March 5th, 2010

Workshop #2–Character

Well, I’m completely not making good on my plan to post lesson plans ahead of the actual lessons to get your feedback on’em, but considering that on Wednesday I briefly stopped walking in the middle of the sidewalk because I’d jammed two fingers into one glove-slot and wondered how I was going to cope (I worked it out) we’re lucky I managed to get the lesson together for the actual students.

And, when it came time to deliver said lessons, I also count myself lucky that my energy miraculously returned. There’s something about those eager, curious faces, their great willingness to learn and/or to laugh if I fall down…

So the character workshop was similar to last year’s except the kids took it in a different direction. When I asked where they have seen character descriptions before, they said the usual “in books” stuff, but also, on the backs of movies, on the backs of video games, on plaques at a museum, in biographies (one long character sketch), and then, even more interesting, on your passport or your driver’s license!

I love that, because sometimes I do get lost in the “big” “emotional” issues of character development and not bother about “little” details like how old someone is–not “early twenties” but birth year and date. Not, “from southern Ontario” but pick an actual town on a map. These things make a difference to character icebergs, I think–although it sure would be odd if my students think they have to actually use all this stuff in their stories and start describing every character with height and weight!

So, yes, upcoming, a very dates/places/numbers intensive character sketch from me–I’m not sure what style, but maybe a la fight stats in a video game–which actually, come to think of it, probably won’t be entertaining at all to you guys, but might be useful to me.

And maybe then I’ll get some sleep. Have a good weekend, all!
RR

March 4th, 2010

City of My Youth

I moved to Toronto on March 4, 2002. I moved to take a barely paid full-time job, and only-slightly-better-paid evenings and weekends job, as well as to go to school the nights I wasn’t working. I had two friends in town, an apartment where you could see the fridge from the bed, a fear of the subway system (steel wheels–so noisy!) and two goldfish named Demetrius and Lysander.

The first thing I did when I moved was go to the Spadina Road library (shout out!) and get a UTPL card. I did this yes, partially because of my love of literature but mainly because I had neither an internet connection nor a phonebook, and I needed to find a locksmith to install the lock I had bought and installed in Montreal after the Terrible Millennial Break-In, then had de-installed at great expense when I moved.

I eventually got Jason from Spadina Security. I think locksmiths, like bartenders and nurses, often deal with people who are freaking out or about to do so, and they have to have the people skills to match their technical skills. Jason was extremely nice and comforting about my move to Toronto (he told me I had an excellent lock!) Spadina Security was the first Toronto address I added to my book after I moved, and probably the nicest conversation I had that day.

You’d think that I would have been using all my scant free time to sleep, but as I remember it now, with little in the way of friends and money to entertain me, it stretched out. I wasn’t writing much in those days, and even then my tv was only sort of functional. My principal hobby was free-trial periods at gyms. It was a form of entertainment (expecially since I found that Toronto gyms often had tvs you could watch) as well as fitness, plus the trainers who showed you around were usually really friendly. Policies were looser in those days, and I got in at least a couple workouts at almost every gym in the downtown core and some beyond, including one in Rosedale that had an in-house kitten.

I walked everywhere, continuing to be both afraid of the TTC and cheap about the $2.50 fare (ah, those were the days!) “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you time is of no value,” I told a work superior in the elevator one day, when he opined that me walking 30 blocks to a store I wanted to try was not an excellent plan. There was little he could say to that, I suppose.

I went to so many libraries to do my homework, so many flowershops just to sniff things, I knew the cost of every brand of everything in the supermarket. My brother (one of the two TO friends) snuck me into his film classes to watch movies about prison breaks. Someone told me not to walk through any parks alone at night and I was SO happy when I finally made a friend in one of my night classes so that together we could cut through Queen’s Park on the way home. I was distraught (though he was more so) when he had to drop the class because misdirected arsonists had burnt down his house. I don’t know what ever happened to him–I hope he’s ok. But then I made another friend and walked home with her.

