Story Codes: Reflections on a Lifetime Writing Novels

1. Beginnings: Why Storytelling In Fiction Is Not About Telling Your Story

First, a wake for the novel. Then, let’s pretend I don’t really mean that, we’ll forgo the funeral, and circle back to the beginning. Or to beginnings, as they are as essential to a writer’s life as they are to novels.

The wake: I didn’t kill the novel. I doubt that you did, either. Others contributed, though, and I possess a long list of suspects. Those whom in earlier years declared, “we need to tell our country’s stories,” or “our people’s stories,” or, “my story,” or “herstory” were homicidal sorts, everyone. Arts councils and corporate supporters armed them and provided the ammunition. Novelists have never needed to tell anyone’s specific story. (Try telling that to Oprah.) If an individual’s story or a nation’s story is critical, then tell it like it is, as non-fiction. Exercising the imagination through fiction, however, whether reading or storytelling, is a tonic to the mind, and vital, and we do need — if not individually nor collectively, then within a cluster of initiates while remaining accessible to all — to grapple with the essence of life and endeavour to comprehend the universe, and the earth, and we ought to mangle ourselves in chaos and distil our inquiries, because we can, and we do need to extort societal ills and illuminate horror and resuscitate human fatigue and invigorate our strengths, mock our fallacies, both smudge joy and revel in it and laugh and much else, and a most excellent way to do that is through the invention of compelling, imaginative story. All these matters count. Or count for anyone who loves the artform. But to regurgitate someone’s actual story is the least of a novelist’s concerns. It’s too faint an occupation. By definition, the novel is fiction, it’s made-up stuff, so whose “story” is that anyway? Such a claim — that storytelling requires weeding through the detritus of what has already transpired — is what has landed us in this fix, in which less than a couple of centuries of novel-writing has arrived at an abrupt fissure. It’s either leap across the gaping canyon bravely or cannonball into a puddle. The death of the mid-list was the coal mine canary that flopped over, while the dominance of pop genres (I’ve written those, too, it must be said, while striving to infuse them with a certain validity and gravitas, oh yeah) did much to annihilate art by replicating craft. Prizes became assassins, given that everyone but the winner is obliterated, and the eagerness to find false promise and declare false import successfully murdered the book as surely as taking cod liver oil killed taking cod liver oil. Trying to turn the novel into an extension of poetry lit up the heart monitor briefly, before the inevitable flat-line, proving it was no more than a blip, while experiments that resembled modern visual art became their own pandemic. Some like to blame TV, or film, yet any relentless flogging of books is its own lethal enterprise, while academia has cheerfully chipped in with its unwitting yet villainous intent and meagre payout. Let’s not excuse writers themselves for never have so many books been brought to market, like unsuspecting little piggies, month in, month out, creating a cacophony of frantic high-pitched squealing all the way to the slaughterhouse of utter neglect. Too many authors have too little shame. The artform is moribund, people. Long live what went merrily on before. Cheers. Drink up. It’s what we do at a wake.

As we’re skipping the funeral here, let’s not argue too much. I presume that readers will continue to read. And writers shall write. It’s what we do. Writers, young and old, enthused or moribund themselves, will begin, and readers will bend back book covers in either naïve or wary hopefulness, and begin.

Let’s do the same. Begin. By discerning what a beginning is meant to be.

We don’t, of course, begin at the beginning. Aware or unaware of that essential necessity, writers may stare at the blank page and walk across cities and dales in an attempt to get started. Or wait on a street corner like Graham Greene used to do until a 777 license plate passed by, then start in. If a writer lands upon an actual starting point, the novel has already failed. A good book requires motion, its runners need to be circling the track, not be bent over with their butts in the air stock-still in the starting blocks. Tip: forego the starting blocks.

For instance, if a book begins with the character waking up in the morning (intentionally subversive, I wrote one of those: let’s pretend it’s an exception that does not prove the rule), with dust motes visible in the sunlight breaking through the curtains across the windowpane, the chances are very high that the writer hasn’t woken up yet. Nor the book.

