The Little Skiier Who Could--A Tale Perseverance and Perspiration

Long ago, when mullets were still kind of cool, my friend Rachel and I went through four years of high school gym classes together. Despite having an aversion to the whole experience, I do recall at least being in shape and, for that matter, being in better shape than Rachel.

Oh, how times have changed.

Last Sunday, Rachel and I went cross-country skiing up Cypress Mountain. After getting our tickets, Rachel pushed off on her skis with the confidence and grace of speed skater, regularly stopping to wait for me as I puffed and huffed slowly up the hill behind her.

Along the way, other skiers passed me like Ferraris on the autobahn. Finally, mercifully, we reached the top of the first hill, where I swung back some desperately needed water, and caught my breath.

“Are you okay, dear?” asked a concerned septuagenarian in a jaunty snowsuit.

“I’m fine,” I said. And then to Rachel, “Do I look like I’m about to die or something?”

“Well,” she said, “you do look a bit flushed.”

Knowing this meant I looked like an overripe tomato, I pushed on, and had a great time, until we got to this particularly long and steep hill.

Rachel trekked ahead of me like a penguin returning to the birthing grounds, while I floundered like a flamingo on rollerskates. Eventually, I opted to just incrementally sidestep up the mountain.

About halfway up the hill, this line from one of Frisbee’s books popped in my head. “I think, I think I can, I think I can, I know I can, I know I can.”

And it was true. It took me forever, and I probably looked foolish doing it, but eventually (and not without help from Rachel who traded skiis with me) I got to the top, and then it was mostly downhill from there.

These last couple of weeks, I’ve been despairing about writing. Worried that I’ll never get anything done. That nothing I write will actually add up to anything more than a random collection of scenes and musings. But experiences like this remind me that, as long as I keep at it, and stop measuring myself against all the other writers I know, I will get there…eventually.

Missing—Quotation Marks, Reward if Found

Every year in the spring, coyotes come down from the nearby mountains and cats in my neighborhood begin to disappear.

Recently I’ve noticed that quotations marks in American literature are suffering a similar fate. The situation is getting so bad I’m considering putting up missing posters on telephone poles and at the library.

Miranda July doesn’t use quotation marks. Cormack McCarthy doesn’t use ’em. And Robert Coover didn’t use ’em in his story “White Bread Jesus” in last month’s Harper’s.

I fear soon nobody will use them; that quotation marks (also know as “quotes” or “double quotes”) will go the way of the trema (the two dots used above a vowel to indicate an extra syllable, as in “coöperate”) and the en-dash (once used to indicate equality among words used to form a compound adjective, as in “the Franco–Prussian war”).

I can live without tremas and en-dashes, but I can’t bear the thought of the typographic menagerie lacking quotation marks.

Sure, I get it: a page free of quotation marks is easy on the eye. Without any of those distracting, dimple-like quotes grinning out at you everywhere, the page looks and feels uncluttered.

And I can’t help but admire a writer who is so totally confident in his characters’ voices that, with help only from line breaks, periods, and the occasional speech tag, he feels his readers will be able to easily distinguish dialogue from exposition—even when the dialogue appears mid-paragraph.

But despite these things, I think the stylistic decision not to use quotations marks is risky—particularly if you’re dealing with lazy readers like me. In Coover’s piece (you can read the first paragraph here), it wasn’t until after I’d read a few paragraphs that I was able to understand what was going on in the first paragraph, at which point I had to go back and reread it to really appreciate the story.

While it could be argued that this was a deliberate decision on Coover’s part—the protagonist is having a mental and spiritual breakdown and the style reflects his confusion—it didn’t work for me.

If Coover had just sprinkled his text with a few extra little pieces of punctuation, then the characters immediately would have become more clear and the writing more enjoyable.

William Zinsser, the guru of style, has a lot of great things to say about writing. One of them is, “Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.”

Quotation marks—as easy-to-follow indicators of speech—achieve all of these things. I hate to think they might get devoured.

Your Best Character Might Be An Atheist Who Loves Sarah Palin, Hates Fidel Castro, and Smokes Cuban Cigars

Yesterday a friend and I started a dispute over the response of Westerners to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. I say started a dispute, because I know it’s not over yet. In fact, this could be one of those topics that will haunt our friendship for years to come.

Etiquette dictates that if you want to remain friends with somebody, you should never discuss religion or politics with them. Over the fifteen years Chris and I have been friends, we’ve discussed religion and politics a number of times, and have rarely agreed on anything.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about global warming, the existence of God, or whether Barack Obama will make an effective leader—the likelihood of us having the same feelings (he would prefer the word “thoughts”) on the matter are about 1 in 567,832,486. (Having taken statistics, he would also point out that the likelihood is actually more like 1 in 7, down from about 1 in 10).

