Lynda Simmons's Blog
April 6, 2011
Is there life outside the pages?
I was recently asked to write a feature for the Book Club Queen newsletter, Life Between My Pages. I'm posting the piece as a blog entry here, or you can visit the site, (http://www.book-club-queen.com/Book_C...) Either way, I hope you enjoy it!
While thinking about the title of this piece, I started to wonder – is there life outside the pages? I soon realized that the answer is no, not really. Certainly, there appears to be a life because I teach, and have friends and throw parties and love to sit in the morning with a cup of tea and a newspaper spread on the kitchen table, poring over every page before my day begins. On top of which, my adult children like me, I’m still married to my highschool sweetheart, and if you were to ask them, they would undoubtedly tell you that I am a devoted wife and mother because I’ve trained them well. They think it’s perfectly reasonable for a mother to shut herself up in an office for days on end, or for a wife to take herself away to the cottage for weeks at a time because she has a book to finish.
All three of them also know enough to stop in at every bookstore they pass to see if my mighty tomes are there, and to ensure that the little darlings are not sitting spine-out on the shelf. This takes time and dedication, and I am grateful every time they report back from a successful mission. But the more I think about this, the clearer it becomes that every part of my life has, for years, been tied somehow to the writing. I’m always between the pages.
When I’m reading that paper, I’m not simply catching up on what’s going on in the world. I’m storing tiny nuggets of trivia or human nature which, if mined properly, may one day offer up a new story, or a different direction for a current one.
When I’m out with friends, enjoying their company and a glass of wine, I find myself shamelessly eavesdropping on the conversation at the table behind me. Or noticing something in the waiter that reminds me of a character in my work-in-progress. Or watching the young woman across the aisle and wondering what’s happened to make her glance at the man sharing her table so furtive, the line between her eyebrows so very deep. Always drifting away from the moment I’m in because the writer in me never shuts off.
Even in the shower, the answer to a question I’ve been wrestling with at the computer will come to me in a blinding flash. Then it’s drip, drip, drip, down the stairs to the computer. Those same sudden answers will come when I’m driving, or loading the dishwasher, or worst of all, when my husband is telling me about something that happened at work that day. After yea these many years, he recognizes the signs. I may be nodding and murmuring encouraging words, but my mind is somewhere else, with people that don’t exist, thinking about things that never happened. My life is not a fiction, but fiction is my life. Fiction is what drives me, what makes my heart pound when a character reveals something I hadn’t known before, and my fingers twitch if a keyboard or notebook or voice activated recorder is not within reach.
I blame my mother. I grew up, after all, in an era before playdates and nursery school, a time when your mother would put you outside to play and then lock the door. She had a house to clean and you had a swingset and a sandbox. At the age of three, what more did you need? You now had two choices – cry at the door for an hour or find a way to amuse yourself. Being resourceful, I amused myself with an imaginary friend and my mother humoured me, making room for Susy at the dinner table, and telling my sister to make room in the bed we shared for this same imaginary girl.
When my mother finally figured I was old enough to be set loose on the street, the imaginary friend disappeared, but the imagination was there to stay. I made up stories about everything, including one doozy about my grandmother’s untimely death, which brought the neighbours to the door with casseroles and cakes. Yet my mother never called me a liar, never tried to dampen the story-telling spirit in her youngest child. She simply explained again and again the difference between what was real, and what was imagination until I finally understood: imagination went on paper – real life just went on.
Maybe that’s why I spend so much time between the pages. Fiction allows me to feed that over-active imagination and the natural curiosity that comes with it in a way that real life never does. When I’m researching a book, I have a reason to squeeze through the locked gate of an abandoned old house so I can peek in the windows, or ask my doctor about the feasability of a murder I’m thinking about, or call up a perfect stranger who happens to work in the same field as my character, and talk my way into spending a couple of days with her so that I get the details of her workday right. This is not a new phenomenon. My kids remember plenty of Adventures With Mom that sometimes landed us in some strange and scary spots, but were always fun and food for another story.
I love writing. Always have. It’s who I am, it’s what I do. And if the time comes when no one wants to buy what I’m selling, I’ll still write, putting words on the page as long as that imagination is alive and well. And I know I’m lucky to have a family that understands and loves that about me, because I don’t know how the story would have turned out if they’d been written differently.
