The Best writers' library I can imagine

I had an idea. A wonderful, crazy, bizarre idea. Yesterday I wanted to write an exercise about a character, but none of the exercises I was finding in my various books and sources were helping. So I wrote a poem about the character's backstory, the kind of poem you might read on a fan site for a famous person, sort of angsty and intense and vivid and sparse. A "Getting to understand you" poem for someone I've never met. And no one else is ever going to get to read it. But it helped. (This was not the amazing idea.)

See, I was thinking about all the writing exercises and scrawled notes and outlines and caffeine and props and bits and pieces that are involved when a book is being written. I imagined all that stuff and imagined a library where you could read a book and then browse all those bits and pieces that made up the book, resulted in the book, helped, added, advertised, linked, and generally were a part of that book's writing process. A library like that would be amazing. Seeing the notes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote while imagining Holmes. Reading Stephen King's thought processes during his first hundred rejections. Taking a look at Tokien's character notes (if he had any) for Middle Earth. And... and... and...

I can't even begin to imagine subject indexing this collection, let alone storing it in a way that could be useful. If it were actually complete there'd be books, photographs, notebooks, receipts and beer mats with ideas: Horses in space? scrawled, helpfully, along their edge. Quotes on Post-Its. Coffee mugs galore. Authors' favourite sweaters. Paths walked beside canals. Kleenex and pet cats. Thoughts themselves.

Insane, impossible, something out of Doctor Who. But I would really, really like to see that library.

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"Magnus Christensson's notes" by Jacob Botter at flickr.

Professional conduct in fiction

What if you were in a library, looking for books on a particular subject, and they were all on loan. The librarian says, "It's him over there - he has them all." And points at another patron. Would you be glad you'd been told? Would you be surprised? What if you were the one approached by another patron who said, "The librarian told me you had all these books?"

Librarians are not supposed to give out personal information, including what you're reading. It's a big fat privacy no-no. And as authors, it's wise to be careful how we portray professionals in our fiction, particularly if they're breaking the rules. Yet people break the rules in real life all the time. And frankly, it's the rule-breakers who are more fun to write and read about, anyway. But how far can this go before it becomes a problem?

If you're reading a book and find a character with your own career, you pay attention. And authors must navigate the danger of suggesting that the character represents the profession as a whole. J.K. Rowling has been criticized for her portrayal of Madam Pince, the librarian at Hogwarts. Pince tends to be nasty and unhelpful. Rowling has apologized, saying that she knows many helpful librarians in real life, but a helpful librarian at Hogwarts would negate a good part of her heroes' efforts. The character isn't meant to demonstrate the general nastiness of librarians everywhere, she's just a plot device.

And really, there are many nasty characters in fiction that don't ruffle feathers about their careers. Perhaps the real issue is when the characters' negative traits play to negative stereotypes, like mean librarians and bad cops. Although it might seem useful in crime fiction to have the police bumbling and useless, or dirty and dangerous, apparently police officers get tired of every book they read portraying them as a joke or corrupt. And fair enough. When a plot device becomes overused it ceases to be useful and becomes an cliche.


A friend wrote a story in which my original scenario occurred. The librarian told the protagonist who had the books. It was wrong professionally, and yet it happens in real life, perhaps often. And even if it happened rarely, it's still a valid scenario within the story. It's fiction, after all. It's a plot device and it works. The question is whether it adds enough to the the characters to override the grumbling in the reader's brain, and whether they believe that it was written to purposefully break the rules, or out of ignorance about how things really work. Does it add to the story, or the stereotype?

It's difficult for me, with my pet issues, to give my friend good advice about whether the scene needs to be changed. Even if I do want the character to be fired, my gut says my friend's portrayal of the librarian was fair and doesn't play to any particular stereotype. But the whole debate certainly reminds me to consider my own characters and what their professional conduct says about them, and my stories.

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"Librarian Flair" by Flyover Living at flickr, "Police - 1978" by AndyWilson at flickr.

