2013 Dance, Gladys, Dance by Cassie Stocks

Lesson 66

Caring about characters

I felt relieved after reading the 2013 Leacock Medal winner, Dance, Gladys, Dance. Having completed what was then the last book on my list might have had something to do with it. But the feeling flowed mostly from knowing that I could look Cassie Stocks in the glasses, should we meet again, and say, “I liked your book.” Cassie has a well-tuned bullshit detector, so I would be bound to the truth.
 

          A down-to-earth Albertan, now Saskatchewan dweller, Cassie makes fun of herself, laughs a lot, and connects with lots of people. She lists one-time biker chick, actress, gardener, waitress, office clerk, aircraft cleaner, fowl farmer, and Eston Co-op employee in her author bios.
 

          When she added award-winning novelist, it gave her more opportunities, but in addressing the June 2013 Leacock Medal banquet, Cassie said that she enjoyed the profile mostly because of the young women who identify with characters in her book. Cassie said many “don’t think they’re like everyone else, and don’t feel normal.” She liked the thought that her book may have helped them.
 

           “Women are by and large less likely to believe in themselves as artists,” said Cassie, the first woman to grab the medal since 1996. “And when an artist gives up their dreams and gives up their work then we’ll never know what we have lost.”
 

          Cassie Stocks cares about people, including fictional dead ones and people who exist only in her imagination. In a banquet speech that went on a lot longer than Patrick deWitt’s thank you, she described her characters one by one, saying she not only loved fleshing them out as an ensemble, but loved them individually.
 

          “I like to call them freaks; they are odd and a little bit outlandish . . . strange . . . and I think they’re beautiful, all of them.”
 

          Frieda, the narrator, lacks self-esteem, dwells on imperfect decisions, and shares some of Cassie’s curriculum vitae and sense of humour. Frieda decides to give up on art, get a “real job,” and become “ordinary.” She stops seeing the world as a “series of potential paintings” and starts talking about the weather.
 

          A classified ad for an old phonograph, ending with “Gladys doesn’t dance anymore--she needs the room to bake,” launches Frieda’s adventure and the encounters with her disembodied mentor.
 

          “I made Gladys a ghost because I wanted her to tell her own story rather than, you know, through someone else or someone reading a diary,” Cassie said. For many reviewers, the characters make Dance, Gladys, Dance work.
 

          Caring about your characters provides a pretty good starting point in writing fiction. With no exception I can recall, characters are the vehicle for moving a story along and exercising all those techniques of action, dialogue, and thinking. To be believable, no matter how nice or disagreeable, they have to tap into something human, usually a bit of the author. In Frieda, the relationship between author and subject was glaring, but Cassie tweaked the superficial details to create a character with her own energy. Some of Cassie’s characters had little in common with the author, but enough for a connection. All of them had their own interests and motivations.
 

          “Kurt Vonnegut said make your characters want something . . . right away . . . even if it’s just a glass of water,” Cassie said, explaining that Vonnegut recognized that even characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life are human and have to drink water.
 

          Her central character wanted something: to be ordinary and get a real job.

          I have a real job of sorts, and this made the trip from Ottawa to Orillia and back difficult to justify. But attending the 2013 banquet struck me as something that would be good for me to do, given all the time I’d spent studying Leacock Medal books this past year, especially after my wife said, “This would be good for you to do, given all the time you’ve spent on this thing this past year.”
 

           It was a five and a half hour drive each way, so I decided to stay overnight at the Geneva Park Conference Centre on Lake Couchiching. It wasn’t much of a hardship.
 

          But because most people attending the banquet live in Orillia, only a handful stayed overnight--mostly people from far away. People like Cassie Stocks and me. We had breakfast together. Cassie was dejected because she thought her sometimes rambling speech was a flop. She wanted to “crawl into a hole like a gopher.”
 

          Cassie Stocks could not have picked a better bacon and eggs partner. I pumped her back up by telling her how much I enjoyed the talk and connected with it.
 

          “Don’t worry--only a few hundred heard your speech,” I said. “Millions will read my glowing account of it someday.”
 

          She laughed again, and we talked about the craft of humour writing and how funny it is to study funny. In her speech, she cited sources such as the Humor Reference Guide: The Comprehensive Classification and Analysis, which identifies some ninety-seven different types of humour or flavours of incongruity. These include the liar paradox, the deviation from the ideal, the unexpected honesty, and anti-humour humour: “the intentional violation of the expectation of the joke: the joke turns out not to be one, and it’s funny because ironically it’s not funny!”
 