While thinking about the title of this piece, I started to wonder – is there life outside the pages? I soon realized that the answer is no, not really. Certainly, there appears to be a life because I teach, and have friends and throw parties and love to sit in the morning with a cup of tea and a newspaper spread on the kitchen table, poring over every page before my day begins. On top of which, my adult children like me, I’m still married to my highschool sweetheart, and if you were to ask them, they would undoubtedly tell you that I am a devoted wife and mother because I’ve trained them well. They think it’s perfectly reasonable for a mother to shut herself up in an office for days on end, or for a wife to take herself away to the cottage for weeks at a time because she has a book to finish.
All three of them also know enough to stop in at every bookstore they pass to see if my mighty tomes are there, and to ensure that the little darlings are not sitting spine-out on the shelf. This takes time and dedication, and I am grateful every time they report back from a successful mission. But the more I think about this, the clearer it becomes that every part of my life has, for years, been tied somehow to the writing. I’m always between the pages.
When I’m reading that paper, I’m not simply catching up on what’s going on in the world. I’m storing tiny nuggets of trivia or human nature which, if mined properly, may one day offer up a new story, or a different direction for a current one.
When I’m out with friends, enjoying their company and a glass of wine, I find myself shamelessly eavesdropping on the conversation at the table behind me. Or noticing something in the waiter that reminds me of a character in my work-in-progress. Or watching the young woman across the aisle and wondering what’s happened to make her glance at the man sharing her table so furtive, the line between her eyebrows so very deep. Always drifting away from the moment I’m in because the writer in me never shuts off.
Even in the shower, the answer to a question I’ve been wrestling with at the computer will come to me in a blinding flash. Then it’s drip, drip, drip, down the stairs to the computer. Those same sudden answers will come when I’m driving, or loading the dishwasher, or worst of all, when my husband is telling me about something that happened at work that day. After yea these many years, he recognizes the signs. I may be nodding and murmuring encouraging words, but my mind is somewhere else, with people that don’t exist, thinking about things that never happened. My life is not a fiction, but fiction is my life. Fiction is what drives me, what makes my heart pound when a character reveals something I hadn’t known before, and my fingers twitch if a keyboard or notebook or voice activated recorder is not within reach.
I blame my mother. I grew up, after all, in an era before playdates and nursery school, a time when your mother would put you outside to play and then lock the door. She had a house to clean and you had a swingset and a sandbox. At the age of three, what more did you need? You now had two choices – cry at the door for an hour or find a way to amuse yourself. Being resourceful, I amused myself with an imaginary friend and my mother humoured me, making room for Susy at the dinner table, and telling my sister to make room in the bed we shared for this same imaginary girl.
When my mother finally figured I was old enough to be set loose on the street, the imaginary friend disappeared, but the imagination was there to stay. I made up stories about everything, including one doozy about my grandmother’s untimely death, which brought the neighbours to the door with casseroles and cakes. Yet my mother never called me a liar, never tried to dampen the story-telling spirit in her youngest child. She simply explained again and again the difference between what was real, and what was imagination until I finally understood: imagination went on paper – real life just went on.
Maybe that’s why I spend so much time between the pages. Fiction allows me to feed that over-active imagination and the natural curiosity that comes with it in a way that real life never does. When I’m researching a book, I have a reason to squeeze through the locked gate of an abandoned old house so I can peek in the windows, or ask my doctor about the feasability of a murder I’m thinking about, or call up a perfect stranger who happens to work in the same field as my character, and talk my way into spending a couple of days with her so that I get the details of her workday right. This is not a new phenomenon. My kids remember plenty of Adventures With Mom that sometimes landed us in some strange and scary spots, but were always fun and food for another story.
I love writing. Always have. It’s who I am, it’s what I do. And if the time comes when no one wants to buy what I’m selling, I’ll still write, putting words on the page as long as that imagination is alive and well. And I know I’m lucky to have a family that understands and loves that about me, because I don’t know how the story would have turned out if they’d been written differently.
March 16, 2011
Profanity – A Literary Tool, or Mere Laziness?
I recently had an interview booked on a radio show with a host who was looking forward to chatting about Island Girl. The book had been in her hands for a while, the bio had been forwarded and the questionnaire answered. We had communicated by e-mail a few times, and it was all systems go for the interview. So imagine my surprise when I received another e-mail only days before the scheduled date, informing me that it was with “mixed emotions” that she was forced to cancel.
