Edward Willett's Blog, page 49

TSR, Gygax, D&D & me

TSR. Gygax. The names may mean nothing to you, but to me, they were once words of power, for TSR (Tactical Studies Rules Inc.) published Dungeon & Dragons…and Gary Gygax, who cofounded the company in 1973 with childhood friend Don Kaye, created that seminal fantasy role-playing game, along with Dave Arneson.

Now comes news that Luke Gygax and E. Gary Gygax Jr, sons of Gary Gygax, are relaunching TSR Games: a new company with the old trademark, which they purchased after it was abandoned by D&D owner Wizards of the Coast (itself owned by Hasbro) about nine years ago. They’re also launching a new gaming publication, Gygax Magazine.

Why do TSR and Gygax mean something to me? Because, although officially I majored in journalism and minored in art at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, based on hours devoted to a topic it would be more accurate to say I majored in Dungeons & Dragons and minored in everything else.

I had never heard of D&D when I started university, but fairly early on I met and made friends with Andrew Crossman, who certainly had. Andy, who was from Arlington, TX, had been playing the game for years. He soon had me hooked, and it wasn’t long before weekends were largely devoted to the game, at first in the common room of our dormitory, but later, as our circle of gamers expanded, in the snack room of one of the university’s central buildings.

How devoted were we? We’d start Friday evening, play late into the evening, start again the next day and play all day, and often continue playing on Sunday (after church, of course).

At the beginning of my university studies we were playing from the original D&D rules, three skinny, cheaply-printed manuals illustrated with amateurish black-and-white drawings. In 1977, TSR released Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (hardcover, but the art was only marginally better) and we began using it…

…or sort of using it, because truth be told, the version of the game we played often bore little resemblance to the rules as laid down in the manuals. We had a set of “house rules,” some drawn from unofficial supplements to the game, some of which we’d come up with ourselves, that we thought made the game play more smoothly.

At first I was always a player, but it didn’t take me long to become a DM (Dungeon Master). I found I’d much rather run the game than just be along for the ride. And although there may have been a few published game modules—pre-packaged adventures—out then, we mostly created our own: so in addition to the many, many hours I spent playing the game, I spent many more creating a whole world, mapping dungeons and ruins and cities and castles, mountains and meadows and caverns and chasms, “rolling up” monsters to populate them (in D&D, you “roll up” all sorts of things, since dice: four-, six-, eight-, 12- and 20-sided, govern all).

Most of that world was never played in. It still exists: there’s an old briefcase in a closet that holds all of my D&D stuff, except for the dice, which for some reason are right here in my desk…not that I use them to create my fictional characters, although sometimes it’s tempting.

And therein lies one of the reasons I quit playing D&D.

Not the main reason, perhaps: that would simply be that I graduated, and returned to Weyburn, Saskatchewan, as a newspaper reporter for the Weyburn Review, and although there were a few D&D players in Weyburn, no doubt, they were mostly high school students and I wasn’t exactly in their circle of acquaintances, nor they in mine. For a couple of years I returned south for my vacations, and would play with my old college friends (especially with Andy, who was my roommate at Harding after my first year there, and at whose wedding I was best man), but the magic was slipping away: and one day it struck me that the vast creative energy I had poured into D&D, creating whole binders worth of details about fictional places and characters for games that in the end never took place, was energy that would be better utilized in creating fictional worlds for my novels.

What is an author, after all, but the ultimate role-playing gamer? He or she is everything rolled into one: maker of the rules, creator of the non-player characters, inhabitor of the minds of each of the player characters, and, of course, Dungeon Master, keeping the game moving along, making sure everyone has a good time, or at least dies in an interesting and appropriate fashion.

Dungeons & Dragons has moved far beyond those early years, from what I can tell (I haven’t kept up with the changes in rules or the vast array of books, computer games, movies and more that have occurred), and so, I guess have I.

But I’ve never felt my D&D-playing time was wasted. I had wonderful adventures in the company of good friends (and the company of too much Coke and junk food, admittedly), and I even made use of that vast world I created: my second YA novel, The Dark Unicorn, makes use of the place names and geography, although the story and magic owes nothing to any campaign I ever ran.

Now, full circle, my daughter has expressed an interest in trying out D&D.

Maybe it’s time to break out the dice and roll up a few characters once more.

A modest proposal (for the complete overhaul of the legislative process)

Back in high school, I was a debater…kind of.

I say kind of, because like football, debate was something I did for only one year. (What, you don’t think football players usually end up on the debate team? Then you didn’t go to a small enough school.)

I don’t know that I was a very good football player, although we did have a very successful team the one year I played (center: I couldn’t catch and I couldn’t run, but I could snap the ball and I was big and rather enjoyed running into people), but I seem to have been a pretty good debater. I jumped straight into the Open category since I was already in Grade 12, without ever going through the lower categories, and I did quite well individually in the few tournaments we took part in, and placed in the top 10 (eighth, I think) in the provincial tournament—high enough to go to the national debate tournament, except since I’d only debated for one year I hadn’t competed in enough Open debates to qualify.

My favorite debate partner was my best friend, whom I’ll call John Smith, namely because that was his real name: we made a pretty formidable team.

Now, here’s the thing about high school debate, at least as we practiced it. You would be presented with a resolution to debate. (The one I remember best was, “Be it resolved that the future leaders of the major political parties in Saskatchewan be elected by universal popular suffrage.”) You might have strong feelings about whether or not that resolution was a good idea or a bad idea…but it didn’t matter how you felt about it personally. You had to prepare two arguments, one in favor of the resolution and one against it, and argue passionately for both sides.

In the end, you might still feel strongly that one or the other side had the best argument, but at least you had researched the arguments on the other side. You couldn’t ignore them, or pretend they didn’t exist—not if you wanted to win the tournament and score points yourself.

And that brings me to the modest proposal of this post’s headline: why don’t we require our elected officials to do what high school debaters have to do, and argue both sides of each piece of resolution brought to the floor of the legislative assembly?

The government would present its legislation, and speak in favor of it. The opposition would present its arguments against it. And then the tables would be turned: the opposition would have to speak in favor of the legislation, and the government would have to present its best arguments against it.

(I supposed they could stay in their usual seats, although I rather like the idea of the Speaker giving a signal and everyone having to get up and switch sides, the government moving to the opposition benches and vice versa. Perhaps they could meet in the middle for a brief reception: tea and dainties. Nothing defuses political tension like a good Nanaimo bar!)

Only after both sides of the assembly had argued both sides of the issue would a vote be taken: a free vote, by secret ballot. Let the debaters vote their conscience and in the interests of their constituents.

No longer would politicians be able to pretend, as politicians love to do, that there are no valid arguments on the other side of an issue, because they would have to present those arguments themselves. And surely legislation would be crafted differently if those creating it had to truly wrestle with what its application would mean in the real world instead of simply relying on ideology and a desire to punish those of other political parties.

I think it’s an idea whose time has come!

Or, at least, an idea worth debating.

