ANY ROOM FOR THE NOVELIST TO EMERGE? I’M SOFTENING ON FICTION

Back in the early 1980's, a writer friend and I, both working for the community press at the time, in Bracebridge, decided to put together a stage-play. Two news hounds thinking about a plan to pursue fiction, is just left of nuts. It took a lot of booze. It was at my peak of imbibing and the more whisky we consumed, the more the idea seemed golden. We might have even written a screen play, or television pilot, had we carried on in our drunken stupor. Heavens knows, we might have co-written a novel. The only reality we needed however, to figure the whole thing out, was a good re-read of what we’d penned during the previous binge. Take out the gratuitous stuff, the ridiculous story-line, and really bad word-smithing, there wasn’t a shred of workable copy to salvage. We gave up when the booze ran out. I don’t know what happened to the rough copy but it should have been burned-up, just in case it had our names attached.

Both of us have remained in the writing enterprise, to varying degrees, ever since, just not as authors of fiction. I’ll admit to having made a few attempts in the past thirty years, beyond what we started to pen from that front table at the local watering hole. Each time, I get about the same number of chapters in, sober as a judge, but can’t seem to find the inspiration to finish the book. I’ve never been very good at reading fiction, and even as an old book seller, by profession, more than 95 percent of my books for sale, are titles of non-fiction. So it’s a belief issue, that fiction is frivolous, although it’s always crossed my mind, that as a writer, it would be okay to be called a “novelist.” I’ve been called better and worse, in a career that began with poetry in the mid-1970's in my latent beatnik phase.

My first published works were poems. At York University I was taught by a number of successful poets. Truthfully, I still write poems, in an old hardcover ledger, I keep by my livingroom chair. I only write in it when everybody’s gone to bed, simply because I don’t want to explain my creative dabbling. Family couldn’t leave well enough alone, and sooner or later, they’d be quoting poetic lines, to counter-point one of my arguments, or follies, or both at once. While it might seem strange to do this, I enjoy creative writing for personal entertainment, not for career enhancement. It’s why I tread so lightly on the subject of writing short stories, or an eventual full-chapter novel. As a career anti-fiction crusader, I look pretty stupid when one or more of my kin find several sample chapters of sample fiction loose on my desk.

I have made mindful attempts to re-invent myself as a creative writer, in common step with the historian, feature writer, blogger, and columnist. So far it hasn’t worked. The other discipline kicks the novelist’s ass repeatedly. It’s not that I’m unable to write fiction but that my own history makes it a difficult conversion. I’d love to start with a clean slate, as a novelist, and live the novelist’s life. If it was that easy, I’d have converted twenty years ago when I left full-time employ of the weekly press, and I was searching for career opportunities. In those two decades I’ve written twice the volume of historical and feature material, as an independent, that I would have for a regular pay cheque working for one master. Independence and freedom from a publisher’s influence, has been the hallmark of my writing career so far. But to think that, as a novelist, I’d have to cater to the editors and publisher of popular books, with market strategies for profit-making, makes me nauseous just thinking about it. I’ve enjoyed writing for all of these years, and hope one day, my boys will appreciate some of my accomplishments......ones in authordom they don’t know about. I’ve spent many years working as a writer; owned by no one, loyal only to my own conscience. Yet as I have long advised my two sons to pursue dreams with passion, and challenge for success, I realize the contradiction is pretty striking. If I was to embrace my own advice, I’d start working on an idea right now, and let everyone here know, a novelist had emerged.....having just now escaped from the historian’s dominion.

I have one of the most beautiful and compelling backdrops, here in the Muskoka hinterland, any writer or artist could ask for........ a perpetually inspirational place to create. I can sit here, in the comfortable digs at Birch Hollow, our modest homestead, and watch out at a most enticing environs, thriving with activity from the bird feeder guests, to the half dozen squirrels and venerable old crows, dwelling in the adjacent woodland. Robert Frost and Washington Irving benefitted from such inspiring vistas.....and while I don’t have the advantage of Irving’s haunted Hudson River Valley, or Frost’s picturesque farmstead, we do share the immersion, and restorative communion with nature. Sometimes non-fiction simply can’t address the enchantment I see in this hinterland, here in South Muskoka. As hard as I try, there are descriptions I compose, that borrow from the obvious qualities and quantities of nature, yet overlap the shadowy expectation of what I think exists and interacts beyond my sight. As Washington Irving understood the botanist’s need to investigate the smallest molecules of a larger life-form, he also appreciated that despite the revelations magnification and dissection would reveal, it could never totally explain the nuances of the enchanted life. He was not deterred from believing in phantoms, wee fairies and their midnight revels, and held considerable regard for lore and legend, as part of enduring, important cultural beliefs and identity. His was in no way, a bid to abandon science for what it could explain, yet as with the heavenly music a harpist plays, it might be supposed, as much, the summonsing of angel-kind to earth. Just because science hadn’t proven the existence of angels, didn’t stop the believer from anticipation and expectation,........ regardless of the scientist’s conclusions otherwise. Irving could believe in the revelations of new science yet still not be thwarted from believing in the great worth of legend to existence..

It is this perpetual badgering I engage upon myself, whenever I get the urge to pen the opening chapters of a novel, or collection of short stories of which I most enjoy. I will get to a mid-zone of work, and the non-fiction interest, will implore the novelist to settle back into wishful thinking and nothing more. Even by this confessional, I have no such personal fortitude, at this moment, to become a novelist all of a sudden by any type of internal revolt, or staged intervention......of novelists I know gathering round me, to cast-out the historian’s bent, for more fertile thoughts and creative enterprise. Still, I’m having more fiction-friendly hiatus periods these days, as I find my column work full to overflowing, and time on my hands to pursue other interests. I think it’s fair to think of it all as a future potential, when I’m satisfied it hasn’t been at the sacrifice of my daily scribblings on-line and for assorted publications. I suppose it’s as much a fear of the unknown, and the expectation, based on early trials, that my creative foray will fail miserably. I’ve always rather worried, that a failure in any writing enterprise, might thrust me into such a funk, that composing anything thereafter would be next to impossible. It’s happened before just not the result of a turn toward fiction.

I will continue to be inspired, sitting here, looking out on such a magnificent scene, as this winter lowland, in the great woodlands of Muskoka. I will make subtle forays in creativity, and dress it up as non-fiction, at least for the immediate future. One day, I think, I will sit down here, early one morning, and experience a sort of grand re-constitution of values......commencing an unfettered, inspired season of creative liberation. Until then, the historian rules this body, and is a taskmaster, let me tell you.