I finally got a real job, one that paid decently and was only 8 hours a day. It was a shocking amount of free time, and a shocking amount of money (if I told you, you would laugh in pity). I remember buying a pair of pretty ballet flats, utterly flimsy, made out of cardboard and vinyl, for $15, and being thrilled that, a) I could afford to waste money on something I didn’t need, and b) that I no longer needed to stand for hours at a time (ah retail) so it didn’t even matter that the shoes were cheap.

As it turns out, those cardboard shoes were wonderful and I had them for 6 years. And I learned to take the TTC to get to my new job, and then to take the TTC efficiently, and then to love the TTC with all my heart. I got an apartment with two rooms and spent days doing figure-eights between them. I made more Toronto friends! I started having people to borrow books from and bake cookies for and hug when I hadn’t seen them in a while. That was, and has never stopped being, amazing.

With my friends and also alone (because I had in fact learned to enjoy my own company) I went everywhere and talked to everyone and petted everyone’s dogs. Never forgets:

–that time Jaime, Lara and I went to the Santa Claus parade in a blizzard and got amazing spots in the crowd because of the snow. And the parade was so silly and happy and the kids didn’t care about the weather at all. And these sad free-sample distributers gave us tonnes of free tubes of pudding because they just wanted to get rid of them and I wound up with dozens only to discover I don’t like sucking pudding from a tube. And when I got home my hands were so numb I couldn’t turn my key in the lock for a few minutes.
–that time Penny and I went to see Chad’s band play and then Ron Hawkins jumped on the stage and played a song
–the night I was walking on Sunnyside Beach with Jay and then fireworks started
–the big 2004 blackout, when I was not inconvenienced one iota, but everyone was in such good moods, plus I got a day off work
–finally having my scary crazy operation at North York General and being absolutely convinced that I would die under anesthetic just like my parents’ kitten…and then I didn’t, and I spent that whole spring being thrilled just to get out of bed
–climbing 22 flights of stairs with Mark J. while carrying the Penguin anthology
–the well-dressed corpulent middle-aged man who approached me on the street late one night to say he’d just been to a fashion industry event, and did I want the samples of cosmetics that were in his goodie bag? (yes!)
–when Ben and I were on our way to sushi when we ran into a naked man…and then another…and then we realized it was Pride weekend.
–when Brandon and I were walking down the street during (a different) Pride and I said, “Hey, that women wasn’t wearing a shirt.” and Brandon hadn’t noticed.
–the untoward flirtation Kerry and I discovered at Starbucks
–when Maya made me run around and around at Circle Thai because she was bored sitting at the table (she’s three).
–the day Mark and I took the ferry to Ward’s Island for Katie’s birthday, but we went to the wrong island and had to walk all the way around and then we ran into everyone and had a big delicious picnic on the beach in the freezing cold
–the night I was reading at Strong Words and brought a bunch of friends to hear me, but the Art Bar was flooded so they gave us a different room at the Gladstone, but the room was locked, so my friends and I just stood on the stairs, with me saying, “I really do have a reading tonight, I swear.” (eventually someone came and unlocked the room and it was an amazing night)
–the first time I saw Harriet (who is currently a baby) roll over
–when a man who thought he was flirting with told me that the problem with the publishing industry is “too many Jews”

And the crazy thing is that I’ve already forgotten so much, no doubt–a hundred idle kindnesses at the grocery store and on the bus, birthday cards, snowstorms, fashion faux pas, and free cheese. But that’s, I suppose, what real life in a real place is–not having to keep perfect account of every amazing moment because, while they aren’t constant, there will be more to come.

I know a lot of my most-loved Toronto memories are not Toronto-centric–they could have happened anywhere, but they didn’t. Toronto is where I’ve lived the last 8 years, and where amazing and banal things have happened to me, and I’m so grateful. Here’s to another 8!