The reason? Profanity. Turned out she hadn’t read the book until the week before, and has very strong feelings about the issue. To cut to the chase,She couldn’t possibly endorse a book, even one she enjoyed, if it contained profanity.
Now I admit that one character, Liz, swears a lot. In fact a quick count of the F-bomb alone puts her use of the word at well over two dozen. Still, I was shocked to discover that in 2011 in North America, the use of profanity in an adult novel could still get you banned in some places.
I’m not saying the radio host was wrong. She has the right to choose which books she reads and which guests she has on her show. But it was her admission that she had mixed emotions about cancelling the interview that intrigued me.
Despite the profanity, she had found something to like in the book, something to give her pause, to make her hesitate, if only for a moment before cancelling. Of course, to my mind, it would have been better to forge ahead, to have a heated discussion about the issue, to engage the audience by challenging their ideas and values. But not everyone likes heated discussion, something I appreciate but will never understand, but that is an issue for another day.
The point today is that her e-mail got me to thinking: Could I have written that character without dropping a single F-bomb on the reader? Would she have have been less believable, less realistic, if her language had been more genteel?
I’m not the first to think about this issue. There are no shortage of essays and blogs written on the subject, most from the point-of-view that profanity is never necessary. The proponents of gentle speech routinely trot out the popularity of Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway and, more recently, Stephanie Meyers as proof that one need not use crude language in order to create compelling fiction.
That’s all well and good, but both Austen and Hemingway wrote in bygone eras when social rules were stricter and censorship harsher. And Meyers writes contemporary fiction in a genre where careful speech is appreciated, which makes sense I suppose since young minds are at stake, but that too is a topic for another day.
My novel, Island Girl, is written for adults, so the question is this: would the story have benefitted if Liz had been more circumspect in her speech?
Let me be honest up front – not every reader likes Liz. Some actively hate her. She’s an alcoholic, after all, and self-destructive, so she’s not always on her best behaviour. She’s purposely shocking in both dress and lifestyle, so again, not someone who’s going to worry about offending people, not someone you would necessarily want for a friend. But does that mean profanity has to form part of her character?
When I was a kid, my mother always told me that nice girls don’t swear because it marks them not only as crude, but also semi-literate. Lacking the words to express themselves properly, the poor unfortunates had no choice but to fall back on the shock value of profanity. I, on the other hand, was one of the lucky girls, equipped with a plethora of words all balanced neatly on the tip of my tongue, just waiting to be set loose in a fabulous tribute to the English language. In short, there was no need for me to stoop to such low speech.
A fart could become a gaseous expulsion. Shit, a malodorous discharge. And of course, there are the old standbys of penis as member and ass as bottom. So mom was right. The alternatives are endless if one only tries. My character could have said gosh darn instead of God damn and heck instead of hell, so honestly, does anyone ever need to drop an F-Bomb on anyone?
After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that the answer is yes – sometimes an F-bomb is essential to the realistic portrayal of a character. Liz would never have said Gosh Darn, unless she was trying to be a smart ass. Or should I say, a clever rascal. Except she’s not a rascal. A rascal implies an impish quality, a playfulness, even a certain innocence, which in no way describes Liz.
Had I gone that route with her speech, she would have become someone else. A woman who liked herself, who wasn’t a danger to herself. A plucky character everyone could like, and that is not who she is. I honestly believe that not only Liz, but the story as a whole would have been weakened with the use of gentle language for her character.
So I stand by my F-bombs, knowing there will be fallout. And once more I ask, what think you?
The reason? Profanity. Turned out she hadn’t read the book until the week before, and has very strong feelings about the issue. To cut to the chase,She couldn’t possibly endorse a book, even one she enjoyed, if it contained profanity.
Now I admit that one character, Liz, swears a lot. In fact a quick count of the F-bomb alone puts her use of the word at well over two dozen. Still, I was shocked to discover that in 2011 in North America, the use of profanity in an adult novel could still get you banned in some places.
I’m not saying the radio host was wrong. She has the right to choose which books she reads and which guests she has on her show. But it was her admission that she had mixed emotions about cancelling the interview that intrigued me.