           “Now, I think that definition is totally hilarious!” Cassie said, also noting humour-writing advice from the previous female Leacock medalist Marsha Bolton: “Wear tight pantyhose at readings ’cause it makes you stand up straighter.”
 

          So, I like Cassie Stocks. You don’t need to like every author you study, but I think that, like working on characters for a book, you need a human connection that makes their mistakes yours, their humour something you might appreciate, and their lessons something you might want to write down and remember.

         

Writing Exercise

Write three paragraphs to introduce a ghost who is doing something not normally associated with the spirit world, like brushing teeth, going to the bathroom, or doing a humour writing assignment.

2012 The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Lesson 65

The incongruous setting

At the 2013 Leacock Medal award banquet, the regular attendees at my table told me that they found Patrick deWitt’s acceptance speech the year before to be the funniest and most memorable one ever. They laughed because the speech was exceptionally short. Some of them recalled his remarks as being limited to a modest and soft, “Uh . . . uh . . . thank you.”

But that’s an exaggeration--just a modest and soft bit. DeWitt did add a few crumbs on the subject of
creativity for those listening closely.

But that was about all. My tablemates thought this was funny and kind of cute because of their own expectations.
 

          The annual bun-fest, always held in or around Orillia, gives locals a night out that includes a cocktail hour, book signings, and a chance to meet current and past medalists. The performances of previous winners have created the anticipation that the medal recipient’s speech will be funny and thought-provoking and will help justify the $65 per ticket cost of the evening out. Patrick deWitt is funny and thought-provoking when writing books, but not so much when asked to perform on stage--unless unintentionally, because of the setting.
 

          Patrick probably finds it more comfortable in the spotlight now after over two years of picking up honours for his dark but comical novel, The Sisters Brothers, the book that won the 2012 Leacock Medal. Still, I suspect he remains most at ease in the context of written words.
 

          In another way, the issue of context probably constitutes the greatest factor in the humorous effect of his medal-winning book. Please allow me to illustrate with the following lifeless summary of The Sisters Brothers, which I prepared as an exercise.

The Sisters Brothers, the second novel by Canadian-born, Oregon-based Patrick deWitt, describes a transforming journey made by Eli and Charlie Sisters, two men who are different in many ways but have a fraternal bond that keeps them together as business partners. They do contract work, now exclusively for a powerful entrepreneur identified as “the Commodore,” who has asked them to travel to California on his behalf and negotiate with Hermann Kermit Warm, an inventor with a special process for mineral exploration. The brothers are to deal with Warm through Henry Morris, an intermediary in the Commodore’s employ.
 

           The Commodore puts hard-nosed Charlie in charge. Eli, the sensitive narrator of the story, thinks about leaving the business because of all the travel and the tense interactions with customers. Eli also worries about his weight, his teeth, the lack of female affection in his life, his widowed mother, and his brother Charlie’s taunts. Charlie drinks heavily and focuses clinically on work.

          Whew! That was tough, trying to outline the story of The Sisters Brothers without the nineteenth-century context of cowboys, gold rush prospecting, horses, guns, knives, and killing. I pulled those elements out of the description to try to evaluate the impact of the incongruous setting and the writing style.
 

          The book teases us into compassion for the brutal and reminds us of the universality of human concerns in the tradition of recognized literature. It has carried off so many literary prizes that any comment on the quality of the writing seems redundant, and critics in Canada, the United States, and abroad have detailed the book’s literary merits many times.
 

          So, I focused my thoughts on why the book made me laugh, always coming back to the gun-slinging, the dirty work of mid-1800s hit men, and the violence of the Old West in contrast with the clowning and bickering of the brothers.
 

          When Eli confesses a fear of spiders, cares for his one-eyed horse, fusses over toothpaste flavours, or feels hurt over his brother’s teasing, we might not find it funny if he weren’t also an assassin ready to blow a stranger’s head off or do what was “necessary” to extract information from an old woman. Because Eli, the narrator, relates all this in the formal old-time Western sort of way (“that’s some nice shooting, brother”), he enforces the incongruity in almost every passage. 
 

          Patrick deWitt definitely knows the importance of setting and context, and he may have been more aware of the expectations at the Leacock Medal banquet than it seemed.
 

          In verifying the facts of the 2012 event, I read that Arthur Black and Dan Needles bookended deWitt’s acceptance speech. Both are polished speakers and hard to match. In similar circumstances, I too, would have limited myself to “Uh . . . uh . . . thank you.”

         

Writing Exercise

Write a short story about a pair of humour writers doing contract work in the Old West.