How I became a DAW author

Here is a tale I’ve told oft before, though never (I think) in print or pixel: the tale of how I became a DAW author.

It’s an oft-told tale because I like to share it with writers who are still in that seeking-publication stage, for though the specifics of it are of little use (I doubt any other writer has taken or will take my particular route to a New York publisher), there are some details of it that are, I hope, both helpful and encouraging.

Here’s how it transpired…

As the new millennium dawned, I had written quite a lot of non-fiction, but only five novels had appeared bearing my name.

Two (Soulworm and The Dark Unicorn) had been published by Royal Fireworks Press, and the less said about that the better: suffice it to say I made the mistake far too many beginning writers make and signed a bad contract with a publisher I should never have gone near.

One, Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star, had been published by Roussan, a small-but-respectable publisher in Montreal that fairly soon thereafter went out of business. (Not my fault—honest!)

One, Spirit Singer, was my boy-was-I-ahead-of-the-curve print-on-demand-and-ebook offering, brought out under the auspices of Awe-Struck E-Books, which called itself Earthling Press for POD purposes (not to be confused with Earthling Publications, a respected American small press specializing in fine limited editions of horror, dark fantasy and suspense).

And then there was Lost in Translation.

Lost in Translation was my first adult science fiction novel, and had, without success, made the rounds to all the big SF publishers (including DAW) under the auspices of an agent I had for a while but who promptly dropped me when that book didn’t sell. (Not exactly committed to building her writers’ careers…)

But then I heard of Five Star Books. Five Star publishes lines of books which are marketed primarily to libraries: libraries set up a standing order with Five Star and receive, say, three mysteries a month, selected by Five Star’s editors. The books have library bindings—they’re tough hardcovers with the cover image printed right into the cover, as opposed to on a slipcover.

Although I believe it is now gone, at the time Five Star had a science fiction line, packaged by Tekno Books, which was run by the late Martin H. Greenberg, a well-known editorial name in the science fiction field. John Helfers edited for Tekno, and it was Helfers who gave me the good news that Tekno would take Lost in Translation for publication through Five Star.

Yay! Although, Five Star’s model being what it was, the book was impossible to find in bookstores, had an…unfortunate…cover, and was pretty much ignored by reviewers and the like.

But here’s where it gets interesting…

February, 2006. My phone rings. I answer it; it’s John Helfers. “Mr. Greenberg wants to talk to you,” he says.

“Okay…”

Mr. Greenberg comes on the line. He informs me, with great pleasure, that DAW has decided to bring out Lost in Translation as a mass-market paperback.

As I understood it from what he told me, DAW had a “hole” in its publishing schedule it needed to fill, so it turned to him (he did a lot of work with DAW over the years, primarily as an editor of anthologies), asking to see some of the books he had published through Tekno. Among the books he sent them was mine, and mine was the one they chose to plug that “hole.”

That was (he says with vast understatement) a very exciting morning. I was tickled pink, even though I had yet to meet or even be in direct contact with anyone at DAW. One reason: the old DAW paperbacks with yellow spines had always, in a way, meant science fiction to me (that, and the little stickers of a rocket in front of a stylized atom that the local library stuck on the back of SF titles so they could be easily identified on the shelves), simply because they were so instantly identifiable.

There was also the interesting fact that the letters DAW, which of course stand for Donald A. Wollheim, are also the initials of my five-years-older brother, Dwight Arthur Willett, whose own SF-reading habit had so much to do with the fact I also read (and eventually wrote) the stuff.

(An aside: there is also an ECW Press, here in Canada, which has my initials—and which is also, these days, publishing some science fiction. If I were inclined to see things karmically as opposed to comically, I might see that as a sign of some sort. Although I suppose to round things out, since I’m being published by DAW, my brother should write a book to be published by ECW…)

With that contract in hand, I set out in search of an agent. I contacted a few. At one very well-known agency an assistant said they’d get back to me “within a couple of weeks” if I sent them a few chapters by snail mail…but I had that contract in hand and needed to get it finalized and signed right away. I didn’t have a couple of weeks.

By contrast, Ethan Ellenberg had me email him a chunk of the manuscript—and got back to me almost once saying he’d represent me.

And so, within the space of about a week, I was a DAW author and had a well-known New York agent…

…and the way I did it is of absolutely no use to anyone else, you might think, so why do I tell this tale often to wannabe writers?

Because, I firmly believe, buried within it is, if you squint just right, a ray of hope for other writers seeking publication.

I’ve asked both Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert how many manuscripts DAW sees, and the number is in the low hundreds. Every month.

And yet…they had a “hole” in their publishing schedule they needed Lost in Translation to fill. Out of all those manuscripts, they had nothing with which to fill that hole.

So what I tell beginning writers is that, yes, the odds are against you—but this isn’t a lottery. Most of the manuscripts DAW or any other publisher sees are unpublishable: either completely unsuitable, or just plain bad.

That means that if you’re good—heck, if you’re even competent—and if you’re writing the kind of thing the publisher to which you are submitting actually publishes, then you’re already way ahead of the bulk of the manuscripts that show up on DAW’s, or anyone else’s doorstep.

Keep writing. Keep improving. Keep submitting. And someday…

Well someday, maybe, just maybe, you’ll receive your own exciting phone call.

The case for coffee consumption

I first wrote about coffee in a science column back in the dawn of time, so long ago that it began, “Let’s get one thing straight.  I don’t drink coffee…”

Since as I type this I am on my second…or maybe third… good-sized cup (oh, all right, mug) of the stuff, something has clearly changed in the intervening years.

And guess what? Apparently that’s all to the good of my health.

Oh, I know, anyone of adult years remembers news stories about coffee drinking being bad for you, but as more research is done, quite the contrary has emerged as the scientific consensus: drinking coffee is good for you. To the extent that The Atlantic recently ran an article by Lindsay Abrams headlined, “The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like.”

(It’s an article packed with links to the original material, which I’ve tried to include in the summary below, as well, so you don’t have to take Abrams’s—or my—word for it.)

The benefits, Abrams says, extend “from preventing Alzheimer’s disease to protecting the liver“ and research findings, taken together, “suggest we should embrace coffee for reasons beyond the benefits of caffeine, and that we might go so far as to consider it a nutrient.”

First, a few basics, drawn from my own earlier column, about this amazing substance I am currently guzzling.

The coffee plant is an evergreen shrub with waxy leaves that produces small red “cherries,” each containing two coffee “beans.”  A tree only produces two kilograms of fruit a year, which in turn yields less than half a kilogram of coffee.

Although there are many varieties of coffee plant, two species, arabica and robusta, account for 99 percent of the world’s output.  The robusta plant is hardier, but its beans have a harsher taste, so arabica beans are used for premium coffees.

Coffee cherries are only picked when fully ripe, which means they must be picked by hand.  Robusta cherries remain on the tree after they ripen, but arabica cherries will fall to the ground and spoil, which means they must be very carefully watched and frequently picked over–one reason arabica coffee is more expensive.

The pulp is removed from the beans either by drying the cherries or by washing and mashing them up.  The two methods produce distinctive flavors.

