A Novel Journey: Issue 6, February 4, 2012
Contents:
Next issue April 4, 2012: Anniversary issue, Seeking a publisher, Queries
1. Introduction to the Newsletter
Welcome all and thank you for joining me in this literary adventure. I’m hoping the newsletter is an interesting and fun experience for you. Like the novel, it is a work-in-progress and I welcome feedback from you so I can improve it along the way. If you have any problems receiving or reading this email, or have suggestion or questions, please email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Please feel free to pass this newsletter on to others you think may be interested. New subscribers can send me an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to let me know they would like to join. You can also request that your name be taken off the subscription list by sending me an email with ‘Unsubscribe Newsletter’ in the subject line (don't worry, my feelings won't be hurt).
2. Draft 4+
Q. How does a writer know when the manuscript is finished?
A. When someone feels sorry for them and takes it away.
Some days I wish someone would feel sorry for me and take the manuscript away, but I’m not quite there yet. I’m still waiting for feedback from a few technical readers (people I interviewed) on Draft 3. Once I incorporate their comments, I’ll have to go over the manuscript carefully to make sure one change doesn’t affect something elsewhere in the manuscript. For example, based on comments from a psychiatrist, I have changed the type of medication Ruby would be on. Not only do I have to find each mention of the medication throughout the manuscript but also alter the references to side effects, dosages, etc. scattered throughout the text. It’s all a bit like a house of cards; move one card and everything shifts.
Draft 4 is much altered. Most importantly, I’ve gone back to a shifting omniscient third person narration with Jay now one of three narrators. The first person narration I had experimented with helped flesh out certain aspects of the story, but having Jay narrate the entire story created a number of logistical difficulties, such as, how would Jay know what Ruby was thinking and experiencing when she was psychotic? Ruby might have told him sometime in the future but why would she do this and would she remember such detail about a very confusing time? I also had to create a reason for Jay to be telling the story, rather than Ruby herself, or Glen or Sybil or even Sam who were all much closer to the events than Jay. I tried various revisions to see if I could make it work because there was something intimate about Jay’s first person narration and I didn’t want to lose that, but as soon as I changed back to third person, all the awkward issues fell away. Sometimes the manuscript knows what it wants better than the writer. The story has a new character, Matt, a love interest for Ruby; and I have added a lot of detail, so much so that it is the longest manuscript I’ve written yet, now about 85,000 words, no War and Peace, but long for me. And the longer the manuscript the more words to read, edit, weed, and reread so that each new draft can feel a bit more daunting that the last. But I have received a lot of great feedback and ideas from those who have read it and the manuscript is better and more accurate as a result. I am enormously grateful to them all. In fact, I’ve been saved from some embarrassing bloopers and faux pas. I’m hoping that by the time the next newsletter rolls around, I’ll be able to report that I’m ready to start the next phase: looking for a publisher.
3. Ethics and Fiction
The artist's only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies. ~Faulkner, quoted in M. Cowley, Writers at Work, 1958
Plagiarism is the “practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.” (Oxford Dictionaries: http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/plagiarism).
Imagination is a wonderful thing, but it has its limitations. This novel is fiction, but it is based on reality. The story is intended to show readers what a family with a child who has a mental illness will likely experience in a particular place and time. If I were to write the book entirely from my imagination, I would inevitably get it wrong. How do I inhabit the head of a character whose experiences are far removed from my own? The answer to that is research. I interview people, read memoirs and technical books, watch movies and peruse websites-all of which help me place my characters into realistic scenes with realistic dialogue. Which brings me to the ethics issue? What are the ethics of using someone else’s story to formulate your own? This is the first time I have really been confronted with this dilemma. My first three books were rooted in my own personal experience (Decomposing Maggie: losing a child, living on an island; In the Hands of Anubis: growing up on the prairies, being stranded in Egypt, losing and gaining husbands), or from previously documented historical events (Falling From Grace: BC’s war in the woods). I did interview real people for Falling From Grace but these were canopy scientists and the information technical. I tried but failed to find a dwarf to interview. The character Faye was developed through reading, watching movies, and imagination.
For this book, most of my inspiration and ideas have originated from face to face interviews or through reading already published memoirs. The stories I am hearing, by nature of the topic, are very personal with a great deal of emotion attached. Is it okay, as Faulkner says, to be ‘completely ruthless’ about material? Personally, I wouldn’t feel good about ‘robbing my mother’ in order to write my books (my mother is one of my most faithful fans!). People sharing their stories with me, knowing I am using their lives as source material to write a novel, are trusting me to use it in a way that they would not object to. There have been recent literary lawsuits where individuals (e.g., The Help- lawsuit not successful) and other authors (e.g., Gold Mountain Blues – ongoing) have accused writers of stealing their stories or plagiarizing their work.
I make it a practice to give the draft manuscript to anyone I interview to make sure they are okay with what I have done with their stories. Sometimes they are not. They may feel that I have veered too closely to their experiences, or that it brings up too much emotion. If someone objects to a scene or particular details, I discuss their concerns with them. Often this discussion alleviates their objections and if not, I find ways to rewrite the material or remove it completely. In one instance, the material of concern was something I had invented completely and just happened to coincide with an experience the interviewee had not shared with me (including the name of a minor character!). The experiences of people with mental illness and the mental health system are often common. A psychologist who reviewed the manuscript commented that “a lot of people will think you are writing about them.”