RR

March 3rd, 2010

To Do

I haven’t posted any events in a while, in part because I have been, as I may have mentioned so busy I haven’t been going to many. But here are some I do plan to attend, because they are awesome and I will soon be (I hope, touch wood, fingers crossed, etc., etc.) less busy. If you are also less busy, perhaps you are interested in:

–the University of Toronto masters in creative writing showcase and gala tomorrow night. Should be some good readings, possibly some wine and cheese, and a nice opportunity to clap for Andrew when he is awarded a prize!

–Bad Dog theatre improva at That Friday Show, (appropriately) this Friday night. Hilarity, uncertainty, and pay-what-you-can–how ideal?

And if you are, sadly, too busy to go out, be comforted that I fully understand.

RR

March 1st, 2010

Endings

I’m off to Waterloo tomorrow to do a reading for and have discussion with a group of high-school students who have been studying one of my stories, “Fruit Factory.” Doing such a talk is a rare honour and a treat for various reasons, many obvious, I’m sure (what human doesn’t like it when people pay close attention to something that that human has worked very hard on?) One that might be less obvious is that, since the teacher can guarantee that (at least most of) the students have read the entire story, I can read and discuss the ending.

Endings are very very difficult to write–Sam Shephard said in the New Yorker that, “I hate endings… Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing, and endings are a disaster.” And he’s been writing for 30 or so years and is thought to be one of the foremost playwrights of… Oh, despair. What hope is there for the rest of us?

Obviously, the rest of us struggle on, and when we hit on an ending that we think is good and resonant and true to the rest of the story while also surprising and maybe even illuminating in some way, we are damn proud of ourselves–it doesn’t happen very often. It’d be nice to get to share it your own self occasionally.

Of course, I’m not kidding myself that my stories are rife with suspense, nor am I of the opinion that knowing the ending of something “ruins” the pleasure of reading the rest. But structuring a story, arranging what happens when, is hard too–almost as hard as writing an ending. In separate places, I’ve seen story experts as impressive as Alice Munro and John Metcalf say they don’t necessarily read stories from beginning to end in sequence, but rather jump around, like moving from room to room in a house (that’s Munro being paraphrased there–I’m sorry but I’m not going to be able to find these citations).

That makes me sad, although it makes some sense, too. Certainly I can gauge the emotional tension and intensity, the sense of humour, the clarity and poetry of language if I start in the middle, but I don’t get the events as the writer lived them with the characters, and how he or she wanted to place them in my imagination. You can take someone’s temperature in lots of places on their bodies, but if you want to know how that person is actually feeling, it’s best to just let them tell you (hmmm, is that metaphor working?)

I put a lot of deliberation into making the order of the story make sense to the characters and their worlds–so that’s how I want it to make sense to the reader too. There’s no reason why a story won’t be enjoyable or interesting or perfectly understandable out of order–but that’s not how I meant to do it. You might not love it, like it, or even get it the way I did, but I want to give you every chance.

So I don’t read endings aloud at events where I assume no one’s read it. They might not be going to read it, actually–this might be our one and only encounter–but I’d generally like people to enter the story at the point I worked out as the beginning. So I read beginnings, for the most part, or whole stories if they’re short enough, when I do public readings.

But! I like my endings, too! Some of them took a dozen drafts and years of work–if I feel like I finally got it, I take a lot of pleasure in the words as they fell into place and I enjoy sharing them aloud. And even if I do feel like I nailed it, I am very much open to feedback to the contrary–there’s always next time–and there’s nothing like reading aloud to elicit an honest answer from some people.

So whenever I know the audience has read the work, I choose the ending as my selection to read aloud. This has only happened a few times and I’ve never done “Fruit Factory”‘s ending before. So this evening will find me at home standing on a chair, praticing and tomorrow–who knows what they’ll think!