In his brief Leacock Medal banquet remarks, deWitt mused a bit about the craft of humour writing, noting some people think “life itself is a joke,” and adding, “if that is true, it is a complex one.” The author also managed to hint at his inspiration by quoting the British playwright Joe Orton. Orton, who was brutally murdered in his mid-thirties (Patrick deWitt was about the same age when he wrote The Sisters Brothers), was a champion of black comedy, calling it “a weapon” and a “dangerous” one. 

He won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize as well as spots on the short lists for the Man Booker Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize.

2011 Practical Jean by Trevor Cole

Lesson 64

How a creative spark leads to a story

In April 2005, I tried to kill my father.
 

          We declined life support and wanted his pain to end. Teeth out, struggling for every breath, and mouth contorted, he looked like a grey version of Munch’s Scream. My attempt to bump him off (with lies to get excess morphine) failed, and he came back to life long enough to grab my collar and remind me of what he wanted. I laughed nervously and said, “I’ll do what I can, Dad.” 

          I told that story after his funeral with the same confliction.
 

          That memory and the nervous laugh visited my head again and again as I read the 2011 Leacock Medal book, Practical Jean by Trevor Cole. The book tells the story of Jean Horemarsh, a woman who cared for her mother on the way to a nasty death. Jean vows to spare her friends the same fate and sets out to kill them in a prophylactic way while they’re still relatively young and healthy.
 

          Sometimes, it seems that everyone, save a few newly born babies, has a story, like me, of a loved one who suffered too long and has likely thought about the issues raised by Practical Jean. But Trevor Cole takes those thoughts just one step further into a twisted, but also kind of honest realm that does what all good story ideas do. It touches on a universal in an unusual, creative way.
 

          When you’re struck by the creative spark, you feel an energy that flows from other ideas--or at least that’s what I’ve read. Reflecting on the idea of Practical Jean and the book that sparkled out of it, I have a guess as to why this happens.
 

          An unusual thought, contrary to a usual one, raises questions. Who would think that way? Why would they do that? How would they pull it off? And what will happen as a consequence? The questions tickle your mind.
 

          So, after seizing on this concept of proactive euthanasia, you would naturally try to think of a sensitive protagonist who has attended a bad death and doesn’t want to endure it again. Jean, a ceramic artist with a bland but comfortable husband and home in small-town Canada, fits the requirements. Then, you would need a backstory that makes euthanasia an acceptable approach to such problems, and this produces Jean’s childhood at the ringside of her mother’s veterinary business and multiple puppy terminations.
 

          Jean, the sister of two police officers and the daughter of another, has lived all her life labelled as the one incapable of doing the “practical” thing when required. Then, the death of her mother pushes her to take action. As a caring person, she sees the plan to end the lives of her closest friends as the means of saving them from the “ruthless” and “pulverizing” experience of age and the bleakness of a “slow and agonizing” death.
 

          Cole sticks with this portrait by having Jean give each of her victims/friends one last bit of happiness and beauty. One time, this beauty comes as sex in a car with a youth; another time, it’s sex with Jean herself. She hacks with a shovel, strangles with wire, and poisons with drugs.

          I can easily imagine how Cole generated each element, from the dead puppies to the murder mystery-style climax, building on his initial idea. But what makes Cole’s words better than a pile of clay is his execution, if you can excuse that word here. A one-time journalist with decades of experience in magazines and daily newspapers as well as fiction, Cole enjoyed recognition as a talented and literate writer before receiving the Leacock Medal.
 

          Practical Jean impressed me because it sought to get into the heads of middle-aged women. As a mouth-breathing male, I may be a poor judge of how well Cole does this but I can say for certain that he twists the mind, draws detailed characters, and generates thoughtful dialogue that doesn’t go on too long. For this reason, I was surprised by some not-so-great comments in early reviews of Practical Jean. Most of the negative stuff struck me as conflicted.
 

          It made me think again of my conflicted feelings about my dad, his suffering, and his sense of humour, and it gave me a twisted but creative idea on how I could spare humorists like Trevor from the “vicious, ruthless . . . grinding . . . pulverizing ugliness” of confused reviews in the future. I’ll work on it after this project is over.
 

         

Writing Exercise
 

Write a short story about a serial killer who bumps off humour writers before they can experience bad reviews.
 

2010 Beyond Belfast by Will Ferguson

Lesson 63

Plotting and plodding 

 In the spring of 2013, in an old stone church overlooking the Rideau Canal, I went up to a table by the altar and converted. There, in the sanctuary of Southminster United, I broke my vow to buy only used copies of the Leacock Medal books.

