Airplane Window

Posted on November 6, 2013 by McPhedran

I was on a long flight, the in-flight movie about hapless criminals, depressing. I stared out of the window, the drone of the plane’s engines coming through the fabric walls, and tried to imagine the ocean below. I pictured the ice bobbing in the swells but had the smell of the plane in me, antiseptic, and nothing of that smell was in the ice, and opened my eyes, the interior lights off, and it came to me, that pristine crystalline moment of a thought, something from nothing, the genesis of a book – prostitutes driving across the United States in an 18-wheeler. That was it, prostitutes in an 18-wheeler. And west; they were going west. I knew that too. I had my book just like that, in the thin light, timeless, constant, an arctic summer, my hand down the plastic handle, on the plane over the stark Greenland mountains.*

*Extract from Buzz

Channeling Family

Posted on October 24, 2013 by McPhedran

When I presented my first novel, The Sacred Whore, to my mother, she grimaced. “Where am I in there?”

"My mother? Let me tell you about my mother" Leon Kowalsji, "Blade Runner"

“My mother? Let me tell you about my mother” Leon Kowalski (Blade Runner)

My family is certainly a grow-op of raw material but it lacks the dynamics needed for a good story. One of my earliest, and clunkiest attempts – Fashion for the Apocalypse – an awkward thing that must stay buried in the backyard, is exhaustive in meandering ruminations and presents family in a tedious and pointless light.

“How’s your dinner?” My mother peered over at me. “I made two extra vegetables for you. We’re having chicken.”

I looked at my broccoli, beans, tomatoes and potatoes on my plate. “It”s delicious.”

Tree of Life

While I’ve stuck with writing what I know, I’ve learned to tighten and hone. From Black Ice:

My mother grabbed the arm of my shirt. “What happened? What were you thinking of?”

“I didn’t do anything! He just stopped breathing.”

“How, Cameron?” My father was across the room, holding my dead brother’s jacket. “How did he stop breathing?”

“I don’t know. He just…stopped.”

“You suffocated him!?” My mother wrenched my arm up. “Did you suffocate him?!”

My father rolled the jacket under his arm. “Michelle…”

I was surprised how calm he was, how slowly he took my mother’s arm and pulled her back.

“We have to stay calm.”

Ordinary People

It’s a balancing act, finding those moments, making them into something that is true, just not too true, because that can be really boring.

The New Yorker’s Answers for Everything

Posted on March 12, 2013 by McPhedran

The New Yorker is an excellent magazine; the articles are structured, the reviews informative, the cartoons most entertaining. Although somewhat predictable in its observational style – which can read like an extended Jerry Seinfeld stand-up – the point of view is always insightful and clear. Most impressive of all is the remarkable diligence demonstrated in research; every stone is rolled again and again.

And yet something is askew; there is a fly between the pages. In being so thorough, so driven for the infallible, the reporting can fail in timbre. With the details pulled apart, the thing is no longer itself; the butterfly no longer flits. Patrick Radden Keefe’s story A Loaded Gun in the February 11/13 issue is a good example of this. While there is much to recommend this investigative piece on convicted murderer Amy Bishop – an effective, albeit predictable narrative, a murder mystery with facts and statements cited at every turn – there are questions that won’t be answered because the dead don’t speak, nor will Ms. Bishop and her parents. However Mr. Keefe presses on, substituting these key elements with damning scenes from Ms. Bishop’s unpublished writing as psychological evidence of hidden acts. He specifically cites a scene of a brother accidentally killed by a rock. “He fell back like a toy soldier,” Amy writes. “He never knew what hit him.” Mr. Keefe’s mission was to find what needed finding, whatever it took to close the gaps, to make a good story, and like a good New Yorker writer, he did just that. However in this quest, the butterfly flies too much like a jet. In reflecting on what Mr. Keefe divulged from the prose of Ms. Bishop, I wondered what he would ascertain about me, indeed anyone, if he were to New Yorker another. As my mother dubiously commented upon reading the title of my first novel, “The Sacred Whore? Hmm. Where am I in that?” 25 years later, I have yet to figure that out. Maybe I’m in there too. I don’t know. But I do challenge the notion that another has the wherewithal to make that determination. No matter how hard the researchers might work, The New Yorker editors just have to accept that they, like anyone, do not always know best.

Re-inventing the Business of Writing

Posted on March 8, 2013 by McPhedran

My aspirations as a writer began in Grade Five, although I must admit that my series on the Secret Spitball Society didn’t impress Mr. Bacon, nor did my extra-terrestrial cat-being proclaiming See the USA in your Chevrolet! Mr. Bacon had us listen to John McIntyre’s clever, metaphoric prose instead, a story set in Niagara Falls, someone going over in a barrel. My words weren’t as adroit as John McIntyre’s, but I did have stories in my head; I just had to learn how to let them come out in a pure kind of form. I continued to write – more superficial stuff, including the closing pages to a confused epic (Vile Illuminations), and some awful poems in high school, and then angsty plays (Alleluia & Bare Cage) and awkward screenplays (Ferges in Newfoundland & Beyond the Sand of Virginia) in university – before starting my first novel in Paris.I had a few moments of my hoped-for purity in The Sacred Whore, characters speaking for themselves, images flowing out, but it was more me just doing my five pages a day, gleaning along the way, until I had arrived at page 718. Something seemed to be working. I shared my progress with Ben, a fellow writer I met at a party in Toronto. He stared back. “I’m re-inventing the novel. It’s time to shed the artifice of the narrative and create something more pure.” Purity? Oh no. Was I as stupid and inane? I resolved to avoid writers from that moment on. I wrote in silence. I would think and read and write alone. That was all. I would send the work out and someone, somewhere would understand. And I did just that, stayed away from other writers, from everyone in the business, and wrote in London, Cordoba, Sardinia, Vancouver and New York. The isolation helped me find my sense and direction. And even if I didn’t re-invent the novel, I found a voice and only need the patience for it to be heard.