RR

(More) On Advice

Advice–I love it! Anything anyone I respect wants to (gently) suggest I do or try, I’m open to hearing. I might not do it–I suppose statistically speaking, I do very little of what people suggest I do–but hell, it’s education just to know that this person thinks something is a good idea. Tells me something about his or her worldview, and that there might be others like it, if nothing else. But I do owe a lot–everything from my ability to use a hair-dryer properly to lots of brilliant edits on my stories–to someone else telling me what I was doing wrong and how to do it better.

February 27th, 2010

Oscar Derby!!

You are playing this year, aren’t you? Go over to A Place and enter your picks before you forget. I’ve even seen some of the movies this year, which makes me more of a shoe-in to win than usual. Go right now! It’s fun and it reminds you of the movies you’ve been meaning to see–what more could you ask for?

RR

February 25th, 2010

“How to Keep Your Day Job” in *Room Magazine*

Hmm, I seem to have gotten confused about when this was coming out, but I’m quite delighted that it turns out to be now! You can find my short story “How to Keep Your Day Job” in issue 32.4 of Room (the issue isn’t on the site yet), available now, much to my delight.

I had an awesome day with the teens, in case you were wondering.

RR

Workshop #1: Ideas

So I’m back to teaching with the very wonderful SWAT program this week, and those who were around for last year’s term will know that I am a bundle of nerves and excitement, and massive lesson-planning.

I thought I would put my lesson notes on Rose-coloured this year, in the hope that we could live that bloggy interdependent dream–maybe you guys would find some of my ideas interesting, and at the same, you might have more/different ones that could help me. Or maybe you will find this boring–either way, let me know!*

I should note here that I massively over-prepare, just in case the class is incredibly surely and won’t talk and I have to resort to lecturing. This has never happened, and I vastly prefer to run a class by discussion, with a few longer bits of explanation from me. In a typical class, I use about a quarter of what I prepared, sprinkled throughtout the hour. It’s a little random, but it works out. Anyway, onwards, any of this material below will come after introductions, a discussion about what they might like to write about, and how to figure that out.

—

Writers constantly get asked in interviews “where do you get your ideas?” It’s not a very original question, but I am always interested in the answer–it’s rarely straightforward. Sometimes it is–an event in one’s own life or in history that seems like it could be molded into a story, a bad book or movie that the author read that made them think “I could do the same thing but better!”

Sometimes it’s a character you’ve created, and think about, and imagine out his or her life, and then you find an incident in the imaginary life you’ve created that might work as a story. Sometimes you want to capture a feeling you’ve had, a person you knew, a neighbourhood you’ve lived in. Sometimes you want to write a story as a caricature or spoof, as revenge (that often works very poorly), as a love note. Sometimes your idea for a story is to try to write the thing a given audience wants to read: your teacher (this also doesn’t work well, mainly), a publication, someone you want to date.

Sometimes you have no idea where the idea comes from, you just start writing because you’re bored, or lonely, or your teacher told you to, and something comes from nothing and you realize you are writing a story. Sometimes by the time you have a story, you have no idea where the idea came from. The piece I’m currently working on is structured around a set of reworked advertising slogans, but it’s certainly not about them. It’s set where it is because I had wanted to return to a place I’d created in another story, and make better use of it, but the story’s not really about the setting. Now that I’m in the thick of it, I have no idea what led me to these people doing this stuff…though I’m (mainly) glad I got here. It was a long slog to figure out what the story was even about–I didn’t really know before I started writing where I was going to end up.

My point? Is that ideas are what you make of them. I think the only thing an idea needs to be to make it a good one is that it’s something a writer likes enough to start writing and keep writing. The rest will work itself out on the page (well, *the writer* will work it out, but it’ll feel natural).

There are so many good things about being a writer that I don’t like to dwell on the negative, but it does drive me crazy when I meet someone at a party and they say, “It’s great that we ran into each other because I have the best idea for a story/novel/series of 14 interconnected novels.” They have inevitably never written anything before, but after explaining the book to me at length (it’s always at length) they say, “It’s practically written! I have it all worked out inside my head; I just have to get it down.”