Instead, consider a river in its flow. A child tosses in a stick. Then chases it by racing along the riverbank as the stick bobs in the current and ducks over rocks and swirls in eddies and casts off for adventures unknown. The stick is the tale. The writer is the rapt child who has foolishly lost a good stick.

Losing your stick is a requirement. (If it’s snared by shoreline rocks or muck, the child must toss it further out to try again.) That is to say, any precognition of what the novel will be is the writer’s foe. Preconceptions are essentially misconceptions that ought to be dismissed with incredibly callous disregard. If not, the writer is tied to a safety net which renders the work impotent. The writer has failed to begin. The writer has failed to permit the story to already be in progress without him or her, like the flow of the river, and instead endeavours to dam the waters as if he or she is in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A novel is not engineered. What has gone before ought to be unknown to the writer, and the writer must then acknowledge that all persons and events were preceded by the incidental event or encounter that occurs on page one. Writers must not merely accept their ignorance of what has gone before but be super-hyped to discover the unknown, which should not happen right away under any circumstances. No information-giving allowed. That’s restricted to non-fiction writers. Next, novelists must accept a subsequent dare as the second risk to be undertaken: the writer cannot know where anything is going.

I’ll wrestle with exceptions later. That can be another essay.

Why is this so critical? The answer to that is profoundly basic. Does any person know what tomorrow will bring anywhere around the globe? The occasional psychic, perhaps, who is bereft of believers and so must cosset the knowledge in secret anyway — but the answer to the question is no. Now, pass any stranger on a street. Does that grant you full knowledge of the stranger’s life? Suppositions based on dress or on attitude are useful, but not reliable or thorough. Now, imagine being the novelist in our scenario. To suggest that the writer knows what has gone before and knows what will transpire and who these strangers are is to present oneself as a colossal fake. As someone divorced from life as we know it. Rather than be fraudulent, the writer must accept that what has gone before remains to arise, to be surmised or unearthed, and what is yet to come remains to be experienced, and who the characters are will be revealed to large extent by none other than the characters themselves, not by the know-nothing writer who pretends to know it all, and if all that occurs we just might have the ingredients for a novel. At the very least, a start.

Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash

Here’s another quagmire. We don’t even know ourselves as well as we might, nor do we see ourselves as others see us. So how dare the novelist pretend to utterly know a character? The unknown must always percolate. To writers: You are not God, and if you think you are — or even if I’m mistaken and you are God — nobody wants to hear from you.

A few caveats are worth inserting at this juncture. What I’ve stated is not a mere assault on “write what you know,” for writers are justified in using what they know to create the illusion of veracity; this is, however, an assault on whatever impedes the novel from being fully realized, and that realization is beyond the writer’s ken at the outset. The writer may be permitted a notion, an impression, a hope, but that’s it. For the writer to restrict the novel to what is known or what he or she declares the book to be is to abort the foetus, or to nullify conception altogether.

Good writers don’t talk about their work-in-progress because they don’t know what there is to talk about, since it hasn’t been created yet. Poor writers gab about their projects endlessly, or map them out, then never write them or fail to write them well.

Neither is this a siren song to “seat of the pants” writing, which is another form of claptrap. When I was a heavy-equipment operator, that was a seat of the pants occupation. The novelist, if he or she is any good, knows that the outlay of antennae and experience and fortitude and time spent, of intuitive gifts and crafty triggers, of flukes and accidents, influences and overt theft, are far too complex and beguiling for a summation such as “seat of the pants.” Furthermore — allow me to step off a ledge here — a theory raises the possibility, even the likelihood, that consciousness arrives via quantum waves that zip through our heads and light up microtubules in the brain. If true, we catch waves of thought from across the universe, and what artist would want to deny him- or herself access to that connection? If it’s not true, that won’t be determined in any of our lifetimes, so what artist would want to deny him- or herself even the possibility of access to that connection? Why heckle your finicky muse or depend wholly upon your miserly intellect when you could be unseated by quantum waves from across the great divide? What may never happen can still be anticipated or at least entertained as a possibility. “Seat of the pants,” is for dummies. That could be a book. Quantum waves reminds us to get serious. That could become books if one is patient with the art.