          I paid full price for Beyond Belfast: A 560-Mile Walk across Northern Ireland on Sore Feet, the 2010 winner by Will Ferguson. He came to the church for the Ottawa Writers Festival, and I had a chance to get a book signed if I bought it on-site.
 

          After a brief exchange, he wrote out his signature, a salutation, and the note, “Funny is as Funny does.” I read a lot into that comment, probably more than warranted, because I associate it with something he had told the audience that night. Earlier in the evening, Ferguson had said he doesn’t like stories that feature introspective personalities and that he always tries to reveal character through dialogue and action.
 

          “I believe deeply that our character is decided by the choices we make,” he said in reference to his Giller Prize-winning novel, 419. “I think character in fiction and in life is defined by the actions that characters do and not who they think they are or the slights and the grudges and regrets that they dwell on.”
 

          The comments echo standard writing text advice to tell stories through vivid experience, action, and deeds. If you wanted to extend that to writing humour, you might express it as “funny is as funny does.”
 

          When I got home that night, I looked down at the scribble in the front of my new book and broke another pledge. I started reading this 2010 winner out of chronological Leacock Medal order, keen to find words that would illustrate Ferguson’s point and to make that the theme of my review of his book. I saw a few examples, but not enough.
 

          Beyond Belfast follows Ferguson on a solo journey along the Ulster Way, the long, looping footpath around Northern Ireland. The book documents action: the action of walking across streams, up mountains, along cliffs, and over dung-filled pastures; and it presents dialogue: in dank pubs, dank B&Bs, and dank city streets. The book makes the slipping and sipping experiences pretty funny, but Beyond Belfast also contains more than just a little dwelling and thinking, too.
 

          Fewer people had completed the sore-feet feat than had climbed Everest at the time Ferguson set out on it just over a decade ago, but he was not motivated entirely by the physical challenge. He wanted to understand his ancestry, which he saw not in the Fergusons, but in the Ulster line leading to the single mother who raised him in Fort Vermilion. I don’t think that

Ferguson could suggest that this book kept entirely clear of introspective thoughts and feelings. 

 

          He mused not only about his orphaned grandfather but also about the history, politics, and religion of Northern Ireland. In the front end, he frames his journey with the basics of William of Orange, the 1916 Easter Uprising, and the 1969 events that sparked the more recent terror.

          Although Ulster issues defy understanding, Ferguson wades in, perhaps feeling he had earned a connection with his blisters and his research on family history. As he flops his dung-covered hiking boots around Northern Ireland, he passes all the points of sadness: Armagh, Derry, Enniskillen, and, of course, the starting and ending point, Belfast.
 

          I don’t know what kind of person could avoid introspection on that r
oute and I don’t blame Ferguson for failing to provide me with an easy, exemplary book of telling by showing.
 

          Still, I felt a little dejected. As I pondered this hurdle, I thought about my decision to buy a new book just because of the convenience and wondered if I was giving up. Having read the 2010 Leacock Medal winner out of sequence, I knew that when I put Belfast down, I would be slipping back to 1992 and would be facing twenty more books.
 

          Maybe in part to put off the backward slide, I started flipping through Beyond Belfast again and I took greater notice this time of the maps and charts that introduce each section, thought about the plans and preparations and the plodding along in the pastures, and remembered something else Ferguson had said in the Ottawa church.
 

          He told the pews that he puts more time into planning and working on the plot for his books than writing them. He spent over a year and a half on the outline for 419.
 

          “I should have brought the actual outline--it’s about eighty pages,” he said. “It’s a scene-by-scene breakdown. The trick is to outline and outline and outline . . . before you start.”

 

          Ferguson said that he thinks a detailed plot ensures that a writer doesn’t follow ideas into a corner or get swept up into the fog of endless possibilities. He told the audience that this applies equally to fiction and travel writing.

          “My sister is a sculptor; she prefers to work in marble, but it is quite expensive and so she also works in clay,” he said in what seemed like a non sequitur. “She says with clay, you build something up . . . with marble, you cut something down.”
 

          Ferguson said travel writing like Beyond Belfast is like sculpting in marble because you typically have this huge block of experience, history, and destination information. You have to make choices and cut away.
 

          “But with fiction, it’s like writing in clay . . . you are building things up from something," Ferguson said, adding that you can be overwhelmed in either of them--in one by information, and in the other by ideas. Then he repeated that a detailed plot can be the answer.
 

           “With a good plot outline, you can skip ahead and work on a scene out of sequence and then come back to your plan,” he said. “Don’t worry about themes--themes come out of the story” if you stick to the outline. Maybe I jumped ahead in reading Belfast, but I did it within an outline: my Leacock Medal book reading plan. Now, I just need to do the same kind of planning with my writing.
 