Similarly, when I am inspired by something in a published memoir, I write to the author to ask if they mind if I use their idea and fictionalize it. Not only do I ask the author for their okay but assure them that they and their work will be clearly acknowledged as the source of the idea in the Acknowledgement section in the back of the book. In most cases, I have received supportive responses from other authors from ‘I am so glad to get this information out into the world’ to ‘your request not necessary as long as you don’t use the exact same scenario but thanks for the professional courtesy.’ But I did receive an entirely negative response from a writer who said he was very uncomfortable with me using his idea. I understood his explanation, and his feeling of ownership of a very emotional experience. But the scene I had written was one I particularly liked and was completely in keeping with the personality of the character, so I was not keen to remove it completely. I knew I wasn’t doing anything illegal as this author would be clearly indicated as the source of the idea for that particular scene and I wasn’t using his words, characters or situation. I also knew he most certainly was not the only person who had ever had this particular experience. But I had asked and was given an answer I now had to deal with. I have some ideas and will likely talk them over with my future editor/publisher but for now, the jury is out on a solution to this particular dilemma.
5. Did You Know?
…that we can learn a lot from whale poop. Last week I attended a killer whale symposium on Whidbey Island called Way of Whales. One of the featured speakers was Jessica Lundin, a graduate student from the University of Washington’s Centre for Conservation Biology. I already knew about the Centre’s research on whale scat (animal poop) and had included a scene about it in the manuscript (see excerpt), so it was wonderful to hear Jessica speak. In the same way doctors can tell a lot from a sample of human stool (most of us have suffered the humility of gathering one), scientists can tell a great deal from whale scat including the species, the sex, the identity of the individual, their diet and hormone levels and the levels and types of pathogens and toxins they carry in their bodies. All of this information is collected at a distance from the whale making it a non-invasive research technique. As Jessica says, a health panel without having to see the patient. To find out how the researchers collect the scat of whales, read the excerpt below.
Did you know… that a University of Victoria student, Christopher Dodge has written a Master’s thesis on the changes in relationships between siblings when one is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Not surprisingly, he reports that many siblings suffer emotional stress and confusion during the onset of the illness and following the diagnosis often experience fear and guilt and a decrease in attention from their parents who are overwhelmed in their own role as caregivers to an ill person. Many siblings overcompensate by becoming ‘model’ children and may take on a caregiving role in order to alleviate stress for their parents. The excerpt below explores some of these issues. If you are interested in reading the thesis, let me know.
6. An Excerpt
Jay watched from the stern while Glen piloted the zodiac out of Victoria Harbour into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Jay had convinced Glen to catch up on his research while Sybil was on summer break and able to be home with Ruby, whose care preoccupied the time and energy of two adults. Jay worried for their mental if not financial health; they’d both scaled back their paid work to concentrate on their daughter. He was happy to see Sam, who had retreated into a tight shell since his sister had become sick, chatting happily with TJ and Louise, the three on the other side of the boat, scanning for whales.
The marine radio on the dash, tuned in to the frequency monitored by the whale watching companies, reported a sighting of K pod off Race Rocks, the point of entry into the inner waters of the Strait. Bella, dressed for work in her bright yellow canine life jacket, harness and leash sat head up and attentive at the helm beside Glen. Once out past the breakwater, Glen opened up the throttle. Louise moved Bella to her work station in the bow of the boat, a tight hold on the leash. Bella’s ears perked up, her chest filled, eyes focussed ahead. Her task, to detect floating whale scat on the surface of the sea.
Glen held up his hand, five fingers spread. Whales spotted. Ahead, K pod milled around below the cliffs at William Head, a high rocky peninsula east of Race Rocks light. A handful of whale watching and private boats jockeyed below the cliffs, outside the whale watching limit, for a view of the whales, which appeared undisturbed and intent on their feeding. Ahead of the boat, a dorsal fin sliced up from below and through the air like a sabre, followed by the powerful black body, the grey saddle patch and the punch of air from the blowhole. The eye embedded in white swivelled toward them. The sword-shaped slash on her saddle patch identified her as K13 and the pod as the K7 matriline. K13 breathed three times, air misting from her blowhole and, followed by her two daughters, arched her back and dove. Minutes later, they spyhopped together a hundred metres to the south, sun glinting off their white bellies.