Despite the profanity, she had found something to like in the book, something to give her pause, to make her hesitate, if only for a moment before cancelling. Of course, to my mind, it would have been better to forge ahead, to have a heated discussion about the issue, to engage the audience by challenging their ideas and values. But not everyone likes heated discussion, something I appreciate but will never understand, but that is an issue for another day.
The point today is that her e-mail got me to thinking: Could I have written that character without dropping a single F-bomb on the reader? Would she have have been less believable, less realistic, if her language had been more genteel?
I’m not the first to think about this issue. There are no shortage of essays and blogs written on the subject, most from the point-of-view that profanity is never necessary. The proponents of gentle speech routinely trot out the popularity of Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway and, more recently, Stephanie Meyers as proof that one need not use crude language in order to create compelling fiction.
That’s all well and good, but both Austen and Hemingway wrote in bygone eras when social rules were stricter and censorship harsher. And Meyers writes contemporary fiction in a genre where careful speech is appreciated, which makes sense I suppose since young minds are at stake, but that too is a topic for another day.
My novel, Island Girl, is written for adults, so the question is this: would the story have benefitted if Liz had been more circumspect in her speech?
Let me be honest up front – not every reader likes Liz. Some actively hate her. She’s an alcoholic, after all, and self-destructive, so she’s not always on her best behaviour. She’s purposely shocking in both dress and lifestyle, so again, not someone who’s going to worry about offending people, not someone you would necessarily want for a friend. But does that mean profanity has to form part of her character?
When I was a kid, my mother always told me that nice girls don’t swear because it marks them not only as crude, but also semi-literate. Lacking the words to express themselves properly, the poor unfortunates had no choice but to fall back on the shock value of profanity. I, on the other hand, was one of the lucky girls, equipped with a plethora of words all balanced neatly on the tip of my tongue, just waiting to be set loose in a fabulous tribute to the English language. In short, there was no need for me to stoop to such low speech.
A fart could become a gaseous expulsion. Shit, a malodorous discharge. And of course, there are the old standbys of penis as member and ass as bottom. So mom was right. The alternatives are endless if one only tries. My character could have said gosh darn instead of God damn and heck instead of hell, so honestly, does anyone ever need to drop an F-Bomb on anyone?
After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that the answer is yes – sometimes an F-bomb is essential to the realistic portrayal of a character. Liz would never have said Gosh Darn, unless she was trying to be a smart ass. Or should I say, a clever rascal. Except she’s not a rascal. A rascal implies an impish quality, a playfulness, even a certain innocence, which in no way describes Liz.
Had I gone that route with her speech, she would have become someone else. A woman who liked herself, who wasn’t a danger to herself. A plucky character everyone could like, and that is not who she is. I honestly believe that not only Liz, but the story as a whole would have been weakened with the use of gentle language for her character.
So I stand by my F-bombs, knowing there will be fallout. And once more I ask, what think you?
March 8, 2011
Blogs - To Write Truth or To Write Pleasantries?
This is my premier blog, the first one I have ever attempted. I'm late to the game because honestly, blogging does not come naturally to me, which is odd because I have opinions about everything. But I've been told that blogs meant to promote a book or an author should never contain that author's real opinions. They should be whitewashed and sugar-coated, sanitized for public consumption – and that is the main reason I have always avoided blog writing.
If I have to write about the weather or my vacation or the pearls of wisdom I discovered while writing my latest book, then forget it. I'll be bored writing it, so I can only imagine that people will be bored reading it. Yet, if I write what I really think about politics, religion, ethics or anything else that I like to discuss, then I risk alienating people in a way that only body odour was formerly able to accomplish.
That's why I'm hesitating even now, labouring over the keys and holding back my thoughts as though they were a sneeze, set to explode all over my monitor, leaving a sticky mess behind.To blog the truth, or to blog pleasantries, that's the question. What think you?
If I have to write about the weather or my vacation or the pearls of wisdom I discovered while writing my latest book, then forget it. I'll be bored writing it, so I can only imagine that people will be bored reading it. Yet, if I write what I really think about politics, religion, ethics or anything else that I like to discuss, then I risk alienating people in a way that only body odour was formerly able to accomplish.
That's why I'm hesitating even now, labouring over the keys and holding back my thoughts as though they were a sneeze, set to explode all over my monitor, leaving a sticky mess behind.To blog the truth, or to blog pleasantries, that's the question. What think you?