          So, I plodded along, thinking back on Ferguson’s varied advice, his 560-mile walk, and my book. I visualized his sister’s work with chunks of marble, the towers and castles of Ulster, the rock of the Mourne Mountains, the stone walls of the Ottawa church, and then the craft of writing. A unifying theme emerged: “This stuff is hard.”

         

Writing Exercise
 

In 560 words, plot a travel adventure story based on the circumnavigation of Prince Edward Island in a canoe.

2009 Never Shoot a Stampede Queen by Mark Leiren–Young

Lesson 62

How to write the fish-out-of-water story

 You breathe heavily all the time, flail around in angst, and hope someone will intervene to put you out of your misery. A fish does that when pulled out of water; Mark Leiren–Young behaved much that way while living in Williams Lake, British Columbia; and I usually do that when I read a journalist’s memoirs.

          Leiren–Young’s account of his time in the Cariboo in the mid-1980s, as told in the 2009 Leacock Medal winner, Never Shoot a Stampede Queen, amounts to what reviewers called the standard “fish-out-of-water” story. Playwrights and movie scriptwriters like the form for its comic get-your-hero-in-trouble potential. This means they have pretty well worn it out, and Leiren–Young’s book doesn’t break from the routine. But I liked his stories despite the formula and their journalist-memoir aura because I believed them, learned a bit, and laughed.

          His publisher calls his book the tale of “a city boy” in “a cowboy town,” and the title promotes the tenderfoot in the Cariboo image. But when you read it, the floundering fish you see lying on the page has the body and soul of a playwright trying to survive in a weekly newspaper job. He could have been anywhere--even in the big city. The cowboys and Stampede setting have less to do with his stories than his personality and perspective.

          I say this with confidence because I lived in Williams Lake around the same time as Leiren–Young, knew all of the places he cited, and floundered around as a reporter in small towns myself. 

Please accept my word on that, because an elaboration would flip me into old-journalist boasting, the kind that makes me wheeze.

          Leiren–Young’s stories don’t do that, and I think this is partly because they mix the fish-out-of-water structure with the newsroom memoirs. Mixing formats always blows air on a story, but first you have to master each one individually.

          Stampede Queen has all the fishy elements for anyone wanting to study them. First, you have to set up the protagonist and his point of view, and Leiren–Young does that by telling us how he recognized the theatre as his calling at UBC and later at the University of Victoria.

          Next, the book pulls the fish out of the water. Leiren–Young’s post-graduation appointment as artistic director for a children’s theatre falls through, and the job offer from the Williams Lake Tribune presents itself as the only alternative to six dollars per hour on the line in an Ontario cookie factory.

          Now, with empathy for the fish and its waterless situation established, the third phase is introduced: the flailing.

          Abuse and assaults, car accidents and robberies, bikers and bears, municipal politics and Stampede Queen photo shoots thrash him around for about a year. Leiren–Young’s accounts have an authentic ring for anyone who has had a police scanner next to his pillow or covered dog shows in the morning and murders at night, and they might still be a good primer for journalism students. But they make other people laugh, too, because of Leiren–Young’s imagination and outsider’s perspective. He looked back on the experience as an anomaly in his career and not a step on the path to glory. As usual, I’m awed by stories that make something out of nothing: like the explosion that doesn’t happen but had so much drama that Leiren–Young used it to open his book.

          In another illustration of how strangely personal humour can be, I also laughed at the problems caused by his hard-to-spell, hyphenated, half-Anglo/half-not name. A Vancouver paper makes his cheque out to “Neil Leisen–Young,” and irate Stampede Queen contestants complain about the “horrible [photographer] Mark Leiner–Young.”

          His stories feel bright because they were written not like faded and fabricated memoirs, but while still fresh. Mark Leiren-Young fell ill with mononucleosis shortly after leaving the Cariboo. Housebound, he put the stories to paper in 1988 and didn’t change them much, even though they went unpublished for over twenty years. As a result, the stories remained vivid, but with a touch of perspective and bemusement.

          The final phase in the standard fish story flows from hoping someone or something will intervene to either pull the fish back into its natural habitat or help it grow legs and live in the new environment. In fact, the typical Hollywood exercise ends with the out-of-water hero learning to adapt to his new surroundings, usually well enough to mate and spawn.

          Leiren–Young left the Cariboo and went on to a career as a screenwriter, playwright, performer, and comedian. Yet he still sometimes describes himself as a “freelance journalist” and did manage to mouth, “maybe living in a small town’s not so bad after all” before swimming away from Williams Lake. The sum makes you want to jump out of the water, take a chance, and maybe even read more journalists’ memoirs.