To float freely, like a stick in a stream (or a lit microtubule catching a quantum wave), is what a novel must be permitted to do. To release oneself to child-like abandon chasing that stick as it embarks upon an unknown journey is what the writer must be willing to do, while trusting the stream to apply the necessary discipline. The forces at play (the river, or quantum waves) are beyond the writer’s power to control. Few will dare to take this on properly. Many will settle for what feels a whole lot safer which will inevitably lead to nothing more than what is a whole lot safer.

Photo by Aleksander Naug on Unsplash

About me. My eighteenth novel is pending. I’ve had plays performed and a film from my work produced. I wrote novels that were as highly acclaimed as any novel can be, while they also excelled at keeping me student-poor for decades. Needing to eat better, I wrote a crime novel, City of Ice, under a pseudonym, John Farrow; bless its heart, the book went around the globe and made the more numerous bucks. My publisher, Random House, was bought out, a first for them but not for me, as I’ve found that experience in my professional life to be chronic, so I moved on from them until the editorial staff of my next publisher, St. Martins’ Press, was supplanted, and I’ve been through that before, it’s been chronic, so I moved on from them, to the UK this time, where that publisher also underwent a change in personnel and it dawned on me that I hadn’t published in my home country (Canada) for the last six books, so I brought it on home to a small proud house where I’m both happy and universally neglected again, as in the old days, student-poor once more, but, just as in the old days, still writing and publishing good books. Unlike the old days, I’m old (truthfully, I’m considered long dead; charitably, I’m officially if not actually moribund), and boo-hoo if that makes me an unwanted corpse. It’s always been one thing if it’s not another, so I live with whatever the thing happens to be this time around and carry on writing. It’s what I do. It’s what writers do.

On the subject of beginnings, I’ll relate a story of how I began. Perhaps the latter half of this tale works as cautionary for some, or as promising or as validating for others. Each to his or her own reaction. It does, however — and this is cautionary — reflect a publishing environment that is no more. Indeed, today, it’s difficult to imagine that such a time ever was.

Of course, I won’t begin at the beginning, and instead ask readers to notice a stick bobbing in a stream along the way.

The day I officially signed on to be a writer was singular and stunning. I was 16, working in a railroad camp in northern Alberta. A high latitude where the landscape is exceptionally harsh and relentlessly unforgiving. I had come down from further north, in the Northwest Territories where I’d been working in a camp’s kitchen between 16 and 20 hours a day, usually the latter. A tough camp, utilized in my novel The Timekeeper and in the movie with the same title. A visiting supervisor discovered that I could read and write, uncommon attributes in a camp where most workers spoke languages other than English, or they’d been recruited from skid rows while intoxicated only to wake up sober with a shovel in their hands. I was far handier with a pencil than any of them, and that ability to read, not to mention add and subtract, took me out of the kitchen to a slightly more southern camp to be, yup, a timekeeper. (I was not the timekeeper in the camp portrayed in The Timekeeper. See how that works? That story was not my story, although this one is.) In my new job I kept the books. My former twenty-hour-a-day workload was reduced to twenty minutes a day, tops, as I wrote down 12, or 14, beside every man’s name, to denote hours worked.

At 16 years of age, that’s a bore. Catskinners — the name for bulldozer operators — noticed my free time, and as they were paid according to the vibration clocks on their machines, they taught me to run their Cats while they took turns to have a nap or a relaxing meal. No need for me to be productive, although I was learning a useful trade by osmosis. I could knock down trees for fun or alter the course of a stream — the environment was under duress from me but, honestly, we didn’t think of such things in those days, especially not in such a vast and brutal wilderness. I had only to keep the machine running well above idle. I was playing with massive, magnificent toys in an extraordinary sandbox. Life was a kick.

