Writing from the Bushes by Alan Cumyn
I mentioned, as gently as I could, that first novels, even
brilliant ones, are usually not good investments, and that
with fiction writing in general the financial rewards are
unpredictable and usually disappointing. I didn't spend long
on this speech; his eyes quickly glazed over. Instead I
asked him if he had sent any sections of his novel to
magazines or literary journals. Publishers might be
encouraged if a portion has seen print elsewhere, I told
him. He replied that he couldn't possibly chop his work into
pieces of less than fifty pages.
I didn't tell him what I was thinking--that it seemed to me
he had stepped off a cliff clutching the blueprints of a
wing he had yet to assemble. A great bell went off
signifying the end of the fifteen minutes, and someone else
arrived at my table to ask about making money from fiction.
I'm not the person to talk to about that, of course. I think
I'm more of an expert on living as a fiction writer
without making much money. For instance, I was doing that
event on a volunteer basis, and few of the guests had read
my books. I've also received more money in the past few
years from grants than from book sales, but at 36 I'm young
yet too, for a fiction writer. It must have been frustrating
for those people to talk to me. I don't think I'm the model
they're hoping to follow: no movie deals yet, no huge
advances, just a file of fine reviews from publications not
many people happen across.
In Canada the fiction-writing landscape is strangely skewed.
I'm not sure there has ever been a time when it was easy
being a young writer in this country, when it seemed
reasonable to assume one could make a living from making up
stories. Yet an unusually strong generation of writers, with
a talent for organizing and for lobbying government into
subsidizing writers and publishers, has helped create a
flowering of literary fiction, with a host of names now
garnering international attention: Margaret Atwood, Alice
Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, Rohinton Mistry, to
name a few. Yet literary fiction is rarely of large popular
interest. For all these bright lights, there are no
corresponding Tom Clancys, Stephen Kings, or Danielle
Steeles. Our mass market fiction comes from the United
States or Great Britain, which have the markets already and
the big publishers. Canadian writers who create stories with
mass appeal are encouraged to place them in American
settings, if they want an American publisher, since American
readers are notoriously uninterested in Canadian settings. A
New York agent explained this at a writer's conference I
attended a few years ago. (He was paid for his appearance,
I'm sure). Canada isn't exotic enough to be a truly foreign
location for Americans, he said. He didn't actually say that
in the American imagination Canada is hopelessly bland, but
one got his drift.
I don't like to spend a lot of effort complaining about the
economics of this situation. If I were investing money I
suppose I too would want my murder story set in New York
rather than Toronto. Then for the film I'd go to Toronto and
paint graffiti on the walls to _simulate_ New York. Human
behaviour is rarely simple, and usually fascinating, and
that's the wellspring of good fiction. However, good fiction
and a healthy bank account don't necessarily coincide.
Littered with small and medium-sized publishing companies,
competing with the giants from other countries, reliant on a
tiny market and propped up by capriciously unstable
government money, the Canadian literary scene seems doomed
to a lingering state of half-health. New writers who have
fought their way through to publication are often faced with
the prospect of next-to-no promotion of their work, the
small companies that take them on usually having few
resources left once the book has been completed. Without
promotional funds, and without an already recognizable name,
the chances of getting any attention on the few major
Canadian media outlets come down to the intense competition
for major awards. There's no shortage of terrific fiction
writers in this country. But hardly anybody makes a decent
living at it.
With this in mind, I try to look at the long run. In the
twelve years since I graduated from the University of
Windsor with a Master's in Creative Writing and English
Literature, I've almost always worked at something other
than fiction writing. At the same time I've almost always
had some sort of novel on the go. I tend to take a guerrilla
warfare approach to the novel-writing: no large battles, but
a long series of skirmishes and ambushes, shooting from the
bushes until the enemy surrenders and the project is more or
less done. The first draft of my second novel was written
almost entirely between six and seven a.m. before going to
work at a research and writing job. I kept that up for about
a year, snapping off the alarm before my wife woke up,
tiptoeing down the stairs past the sleeping children, not
even plugging in the kettle for fear of making too much
noise. My first (eventually) published novel was written in
the year I stayed home with our first born, Gwen. If I
really worked hard and if Gwen cooperated, I could usually
squeeze out an hour a day on the computer. Sometimes it was
with Gwen on my lap, but often it came during nap time--I
got very good at singing her to sleep. Then in my
imagination I'd travel a few years back to China, one of the novel's
settings, and summon the sights, sounds, feelings and memories of the
time my wife and I had spent teaching there. In China I'd worked on
two other projects, one of which I still hope to see
published. I wrote then on a manual typewriter that froze up
in the winter--I'd leave it on top of our one precious
electric heater and "thaw" it for half an hour in the
morning before beginning. I've also written in lunch hours
at work, in the evenings, on weekends and sick days, and
have carried stories in my head for days and weeks until the
next opportunity to write them down.
But it's hard to keep up years of this sort of effort
without being published. I had high hopes for my first novel, and was
deflated after it started coming back in
the mail. I'd reached a sort of breaking point. My research
and writing job was turning into a demanding and interesting
career, covering the human rights scene in many different
countries. Our second child was on the way. Eight years of
effort had yielded four novels in manuscript yet no fiction
publications, not even a short story. And I have many other
interests, including a love of sleep. Why keep banging my
head against a wall?