Once dried, the gray-green beans are sorted, bagged, graded and shipped to processors for either continuous roasting, in which hot air at between 200 and 260 degrees Celsius is forced through a small quantity of beans for about five minutes, or batch roasting, in which much larger quantities are roasted for a longer time.  Beans roasted for a long time are stronger and mellower.

After which, of course, the beans are ground, producing a powder that is a complex mixture of more than 100 different proteins, starches, oils and aromatic and bitter chemicals, and steeped in hot water to make the delicious beverage so many of us enjoy.

And the health benefits?

The most recent findings, as Abrams notes in her Atlantic article, will appear in the December issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Conducted over 20 years, this study found that coffee consumption—regardless of caffeine content—was associated with an eight percent decrease in the risk of Type 2 diabetes in women. In men, the reduction was four percent for regular coffee and seven percent for decaf. (A word of warning: if you add a lot of cream and sugar to your coffee, you’re probably negating whatever anti-diabetes effect the coffee itself might be having.)

There’s more: a meta-analysis found an inverse association between habitual, moderate consumption of coffee and the risk of heart failure, peaking at about four cups a day. There’s a study that indicates caffeine might function as a pain reliever, another that finds it helps reduce the rate of depression in women, another that links coffee consumption to a reduced risk of metabolic syndrome.

There’s research showing that coffee consumption can provide some protection against various types of cancer and fatty liver disease. Drinking coffee during your road trip breaks can make you a safer driver. It can make your workout more effective. Although coffee does nothing to make a drunk person sober (all you end up with is a wide-awake drunk), upping coffee intake seems to help people enrolled in Alcoholics Anonymous stay sober.

Of course there may still be some negative effects to drinking coffee—nothing, as Abrams says, can be all good—but “the evidence remains overwhelmingly in coffee’s favor.”

A study published in May in the New England Journal of Medicine, she concludes, “looked at hundreds of thousands of men and women and found this bottom-line result: people who drank coffee lived longer than those who didn’t. And the more they drank, the longer they lived.”

My mug is empty. Clearly, it’s time to refill it.

Christmas and me

I like Christmas.

I like the traditional songs, the lights, the trees, the food, the presents, the getting together with friends and family, all of that stuff.

I like A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Christmas Carol (Muppet, Mickey Mouse, George C. Scott or Alistair Sim versions, or all four).

I even like the snow…well, for that two or three weeks of the year.

But I’ve never been someone who worries about the commercialization of the season, which might seem odd, since I grew up the son of a preacher and church elder…until you understand that I grew up in the Church of Christ, and Christmas (as I’m forever explaining to startled acquaintances) wasn’t that big a thing with us. In fact, we were more likely to cancel services (at least evening services) on Christmas Day if it fell on a Sunday, rather than hold any special services. And while we might have gone so far as to sing a Christmas carol or two in church, I sang many a carol in the middle of the summer when the preacher decided to draw his lesson from the nativity portions of the Gospels.

That’s not to say my family didn’t celebrate Christmas. We had a tree and presents and all that stuff. We had the big Christmas dinner (although it was more likely to be enchilada casserole, one of my Mom’s specialties, than a turkey). We just never really considered it a religious holiday, because we didn’t have any religious holidays (including Easter): or, rather, every Sunday was considered a religious holiday, and we didn’t need any others.

So when the Pope ended up in the news in the past few days by pointing out a few gentle truths about the historical record (“Killjoy Pope crushes Christmas nativity traditions: New Jesus book reveals there were no donkeys beside crib, no lowing oxen and definitely no carols,” screams the headline in that U.K. bastion of sober journalism, the DailyMail), well, whoopdy-do. As the folks at Get Religion (a blog focusing on news coverage of religious matters) point out, anyone in any Christian tradition that’s been paying attention already knows what the Pope just reiterated.

Growing up in my tradition, I especially knew it, because one reason for our iconoclastic avoidance of religious ceremony on December 25 was because it almost certainly was not Jesus’s birthday. (Although the main reason is simply that there is no instruction in the New Testament to celebrate Jesus’s birth, unlike the injunction to mark the first day of the week [the day on which Jesus rose from the dead], and the motto of the early-19th century Restoration Movement, out of which the Church of Christ emerged as a separate group, was, “To speak where the Bible speaks, and to be silent where the Bible is silent.”

Also, I’ve been told since I was a child that Jesus was probably actually born a few years B.C., because King Herod died in 4 B.C. and he was King when Jesus was born and for at least a couple of years afterward, and he was the one who, in the Bible account, ordered all children two and under slain in an attempt to snuff out the incipient threat to his Kingship, which is why Mary and Joseph fled with the infant Jesus into Egypt.

Oh, and while we’re at it, the number of wise men is not given (three comes from the number of gifts mentioned), and they did not show up while Jesus was in the manger, but some indeterminate time afterward, within that two-year period, and found Jesus in a house, not a stable.

That’s not to say we didn’t occasionally, in church, give a nod to the world’s fascination with December 25 as the birth of Jesus. We excused ourselves by noting that at least the world was interested in Jesus this time of the year, and anything that drew the world’s attention to Christ was bound to be beneficial.

That said, I distinctly remember one blistering anti-Christmas sermon from a visiting preacher from Nigeria telling us we should have nothing to do with this heathen custom. We listened politely, but I don’t think he convinced anyone.

So, Christmas was never a religious occasion for me, and I guess it still isn’t. But still…

It’s glittery and tawdry and over-the-top, and we all indulge too much, and though families get together they don’t always have a good time together, and lonely people feel lonelier, and blah blah blah: we’ve all read the news stories, year after year, which in their own way are as blisteringly anti-Christmas as that Nigerian preacher’s was all those years ago, though the criticism comes from a different direction and a different source…

…and yet, I love Christmas.

Partly it’s because I have a child of my own, and she loves it for the same reasons all children love Christmas. Partly it’s because, as my wife will affirm, I perhaps have not completely grown up (hey, I make up stories for a living—what do you expect?) and thus retain a bit of my own childlike enjoyment of the season. But partly, I think, it’s that there’s something at the heart of Christmas, the story of the Creator who becomes one of his own creation in order to save them, that resonates with many of us.

And it should especially resonate with writers. God is sometimes called the Author of Creation. He’s the only author who ever actually became one of his characters: and out of all the characters he could have chosen, he chose a character born in humble circumstances who was tortured to death while still a young man.

Religious or not, you have to admire that kind of dedication in an author!

 

 

From the vaults: Opening of Land Surveying in Saskatchewan

Commissioned by the Saskatchewan Land Surveyors Association, Land Surveying in Saskatchewan: Laying the Groundwork for Property Rights and Development talks about the work of surveyors past, present and future in the province. And here’s a good long chunk of Chapter 1, which (you should pardon the expression) lays the groundwork for the rest of the book:

Land Surveying in Saskatchewan: Laying the Groundwork for Property Rights and Development

By Edward Willett

Nobody knows who the first surveyor was; he’s lost in the mists of time. That’s not too surprising, considering surveying dates back to the beginning of recorded history, some five millennia ago (which is why it’s often called “the world’s second-oldest profession.”) Hunter-gatherers had no concept of owning land, but once hunting and gathering gave way to farming, the fact that the amount of fertile land was limited meant that people needed some way of identifying and marking boundaries between different plots of land.