That continued until the supervisor who’d hired me to keep the books drove into camp and caught me diverting a creek. I think he was a little intimidated by the Catskinners, so took out his vitriol on me. I was to operate the machines no more and the men, gently, were put on notice. So, good times while they lasted, but they did not last.

Back to super boredom.

To occupy my time I read and wrote and walked in the woods.

Part of my job was to be the camp’s two-way radio operator. A few days after my reprimand I received a call. I was charged to locate and investigate a boxcar on a siding in the camp and report back on its contents. An unusually hot day. A scorcher. A twenty minute walk to the boxcar, twenty minutes back to my bunk. I was happy to have a task. I reported that the boxcar contained nine kegs of nails. I was asked to hang on. Then a voice returned, excoriating me for not doing my job. I was to go back, find the right boxcar this time, and make a detailed list of its contents.

Upset with myself for having failed, I slumped back across the railyard. Double- and triple-checked the boxcar’s number. Climbed inside, I kicked its four walls. In the centre of the car stood a cluster composed of nine small kegs of nails. I counted them frequently. Getting to nine was not difficult. This time I walked back full of vim. I would tell those so-and-so’s at head office (using different terms for them at the time) who was right.

And I did. Only to be excoriated again and told to stop screwing around, to go back once more and do it right.

Now I’m fuming. But I return. I check every boxcar number in the entire yard. I have the right car, no other number is similar. I bounce off the walls inside the boxcar. I’m still fuming as I make the trek back to my office that’s in a small trailer. Talking to myself. Talking in my head, or perhaps out loud, to my superiors. It never occurred to me that perhaps a trick was being played, and I don’t know if one was, but this could have been punishment for operating bulldozers. I notice the yard locomotive rearing up behind me. Good. When it’s close, I’ll hop on the brakeman’s platform and ride the rest of the way in. But I forget about it, absorbed as I am with my grievances. Until. A sound. I turn. It’s right there. I’m about to be run down. The moment of collision is a fraction of a second away. Leaning back, I start to go under the train.

Here's a cliché that’s true. In such moments, time stands still. What is actually happening is that the brain has sped up to such an astonishing rate that it creates the effect of slowing down the pace of life. I’m about to die, and I chose to spend my last half-second alive arguing with myself, while thinking also that if my mother ever hears about my death, and she probably won’t as I’m a runaway, she’ll be sad. The argument with myself was simple: Reach up, grab that bar, see if you can pull yourself up. Save your life. The counter argument was also simple: No chance. It’s too late. That discussion bounced back and forth a few times while I was going under the locomotive in what felt like tens of seconds yet had to be less than a nano-second of actual time. “Just try,” one side of the debate insisted. Then whoop!

I’d tried.

Having opted to give it a shot, I was standing on the brakeman’s platform, hanging on to the moving locomotive.

I’ve never felt better, before or since. I was riding an extraordinary high.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

After enjoying my elevated head-space for a half-hour or so, I made the radio call, advising head office that nine kegs of nails were housed in the boxcar, and also that I quit. I advised them where to send the cheque I was now owed. Then, still as high as the sky, I walked out of that camp, a long trek, and hitchhiked down the Mackenzie Highway to the town of High Level. (It’s actual name. No irony intended.) At the time it was a muddy hamlet where the bank was a trailer, the motel composed of plywood and tarpaper. I needed to wait for the bank to open the next morning to create an account to receive my pay as I had no address. Under the northern lights that night, undoubtedly naïve at 16, but compelled by my near-death experience during the day and alone and homeless and unable to fathom what might come next, I used the only paper I could find, in the motel’s Gideon Bible, to write what I so deeply felt: I will be a writer. Nothing will stop me. I will never take a job I like because that might distract me. And I signed that declaration. Then lived it. Presto. My future had been revealed. I was to become a writer. A terrible one for a mule’s age. But stubborn and utterly determined. And that counts for everything.