         

Writing Exercise

Describe your personality and passions. Then think of the worst employment circumstance for a person like you and write a story with you in it, explaining how you got there, what happens while you are on the job, and how you leave.

2008 The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis

Lesson 61

Seeing the humour under your nose

 Terry Fallis and I might not get along.

          I wish it weren’t so.

 He seems like an interesting and friendly guy. But if Terry got to know me, he’d probably see me as an irritating evil twin to be avoided. He already has a twin, whom he likes and looks like, and probably doesn’t need an older one.

          My resumé looks like a cracked reflection of his. As an engineering student at McMaster, Fallis got involved in campus politics and fell in love with words. Just down the road in Guelph, my math studies had been disrupted by politics and campus radio.

          In the 1980s, when Fallis haunted Liberal backrooms, I toiled as a Conservative Party drone. He supported Jean Chrétien’s first leadership bid in 1984, the year after I devoted hours to the Mulroney leadership campaign. We then worked on opposing sides in testy elections. He once scurried around as an aide to a Liberal cabinet minister; I did the same thing a few years later for the Conservatives.

          He founded a public relations company with the accounting-firm-style name Thornley Fallis; I had a PR business that specialized in clown-delivered balloon-a-grams and operated under the name Hot Air from Ottawa. He moved away and now mocks the government city, which has been my home for over thirty years. I look forward to our first formal encounter.

          Actually, Fallis is probably not inclined to loathe too many people. He sounds, in his public comments, like one of those “progressive and enlightened” Canadians who is all about “tolerance and acceptance”--you know, the way Liberals like to think of themselves.

          He might even count me among those whom he hoped to amuse when he podcasted and self-published his first novel, The Best Laid Plans, the 2008 Leacock Medal winner. For those of us who’ve spent time bumping around the buildings between Wellington Street and the Ottawa River, the book was a kind of obvious chronicling of all the facts of political life. 

It documents the talk that can be overheard any day of the week in bars and boardrooms around Ottawa, but in an engaging story.

          Everyone in politics has fantasized that a reluctant maverick might come from behind to take another party’s stronghold or that their opponent’s star might get caught in an awkward, vote-crushing scandal on election eve. These have been the damp dreams of Canadian political hacks since Confederation was consummated.

          But the dream is more often nightmarish--the tug of war between what Fallis calls “the cynical political operators” and “the idealist policy wonks” that plague every party from the roots to the crown; the problems with polls; the theatre of Question Period; toeing the party line against all reason; the incest and dirty dancing of politicians, journalists, and pundits; and the partisanship that transcends even the inanity of ideology and policy in its destructiveness.

           It can get really, really bad and begs a lampoon. So, if it was right under our noses, why didn’t someone write a book like this before?

          Well, some tried, but PR-savvy Terry Fallis succeeded in communicating it more effectively than others by stringing all those oddities together in a readable narrative--a real story with a beginning and an end and other parts.

           The Best Laid Plans has both a Terry Fallis-like protagonist, Daniel Addison, and a hero, future MP Angus McLintock. Unfortunately, many early reviews and even some publisher promotions presented the book as a simple story about Addison’s adventures as the suffering aide of a wild, incompetent goofball. Yet Angus clearly embodies Terry’s idea of a great politician and the ideal boss: quirky, but thoughtful, inspiring, and full of integrity.

          I’m pretty sure that Fallis did not base his idol on a Conservative cabinet minister. But I’m struck by how many people have suggested that McLintock was inspired by my old boss . . . an odd coincidence and interesting to me, but maybe no one else. Still, I take this to be a reflection of how much The Best Laid Plans resonates with Ottawa readers and to be more evidence of material that was always under our own noses.

          “Everybody in Ottawa thinks they are in that book,” Leacock scholar, author, and fellow Ottawa-resident David Staines said when I told him my story.

          You certainly don’t have to be associated with politics to recognize Ottawa in The Best Laid Plans. Despite the emphasis on stereotype and political cliché, this book, like King Leary, also treats Ottawa like a place in which real people live, and this appeals to people who are not always preoccupied with policies, polls, and media spin and are more focused on groceries, mortgages, weekends in the park, and getting the kids to school.

          The book celebrates the rivers, the village of Cumberland, the Ritz restaurant, the Canal, the universities, the bilingual ambiance, the Chateau Laurier, the museums, and the enlightened part of Parliament, the Library. Even the slipping in springtime dog dung story speaks to quintessential Ottawa. As I mentioned in reference to Leary, after thirty-one years, I am starting to see this town as my home and, like Terry’s protagonist Daniel Addison, as the place where I fell in love. These other elements of The Best Laid Plans were also sitting under my nose.

