What pushed me over the edge to start writing

My Unorthodox Journey to the Published Land: 2

Just to set the scene, my first full time job out of university was as a political staffer on future Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s leadership campaign. A baptism by fire (complete with 1920s style Bell Telephone headset). This photo was taken on the floor of the convention where I was responsible for an entire section of the Ottawa Civic Centre’s capacity crowd. This was back when my hair was thicker and I was thinner. I seemed to have suffered a reversal in fortunes on both fronts in the intervening years. But this was a formative experience that led to a stint working in the crucible of federal politics on the political staff of one of Prime Minister’s John Turner’s cabinet ministers. Heady days for me at 24 years old.

During that period I wrote a couple of short stories, both set in an Ottawa of an earlier age. I wrote these purely recreationally and submitted them nowhere and shared them with no one. In the fall of 1985, I moved back to Toronto to serve as Legislative Assistant to the Honourable Robert Nixon who was Finance Minister in the newly-formed Liberal government in Ontario under Premier David Peterson. Then in January 1988, I embarked on what would become a 34-year career as a public affairs and communications consultant in the agency world.

I think it was in 1989 or 1990 when I took my one and only writing course at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. I believe it was called something like Introduction to the Short Story. It was way back when I thought short stories were easier to write than novels, and so a good place to start. (I’ve long since decided that short stories are in fact much tougher to write, at least for me. Every single word and its placement in every single sentence, paragraph and page must be so carefully and thoughtfully conceived. In many ways, I think a great short story is a more impressive feat than a great novel. One day, perhaps I’ll graduate to short stories. But until then, I’ll stick to the broader canvas novels offer. But I digress.)

I remember very little about the course including who taught it—after all, it was more than 30 years ago. But I do remember the satisfaction of writing, sharing our pieces, and workshopping them in class.

For the course, I wrote two longish and deadly serious short stories, driven by feminist themes. (My earlier time in the student movement awakened a strong feminist streak in me that has only intensified in the years since. My interest in gender equality lurks in the undergrowth of all of my novels, but is front and centre in my fifth, Poles Apart.) I clearly had not yet found my voice as a writer and very likely felt that humour was not appropriate when advancing the feminist cause. I’ve learned since that humour can be a very trenchant instrument of social comment when wielded well. (I’m still working on the “wielded well” part.)

So after that one and only writing course and those two serious, very earnest short stories, utterly devoid of levity, my dreams of writing were back-burnered (if I may coin that verb) in favour of my consulting career at the same time as my wife began her long and lauded career in Ontario’s civil service, which continues to this day. (I married well above my station!) We’d soon have two young sons in the house so the idea of carving out time for writing seemed impossible. In 1995, I co-founded a communications consulting agency, Thornley Fallis, and added that particular stress to my life as the firm grew quickly topping out at around 40 people. (Though the firm carries on, I’ve just retired from it to write full-time.) Back then, writing was far from my mind, yet my love of comic novels persisted as did a vague and distant dream that one day I might even write something myself.

I even got my act together enough to write a funny short story (but with serious undertones about the state of our democracy), called, yes, The Best Laid Plans, for a contest in the Toronto Star.

It captured in about 2,000 words, the story of Angus McLintock, a Scottish-Canadian mechanical engineering professor blessed with more than his fair share of honesty and integrity while not caring one whit what anyone else thinks of him. An interesting combination. With no intention of winning or even campaigning, he agrees to let his name stand as the Liberal candidate in his home riding, the safest Conservative seat in the country, in return for the story’s narrator’s commitment to teach McLintock’s English for Engineers class, a quadrennial nightmare the professor cannot again endure. Oh yes, the incumbent Conservative MP is in fact the most popular Finance Minister in Canadian history. So there’s no chance of a no-name Liberal sacrificial lamb winning the seat, right?

Of course, the short story ends on election night some days after a late-breaking scandal, captured live on television, sinks the once unbeatable Conservative Finance Minister. Our mechanical engineering professor, who had not campaigned at all and wasn’t even in the country until late on election night, finds himself elected. It’s not so much that he won the election, but rather that the popular Conservative incumbent lost it, leaving Angus McLintock, much to his shock and distress, as the accidental Member of Parliament for Cumberland-Prescott.

I submitted the story to the Toronto Star and heard nothing. I was not among the top three winners, or the 15 or so honourable mentions, all of whom had their stories published over the summer months in the Toronto Star. But, still, I liked my story idea even if the execution was found wanting by the judges. So I set a goal for myself of trying to write a novel—not necessarily actually writing one, but at least trying to. As a serial procrastinator with a busy life, it became a perennial New Year’s resolution that went unfulfilled for quite some time.

Finally, the confluence of two seemingly disconnected events pushed me to start writing that first novel, based on that unheralded short story I’d written for that Toronto Star contest.

First, in quick succession, I read two supposedly “hilarious” novels—at least that’s what their cover blurbs promised—with nary a chuckle between them. (I’ll not name the novels here, largely because I can’t actually remember the titles. And I know there are some readers who don’t find my novels funny. Humour is a very personal and subjective thing.)

But I just didn’t find them funny and thought I’d been duped by the endorsements. As I finished the second novel, I remember naively saying to myself—only to myself—I think I could write something funnier than this. Famous last words.

Second, and coinciding with the first, we actually bought a new laptop computer for our home. It was a Fujitsu Lifebook and I loved it. Small and powerful with a great screen and keyboard, it was state of the art for 2005. (I’ve since joined the legions of Apple lovers and write on my MacBook Pro.)

2005 Fujitsu Lifebook.

I know it sounds odd, but I honestly don’t know if I’d have written my first novel if we hadn’t just purchased a new and fancy laptop. But the frustration I felt reading two “funny” novels that weren’t, and the access I suddenly had to a shiny new laptop sitting in our third floor office, was the impetus I needed. In early 2005, I started blowing out my accidental MP short story into what I hoped might one day become a novel.

I’m not kidding. A couple of not-so-funny novels and a new computer finally pushed me over the edge to start writing. I was 45 years old. Strange, but true. No epiphany. No lightning strike. No fateful sign. Just a reader’s frustration and a new laptop. In those pedestrian, everyday events, my life as a writer began.

Incidentally, after taking that one short story course more than 30 years ago at the University of Toronto, I’ve now been teaching in the same Creative Writing program for the last decade. I’m not sure what that says about their teaching standards, but I do enjoy it. I seem to have come full circle.

Next up, figuring out how to write a novel when I’ve only ever read them.