Whatever.

The point is, the ability for us to remain friends despite disagreeing on important matters, is one of the things I value the most in our friendship.

(It also helps that he’s not a rabid ideologue who is unwilling to consider other people’s points of view. And that he’s intelligent, thoughtful, loyal, considerate, funny, and a number of other things that make him fun to be around).

What does this have to do with writing?

Everything.

In my opinion, the best fiction does what journalism so often fails to do: it presents the perspective of characters we might normally find disagreeable, even dislikeable, and makes us understand their motivations.

Some of the most iconic characters in literature—Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff, E. Annie Proulx’s Quoyle, or even Batman—are characters who in real life we likely wouldn’t choose to be friends with. And yet, even if they are murderous, psychopathic, cowardly, or wounded, we come to empathize with them.

I don’t want to read—or write—books with characters who are just like me (only way better than I could ever be) because that would get really boring, really fast. For similar reasons, I don’t want all my friends to agree with me on everything all the time, because that too would get boring after a while.

The best fiction makes us stretch: often, so do the best friendships.

New Year’s Resolution: Be Less Ambitious

In my first post I talked about how I had a list of twelve things I wanted to accomplish in 2008, and how by April it was becoming clear that most of them just weren’t going to happen, and how by September they just seemed laughable. As in, “Ha, ha, ha, I thought I’d achieve that? Ha, ha, ha…that’s rich.”

So this year, I’ve decided to be less ambitious. I have a list resolutions but I’ve decided to aim lower. So instead of the mighty 2008 goal of “Finish first draft of novel by March” (which nine months later I still haven’t done), I’m lowering the bar I set for myself. Significantly.

My writing goal for this year? Write three-sentences a day.

That’s it.

It’s actually something I’ve been doing almost every day since September. And it works really well for me, because if three-sentences is all I manage on a given day I don’t beat myself up too badly over it—the way I most certainly would if I set myself a loftier daily goal of, say, three pages a day, and then only wrote a paragraph.

When you’re trying to work and parent and still have a life, three sentences a day is manageable.

And one of the great things about sentences is that they’re cumulative. Even if you only ever wrote three sentences a day, they would still slowly add up, forming paragraphs and scenes and short stories and, before you knew it, a short-story collection or a novel.

But the best thing about the three-sentences-a-day rule is that sitting down to write three sentences tends to lead to writing more than just three sentences a day. Like this blog posting: I’ve accomplished five days of writing in fifteen minutes…and suddenly I feel like a successful overachiever.

You should try it.

Short, sweet and pickled

So about a month ago, my friend Michael Onesi turned me on to this website he regular contributes to called The Four Word Film Review where people review films in four words or less. It seems like a daunting task: how do you sum up a movie in so few words? Very wittily, it turns out. Some of my favourites:

The Fantastic Four—“Four? Yes. Fantastic? No.”

The Blair Witch Project—“Tense. Intense. In tents”

Iron Man—“Downey surprisingly well cast.”

XXX—"Why? why? why?"

Jurrassic Park—“Experiment with dino sours.”

Michael also turned me on to Smith Magazine home of the "Six-Word Memoir" where people post their six-words-or-less autobiographies. If you ever need a source for story ideas, this is fertile ground. Recent submissions include:

"Foster Parent. I now know heartbreak."

"Mum's wig is my biggest secret."

"I am undiagnosed, unnoticed and unhappy."

"You can't be gay in Tennessee."

The six-word memoirs have been so popular, they were published in a book called Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure which became a New York Times Bestseller. Not surprisingly, it's being followed up by other six-word books, including one on love and heartbreak, and one written by teens.

I've been pondering how I would sum up my life in six words or less. I have some ideas, but am still letting them percolate. In the meantime, while browsing the site yesterday, I noticed they had a 100-word contest for Pregnancy Stories. A whole 100 words! It was irresistible. So even though the contest closed in August 2008, and I won't be eligible for the contest prize—a yummy-looking jar of pickles—I decided to post a pregnancy story anyway. Those of you who are interested can read it here:

Pregnancy Stories Contest at SMITH Magazine http://www.smithmag.net/pregnancy-contest/story.php?did=44824

A Christmas Letter

The other night “Frisbee”, my three-year-old son, woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, coughing and gasping for breath, his whole being seized with the struggle to draw air, his fingers clawing at his throat. Eyes wide, he stared at me in panic, and between coughs rasped “I want…I want…” but he wasn’t able to finish his sentence.

A few minutes later he was back asleep, his ribs sticking out with every wheezy breath, but no longer looking like he was going to imminently die of asphyxiation. I called the nurse’s line and was told to take him to emergency.