          I am even looking more charitably upon my life in the public service. In fact, when I read political theories that talk of cynical operatives and policy idealists, I always think there is something missing: the people who take those airy policies and make them real--the civil servants. Like lots of things, governing flows from a formula of three variables, but usually, politicos and journalists dismiss the latter group as irrelevant or worse.

          Terry Fallis was typically “liberal” in portraying government officials in his novel, further ingratiating him to me. Add to this Daniel Addison’s recurrent musing about “Canadian comedic novels” and his desire to study writing, and you have the full picture and the reason why I might have been more than mildly intrigued by this book.

           So, while Terry Fallis may not want me trailing along behind him as his embarrassing evil, humour-writing twin or triplet, I hope he understands why I might do that.

         

Writing Exercise

Describe your vision of the ideal boss from the perspective of your current job or one from the past. Then write a short story that shows how hard it would be for someone like this to assume a managerial position.

My boss was a former cabinet minister, who, like Terry’s hero, (1) was a Ph.D. mechanical engineer and a university professor, (2) was keen about aerodynamics and tinkering in his shop with motors and machines, (3) is an expert in water systems and an advocate for the environment, (4) won his seat only to be thrust immediately into other campaigns when a minority government was brought down by a budget-related vote, and (5) made a memorable entry into the House. I worked for him from 1984–86.

2007 Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean

Lesson 60

The secret to storytelling

 In mid-December 2012, with the Vinyl Cafe Christmas concert coming to the National Arts Centre, CBC radio challenged listeners to write 300 words in the style of Stuart McLean’s “Dave and Morley stories.” 

My entry drew on an experience chauffeuring a semi-famous person around Ottawa, but in the story, I became Dave and my guest was Morley. The show picked it as a runner-up. Many people heard my name announced, listened to my story read on the air, and assumed I had won something. Several asked how I managed to imitate McLean so closely.

          “I know the secret of the Vinyl Cafe,” I would say. “Just take real experiences from wherever you can and then squeeze them into the ever-so-sweet Dave and Morley format--easy.”

          Now, all you have to do is repeat the process hundreds and hundreds of times, over decades, and in a way that resonates whether as text, radio broadcasts, stage performances, or presentations on rolling trains. That’s all Stuart McLean did. Easy.

          With enough pharmaceutical support, I might have maintained this delusion through the first two Vinyl Cafe Leacock Medal books, but not the third.

          The first two were pretty well rooted in the Dave-and-Morley soil. The third book, Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe, which took the medal in 2007, presents a different collection, which, more often than not, features a protagonist that is neither Dave nor Morley. A few stories follow their children: teenaged Stephanie, who comes of age as a tree planter; and Sam, who navigates schoolyard sports.

          But most revolve around previously peripheral characters: Dave’s mother, Martha; Italian neighbour Eugene; Carl the retiree; Kenny Wong; and Mary Turlington for the requisite Christmas story. The book was promoted under the “Secrets” theme with the pretense that each character had a secret to hide. Most of the secrets are mild embarrassments that beg forgetting, but they can be Vinyl-Cafe funny and maybe, together, they show the progression of McLean’s skill as a fiction writer.

          Even admitted fans of the radio program find the stories predictable and confess that part of the appeal flows from the comfortable normality of it all. This perception likely caused many of McLean’s writing students to assume that he had a predictable, learnable pattern.

          He’s been pretty open about it all and acknowledges that, particularly as a fiction writer, he spent years trying to find an approach on which to build his Dave and Morley franchise. As someone who regarded himself as a journalist, McLean started out writing his stories by interviewing people, conducting research, and then pushing his material into a fictional framework: not too much different from my 300-word CBC contest approach.

          Yet, by 2007, too many sober people were touting McLean as a great storyteller and creative writer to attribute it to such a technique alone. If he did achieve such greatness, his persistence and the experience of those hundreds of stories in hundreds of venues probably played a role in it. McLean also had a couple of other forces working on his writing hand: his humility, with its associated willingness to learn; and his profession as a teacher, with its obligation to observe other learning.

          The poor student who failed in high school became, during a short sojourn from CBC, an instructor at Ryerson University (then Polytechnical Institute) in 1984 and later the director of the broadcast division of its School of Journalism. Eventually, Ryerson granted him status as a tenured professor. Trent University also picked him as its first Rooke Fellow for Teaching, Writing, and Research.

