Writer Writing about Writing and Writers

There's this program at Humber College -- I don't know if I've written about it before -- but it's this post-grad creative writing thing where they get some less famous Margret Atwood type to mentor you though a "major" work. You can write fiction, non-fiction, children's lit, poetry, whatever you want. My friend James mentioned it to me a while back -- and I thought it might be a good way to write a new novel.

Side note -- While at the University of Guelph, I wrote a short 40,000 or so word novel (that's about half the general minimum, but I figured I was just writing very concisely. . . uh. . .), called "the death of the reader". . . Oh, hell -- here's a bit from my application essay where I talked about my previous writing experiance:

I think I fucked it all up.

I had this idea about this little guy, maybe a stock-boy at a grocery store, maybe a bit autistic, never spoke to anyone, and when he wanted to say “hi” to someone, he would hand them a poem. And the poem said: “I’m terrified that I’ve already lost you /

That somewhere along the way / someone else stole your heart / and left a worm-eaten apple / in its place”

And that would be that. He would just go through life handing out this poem to customers in the produce aisle.

But my film school background led me to “up the stakes!”, and by the time I was done, there were 3 murders, 2 suicides, two alien abductions, a miracle coma recovery, some lesbian sex, and the whole thing took place in an asylum and a university, each home to half the life of my antagonist, “the reader” a bitter and mean English Professor with a perfect basketball hook-shot plotting to kill my hero.

But I wrote it, you know? I had written a lot of scripts at film school, and a lot more essays at university, and a lot of short fiction on my own, but this was the first thing that I wrote while trying to be a real writer. There were like 15 characters and they walked and talked and had sex and crashed cars and I loved them all, except maybe the bastard English Prof, a soulless monster only alive because he couldn’t write a perfect enough suicide note.

And I’ll tell you what burns me the most, not that I never really sold any, not that half my readers thought it was “too dark” and the other half thought it was “hilarious”, but that every one of my friends thinks that the villain – the professor -- is based on me.

Have I talked about this before? I don't know. Oh well, I'll just carry on, and you promise not to stop me.

Anyway, I started working on a second novel sometime after Peja was born. Maybe even a little while before she showed up. It went SLOWLY. I wrote The Death of the Reader in about six months, which seemed like a whiplash pace. I didn't have anything else in my life that I cared about, and I just gave it everything.

The second novel, I had a wife and a daughter. I was plays gigs in a band. I had a new life. Needless to say, I didn't get much done.

In the past four years, I've done about 8,000 words -- maybe 1/10th of a real novel. Two third year university papers worth. But the Humber course was going to change all that. If I had a deadline, and a real writer helping me along the way, I new I could do.

I wrote my application letter -- which required an outline of the work. So I had to figure everything out - the plot arcs and stuff. So I did all that. And when I was done, I realized that I had destroyed my main motivation for writing (which is the same as my main motivation for reading) -- finding out what happens next.

So I never applied. And a lot more digital dust settled on the story.

But the last few nights I've been doing some typing. . . Hoping to do some more.