Unfortunately, we were in the middle of a rare West Coast snowstorm: snow wasn’t just falling gently from the sky, it was dumping like feathers from a giant, ripped cushion. It was snowing so hard a radio announcer dubbed it “snow-ma-geddon.”

As luck would have it, Craig—Frisbee’s dad—was out at a Christmas party in the only vehicle with snow tires. So I called 9-1-1 for an ambulance. When Frisbee woke up again, there were three large firemen looming over him, taking his vitals and strapping him onto an oxygen tank. Then the paramedics arrived. Frisbee, who might just be the most trusting kid on the planet, took all of this in stride, talking excitedly about his toy cars, and requesting we grab his favourite book to read at the hospital.

Still hooked up to an oxygen tank, he was carried out in the falling snow and strapped to a stretcher in the ambulance. We then crawled to the hospital on a silent and empty highway.

By the time we got to the hospital, Frisbee was doing great. The cool air and the oxygen had worked magic: he was sitting up on the bed, flirting with a nurse, and showing off his teddy bear’s craziest dance moves.

Turns out, he was suffering from croup (a Victorian-sounding malady which I had previously thought of as being relatively harmless ailment, permanently associated as it is in my mind with a scene from Anne of Green Gables).

Anyway, long story short: Frisbee got examined, dosed with steroids, I learned all about the health benefits of the steamy bathroom, and we were discharged. After a long wait, we got a taxi, but two kilometers from our house, at 3:30 a.m., the cabby refused to drive any further. His shift ended at 4 a.m. and didn’t want to risk getting it stuck in the snow. Whether he was heartless, gutless, or just greedy and hoping I’d offer him a really big tip, I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter, because luckily at that moment a big SUV drove up, looking like nothing so much as a giant, black angel-mobile floating amid clouds of snow. I flagged it down, and we hitched a ride home.

The next morning, I was reliving the night’s activities with his dad. At one point, I asked Frisbee, “What was your favourite part? Was it the ambulance ride?” He shook his head, “No, it was coming home.”


The last year has kind of been like that night, only much longer. Sometimes I think we need a bit of adversity to really realize and appreciate what is important to us. At the start of the year, I wrote down a list of about twelve things I wanted to accomplish this year and tacked it onto my office door. It had the usual kind of New Year’s resolution stuff on it: “pay off credit card,” “learn to cliff climb,” “hike the Lions," "learn to blog"—that kind of stuff. A few of the more nebulous items on my list I think I did achieve (like “use less plastic” and “drive less”), but most of the items remain for 2009, and the years to come.

The fact is, by April the list had become totally irrelevant. Due to a family emergency, I had unexpectedly become a foster mother to a (then) two-month-old baby who Frisbee lovingly named “Coconut.” And for a few months, up until Coconut’s mom moved in with us and life became a lot easier, I was trying to take care of the baby and Frisbee, and run my editorial business, and keep up with my commitments as a volunteer, while not going totally crazy.

And then summer came. Coconut’s mother moved in and became a cherished friend, I got a part-time retail job selling binoculars to cruise ship passengers, and then, at the end of August, I ended up attending the Maui Writers Conference after one of my clients registered for it and was then unable to attend.

The baby, the retail job, and the conference were kind of like the emergency, the oxygen, and being discharged from the hospital. Coconut made me realize what’s most important to me; the part-time job got me out of the house, paid the bills, and was the least stressful way of earning a living I’ve ever experienced; and being in a room full of writers who all my share my dream of publishing books was like being given a dose of medication and sent home.

I flew back to Vancouver feeling recharged. Two days later, the Ministry of Children and Families called to say Coconut and her mom could go home. A couple of weeks later, the binocular job ended, and I found myself sitting in my office staring at a stack of dust-covered manuscripts and the to-do list I’d tacked on my door nine months before.

Around this time, I decided to “retire” from Black Swan Services. I’ve still got a few editing projects I need to wrap up before Black Swan sings its swan song, but by next summer I plan to no longer be working as an editor, and instead focus more on my own writing.

To this end, I’ve found a part-time job at a university bookstore, a brainless job I’m grateful for, and I’m writing everyday. The writing is going slowly, and painfully, and on bad days I hate everything I type, and wish I was better at math so I could become accountant. But on good days, it feels right. Even though so far the trip is turning out to be a lot harder than I had thought it would be, it feels good to be going home.

So this Christmas letter, while long (thank you for bearing with me) is to celebrate a crazy year which has ended well, and to urge you to think about what’s important to you. Is it the list of what you think you should do? Or is there something else you really want to do? And do you ever stop and appreciate how good it feels just to just be where you are?

Blessings and Happy Holidays to you all,

Nadine