February 23rd, 2010

Groups and Challenges

In Writer Guy’s review of Century as part of Canada Reads Independently, he wonders if he’s right in calling CRI a “challenge.” I’m sure it’s fine to call it whatever one likes, but I much prefer a term I’ve learned from my bookfriends on GoodReads–a “group read.” To me, that implies better what I think these projects intend: to get people agreeing to read something as a group so they can then talk about it. So fun and friendly.

“So why aren’t you participating in any of these group reads, RR?” would be a reasonable question to ask, at least lately. It’s true–I love book conversations and though I’m not the fastest reader, I’m fast enough to read a book purely for the sake of participating in a conversation. I used to quite often. But I can’t quite get committed lately. Maybe it was the demanding, structured reading in grad school that’s put me off. Maybe it was a few book-club related incidents–a club-wide insistance on reading “challenging” books that weren’t “too easy” or “light”…which ended with me miserably hauling myself through a couple books that no one else liked, or indeed, bothered to read.

I think these sorts of group reads a project like Kerry’s, or in fact Canada Reads itself, seems very fun indeed–as warm an invitation to conversation as one could hope for. I love the idea of a group of people focusing their reading so they can share it. All I can say is I really hope to get it together for next year.

Meantime, I’m trying one of the less-structured options of group reads, one where participants don’t read the same book but engage in the same kind of reading and then share thoughts on that. One that appeals (because I was already sort of doing it privately) is a retro-reading challenge. Rereading has been a hot topic on The Literary Type lately, and now over at Free-range Reading, Mark suggests the Retro Reading Challenge. Ok, fine, it’s got the word “challenge” in it, but it still seems pretty fun and friendly to me:

“So here’s the idea, which I’m calling the Retro Reading Challenge, and I hope you all will play along. The idea is to pick a book that you read and adored years and years ago, then reread it now and write a review of it to capture your impressions. Did you still love it? Did you see flaws (or strengths) that you missed the first time? Did you have an “Oh God, what the hell was I thinking?” moment?”

I might not quite be able to comply with all the rules–the book needs to have been something I read only once, at least 15 years ago–but I *might* have Mostly Harmless only once, in my early teens–it wasn’t in the giant omnibus that I owned as a kid, since it didn’t come out until 1992. And it’s way darker than the others, so it’s conceivable it wasn’t on my reread list. And it fits in nicely with my don’t judge Eoin Kolfer too harshly project, which has been going on since fall (I’m halfway through *So Long and Thanks for All the Fish* right now, if you’re curious) and will end when I read *And Another Thing* and try not to hate it for not being written by Douglas Adams.

SO! Rambling aborted, I will read *Mostly Harmless* and review it as part of the Retro Reading project. Yes. This is my plan. Baby steps.

RR

February 22nd, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *True Romance*

There are better movies in the world than True Romance, as written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott, but there are very few I like as much. And after close to a dozen viewings, I’m pretty sure that though TR is not the best movie ever, it is very very very good.

The film starts in Detroit where a lonely loser named Clarence tries to pick up a girl in a bar, failing when he suggests going to a triple feature of martial arts movies. He goes anyway, alone, and there succeeds in picking up another (much prettier girl). They have fun, have pie, have sex, and then have a poignant conversation on the billboard frame that adjoins Clarence’s bedroom window. In this conversation, the girl, named Alabama, admits that a) she is a call girl and b) she has fallen in love with Clarence.

One of the many reasons I love this movie (we’ll get to them) is that it combines real urban grit with the hyper-intensity of (Tarantino’s favourite) pulp romance. There’s so much realism in the portrayal of Detroit, of people’s speech and snacks and clothes–but it’s all just a bit more intense, dramatic, hyper.