Hi! Well, here it is, the much-anticipated Day 3 of 7 of my WorldTeach Twitter Feed Blog. I thought that over the next few days I will talk about my start as a writer, how my WorldTeach experience influenced and fed into my novels, and the basis for some of the characters.
To start, I will need to fast forward to the time after I arrived home from Ecuador. Unsure of where to start a writing career, I began with some courses. I was fortunate enough to be selected to attend the Humber School for Writers twice. I was mentored in novel writing by two of Canada's top writers, MG Vassanji and David Adams Richards. The Humber School has a 30 week studio-type course in which writers provide feedback on your work. Both were excellent mentors who taught me a great deal about the process of writing, and they helped me to understand the important characteristics of storytelling. That is when I learned about how critical the first page is (it should hook the reader and make them want to read more, to turn to page 2), as well as the first fifty pages of a novel (which establishes the characters, the themes, the story arc, and the problems which must be resolved by the story’s end).
While I was interested in writing fictional novels, I understood from various courses that publishers and agents want to see short story publication credits first. So I began entering contests and submitting short stories. I published a short story with Tightrope Books in Toronto about a lone man set adrift on a sailboat journey around the world, entitled Solitude. I shortlisted in the 2010 Matrix Litpop Awards for fiction for a short story set in rural Ecuador. The story was based upon a possible life that a Peace Corps volunteer in Portoviejo might have had. I have since turned that short story into a novel, set in Spain, which is completed but yet to be published. I won a short novel contest with LWOT Magazine in Montreal. The short novel contest was actually a 3-Hour Novel Contest, a parody of the 3-Day Novel Contest. So more of a short story contest in actuality, as the “novel” really wasn’t very long. In that short story/ novel, I wrote about the process of writing an entry for yet another contest. It was my foray into humorous writing. You can still read it at http://www.lwot.net/contest.htm . I contacted Falcon Picture Group in Chicago, Illinois, as I was a fan of the Twilight Zone Radio Dramas and they were looking for script writers with publication credits. I was commissioned to two scripts for them. One of the scripts was based on the Invaders episode, which is about a lone woman confronted by tiny aliens. Difficult to do in a radio drama, so I had to introduce a husband for her to talk to. They didn’t end up using that and went with a version from another writer. The other script was based on a radio drama from the 1940s, but it hasn’t been produced. Not much success there, all in all, but it was good to write for a nationally-syndicated radio program and I’m still a fan of the series. I published a story called the Russian Soldier in Descant Magazine, a literary magazine based in Toronto. That was based on my honeymoon trip to St. Petersburg, Russia and is basically a walking tour around St. Petersburg, with history and Russian literature woven into the fabric of the story.
I attended a meeting of the Canadian Authors Association Toronto Branch, in which the publisher of Quattro Books outlined what made a good novella (short novel). He cited examples of novellas such as Kafka’s “The Trial”, Steinbeck’s “The Pearl”, Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, and Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” (in which Hemingway stated that Paris is a Moveable Feast because you take the memory of it wherever you go). He stated that a good novella is centered around a particular timeframe such as a summer, or within the physical confines of a house. And there shouldn’t be too many characters, as there is not sufficient time to develop them. Quattro runs a contest every year and so I rewrote a story I had, submitted it, and was shortlisted. I was offered a publication contract for the book, Abundance of the Infinite. In the book, a psychologist specializing in dreams travels to a small coastal fishing town in Ecuador. That coastal fishing town is Manta, and the love interest is based upon Karin, a friend of mine who lived there. There is also a portion which is set in the jungles of Ecuador, and on the Amazon River. I travelled to the Ecuadorian jungle with a friend who was visiting from Canada and we visited Amazoonica, an island animal hospital with a capabara (world’s largest rodent), a parrot, a small black jungle cat separated from the rest of the animals, an assortment of monkeys, and a boa constrictor which tightened its grip as I did. We kayaked and white water rafted along the Amazon, and stayed in jungle huts with an innumerable array of sounds. I find the interplay between dreams and reality, when travelling in exotic settings, to be interesting. As the jungle was so surreal to me, the setting seemed appropriate to make a character whose dreams and reality interweave, and I liked the fact that the main character was a psychologist. I was reading “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” by Jung, The Pearl by Steinbeck, and Heart of Darkness as I was doing rewrites...
To be continued...
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