The ancient Egyptians in particular needed the skills of the surveyor, because all of their agricultural land was located along the Nile River. It was very fertile land because the river inundated it every year, but that annual flood also meant that property boundaries had to be relocated year after year (in part for that most modern of reasons: to determine who owed how much tax). The results of the survey were recorded on the walls of tombs of prominent land owners.

The Greeks and Romans developed land record systems further, a few centuries later. The Romans’ record of units of land for taxation purposes was called a “capitastrum.” From that word and concept we get the word “cadastre,” which can be defined as any system for collecting and utilizing information about “real property”—land, and anything immoveable (such as large buildings) attached to it. (The latter are known as “fixtures.”) Over the centuries, cadastre became the primary method of defining and protecting rights to land, whether the rights of the state or the rights of individuals.

The Romans were also the first to treat land surveying as a profession, and it was a profession they made good use of, as their spectacular cities, roads and aqueducts make clear.

A firm foundation

The work of land surveyors provides the foundation of the property rights system, analogous to the foundation of a building. If a building’s foundation is poorly constructed and/or poorly maintained, the upper structure will eventually deteriorate and collapse. Similarly, without a proper foundation laid by professional land surveyors, the property rights system would deteriorate and collapse.

Central to that foundation is the establishment of well-defined boundaries to titled lands, the concrete reality described by the title document. Although natural boundaries can be used to define lands, river banks and lakeshores can change over time. As well, not all lands for which a title is desired can be described by natural boundaries.

As a result, land surveyors’ primary function—their raison d’être—is to define artificial boundaries through survey techniques and monuments, providing a solid foundation for a property rights system that has complete confidence of both the general public and the government and allows for the peaceful occupation of parcels of land.

Surveyors in the vanguard

As Europeans began settling in North America, surveyors were in the vanguard, helping lay out new towns and farms. The earliest settlements naturally tended to occupy blocks of land about six miles square, with public buildings (a school, a church, a meeting house) at its center and farms around that. Within a block that size, you can walk between any two locations in an hour or perhaps a bit more. Many of the early grants of land to individuals or groups by the British Crown were also about this size.

After the American Revolution, the Continental Congress needed a method of allocating lands in the western part of the new country (today’s state of Ohio). The Congress adopted a plan that divided the land into townships, each six miles square and consisting of 36 sections. Each section was further divided into individual holdings of 160 acres each. The American Plan, as it came to be known, also called for the land to be surveyed in a grid pattern—and not just agricultural land, but all land. Swamp, mountain, marsh—all of it was to be subdivided and its disposition recorded and tracked in the Land Titles Office.

At the time of Confederation, several different systems of land sub-division were in use in Canada. Starting in the early 1600s, a system of river lots, like that used in France, had developed in Quebec. These were narrow strips of land fronting on navigable streams, the highways of the day. Once the river lots were filled, a second range of lots back from the river was filled, then a third, and so on. In turn these tiers of lots were formed into irregularly-shaped parishes.

Ontario’s first method of subdivision was similar, but later townships ranging from six to ten miles on a side were developed.

When the fledgling Dominion of Canada purchased the Hudson Bay’s Company’s interest in Rupert’s Land, which then became the North-West Territories, one of the first things it did was send Lt. Col. J.S. Dennis to Fort Garry “for the purpose of selecting the most suitable localities for the survey of Townships for immediate settlement.” Dennis was also ordered to come up with a recommendation for the best way to survey the enormous new lands coming under Canada’s control, so they could be allocated in good order to the settlers Canada wanted to quickly flood the region in order to cement the federal government’s control and fulfill Prime Minister John A. McDonald’s vision of a country stretching from coast to coast.

Unfortunately, the new government rather bungled the task of dealing with the people already living in the region. The arrival of Dennis and his surveyors added fuel to the growing suspicion of the First Nations and Métis that their existing rights to the lands in question were about to be extinguished. That concern was one of the sparks that would ignite the rebellions led by Louis Riel.

Dennis’s four-point plan

Dennis was well aware of the hostility his presence had evoked, but he still had a job to do. On August 28, 1869, he mailed William McDougall, the minister of public works, a four-point plan for surveying the North-West Territories:

1. The system to be rectangular; all townships to be east and west or north and south.

2. The townships to number northerly from the 49th parallel of latitude and the ranges of townships to number east and west from a given meridian, this meridian to be drawn from the 49th parallel to a point say ten miles west of Pembina, and to be called the Winnipeg Meridian.

3. The townships to consist of 64 squares of 800 acres each, and to contain in addition 40 acres, or five percent in area in each section, as an allowance for public highways.

4. The townships on the Red and Assiniboine Rivers where the same had ranges of farm lots laid out by the Hudson Bay Company, to be surveyed, the broken sections abutting against the rear limits of such range, so as to leave the same intact as independent grants.

Dennis’s plan obviously borrowed heavily from the American Plan, with a couple of notable exceptions, most importantly the size of the lots: Dennis recommended 800-acre sections broken into 200-acre lots, rather than the 640-acre sections broken into 160-acre lots of the American plan. (McDougall had urged him to do so, noting that “the first emigrants, and the most desirable, will probably go [West]rom Canada [today’s Ontario and Quebec] and it will, therefore be advisable to offer them lots of a size to which they have been accustomed”); in other words, settlers from Ontario might be disappointed if they discovered their new land in the west came in smaller chunks than the lots in the east.

The federal government approved the plan, but although 200 miles of control lines and township lines were surveyed in Manitoba in 1869, surveying stopped as unrest grew and then blossomed into the Red River Rebellion. (Despite the fourth point of Dennis’s plan, which seemed aimed at alleviating the concerns among the Métis and First Nations that the land they were already farming would be taken away from them, one of the first acts of rebellion involved Métis standing on Col. Webb’s surveyors’ chains so surveying could not proceed.)

After the rebellion, the government reconsidered the original plan and decided to use the American system of 160-acre homesteads after all. One reason: under Dennis’s system, the 5,250,000 acres available to grant in Manitoba would have produced 25,000 homesteads. Under the American system, there would be 32,800. More homesteads meant, potentially, more settlers.

Dennis’s intention to set aside five percent of each township for road allowances was also altered; instead, all township and section lines were to have road allowances 1.5 chains (99 feet/30.174m) wide. That differed from the practice further east, where most recent road allowances were one chain (66 feet/20.117m)

On May 1, 1871, the Surveyor General signed the “Manual Showing the System of Survey Adopted for the Public Lands of Canada,” which explained the Dominion Lands Survey System to what were then known as deputy surveyors. (With the passage of the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, land surveyors were appointed as “Surveyors of Dominion Lands”—Dominion Land Surveyors. The very first one was a Mr. William Crawford; the last one was appointed in 1878. Today federal land surveyors are known as Canada Land Surveyors.)

