- Published on
Some things just don’t go away.
Consider Covid. It’s not going away but keeps coming up with new variants. What is going away, and pretty quickly at that, is our willingness to be diligent about public health measures to slow its spread. It’s not on the news very often anymore. But when it is, I hear people are still dying from it.
I imagine that the Covid virus is gleefully watching as we stop wearing masks and don’t get our vaccinations, relishing the new opportunities our diminishing precaution creates for its transmission and mutation. I bet Covid merrily thinks that politicians are just the greatest, the way they take care of their own popularity rather than their population. (Please forgive the anthropomorphisms gleefully, relishing and merrily—my muse said I should just go for it).
And while some things don’t go away, or at least take a really long time to do so and keep adapting along the way, other things follow a steady diminishing course. Individually and as a society we have trouble with those, trying to figure out just when they are gone.
Last month I blogged about things that gradually emerge. You might remember pondering about when life begins in the womb or when adulthood has arrived to be able to make mature decisions about killing machines, or not. But consider the other side of the life cycle. There we have issues of euthanasia and providing dignified care for the elderly.
Five years ago my mother died after ten years of decline due to dementia. It was a painful process to watch. In her late 80’s she was still driving the old people to their doctor’s appointments. In her early 90’s she was still doing her own and my niece’s income tax by hand, without a calculator.
In her last year or two of life I could only visit two or three times a year as I lived half a continent away and I was still working full time. Those visits provided snapshots of the dementia decline as one faculty after another was lost. One I remember clearly was her desire for me to play the piano for her. Between two visits the part of her mind that remembered the tunes and names of hymns departed. That was sad because those songs had meant so much.
On the last visit she remembered me, but only when I said my name. A brief look of relief and recognition came to her eyes. By then her only vocalization was a repetitive phrase “Help me. Please. Please help me.” Over and over again she said it, never able to tell us what she needed help with. I sadly suspected that it was to be released from this life to go the next that she had always believed would occur for her.
Which brings me to an even more poignant recollection. When I was a teenager she and I would visit her mother, also suffering dementia in a nursing home. It was painful for my mom when grandma couldn’t recall her name but called her by the name of mom’s long deceased sister.
And after those visits mom said to me, “if I ever get like that, shoot me.”
So she did and I didn’t.
When did I lose my mom? At a specific point in time there was sufficient organ failure for the doctor to pronounce her death. That’s when we lost her physical body. But it was a gradual diminishing of the degree of connection. At some point we no longer talked on the phone. At another my visits were no longer occasions for a trip to the eye doctor, dentist, and arthritis doctor—and to go down to the park at Hamilton Harbour, or shopping at the Bay.
At a later point she had no sense of what my life was.
There are somethings that never left—certainly the love, respect and appreciation I have for her. But even the stories that defined who we were are diminishing in their vitality within my mind.
Well, in this blog I announce the end to a portion of my website, doing so even before it goes through its eventual decline. The post of short fiction on my Fourth Comings page two weeks ago will be my last.
Over the last six months I’ve populated the Fourth Comings page with short stories featuring characters from An Incoming Tide. These vignettes have allowed me to recycle some of the backstory that I had to cut from the novel.
At the same time while doing so, I’ve been editing the sequel novel which I hope to release in the next year. Most of the characters from An Incoming Tide are there, trying to overcome what I put them through in the first novel. The sequel is a story of healing and renewal.
These writerly tasks have kept these characters alive for me. However, in the last month or so I have felt those characters start to retreat from my mind. In their place new characters and contexts have emerged. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s Fourth Comings. It’s cool.
But like Covid, this is not an ending but a mutation. Replacing Fourth Comings in September is a new page labeled Engage (not very original but I happen to be watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix). Engage invites you into a deeper relationship with me as an author.
In part this mutation is to further my writing career. If I self-publish stories on the website I’m unable to submit those stories to magazines, contests and anthologies. I hope in the coming year to get my writing out there to the public in that broader way.
For those of you who have enjoyed the Fourth Comings, on the Engage page I’ll be listing synopses of short stories seeking beta-readers, asking for pre-publication feedback to aid in honing my craft. If you’re willing to help me out this way, I’ll send the stories out to you by email.