Re-formating Torturous Prose

Posted on February 28, 2013 by McPhedran

I just finished re-formatting my work from 20 years ago, a project that wore on me both from the tedium and the malaise of reading torturous prose, all of it mine. The worst was in the painfully obvious themes in my first novel, The Sacred Whore, glaring derivative elements from 1984, Do the Right Thing, Dog Day Afternoon and Logan’s Run at every turn. On the upside was one dream sequence, a decent rock amongst gravel, depicting a nightmare I remember well: She sat alone in the clammy interior, amusing herself by pressing and peeling her skin from the plastic seats. Her skin glowed red and she climbed out of the car and stood in what seemed to be an old riverbed. She turned to face the demon of her nightmares. Its black body, swollen and hard, oozed of molten marble. Its nostril slits slapped open and shut in grotesque harmony with its gasps of air. Its massive jaws ravenously clacked open and shut, exposing rows of green-caked teeth and its purple, veiny tongue slopping from side to side. Amazingly, its cement-slab feet, each rising and falling alternately in excited agitation, did not sink into the thick mud. Its head leaned back toward the bleeding sky and, for a moment, seemed to have lost consciousness until it launched itself, jaws first, into her chest.

Naming names: Three Ways to Name a Character

Posted on February 19, 2013 by McPhedran

Whatever the genesis, naming a character can be a challenge. Here are three common methods:

1. The name is symbolic of an attribute. Jason Quati (from The Sacred Whore) is a derivation of the word quat, meaning small pustule. (Yes, he’s a bad person.) The Adamantine sisters (from Sister Prometheus) get their surname from the hardest of substances, the rock to which Prometheus was affixed according to Greek mythology.

2. The name is a random discovery. I found a picture of a man named “Gerbi” (from The Life and Home of Gerbi Norberg) in my father’s old files, who was a banker with whom my father worked in the 1950s. 3. The name evolves as the book is written. The main character in my bad side was originally named Sunshine (ugh) and then Francesca, Elle, Ellen, and finally Dee which actually changed ro Deirdre halfway through the book…because that was her name.

Word NOT Perfect

Posted on February 13, 2013 by McPhedran

I am in the midst of re-formatting my writing (novels and scripts) from my WordPerfect days (1989-1996).

McPhedran computer, circa 1991 (not WordPerfect file)

McPhedran computer, circa 1991 (note WordPerfect file)

Unfortunately, I did not properly convert the files from WordPerfect 4.2 to Microsoft Word, and so now I am faced with the ugly and painstaking task of changing the text line by line, character by character. I start with this:

Þ_@ÞÃ_*’ÃTRAVISƒà__àà__àRelax, relax. Stay
cool.Þ_@ÞÃ_*’ÃCORINNEƒà__àà__àCool? I’m the
fuckin’…coolest.Þ_@ÞÃ_*’ÃRAYMONDƒÃ_*_Ã(holding his bleeding
neck)ƒà__àà__àTravis…Þ_@ÞÃ_*’ÃTRAVISƒÃ_*_Ã(looking into the hotel
room)ƒà__àà__àMr. Quati? Mr. Quati! You all
right?Þ_@ÞÃ_*&ÃSAVANNAHƒÃ_*#Ã(from the room)ƒà__àà__àHe’s unconscious,
Travis.Þ_@ÞÃ_*’ÃTRAVISƒà__àà__àWhat the hell’s going on here!?

I get it back to this:

TRAVIS

Relax, relax. Stay cool.

CORINNE

Cool? I’m the fuckin’…coolest.

RAYMOND

(Holding his bleeding neck)

Travis…

TRAVIS

(Looking into the hotel room)

Mr. Quati? Mr. Quati! You all right?

SAVANNAH

(From the room)

He’s unconscious, Travis.

TRAVIS

What the hell’s going on here!?

It’s effective practice because it forces me to pick through the text, as painful as that might be. I’m the fuckin’…coolest??(And that’s not even close to the worst of it.)

New York Inspired IV: Trisha Brown Dance at BAM

Posted on January 31, 2013 by McPhedran

The Trisha Brown Dance Company performed four pieces at BAM last night, including two New York premieres. I know very little about dance and lack the vocabulary to describe the movements and style; but I do know when it works, when the energy makes sense. It is like music in how it opens thoughts from the day-to-day into something skulking deep within. The dancers spun, flipped and dashed, and I found myself thinking back to my first book, The Sacred Whore. As I told agents time and again back in 1988, “It’s the story of a group of prostitutes who kidnap a college basketball team so that they can air their views on what is wrong with America on primetime television.” The first draft was 720 pages and had 15 major characters.I eventually got that down to 282 pages and five main characters. It’s a chaotic, action-dependent, socio-political piece that stumbles and ultimately fails, but I still am interested in the premise. It opens on the back roads of Oklahoma, women climbing out the back of an 18-wheeler truck like refugees. They’ve been kidnapped by a pimp who wants to address the hypocritical morality of the nation with a hair-brained kidnapping scheme. I was standing in a Paris apartment when I thought of this, a mannequin sitting in the dark beside the bed. Prostitutes transported across the country by a truck. What about that? It seemed like something, I didn’t know what, like the moment some months later, halfway through the book, when a character I had expunged from the text, Chantal, decided to return. She did that on her own. I want back in. She was like the woman on stage last night at BAM, dancing with a camera on her back. She was self-realized, something out of nothing. I thought about that coming back over the bridge.