The answer came one Saturday afternoon. I lay down for a nap
with Gwen, then two and a half, and drifted into one of
those deep afternoon sleeps in which you feel like you're
sinking to the bottom of the ocean, down through the murk of
numerous past lives. When I woke up, Gwen was still sleeping
in the crook of my arm, and I spent an hour just lying
there, semi-conscious, exploring the possibilities of a
story focused on family. Whole generations seemed alive to
me then, and I was imbued not with anything as concrete as a
plot outline or a character sketch, but with the confidence
that somewhere in the soup of my imagination another novel
was cooking.
After that it was a case of infection: glancing at the pages
over breakfast, bring the characters to bed with me, taking
a break in the afternoon to visit the emerging world. Past
rejections didn't matter. New characters were taking shape,
delicious conflicts brewing. I was preoccupied trying to
pass on the infection: I want readers to lose sleep and
neglect their work, to carry in their heads the characters
and situations, the rhythm of the words, long after the book
is closed.
Happily, two of my novels now have seen the light of day, and enough
readers have turned up, bleary-eyed, to make it seem
worthwhile. Of course my long-term goal is to make a viable
living from my fiction. Yet I value too the artistic freedom
I've been able to gain by not being financially dependent
on my fiction writing. There's a sense of independence in
avoiding the haunted look of that gentleman at the writing
event, whose leap over the edge seemed so full of desire,
but devoid of science. At the same time, of course,
interesting work often feeds my fiction, keeps me in touch
with the lives of a wide variety of people.
And going overseas to work multiplies the experience. I've
taught in China and Indonesia now, and in both was rewarded
with a wealth of stories and personal experience. Writers
have known forever that travel takes you out of your self
and forces you into considering different points of view.
Everything seems so vivid and new. You're forced to learn so
much, struggling with different ways of communication,
strange systems of traffic, weird-looking stores, with re-
thinking so many of the things you take for granted at home.
How do you post a letter, get food, say hello? Why did that
man scowl when you handed him something with your left hand?
I also found that when living away from English-language
media, it becomes easy to turn off the television and fill
up the evening hours with writing. And many other cultures
move at a slower pace than we do in North America, with time
for long chats on the porch, lingering meals and afternoon
naps. I think of it as soup-time for the imagination, when
plotlines can untangle, or tangle themselves as needed, and
new characters emerge. Some writers compose in a fever, I
know, but my stories need to stew. My unconscious
appreciates having something to work on while I make a
living. It would work on something anyway, but maybe not so
satisfying: chew over how I've wasted my life, perhaps, or
anticipate new disappointments and failures. But this way it
remains occupied with more useful fictions, and when I turn
on my computer in the early morning, more often than not the
new section of a story is waiting to come out.
Ultimately it's the writing that counts. I really do believe
that, although a bigger royalty cheque would be nice. But
I'm doing what I love, and a bumper sticker has promised me
that the money will come. In the meantime I try to remember
my return from China. I was newly married, and we had no
apartment and no jobs, but a comfortable lump of money in
the bank from my work before China. We rented a nice place,
more expensive than we wanted, but in a good neighbourhood.
And I negotiated with my wife Suzanne that she would find a
job first, and I would take four or five months to do a
second draft of a novel I'd worked on in China. I bought a
computer and printer, and together Suzanne and I watched our
comfortable lump dwindle while I wrote and she fought a
frozen job market.
I entered a lucrative short-fiction contest and was thrilled
when my story was selected for the "final judging". Clearly
(in my own mind), I was going to win the $3,500, and then my
novel would be accepted, and I'd be on my way. Months
passed, our lump disappeared, and still Suzanne was unable
to find work. I finished the draft of my novel and sent it
off. Time slowed. I worked on my resume, and checked the
mail. We really needed money. But I believed in what I was
doing.
Finally I got the letter from the contest organizers: "Thank
you for entering this year's competition. As usual, the
level of writing among the finalists was extremely high.
Unfortunately..."
So I too have gone off the cliff without testing my wings. I
know how rudely the bottom comes to meet you. And now I
don't mind writing from the bushes, biding my time. There's
flight even in that, and it helps you endure the ignominious
situations every hopeful writer encounters.
Some months ago I participated in an event called "Writers
One-on-One" in which not-yet published writers in the Ottawa
area, where I am from, were given an opportunity to spend
fifteen minutes consulting with published writers. I manned
a little fiction table and met with ten people over the
course of two and a half hours. No one was supposed to show
me a manuscript and ask for an instant consultation (one
did, of course), but outside of that almost any topic was
open. The first guest, probably in his late forties, set an
uncomfortable tone. He had the haunted, desperate look that
scares most "established" writers away from these sorts of
"meet-the-public" exercises. He told me he had completed
five drafts of a long stream-of-consciousness novel. Draft
six would be done by Tuesday or Wednesday, he said, and then
it would take a few more weeks to do Draft Seven. An earlier
version of the manuscript had been given to an important
American critic a few weeks before, through a contact. The
writer was going to wait a little longer before contacting
the critic to get his feedback. His problem, he told me, was
money: within a few months he really was going to have to
get some kind of payback for his efforts. I had the
impression that rent was at stake, utility bills were piling
up.
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