Early in July of 1871, 13 survey parties, organized by Lindsay A. Russell, first assistant to the Surveyor General, began work in Manitoba, six in settled areas and seven in areas not yet touched.

Numbering the townships

As Dennis had recommended, the 49th parallel—the border between the United States and Canada—was chosen as the base for numbering townships. Additional township lines were surveyed parallel to it at intervals going north. Thus, Township 1 is the first six-mile square north of the boundary, Township 2 the second, and so on.

East-west numbering is based on meridians. The First Meridian is at 97º27’28.4” (97 degrees, 27 minutes, 28.4 seconds) west longitude. It may seem like a rather arbitrary choice—why not choose, say, 97º even?—but it in fact there was a good reason for it: Pembina, North Dakota (referred to in Dennis’s original recommendations) was the end of the telegraph line from Chicago. To determine longitude, you have to have accurate time, and the telegraph allowed surveyors to obtain accurate time from Chicago.

Townships and ranges

In general usage, townships refer to the six-mile blocks of land that are further divided into sections and quarter-sections. However, township (abbreviated tp) also refers to the entire six-mile-wide strip of land that runs east-west between township lines. The six-mile-wide strips of land that run north-south between consecutive range lines are called, not surprisingly, ranges. By cross-referencing township and range numbers, you can find any particular 36-square-mile township. Township 3-8-3, for instance, would be the third township north of the border and the eighth township to the west of the Third Meridian.

The Second and Third Meridians, both located in Saskatchewan, are at the more straightforward 102º W. and 106º W., respectively. The Fourth, the Alberta-Saskatchewan Border, is at 110º W. (well, very slightly east of that, actually, due an error in the assumed longitude of the First Meridian and other accumulated errors along the way).

As a glance at a globe makes clear, meridians converge as they approach the North Pole. In practical terms, this means that simply establishing lines that run due north and due south as the eastern and western borders of a township will result in townships shrinking as you move north. (For example, Township 17-19-2, the 17th township north of the border and the 19th west of the Second Meridian, which includes the city of Regina, is theoretically 95 feet narrower at the north end than at the south.)

To deal with this unavoidable consequence of the Earth being a sphere, “correction lines” were introduced every 24 miles—every four townships—that allowed the townships to remain approximately the same size: they simply jog west so that a township immediately north of a correction line does not line up directly with the one underneath it. The jogs are small close to a meridian; they increase in size as you move west. The first jog west of a meridian is about 225 feet, and if everything had been laid out perfectly on a smooth globe, they’d increase by that same amount for every township you move further west.

The incredible shrinking townships

The correcting jogs to the west, though they keep townships from shrinking as you move further north, have the opposite effect for a few townships right along the eastern edge of each meridian west of the First Meridian.

In that range of townships, the further north you go, the closer the first range line east of the meridian gets to the meridian itself. Eventually, the two converge, and that’s the end of the townships in that range.

For example, Range 30 west of the second meridian shrinks to nothing just north of Old Wives Lake.

In practice, however, the surveyors made small errors along the way that accumulated, and correction lines were used not only to keep townships from shrinking to nothing as you moved further north but also to correct those accumulated errors.

Sources of error

Of course the early surveyors did everything they could to survey the land as accurately as possible, but the land—and the equipment of the time—didn’t always cooperate.

The main unit of measurement for surveyors was a Gunter’s chain: a length of chain 100 links long. Each link of the chain was about 2/3 of a foot, so the chain itself was 66 feet long. Ten chains gave you a furlong and 80 chains a mile. An area of one chain by one furlong—that is, 10 square chains—equaled one furlong.

Over time the links of the chain would wear and the chain itself would stretch. To periodically check the accuracy of the chain, surveyors were provided with a wooden yard stick. They’d measure out 22 yards, then compare the length of their chain to that measurement. If their particular chain was a little bit too long or a little bit too short, they’d include that variation in their measurements. But over vast distances, even small errors can add up: a mistake of just 1/100th of a foot in laying out the 22 yards would result in an error of 8.8 feet every half-mile.

Heat causes metal to expand and cold causes it to contract, which meant chains could vary slightly in length due to temperature. And, of course, it’s a lot easier to measure a distance accurately on flat ground than on uneven ground; among other things, the way a suspended chain sagged had to be considered, as well as its slope. As a result, very few quarter sections are the exact 2,640 feet on a side they are theoretically supposed to be.

Another source of error was simply the fact that the surveyors were under immense pressure to survey the North-West Territories as quickly as possible. In 1883, the survey’s biggest year, 1,221 townships were subdivided and 1,380 outlined.

Organizing the survey

The first task in surveying the North-West Territories fell to the Block Surveyor, who surveyed the principal meridians and the baselines that together formed the outlines of blocks. Block Surveyors had to work to a very high level of accuracy, which made their work expensive, so although at first each block contained four townships, it was later increased to 16 townships.

Once the Block Surveyor had established the outline of each block, a Township Outline Surveyor subdivided the block into townships, surveying lines running both north-south and east-west at six-mile intervals, creating a grid whose squares each contained 36 square miles.

After that, a Subdividing (or “Contract”) Surveyor would lay off the township into 36 640-acre sections, and further divide each section in quarter sections.

The Block Surveyors established their meridians and range lines using astronomy. A skilled surveyor of the time could, by a series of star observations, locate his position on the earth’s surface within 150 feet north and south and 200 feet east and west.

How parcels of land are identified; or, your farm is where ?

The sections were numbered 1 to 36, beginning in the southeast corner and continuing east to west (1 to 6), then, in the next row north, west to east (7 to 12), then east to west (13 to 18) and so on. The four quarter-sections of 160 acres each are identified by compass direction (NW, NE, SW or SE). Each quarter section may also be broken down into “legal subdivisions” (16 in all, each of 40 acres, and numbered in a pattern like sections) and legal subdivisions may also on occasion be further subdivided into 10-acre quarters, again identified by compass direction. So, a particular 10-acre patch of ground could be identified as, say, the north-west quarter of legal subdivision 9 of section 15 in tp 6 range 20 west of the second meridian: NW of L.S.D. 9-15-6-20-W2. Since a quarter-section was the size of most initial homesteads, more commonly quarter-sections are likely to be identified: NE15-6-20-W2 would be the northeast quarter-section of section 15, tp 6, range 20 west of the second meridian.

All of this sounds rather cold and clinical when described in purely technical terms. In reality, surveyors were attempting to do their work in country without roads or towns, transporting their equipment on horseback or in Red River carts. They struggled with blizzards and snowdrifts, intense heat, weeks of rain, clouds of mosquitoes, mud and marshes. Many were away from family and friends for months or even years; any opportunity to travel home was a major and joyful event.

