(This is an expanded version of a blog post I wrote for Broken Pencil Magazine’s website this past summer.)
Despite what some readers thought, I think of my first novel, A Fine Ending, as a work of fiction. It certainly has a “non-fiction” aspect to it, in that a real time and place serves as the background to the story, and real people inspire many of the characters. However, the story and the major themes came first, and the events and characters served them. If I’d meant to write a non-fiction chronicle of that time and place, or some sort of autobiography, I would have done the opposite.
I’ve written a lot more non-fiction than fiction and always aim to be as thorough and comprehensive with my research as I can. I didn’t think the subject matter of my book would have been well served by a scholarly treatment, however. Approaching it as a work of fiction allowed me to focus more on the mood and gist of the era than just the facts, and helped make the story arc and cast of characters more universal. (Not to mention, this approach afforded me and a number of people who have characters based on them a certain degree of privacy!) I very much wanted the book to not only be “about the Montreal scene in the 1990s” but also about the end of the 20th century and the lives of 20-somethings in general.
In any case, I assume most novelists draw from personal experience for their writing: jotting down memorable lines and anecdotes for possible future use, remembering remarkable acquaintances to base characters on, etc. Myself, I spent a month before writing the book going through my journals as well as letters and emails to and from friends from the 90s. I compiled a lot of stuff that could be useful, mainly funny lines and dialogue and some longer episodes that could be worked into the book.
Before even agreeing to write the book (which, incidentally, only came about because I was offered a contract to write it), I had drawn up an outline for it, and I kept adding possible scenes to this outline as I scanned through my old writing.
Early on, I decided to use some short stories I’d published in the 90s as chapters, thinking that would make my job a bit easier. (I also only had about six months to write the entire thing!) But the longer stories I decided to insert (“Mush” from Fish Piss Vol. 1 no. 3 and my chapbook “Fly vs. Kitten”, to be precise, plus parts of “Beatrice” and “Clinic” from my “Five Stories (Montreal) chapbook) had their own self-contained world of characters and events, all of which had to be broken apart, re-inserted into the appropriate places in the novel, re-written using the novel’s characters and edited down to remove redundancies. Most importantly, nearly every line had to be modified to reflect the tense, tone and pacing of the rest of the novel. In hindsight, it took a lot longer than if I’d just written those chapters fresh to begin with, but this roundabout approach did help me solidify the right narrative voice. It was very important to me that the novel sound like it was written by a 20-something DURING the 1990s, with the story (and the decade) gradually unfolding through the narrator’s eyes. After working those short stories into the early chapters of the book, I felt had properly “gotten into character” and managed to stick with that voice through the rest of the first draft.
Writing the novel was fun – it basically felt like me pretending to be 25 again — but by the time I finished that first draft, I was anxious to start editing it. I’d written all the stuff I meant to and then some, but just as film footage only becomes a film in the editing room, I knew that it would be the editing that would really pull the novel together.
Before this, I’d mostly edited non-fiction, which is all about clearly explaining things to the reader; with fiction, I discovered, it’s as much about what ISN’T being told to the reader. I would sometimes choose vagueness or mystery over clarity, or try to convey intangibles and moods, instead of facts and background. I much enjoyed this intuitive aspect, using my gut instinct to help turn the assortment of events and characters I’d written into something bigger. There’s something almost magical about fine-tuning a text so it gradually changes tone, or subtly arranging minor scenes so that they amount to a parallel story readers may or may not notice (but can enjoy regardless.) Fiction can be multi-dimensional in a way that most non-fiction can never be. I could have tried to explain the various “messages” of the novel in an essay, but they wouldn’t have had the depth they gained by being gradually revealed over the course of the book. Some “messages” might best be communicated in other ways, and I guess that’s why we have art in all its forms.
Reaching the last pages of the book in the editing phase was even more satisfying than finishing the first draft. Only about half of the first draft survived, and much of what was left was moved around within the story. Many minor characters and scenes were either eliminated or combined together so as to help move the story along more quickly. (God knows how I could have done that if it was supposed to be non-fiction!) A surprising number of pages were cut just by scrupulously removing extraneous words in each line and extraneous lines in each paragraph. My editor and I went through the entire text at least twice before it was christened “the final draft.” It then went through three close edits with the copy editor.
The time spent not thinking about the book in between these phases helped make the remaining necessary changes seem more obvious to me. Some new writing was actually added in the very final stages to flesh out a few scenes and characters that were scarred from all the previous cuts. This being my first novel and all, I worried I’d want to keep changing it until the publisher yanked it from my scribbling hands, but by the time we were proofreading it, only typos and minor grammatical corrections jumped out at me. When it was all done, I was surprised at how closely the novel ended up following the loose outline I’d sketched for it at the very beginning, and thought, “I guess that’s how you do that.”
My editor (Anne Stone) and I were satisfied with the length, the pacing, the ending (which felt extremely important to get right, given the title and all the themes I wanted to wrap up), but we were still too close to the text to guess whether an average reader would enjoy it. The first encouraging sign was when the copy editor, who’d never set foot in Montreal, read it and said that he felt he could now comfortably walk around the city. That made me feel like I’d accomplished one of the many balancing acts, namely making the story be very deeply set in Montreal without making it necessary to know (or care) about which city the story takes place in.
Another balancing act involved making sure that the people who had characters closely based on them would be happy with how they and the episodes in the book were portrayed. It turned out that keeping the characters somewhat vaguely defined (I used very few physical descriptions of them, for example) helped provide some privacy while also making the characters feel more universal. (Your average reader seems to be pretty good at filling out the details with their own imaginations, and I’m not much of a fan of overly florid or descriptive fiction myself.)
Shortly after the launch, I was very happy to hear some readers in their early 20s say things like “that’s exactly like me and my friends!” The fact that some people said they were compelled to stay up all night finishing the book was also encouraging – one worry I had was that the book was too much of a collection of episodes, but I guess they were tied tightly enough together to make people want to know what was going to happen next. (Many of the friends who were around during the era covered by the book told me they wished I had included this or that crazy party or character or episode, but I think that keeping the book short and tight was crucial to avoid excess repetitiveness.)
The most satisfying feedback I received from readers was in the form of comments or emails saying they got what I was getting at with the main themes about personal and social responsibility (or lack thereof) and the “gradually darkening” feeling (as one reviewer put it) that marked the fin-de-siècle.
In the end, there is not much I would have done differently: my take on the 90s in Montreal and the end of the century from a personal perspective is done. I’m looking forward to using this experience to write some very different fiction in the future.