          It’s pretty hard to evaluate others without evaluating your own writing, and it’s pretty hard not to want to walk the talk when you have students closely watching you, as a high-profile prof. Still, as I read this latest McLean Leacock Medal book, I was still searching for a magic-bullet secret to his success.

          Finally, the answer jumped out, not from his book, but from his Secrets promotional tour.

          When being interviewed, McLean always, always tried to divert the questioner from the subject of his new book, his show, and his life. He wanted, more than anything else, to tell another story. It’s impossible to watch Stuart McLean on stage or listen to him speak without sensing that this is a person who just really loves stories. Oh, yeah--and Christmas.

         

Writing Exercise

Think of the stupidest thing you ever did. Then tell the story with generosity and with Dave or Morley as the protagonist.

2006 Pitch Black by Arthur Black

Lesson 59

On the need for continuous curiosity

“I plan to improve with age, like fermenting wine,” I said.

          My wife asked if this meant she should stuff a cork in my mouth and keep me in the cellar.

          “No, no . . . I have to breathe and swish around in the real world--you know, just like post-retirement Arthur Black.”

          The fear that age equates to an inability to keep in touch with human events and the issues that interest others can be challenged in lots of ways, but a potent one would be to point to Black’s third Leacock Medal book, Pitch Black, which won the award in 2006. Four years earlier, Black had taken official leave from his CBC job where he had developed his style and produced material for his earlier medal winners.

          Now settled in B.C.’s Gulf Islands, he could have pulled back a bit. But instead, he stayed curious and connected, contributing to newspapers and giving speeches. In many ways, the post-retirement Black reads a lot like the pre-retirement one. His pieces, still around 700 radio-friendly words, cover a wide range of subjects running from animal rights, public nudity, and marijuana to coffee-drinking as a profession, talking toilets, and the invention of macaroni and cheese on a stick.

          If anything, he may have broadened the scope of his preoccupations and peeves with rain-coast references and his stories about Salt Spring Island life.

          Black did not mellow, either. In this book, comments like, “this is nuts,” or “Does it get stupider than this?” routinely introduce his rants. Black sounds, in fact, like someone who has decided that the time has come to take a few more risks, go out on a limb, and lob a grenade or two that may not have survived the political correctness of a CBC script.

          He likes the terms “nutbar” and “Right-wing nutbars” and uses them on those who see The Simpsons as a threat to family values and “the Amurrikan way of life.” He calls Howard Hughes the “famous nutbar” and lists then US President George W. and a string of European royals as inhabitants of the “nutbar department.” The federal cabinet is “a collection of submissive human sock puppets” and “nutbars.”

          He also throws around the “Nazi” label, identifying his childhood dentist by name and saying he “had the forearms of a longshoreman and the compassion of a Nazi.” Diet guru Atkins leads the “Carbo Nazis.”

          Finally, Black directs a tirade at the missing Al-Qaeda leader, saying how much he loathes “Osama bin Hidin’ and his venomous pack of psychopathic lunatics.” That may not seem harsh, given the subject, unless you know that Black’s rant was actually inspired by Bin Laden’s chin whiskers which, he says, have “given beards a bad name.”

          Together, these rants might suggest that Arthur Black had crossed over into the fermented-wine, old-man phase. But read in context, they come across as amplifications of the personality Black has always had, maybe with a touch more pluck. One way to write naturally, to be yourself, and to express feelings without concern, of course, lies in basic goodwill and dedication to coherence and quality. Black shows this when he talks about writing style and words.

          He mocks those who think of writing as effortless typing by quoting Stephen Leacock: “Writing is simple: you just jot down amusing ideas as they occur to you. The jotting presents no problem; it’s the occurring that is difficult.”

          Black is open to learning from any source and admits to having admiration for tabloid newspaper journalists “because writing even a mediocre tabloid story is fiendishly difficult. You have to deliver a maximum amount of impact with a minimal number of words--and simple words at that.” Black definitely doesn’t consider writing for publication to be a hobby or something to pass time in retirement.

          On the never-ending need for hard work and study, he repeats the Margaret Laurence story of “an eminent Canadian brain surgeon [who] once made the mistake of telling . . . Laurence over the hors d’oeuvres that when he retired he planned to become a writer. ‘What a coincidence,’ she responded sweetly. ‘When I retire, I plan to take up brain surgery.’”

          Maybe novelists like Laurence and even people like me can pursue neurosurgery in retirement if we live long enough and have Arthur Black’s inclination to keep learning, working, and jabbing at people.

         

Writing Exercise

Write an analysis of the last federal or provincial budget in memo format as a government policy analyst. Then rewrite it using the words “Nazi,” “idiots,” and “nutbars” at least three times each.