A Writer's Life by The Writers' Trust of Canada

Author:The Writers' Trust of Canada [The Writers’ Trust of Canada]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-8929-9
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2011-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

The writing life is the best life and the worst life. Every time you publish a book, you go into the boxing ring to defend your title. You’re mostly fighting yourself, because you have to do better than last time, refine your voice, improve your cadence, garner better reviews; whatever.

Writing is the loneliest of all the creative arts – just you and your computer. I add a third party. I never write anything without music pulsating through my earphones. I write accompanied by big band jazz: Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, and Buddy Rich, played loudly enough to endow me with its energy, and above all, through its time signatures, rhythmic patterns to empower my cadence. The exuberance of the music is catching.

By the way, book reviewers in this country are butchers. They review authors instead of books. We have no literary critics worthy of that title, only butchers – and maladroit ones at that. But the future is brighter. On some new Internet sites, authors can review their own books. That’s a trend I heartily endorse.

I notice that the Writers’ Union of Canada has a first line contest, so I’d like to enter my most recent volume. I was trying to signal the irreverence that characterizes the latest of my literary efforts, Titans: How the New Canadian Establishment Seized Power, so I started the book off describing an Establishment party in Toronto’s tony Rosedale district. The first sentence reads as follows: “ ‘Sorry,’ smirks the hostess who has just refused me a drink of water, ‘we never serve the stuff, fish fuck in it.’ ”

I had a big fight with my publisher about that opening, but she finally agreed. Later in the same chapter, one guest asks another: “Do you believe in sex before marriage?” Her friend shrugs and replies, “Well, not if it holds up the ceremony.”

As mentioned, my technique is to tell stories. To illustrate the contemporary trend of economic globalization, instead of citing statistics, I wrote the following:

As editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star in the 1970s, I was very much in tune with that paper’s passionately held nationalism and regularly attacked the multinationals who were gobbling up Canadian companies. That made my office a regular port of call for the slyly genuflecting Genghis Khans anxious to de-fang the Star’s not-very-effective sting. Knowing that I had been one of the founders of the Committee for an Independent Canada, dedicated to stopping foreign investors from taking over this country’s most valuable assets, the heads of the marauding multinationals would call on me to try and persuade the Star they were doing the right thing.

My favourite gentleman caller was an American cowboy capitalist named Joseph Culliman III, then head of Philip Morris, who was taking a run at one of the larger Canadian breweries, Carling O’Keefe. A John Wayne clone, Joseph Culliman III was an over-sized Texan who looked as if he made love with his boots on, and kept excusing his frequent lapses into obscenity with the winking admonition, “Pardon my French.

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