Hindsight on great teachers

Last night I lay awake (no doubt a result of too many cups of coffee and too much to think about) wishing I had a stand-by mode for my brain. But I don't. So somewhere between 3am and 5am I started thinking about my teachers.

Maybe it's because the place I'm staying is across the street from a high school, and last week hundreds of inbetweeners and young adults trudged by daily on their way to seven hours of mandatory illumination. Most of them do not look miserable or resigned. Most of them look blank, as if they're here, but they're not here. They'll do it, but because they're told they have no choice, or they're told it's good for them. There's very little sign that they actually feel like it's good for them.

My school experience was probably typical, if the typical student is smart, cripplingly shy, and willing to let their future do its own thing. So maybe not typical. Smart but not driven, shy but apathetic. Most of the favourite teachers were not my favourites teachers, because you couldn't talk to me very well with boisterous disregard for your own classes. My favourite teachers were of the more subtle variety. The kind who probably don't remember me, but did or said something extremely off-hand that managed to completely change my life.

When I finished my Bachelors in Mathematics some people suggested I go into teaching. I refused. I would have wanted to be the kind of teacher who changed lives. If I wasn't sure I could do that, I couldn't consider the alternative.

An elementary school teacher who framed my poems and put them up on the wall (without asking.) A high school English teacher who managed to retrieve the story I'd written for the Grade 12 provincial exam because I'd really liked it. A math teacher, maybe the first female I'd met who made mathematics seem fantastic. Another high school English teacher who handed me the English 10 award and asked me not to go into science. And of course Mr. Liedtke for Grade 6 and 7, who taught us about being our own people, thinking our own way. When my friends and I heard he'd left the school we were actually sad, not for him, but for all the students who wouldn't have his influence, as if what he taught us would be irretrievably missing from their lives.

These teachers made school seem worthwhile. And they made me want to write. And what came to me sometime around 5:30 this morning was that although writing has always been my strongest passion, and although I took writing in high school and beyond, my writing instructors never made me want to write, it was these other teachers. The lessons and experiences that really drove me outside of my shy, apathetic teenager self weren't about grammar and character arcs and identifying theme. They were about myself, the world, and possibilities for everything. Confidence and value in my own thoughts. The lesson that I should be writing, that if I love it I should try, even if it's hard. And that although there are tests and hurdles and things that we are not going to want to do, it's all for something better in the end. There's a purpose and a horizon and there's something beyond even that. Those are the lessons that got me here. And they make trudging to forced education every day for years seem like a small price to pay.

In hindsight, that is.

Short short stories

Just one more day until the SIWC Writing Contest closes. It's a great contest, with generous prizes including publication in their annual anthology. I've been at the awards ceremony every year and I usually think, This is ridiculous. Why didn't you enter? So this year I decided I'd enter. I even had a few ideas of short stories I'd already written that would work.

Then I investigated further and realized I'd probably never get to enter this contest. The reason? Work count. It's my nemesis as far as publication is concerned.

My short stories are short. Short short. I like my short stories to be photographs of incidents. Set-up, delivery, done. My short story "Oliver" that won the TWG Writing Contest was 1100 words when I first wrote it, and I buffed it up to 1500 words to make it eligible for the contest. But SIWC's 3500-5000 word guideline rules me out entirely. How depressing. (In fact, they don't even call it a short story contest. It's a "Storyteller's Award" unless it's Non-Fiction or YA. This makes sense.)

Some people might argue that what I'm really writing is postcard stories, though I don't know how I'd manage to write a 1500 word story on the back of a postcard. Other people suggest scrapping short stories altogether, taking the incident, and making it into a poem. My poet friends would probably understand that there is nothing simple about skipping formats that way.

So, no win for me this year. But I have a few friends who have entered and I think they have a great chance. And you, reading this, if you have an eligible story you should enter it, too! And if you're aware of any markets that cater to the shorter end of the short story spectrum, I'd love to hear about them.

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And as long as I'm singing the virtues of a very short story, let me link to VeryShortStory, a Twitterer whose one-line tales are always entertaining. For example: "Tony was sure that Eunice wanted him. When he proposed, she didn't know how to explain that he was her imaginary friend." Hee.