Russell reported that in that first season of 1871, “The surveys during the season were much delayed, owing to extensive fires and the resulting smoke…Two of the parties, that of Mr. Wagner, and Mr. F.H. Lynch-Staunton, were completely burned out, losing all their provisions, tents, equipage, clothing, some of their instruments and barely escaping with their lives.” Even those who weren’t caught in fires struggled in their aftermath, trying to keep their pack animals fed: “Very few patches of grass remained, they were often obliged to carry feed long distances.”

A long list of duties

Despite difficult conditions, the surveyors had a long list of duties they were expected to perform, beginning with their primary task of marking corners with monuments, in the manner specified by The Manual of Survey.

Originally, wooden posts about four feet long were used for section corners. (In forest, if a tree happened to be located at just the right place, it could be squared and marked on all four sides to take the place of the post.) The tops were shaped to a three-inch-square cross-section and each side was marked in Roman numerals with the appropriate township and section numbers. From 1871 to 1915 township corners were marked by iron posts five feet long. Typically four square pits 12 inches deep were dug, then the stake or post was planted, often in a small mound of dirt, midway between the four pits. (Over the years the methods of marking corners have changed many times; see Chapter 5 for a detailed look at the history of surveyors’ monuments in Saskatchewan.)

When posts couldn’t be used (when the corner was in a lake, for instance), a “witness monument” could be erected, usually a circular trench, possibly mounded in the middle, with a stake at the centre. A sign on the stake and an entry in the field book would specify the bearing and distance of the true corner from the witness monument.

Normally monuments were placed on the south and west limits of the road allowances. Along correction lines and the boundaries of Indian Reserves, however, corners were typically marked on both sides of the road allowance.

Although it has been illegal from the very beginning to destroy survey monuments, many of the original monuments have been lost over the years due to agricultural and development activities. Since the original, undisturbed monument governs the location of the true corner of a piece of land (even if that monument’s location is slightly different from that shown on the survey paln), part of a modern surveyor’s task is often trying to locate evidence that indicates where those monuments were originally placed.

But surveyors were expected to do much more than just place monuments. They were expected to keep extremely detailed field notes which had to be written down on the spot: nothing could be left to memory.

The field notes included the length and exact bearing of every line run, the course and distance from all witness mounds, what kind of monuments were used, where the line intersected with settler’s claims and various natural features, and the extent and height of all “remarkable hills or ridges.”

Surveyors were to note the course, width, depth and current speed of all streams, whether any lakes discovered were fresh or salt, whether the country was level or rolling, what the soil was like and how fitted it was to agriculture. They had to describe the kinds and quality of any timber present and any rapids or waterfalls that could power mills, and report deposits of coal and other minerals (specimens were to accompany their report). They were to make a careful description of, and separate reports on, any improvements made by settlers, including the names of the settlers, the types of improvements, and an estimate of their value.

Everything had to be dated, of course, and at the end of his field notes, the surveyor had to make an affidavit saying that the notes were “correct and true in all their various particulars, to the best of his knowledge and belief.”

Far from “just” marking out the locations of future homesteads, surveyors were providing the government of the expanding nation its first detailed record of just what resources its vast new lands contained.

Go see Tafelmusik’s The Galileo Project…

…if you have the opportunity. We did, last night, and were blown away. The music, the playing, the images, and the text were all fantastic, and pretty much exactly in line with the things that interest me most: science and the arts, mingled together.

Tafelmusik is, of course, one of the world’s premiere period-instrument orchestras. The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres features poetic narration, choreography, and music by Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel.

Here is a sample:

Most moving for me was a final quote from Galileo, taken from his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Although I prefer the translation used in The Galileo Project itself, here is the passage taken from an online edition:

And when I run over the many and marvelous inventions men have discovered in the arts as in letters, and then reflect upon my own knowledge, I count myself little better than miserable. I am so far from being able to promise myself, not indeed the finding out of anything new, but even the learning of what has already been discovered, that I feel stupid and confused, and am goaded by despair. If I look at some excellent statue, I say within my heart: “When will you be able to remove the excess from a block of marble and reveal so lovely a figure hidden therein? When will you know how to mix different colors and spread them over a canvas or a wall and represent all visible objects by their means, like a Michelangelo, a Raphael, or a Titian?” Looking at what men have found out about arranging the musical intervals and forming precepts and rules in order to control them for the wonderful delight of the ear, when shall I be able to cease my amazement? What shall I say of so many and such diverse instruments? With what admiration the reading of excellent poets fills anyone who attentively studies the invention and interpretation of concepts And what shall I say of architecture? What of the art of navigation?

But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to those who are not yet born and will not he born for a thousand or ten thousand years; and with what facility, by the different arrangements of twenty characters upon a page!

You can see why, as a writer, that final passage resonated.

So, let me reiterate. If you have the opportunity, see The Galileo Project. And if you don’t have the opportunity…there’s a DVD version. We bought it. You should, too.

Some writerly (in residence) advice

From last September through May of this year, I served as writer-in-residence at the Regina Public Library, the latest in a long string of writers to serve in that position, which I understand is the longest-running program of its kind in any library in the country.

During my nine months, spending one day a week in my library office, I met with 75 individual writers, many more than once, some several times, critiquing their writing and answering their questions.

And what, you may ask (or you may not, but I’m going to imagine you did so I have a reason to continue this post), was the writing advice I found myself dispensing over and over again during those nine months? And was there anything I didn’t tell them I possibly should have?

I’m glad I imagined you asked that. Let me enumerate, beginning with what I did tell them:

1. Your writing is not perfect. Don’t feel bad, my writing isn’t perfect either. Nobody’s writing is perfect. It can always be improved. Presumably that’s why you came to the writer-in-residence, in the hope of improving your writing.

This may seem obvious, but there were a couple of individuals I met with who seemed quite shocked at the number of flaws I found in my reading of their writing. They thought what they had shown me was essentially ready to be published, and what they were really looking for was confirmation of that belief. When I told them I felt otherwise, and showed them their heavily marked-up manuscript, they were taken aback, and in a couple of cases visibly upset.

It’s an understandable reaction, especially if (as in these instances) you’ve literally worked for years on the piece of writing in question. But it’s something we’ve all had to learn: those hundreds of hours you put into writing your, say, epic fantasy may ultimately result in…nothing. Not even a pile of paper, in these digital days. (Of course, these digital days also mean that, even if no publisher under the sun will give your work the time of day, you can still self-publish it, and you might even find a few readers that way, so there’s that; but more likely it will be as unloved and unread in digital form as it would if you had mimeographed it and were trying to hand-sell it by standing on street corners yelling at passersby.)

Pretty much all of us published writers also have books that we labored over that went nowhere. You know what you do? You write another book. And another one after that. And another after that. Until either one of them does go somewhere, or you get fed up and quit.

As Stephen King (I believe), said, “Anyone who can be discouraged from writing should be.” But those who can’t, who carry on anyway, are the ones most likely to eventually succeed…well, for some definitions of the word “succeed,” but that’s a topic for another post.