How I became a published writer illustrates how the environment has changed. Imagine sending in a manuscript with no fewer than 11 grammatical and/or spelling errors per page. (For every page, I insisted there were none. I was wrong every time.) Today, you’d not go far. Count yourself lucky if a single page is read top to bottom by anyone. Today it’s either a quick form reply or, more likely, no reply whatsoever, whether from agent or publisher.

Determined to write, I wrote. At 17, I received a glorious two-page rejection letter from The Atlantic Monthly. My story had risen like cream to the top I was informed, in those words, but it didn’t make the final cut. Given the source, that was impressive. I was invited to submit again. I did, only to betray my apprenticeship shortcomings. Still. The early praise kept me going even if the rejections had vanquished my short-story career. Nothing but novels since, and I wrote many. A full dozen, actually, unpublished. Finally, I elicited a reaction. An editor invited me to come to Toronto and talk to him about a novel he was rejecting. Still being a roughened dope from the bush, I figured if he wasn’t going to publish me I wasn’t going to talk to him. I wrote another book instead. Upon being denuded of other choices, I sent it to that editor again, being more bruised and a little wiser now. This time he phoned. “Come to Toronto and talk.” I went. He talked. For about six hours. Indoors. Out-of-doors. I listened. I understood next to nothing. Finally, he said, “Do you know that scene midway in your novel, when a crow is hanging upside down and bleeding out? That’s your novel. The rest, get rid of it.” I understood that part. Imagine an editor today glomming onto 15 pages and saying ditch the rest and offering to edit the next draft.

Later I learned that the editor, Dennis Lee, who was celebrated as a poet and for writing kids’ books and later wrote lyrics for Muppets movies and TV shows, expected the process to take at least five years. Little did he know whom he was dealing with. The book was done in six months, became my first published novel, High Water Chants, published by Macmillan and again twenty years later by HarperCollins. The fifteen pages that were suggested to keep? Even those few did not survive the rewrite. I had brought something to the page which Lee recognized as demonstrating talent, or something, yet I was raw, unschooled, undisciplined, too wild. I needed editorial counsel in the worst way. And received it. A blessing. That would not happen today for anyone in my circumstance.

Beginnings. It’s necessary for writers to find their own. And they will, as long as they accept that there is no starting point, that any beginning is never more than another waypoint on an unknown and really, an unimaginable, journey.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

Speaking of beginnings, this is another. Always seeking, always starting out, a new venture now on Substack. Thanks for reading if you’ve come this far. Free subscribers, welcome! And thank you. Paid subscribers, should you sign on, thanks for helping detract from my epic retreat from commercial success. My intention is to cover the threads of one writer’s life lived on and off the page in monthly missives, to drop what insights and dumbass moves ensued during that long wrangle with the language and the artform. The life, the business, the joy, the pain of engagement with writing from someone who stands on no pinnacle but who has experienced both exceptional highs and deep lows. Tackling the word. Challenging common perceptions, which is what any writer ought to do, while staying in touch with my personal bailiwick, which is narrative drive. This intends to be honest reflections, not advertisements for current or past work, except incidentally — the books are rarely available outside of libraries anyway — though past work may be critiqued or utilized. Context is the thing: time spent, joyful days, hurdles overcome and not. Perhaps, if this works out, subscribers and founding readers will be rewarded with an audio story along the way, or perhaps a novel in segments, one that won’t be published elsewhere, we’ll see, but hopefully all subscribers will enjoy the reflections of a novelist who’s been at it a long, long, long time, on this wild, up and down, giddy-yup ride. Cheers!

Trevor Ferguson

(aka John Farrow)