I don’t know when I decided to be a writer. As far as I remember, I always wanted to write, and I have no idea why. I must have talked about it early on, since I have a photograph of myself sitting at a toy typewriter our parents gave me when I was seven years old. My mother also kept a story I typed for elementary school.

“My aunt and uncle went to Seattle. They went to see the space needle. My uncle got a stomick ake. They came home.”

The classic quest narrative. Our heroes set out on a journey, encounter obstacles, presumably overcome with Pepto Bismol, and finally make their return—no doubt in my aunt’s enormous Cadillac, also bright pink, which had huge, glorious 1960s fins.

My parents probably thought all this was cute when I was seven years old. But when I was eleven or twelve and still insisting that I was going to be a writer, they seemed to get a little worried. I have a very clear memory of my father leaning toward me one day and saying, “If you really want to be a writer, you’d better train for another job. Writers don’t make any money.”

This is broadly true.

After thinking it over, my eleven- or twelve-year-old self decided to be a journalist, partly influenced by my favorite comic book character, Lois Lane from Superman, who was a reporter on The Daily Planet. Despite this dubious beginning, I ended up working in journalism for about fifteen years while publishing my first books. Later, I taught creative writing at a Toronto university, and later still I moved to film as a screenwriter and story editor. 

Each of these jobs taught me skills that were immensely helpful in writing my novels, which was what I really wanted to do. Journalism taught me how to research. Film, how to cut to the chase, sometimes literally. 

Yet it was from teaching that I learned something not often talked about that’s crucial to a career in writing: the need to edit your ideas as rigorously as your prose. 

Maybe not just writing. Because who among us doesn’t need to learn to think before we speak?

I stumbled on the idea while preparing to teach my first course in short fiction. (And by that I mean over-preparing). I read endless How To Write books, badgered my writer friends for tips, and examined my own writing practice to see what good habits I’d developed that might be worth mentioning.

Most writers I spoke with kept journals, as I’ve done for most of my adult life. Going back into my old ones, I watched my editing process evolve as I struggled toward writing my first short stories. My earliest journals were unfocused, breathless, often agonized descriptions of my intense twenty-year-old feelings about whatever had just happened, often involving a boy. Sometimes they were followed by the notation, That would make a good story.

Spoiler alert: it wouldn’t. Uncontrolled outpourings by twenty-year-olds usually don’t.

Then I put on a backpack and travelled for a year, and something changed. I realized that twenty-two-year-old me wasn’t nearly as interesting as what I saw. There was the way many people behaved in the Sistine Chapel, which these days we would call performative. The patter of tourist touts in India. (“Very good ghats, Madam. See burning corpse beside Ganges.”)

Essentially I learned to look out through my eyes rather than in, and in my travel journals, I described the world instead of keeping a laser focus on my own jumble of feelings. Sometimes when I wrote, This would make a good story, it would.

Yet often it wouldn’t. And when I got home and sat down to write a collection of short stories, I made a mistake I saw years later in my journals as I prepared to teach. I would write, I could make a story out of this, and because I was planning a collection, I would begin to scrawl pages of, in which this happens, and that, followed by… 

Then I would sit down and start to write it. 

When I re-read my early short stories, I realized they didn’t get better in anything resembling a steady upward line. In the file I’d kept, there would be a half decent story followed by a worse one, then a shockingly good one, then another lousy one (although maybe not quite so lousy), then a semi-decent one.

In retrospect, it was easy to see that the lousy ones were often lousy not just because of bad technique, but because the ideas behind those stories weren’t worth the effort I put into them. The occasional good story represented a moment when I stumbled on a good idea and managed to pull it off. I wish I’d realized this at the time, but I hadn’t yet learned to analyze my work.

Instead, I learned to edit my story ideas accidentally, because I got busy. I landed a full-time job at CBC Radio, got married, enjoyed a party-fueled twenty-something social life, played a weekly pick-up basketball game, a weekly game of hockey, travelled (did I mention the parties?) and meanwhile worked on short stories and sporadically my journal—and, my God, where did we get all that energy? 

In any case, when I wrote about something in my journal that might be a story, I started putting an asterisk beside it for future reference rather than tackling it immediately, not least because I was usually working on something else. Weeks or months later, when looking for new story ideas, I would re-read asterisked entries in my journal. This is when I started asking myself, What on earth was I thinking?

Bad ideas dropped away as simply as that. The better ones continued to resonate, and I soon learned to pause and think about them further. It wasn’t long before I bought a dedicated notebook and started writing down story ideas that survived the first cull. Over time, I discarded many of the ones in the notebook as well. It was a long process, but I’d eventually arrive at a story idea worth writing, and finally get to work.

So what do bad ideas look like?

They’re journalism, not fiction. This was something I fell into easily, given my day job. But I would see it later on from my students as well. Adhering too closely to a real event—whether a political demonstration or a house fire—means you’re in danger of writing an article rather than a story. At best it’s an anecdote. This dramatic thing happened! I’m going to describe it! Yes, but where’s the emotional arc?

They’re didactic. You’re trying to prove a point, working toward a specific ending that says what you want to say. But sweetie (I’m thinking of myself, but also a couple of students) you’ve chosen the wrong way to try to convince me. The best fiction explores. It doesn’t try to convince or to solve a problem.

They’re ignorant. That’s a harsh way to put it. But you have to know what you’re writing about, either through personal experience or by doing meticulous research. 

I’ve had students who try to tackle characters from backgrounds far different than their own without doing any research, and it always shows. Not that I can talk. I started writing my first novel when I was seventeen and finished it when I was twenty-two, away on my backpacking year and renting a bedsit in London. The novel was set in a Canadian veterans hospital after the Second World War among men who were never going to make it out.

What did I know about that? My parents had met a few years after the Second World War when my mother was working as a nurse in Shaughnessy Veterans’ Hospital in Vancouver. My father had been in the army during the war and had recently learned that a buddy of his was still in hospital. He came to visit and met my mother. They got married three months later.

That’s it: everything I knew about veterans’ hospitals. My father never talked about the war and my mother didn’t like to mention upsetting things to her children. So I wrote a novel about a subject I knew nothing about and was too callow to realize that I should do some research. All the characters had deeply symbolic names that expressed, I thought, their essence–although stereotype might be a better word.

Writing in stereotypes is an avoidable problem. It’s best to either do your research or discard an idea you know nothing about and move on to a better one.

So how do you recognize your best ideas?

Let them marinate. Stockpile ideas that come to you in a journal or notebook, or open a file on your computer. Use whatever technology works; it doesn’t matter. But maybe you shouldn’t write them immediately into stories, and especially not into books. Instead, revisit the ideas periodically, and watch the bad ones drop away. 

If you’re like me, you’ll find the ones that continue to resonate touch something deep inside. You may not have realized at first why a glimpse, a sight, an overheard comment or complaint struck you so strongly that you felt compelled to write it down.

But when that comes clear, in time, you’ll be able to pack an emotional punch into the story you’re writing. And rewriting. And rewriting. Edit your ideas, then edit your prose just as rigorously. 

But that’s for another time.