2. There are things you can fix. Here are some. Fixing them won’t result in perfection (there is no such thing), but may inch you a little closer to it.

a) Show, don’t tell. I know, it’s a hoary cliché, but it’s also excellent advice. And it covers off a lot of writing flaws. “Sam opened the door and walked into the throne room,” is telling us what happened, “Sam pushed at the massive bronze doors. Slowly they swung open, groaning, as though in despair at having to allow someone so insignificant into the gleaming marble magnificence of the throne room beyond,” is more in the line of showing. It’s the difference between descriptions and action that lie flat on the page and those that leap off the page and beat the reader about the head and shoulders with the flat of a sword. So to speak.

b) While keeping in mind a), don’t show us everything. Choosing which scenes to dramatize, which ones are needed to advance the plot or develop the characters, and which can be sloughed over, is one of your basic tasks as a writer. It’s rarely necessary, for example, to fully dramatize the scene where the characters wakes up, gets out of bed, uses the toilet and brushes his teeth (unless something vital to the plot happens during those mundane actions). It usually suffices to say, “Next morning Sam made his way to the throne room,” and then go on to dramatize what happens in the throne room. Dramatizing scenes that don’t need it slows the story and bores the reader.

The opposite flaw, of failing to dramatize scenes that really need to be dramatized, typically both bores (because those scenes are the ones where the real drama and action of the story are found) and confuses (because he or she may have missed something vital to understanding the tale, his or her eyes having slid right over the non-dramatized-and-therefore-not-obviously important scene) the reader. (Also, as an aside: don’t [as I just did {and probably too often do}] use too many parenthetical statements.)

c) Watch out for the passive voice. “Was” and “were,” etc., have their place, but often you can liven up your text by restructuring sentences to avoid them. Rather than, “The sky was clouding over,” write, “Long gray streamers of cloud slipped silently across the sky, smothering the stars one by one.” I usually do a pass through my manuscripts using the Search function to find all instances of “was” and “were” and other passive verbs, just to see if there are places where I can punch up the language a bit.

As well, often passive voice is a flag that you are, per a), telling, not showing. “Sam was amazed at how big the throne was and how little the King was.” “Sam gaped, amazed, at the gold-plated chair, twice his height and studded with rubies—and at the elfin figure of the King perched like a child upon its vast seat, legs sticking straight out in front of him.”

d) Watch out for adverbs. Yes, it’s another writing-advice cliché, and yes, adverbs do have their uses, but “Sam ran quickly from the throne room” is rarely as interesting as “Sam scuttled for the door like a kitchen cockroach caught in the beam of a flashlight.”

e) Be specific. Don’t tell us something smelled nice, tell us it smelled like a mixture of fresh-baked bread and roasting coffee. It’s really just another variation of show, don’t tell. Specific sensory details add to the effectiveness of scene descriptions. Generic details are the equivalent of badly painted rickety flats on an under-lit stage; specific details are like Hollywood-quality sets from the days when they couldn’t fill in the empty spaces with CGI.

f) Spelling and grammar matter. Nothing will lose you an editor’s attention faster than the revelation (which usually comes on the first page) that you don’t actually know how to punctuate dialogue, how to spell “somnambulist” (and the title of your book is The Somnambulist), or understand the importance of subject-verb agreement or the correct use of apostrophes (hint: it’s not to turn a noun plural). You wouldn’t trust a carpenter who can’t drive a nail; why should you trust a writer who can’t place apostrophes?

3. The only way to get better is to write more. Half a million words is one oft-referenced threshold that one must churn out before one writes at a professional level. I’m sure I wrote more than that before I started getting published. But the thing was, I kept writing. Three novels in high school. Half a dozen more before I sold even a short story. Always writing, always sending out what I had written, always moving on to something else. The number of hours involved and the amount of sitting and typing and postage that entailed is mind-boggling in retrospect. The endless series of rejection letters was disheartening. But I didn’t quit. I wanted to be a writer…and whaddya know, now I is one.

4. But there are no guarantees. You may write your half a million words or more…and never get better. And actually this is one thing I didn’t typically tell the writers who came to me while I was writer-in-residence, because my job was to en- not dis- courage.

I think there is actually a…call it a knack, for want of a better word…for writing, for being able to put words together in an interesting fashion and tell a tale thereby. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it’s environmental, picked up through the reading of many books as a child. Whatever it is, some people seem to have it, and some don’t; and while perhaps some of those who don’t can learn it, others, sadly and clearly, cannot. They may write their whole lives and never advance beyond a certain level. Their prose remains clumsy, their action scenes lifeless, their characters flat, their plots uninteresting. They may turn out their half a million words only to find that a disinterested reader can tell no difference in quality between what they wrote at the beginning of that monumental undertaking and at the end of it.

That may sound depressing. Heck, it is depressing. But there is one thing about it: those who do not have the knack for writing are rarely those who can be discouraged from it. And there are other reasons to write besides publication. Plenty of people write only for themselves, because they enjoy it, just as plenty of people who paint paintings that will never be hung anywhere but in their own homes, plenty of people collect stamps, plenty of people pick pickled peppers. Writing can be an avocation as well as a vocation (and even, sometimes, a vacation, if you have a full-time job and all you really want to do is write; also an invocation, if you’re of a mystical bent…but I digress).

So forget I said anything about some people not having the knack for writing. I’m sure that doesn’t apply to you. All you need to do is keep beavering away, writing writing writing, striving to make everything you write the best it can be and the thing you write after that even better, and some glorious day you, too, may see your byline on a published work…

And the thrill will last about two minutes, and then you’ll have to get back to writing.

As screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan puts it, “Being a writer is like having homework every day for the rest of your life.”

But at least this assignment is done.

Writing for an audience

My wife and I have had season tickets to the Globe Theatre here in Regina for many years. One of the great things about having season tickets is that you go to shows you might otherwise not have chosen to attend, because you’ve committed yourself to taking in whatever the artistic director decides to present.

Of course, that means that sometimes you sit through plays you’d probably just as soon have skipped, and that happened to us a few years ago. While we were still in the what-were-they-thinking why-did-they-produce-that that-was-awful stage of grumbling, we heard an interview with the playwright who said that she gave no thought to the audience when she was writing a play; nor did she feel she owed the audience anything. Which, based on our experience, we thought certainly showed.

That authorial arrogance annoyed me. Giving no thought to the audience? Owing them nothing? And you’re a playwright?

In the theatre most of all, it seems to me, you have to write with an audience in mind, because there is nothing sadder or more pathetic than a play without an audience. (Trust me, I’ve performed in them.) It doesn’t mean you as the writer have to pander to the audience and go for cheap laughs (although even a cheap laugh is better than no laughs at all, if you’ve purportedly written a comedy), but you should at least be thinking of how your characters, performed by actors, will be perceived by those watching them, out there in the dark away from the lighted stage; you should be thinking of how you can provoke (to tears, laughter or even disgust) those watchers; you should be thinking of how you can reward those watchers for parting with their money and time to watch your words being brought to life, so that they leave thinking their investment was worthwhile.