Glen waited until the whales started travelling east further into the Strait to move in and follow the pod. He manoeuvred the boat downwind, zigzagging in response to the pod’s direction relative to the wind, to allow the scent from any scat deposited in the water to blow toward the boat and Bella’s trained and sensitive nose. Sam stood ready with the scat scooper, an extendable pole with a custom designed plastic scoop on the end. Bella whined and pulled at the leash, scrabbling on the deck with her toenails. A hit. Louise held her back from leaping overboard. Glen turned the boat into the wind; Bella lost the scent and sat down. He spun the wheel and adjusted the boat’s orientation until the dog resumed her frantic heaving at the leash. Glen swung the boat into the wind again, repeating the pattern, narrowing down their search until Sam cried out and pointed, “There!” Scraps of gauzy pale green whale poop floated on the surface of the sea off the bow of the boat, an amorphous mass of uninteresting slime to anyone with an untrained eye. To the crew the slime was pure gold, allowing a health analysis without having to see the patient. From scat, they could read hormone levels and diet, genetic information, and pathogen and toxin levels, information previously gathered by more invasive techniques. Louise was even developing a pregnancy test which would allow them to determine reproductive success and possibly relate it to toxin levels. Louise rewarded Bella with a liver biscuit and a game of tug of war with a rubber toy. Sam leaned over the gunwale and scooped up the floating scat. “Got it,” he said and held it aloft like a prize-winning fish, a wide grin on his face. TJ emptied the scat into a sample bottle and dictated details of the collection into a digital recorder: weather, coordinates, direction of travel, water depth, boat presence. Louise resettled Bella at her post, Glen resumed course following four hundred metres behind the travelling pod. The crew repeated the process a half dozen times until the sun dipped toward the horizon, then headed back to harbour.
Glen and Sam drove Jay to the ferry, the two men enjoying the excited chatter of the boy. Jay hoped father and son had forgotten about Ruby and her problems for a few brief hours.
“What do you call a scientist who studies poop?” Sam called from the back seat, Bella’s head in his lap.
“Sounds like a joke,” Glen answered. “A scatologist.”
“Ha ha,” Sam said. “Really. What is it?”
“I’m not joking.”
“Cool,” he said. “Okay, here’s one. What do you call a turd who forgets everything?” He could hardly contain himself.
“I don’t know,” Jay answered. “What?”
“A scatterbrain.” Sam announced, bursting into a rolling bout of giggles, so infectious the three of them were soon laughing so hard Glen was forced to pull the car over to the shoulder to recover. Jay watched his two friends rolling in their seats, a release of months of tension.
“Can they tell things about people from poop too?” Sam asked once back on the road.
“Sure, lots of things,” Glen said, wiping the tears from his cheeks.
Sam batted at the dusty mesh bag of worn out rose petals hanging from the coat hook over the side door. “I saw her,” he said in a hushed voice.
Glen’s eyes flitted to view his son in the rear mirror. Jay swivelled around; the expression on Sam’s face had shifted from sun to shadow in an instant. “Saw who?” Glen said slowly.
“Ruby.”
“Oh yeah?” Glen said, with feigned nonchalance. “Where?”
“Down by the grocery store. I was walking to the pool with Bobby. She was dressed weird.” He paused. “Like a hooker.”
Glen grimaced but didn’t respond. Jay held his breath.
“She was acting mental. Waving her arms around, talking to herself.”
Glen exhaled slowly, and when Sam didn’t continue, he asked, “Did you talk to her?”
Sam stared down at his lap, out the window. Of course he hadn’t talked to her, Jay thought. He had ducked down the closest cross street, hoping his friend hadn’t identified the crazy woman as his sister.
“Ruby’s sick. We’re trying to get her better,” Glen said. “And you’ve been a big help…” He caught himself before he could say the words Jay imagined were in his head, by looking after yourself…by staying out of the way. “I know it’s hard for you. Mom and I are pretty distracted.”
When Sam didn’t answer, he went on. “After this study’s done, we could go on a kayaking trip. Out to the Broken Group again. Remember our last trip. It could be as good as that.”
When Sam didn’t respond, Glen filled the silence. “What do you think?”
Sam lifted his bony shoulders. “I dunno.”
Glen didn’t persist; the three of them knew a week away under the present circumstances was impossible. They drove along in silence, no one knowing where to take the conversation, until Sam spoke again.
“Could I get it too?”
The confined space in the car filled with a leaden silence. Glen must have contemplated this terrible question for Jay had asked it himself since Ruby became ill. Could it happen to Sam? How does a parent talk about these unspeakable things? No doubt Glen wished he could tell Sam that Ruby had caught a virus or somehow gone off the rails for no good reason and would return to her old self. But he knew that schizophrenia had a strong genetic element, the onset often in late adolescence. Sybil had explained the risk factors for schizophrenia to Jay in detail when he’d asked. Family history was the strongest indicator with the chance of a sibling being diagnosed with schizophrenia being seven to fourteen percent, a limited risk but a risk nonetheless. Jay watched the passing landscape out the window and waited for Glen’s answer.
“Not a chance,” Glen said, reaching over the seatback to lay his hand on his son’s arm. “Don’t you worry.”
7. Patrons of the Arts
I gratefully acknowledge the following people for their generous support as Patrons of the Arts:
Elizabeth Blake, Noah Eriksson, Peggy Frank, Penny Joy, Leith Leslie, Mira Leslie,
Margaret Prevost and Ingrid Strauss
If you like what you read in the newsletter and are inclined to join the list of Patrons, you can do so by donating, either by cheque (contact me for the address) or by credit card through PayPal by clicking your mouse here.
Happy reading and writing. Ann