Stories
Writing Tip: Leave Out Details (Including Prince Albert’s Skates)
I learned a new word the other day: paralipomena. It means things left out, usually from a piece of writing, which are used in something else later on. Recycled outtakes, more or less. Of which I have a few. Playwright Alan Bennett introduced me to the word in one of the essays collected in Writing […]
Research Notes: Out-Takes from a Novel
Researching a novel means reading and travelling, amassing material and then cutting, cutting, cutting for focus and flow. This leaves outtakes, like the cloth left over after you’ve cut out the pieces of a garment. Not that I’ve done any sewing for years. One piece of cloth left over after writing my latest novel, Mad […]
Tip: Writing for the Public, Writing for the Self
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.” I’ve been writing lately about the long-gone British critic Cyril Connolly, having started to read him when I remembered his famous quote about the pram in the hall being the enemy […]
Aphorisms and Where to Find Them
Speaking of Cyril Connolly, as I did last time. Even though he isn’t much read anymore, we still remember more than his “pram in the hall” aphorism. But are any of them true? “Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.” I was recently in the supermarket when a kid of maybe eight […]
The Pram in the Hall
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall. – Cyril Connolly My son Gabe and his wonderful partner Anna got married this summer. It was a joyous wedding, a moving ceremony they wrote themselves performed by a good-humoured officiant. Afterwards came a reception hosted by Anna’s brother. Good […]
How to Record an Audio Book
So there I was in the studio, listening to actor Pascal Langdale tape the narration of my novel Mad Richard for an audio book. Born in England, educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Pascal has a jaw-dropping range of accents and tones ready to deploy. Here was the soft voice of […]
Writing Tip: Keep a Notebook
I’m a big advocate of writers carrying notebooks. You can jot down thoughts, overheard conversations—I’m a terrible eavesdropper—sights you want to call up later. Recently, a father was trying to coax his daughter out of a car parked on our street. “If you could move at any speed beyond painfully slow, that would be very […]
Writing Tip: Listen for the Bell — and Billie Holiday
The question is, how does a writer recognize what is uniquely her material? Save herself from wrong turns, dead ends, dead writing? The subject has always been central to me—an obsession—and years ago, I was able to ask two very distinguished men how it had played out in their careers. One was John Hammond, the […]
Notebook Download: Flanny on the Danny
I was walking out recently, being a flaneuse on the Danforth. A flanny on the Danny. At Pape, a pigeon flew down from a store awning into the path of people heading for the subway. Turning, it flew close to the face of one woman, who didn’t even flinch, before winging around the head of […]
So you want to Bird in Sedona
A day and a half in Sedona: it wasn’t much time, but our hockey team had gone to Arizona for a tournament, and we made the most of our days off. The pools at our hotels, the hot tubs, the meditation classes and massages. Then there were the hikes. For me, hiking involves looking for […]
Mad Richard: How Do You Know What It Was Like to Live in the 19th Century? – 2
In my last post, I wrote about researching a historical novel like Mad Richard. My serendipitious decision to pull Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy off the shelves provided a start. Barker was writing about a period closer to ours, the time of the First World War. Having been born in 1943, she knew a great many […]
Mad Richard: How Do You Know What It Was Like To Live in the 19th Century?
I was scanning the shelves for a book I needed to research a script I’m writing, and my eye fell on Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. I must have read the trilogy almost twenty years ago, not long after it was collected in one volume in 1998. And for some reason, seeing it on the shelf, […]