than telling the most intimate facts about myself. I fear that the world I present will be somehow incredible, invalid. And to create an incredible world, an invalid world is a kind of crime. I realize that over those fifteen years, I’ve managed to hang on to every disappointment, every rejection, every negative comment I’ve ever heard about my work. And now, these comments have crystallized into the reasons I should not be working on this novel. For they must indicate something about me, some fundamental deficiency, some unsuitedness to the task I have taken on. Things are just not a good enough excuse. Not having time. Not having money. Not having sustained concentration because I was so worried about This and That. These are not acceptable reasons not to do it. The reason must be that I’m not destined for it. That I don’t have what it takes. The “vision” the “voice.” Or try this: the “talent” to create a separate world. That must be why.            

It’s not fair, to myself or to life itself or for that matter our excellent arts councils, to say this. So much has gone right, so many resources have come my way. But somehow, the “no’s” and the criticisms seem to remain more clearly in memory than all the times I’ve heard “yes” and “you’re on the right track.” Maybe I’m naturally pessimistic and self-critical. Maybe I’ve just held on to the negative experiences because they make better stories.           

A summer writing retreat (which shall remain nameless) about 1989 or 90.  A hot, humid day, one of those days where you keep your arms away from your sides and hesitate to sit down: everything sticks. I sit in a rose garden with an Eminent Man, who has just read a draft of one of my short stories. We’re perched on rocks facing one another, the scent of roses hanging in the unmoving air. With his triple chin, round belly and fleshy arms he’s having much more trouble with this heat than I am and his gulps and wheezes add to his tone of exasperation. He wipes his brow. 

“Your story,” he says. “Is not very good.  It’s bad, actually.”           

“Could you … um … What do you mean?”           

“I mean it doesn’t really make sense. It’s incoherent.”           

“Could you … um …?”           

“Well, for instance the rutting. The rutting is incoherent.”           

In retrospect I think this was my cue to ask him for a demonstration of coherent rutting, and that my career may have gone very differently if I had. Instead, ever the diligent student, I inquired: 

“Um … Could you …?  What do you mean?”           
His breath came even shorter, and he struck the rock beside him with my soggy, rolled-up manuscript as he searched for the words. At last he pronounced:

“Well, I mean that no-one’s breasts are square.”           

“Oh.” I replied, “Thank you.” 

Chastened, I returned to my residence room, barely emerging even for meals, until it was time to go home. When I got back to Toronto I consigned the story immediately to the filing cabinet (though not before adding “ish” to the description of the unfortunate heroine’s mammaries).           

Another retreat. Another Eminent Man.            “This writer,” he says to the assembled group, “is without human feeling. She is self-referential, caught in her own world, thinking of no-one but herself.” 

And so begins a campaign of ad feminam criticism which lasts throughout the program. On the last day he takes my hands in his, looking at me, fixedly.

“You’re not going to quit, are you?” he asks.

“Um ….No?” I quaver, searching his rheumy eyes for the answer he might want.

But then you see, I did quit. At least, for 15 years I felt I had.           

And then there were the Structural Problems. Too much detail at the beginning.  Too much detail, period. What Happens in this story? Why are you telling it? Where is the conflict? What is the point? Well, that called for Therapy. For did not these Structural Problems indicate some kind of fundamental disorganization in myself and the way I was living my life?  Week after week, I hacked away at my choices in expensive therapy sessions, and at my stories in attempts to make them shorter, make them fit a structure which I did not really understand. To no avail. My stories remained top-heavy, overly long, and bristling with guns that would never, never go off. But unwieldy stories were not the worst of my defects. If these structural problems were a bad sign for the way I was living my life, they boded even worse for my career as a writer. Short stories were the essentials, the building blocks of longer work, and if I could not master this form, the novel I dreamed of writing some day would never come to be.           

I have to say again this is not fair. This is all me. No one told me any such thing about short stories, and those very same people who said awful things, said nice things, too. I was just not ready to take the leap I am now. 

I meant the leap of saying: talent, vision, voice, imagination, “it” – whatever “it” is – these are not what it takes. Time and silence and safety are essential, but something else, too. I laugh a little ruefully at the first word that comes to mind when I try to define it: Cojones.

Alright, Chutzpah, to choose a more gender-neutral term. The noive. It’s a willingness to say “Okay, I’m creating a world. I’m creating characters. I’m setting out a structure and a way of using language and a set of beliefs about life itself.  Deal with it.”

Incoherent, you say? Incoherent as against what?  It’s my world, remember?

And self-referential?  So was Joyce. Ha! So everything was Joyce!  And what did he have over me? (Well, never mind.)

And about those Structural Problems. I’ve come to think that stories are the literary equivalent of baby ballerinas. They possess a form which, for all its beauty, only comes naturally to a very, very few. And the rest of us must control, deprive and aesthetically butcher ourselves to try to achieve those clean lines. But take a look at the best-seller list. These books are loooong. Many of the books defined as classics, too, are really long. People want to read long books. I think it’s because they like to leave the world they’re in, and travel to another world, however similar. They like to travel to a world that someone has created, and hang out there for a while.

So I’m creating a world. So sue me.