In the theatre, the audience is literally in your face; as a novelist, your audience is more amorphous, since you can’t be sure who is buying your books (although the urge may be strong to camp out at the bookstore near your book, spy on those who buy it, follow them home, take note of their address, and knock on their door a few days later and ask them what they thought of it, trust me, fight that urge), but you still have general sense of who you’re writing for. A writer of hard science fiction makes certain assumptions about the ability of his or her audience to follow technical explanations; a writer of romance assumes he or she is writing for people who like characters who eventually fall in love, etc. It’s fun to play with audience expectations, to push the envelope of a particular genre or mash it up with another, but even then, you’re writing with an audience in mind: readers who like that kind of envelope-pushing.

If you write young adult novels, you are theoretically writing for teenagers (although stats indicate that about half the readers of YA are adults, which I figure reflects the fact that everyone and his dog and probably also his cat seems to want to write YA these days; most of those adult YA readers are probably actually wannabe writers), and that can influence your word choice, sentence structure, subject matter and, of course and most obviously, the age of your characters.

Some writers, like the playwright I mentioned above, continue to insist that they write just for themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; diarists have been doing it for centuries. So, sure, feel free to write just for yourself. But don’t be surprised if that translates into being the only one who reads it, as well.

Seems to me, though, that there’s little point in writing unless someone else reads what you’ve written. Even if your purpose is, in your mind, far grander than mere entertainment—heck, especially if your purpose is grander than mere entertainment, for you cannot Change the World unless You Have Readers—you need an audience. You need readers.

And that means, while you’re writing, keeping an eye on the imaginary audience tucked away in the darkened seats of the theatre of your mind, taking note of when they laugh, when they cry, and when they throw up their hands in disgust in reaction to what you are putting before them.

Just hope they don’t spill their popcorn, though. That stuff is murder to get out of your brain.

Every book’s a stage, and all I really want to do is direct

Regular readers of this blog (if such people exist) will know that I act as well as write, and have done since I was 11 years old and in Grade 7 at Weyburn Junior High School, when I was cast in the lead role of Petruchio in a one-act adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

Perhaps it was because I got to carry a (plastic) sword, and even draw and wave it around at one point, but I was hooked. (No, it wasn’t because I got kissed by a girl, which was not as high on my list of things I wanted to happen at that point as it was a remarkably few number of years later, and it definitely wasn’t because I looked good in tights.)

I continued to act through high school, and also got a taste for musical theatre, playing Bumble in an abbreviated version of Oliver! to kick off that side of my performing life, and since I’ve performed in more plays, musicals, operas (and even one ballet—that’s me as the mother in La fille mal gardée in the photo, which I occasionally threaten to use as an author photo should I ever use a feminine pseudonym) than I can easily tally up, as both an amateur and, for a few years now, as a card-carrying member of Canadian Actors’ Equity.

I’ve also directed quite a few plays and musicals…and all of this, I’ve realized, ties in very nicely with being a writer.

At first glance, the two crafts seem very different. Actors perform in public, writers in private. Actors receive their accolades or brickbats almost at once, in the form of laughter, boos, applause or silent disapproval, either during their performance or immediately upon its conclusion; writers must wait months after the conclusion of their performance before it is even presented to the audience in the form of a published book, and then they may very well hear no response at all beyond, if they are lucky, a review here and there and perhaps someone who comes up to speak to them while they are sitting all alone in a back corner of a bookstore with a stack of books waiting to be signed…

Sigh.

Sorry, got really depressed there for a minute. I’m better now.

Despite the obvious differences, however, I find that my acting craft informs my writing craft, and vice versa. Much of that crossover comes in characterization.

Actors start with the words on the page, which provide a skeleton on which they hang the flesh of a living, breathing person. Writers start with a mental image of a living, breathing person, which they then try to capture in words on a page. But ultimately, the actor ends up living the character he or she is creating, using parts of him or herself and other bits garnered from family, acquaintances and, yes, pure imagination, to create a new persona that has never existed before. The writer does the same thing, and I think that writers who are also actors can draw on the actor version of characterization to help them with the writer version of characterization, so that they are able to put themselves more fully into the skin of their imaginary characters, and better bring those characters to life on the page as the actor brings characters to life on the stage; and I also think that actors who are also writers can draw on their writerly imagination to flesh out the unspoken backstory of the character they portray on stage.

There’s another aspect of stage experience I’ve found useful in my writing, and that’s blocking.

That sounds odd, since if you’re “blocked” as a writer, it’s a bad thing, whereas on stage, “blocking” is a good thing, since it means you’ve moved beyond the sitting-around-a-table-reading-and-discussing-the-script to actually getting the show on its feet.

In the theatre, blocking is the term for roughing out the physical locations and movements of actors in a scene. Actors experience it from the inside; directors experience from the outside, because their task is to ensure that the placement of actors and their movements serve the story and, above all, make it clear to the audience what is going on in a particular scene.

I’ve done a lot of work with beginning writers over the years, and one common problem I see in  their work is a failure to keep a clear mental image, in either their heads or their readers’, of where characters are in a particular scene. For example, a character may be looking into the flames of a fireplace while musing about some horrible occurrence, and then, a few lines later, is staring out the window…but the transition is missing, so that the staring out of the window comes as a shock to the reader, who still has the mental image of the character staring into the fireplace. As far as the reader is concerned, the character just teleported from one place to the other without ever crossing the intervening space.

The effect can be even more pronounced, and more disconcerting, in action scenes, where characters can sometimes seem to be flickering in and out all over a battlefield, for instance, without having followed any clear path for any clear reason.

I think I generally avoid that pitfall in my own writing—I’ve been told I write particularly good action scenes (he said modestly)—and I’ve often thought that my acting and directing experience is one reason for that. You could say there’s a little stage in my head (a theatre in the round, not one with a proscenium: that would be weird) on which my characters move, and I am always aware of where they are on it, with whom they are interacting, and the necessity to move them from point A to point B in a fashion that both makes sense for the character and precludes them tripping over the furniture.

I am also aware of what, in the theatre, you would call the audience sightlines. Can the audience see what it’s supposed to see as the characters move around the stage of my imaginary world? Just as important, are they precluded from seeing the things I don’t want them to see, the sweaty guys running around backstage moving sets and the actors frantically changing costumes in the wings?

Because whether I’m acting, directing, or writing, what I’m really doing is creating an illusion of real life, not real life itself. Ultimately, both as an actor and as a writer, I’m in service to something greater than myself: a story. If I do my job well, the audience member/reader will accept that illusion. They’ll see my cobbled-together character as a living, breathing, believable person, they’ll accept what happens within each scene of the story as believable and even find it entertaining (funny, sad, exciting, anything but boring). They will willingly suspend their disbelief at the more fantastical elements of what happens on stage or page because I have successfully directed their attention at what I want them to watch, and presented it clearly, and just as successfully hidden from them that which I don’t want them to see until such time as I want them to see it.

If I may do some violence to the words of Shakespeare (who, having had so much violence done to his work over the centuries, no doubt has long since given up on rolling over in his grave as a waste of post-mortal energy):

Every books’s a stage,

And all the characters in’t merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And the writer at his keys directs their parts…