I sure hope that many of you will say Make it so.
Consider Covid. It’s not going away but keeps coming up with new variants. What is going away, and pretty quickly at that, is our willingness to be diligent about public health measures to slow its spread. It’s not on the news very often anymore. But when it is, I hear people are still dying from it.
I imagine that the Covid virus is gleefully watching as we stop wearing masks and don’t get our vaccinations, relishing the new opportunities our diminishing precaution creates for its transmission and mutation. I bet Covid merrily thinks that politicians are just the greatest, the way they take care of their own popularity rather than their population. (Please forgive the anthropomorphisms gleefully, relishing and merrily—my muse said I should just go for it).
And while some things don’t go away, or at least take a really long time to do so and keep adapting along the way, other things follow a steady diminishing course. Individually and as a society we have trouble with those, trying to figure out just when they are gone.
Last month I blogged about things that gradually emerge. You might remember pondering about when life begins in the womb or when adulthood has arrived to be able to make mature decisions about killing machines, or not. But consider the other side of the life cycle. There we have issues of euthanasia and providing dignified care for the elderly.
Five years ago my mother died after ten years of decline due to dementia. It was a painful process to watch. In her late 80’s she was still driving the old people to their doctor’s appointments. In her early 90’s she was still doing her own and my niece’s income tax by hand, without a calculator.
In her last year or two of life I could only visit two or three times a year as I lived half a continent away and I was still working full time. Those visits provided snapshots of the dementia decline as one faculty after another was lost. One I remember clearly was her desire for me to play the piano for her. Between two visits the part of her mind that remembered the tunes and names of hymns departed. That was sad because those songs had meant so much.
On the last visit she remembered me, but only when I said my name. A brief look of relief and recognition came to her eyes. By then her only vocalization was a repetitive phrase “Help me. Please. Please help me.” Over and over again she said it, never able to tell us what she needed help with. I sadly suspected that it was to be released from this life to go the next that she had always believed would occur for her.
Which brings me to an even more poignant recollection. When I was a teenager she and I would visit her mother, also suffering dementia in a nursing home. It was painful for my mom when grandma couldn’t recall her name but called her by the name of mom’s long deceased sister.
And after those visits mom said to me, “if I ever get like that, shoot me.”
So she did and I didn’t.
When did I lose my mom? At a specific point in time there was sufficient organ failure for the doctor to pronounce her death. That’s when we lost her physical body. But it was a gradual diminishing of the degree of connection. At some point we no longer talked on the phone. At another my visits were no longer occasions for a trip to the eye doctor, dentist, and arthritis doctor—and to go down to the park at Hamilton Harbour, or shopping at the Bay.
At a later point she had no sense of what my life was.
There are somethings that never left—certainly the love, respect and appreciation I have for her. But even the stories that defined who we were are diminishing in their vitality within my mind.
Well, in this blog I announce the end to a portion of my website, doing so even before it goes through its eventual decline. The post of short fiction on my Fourth Comings page two weeks ago will be my last.
Over the last six months I’ve populated the Fourth Comings page with short stories featuring characters from An Incoming Tide. These vignettes have allowed me to recycle some of the backstory that I had to cut from the novel.
At the same time while doing so, I’ve been editing the sequel novel which I hope to release in the next year. Most of the characters from An Incoming Tide are there, trying to overcome what I put them through in the first novel. The sequel is a story of healing and renewal.
These writerly tasks have kept these characters alive for me. However, in the last month or so I have felt those characters start to retreat from my mind. In their place new characters and contexts have emerged. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s Fourth Comings. It’s cool.
But like Covid, this is not an ending but a mutation. Replacing Fourth Comings in September is a new page labeled Engage (not very original but I happen to be watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix). Engage invites you into a deeper relationship with me as an author.
In part this mutation is to further my writing career. If I self-publish stories on the website I’m unable to submit those stories to magazines, contests and anthologies. I hope in the coming year to get my writing out there to the public in that broader way.
For those of you who have enjoyed the Fourth Comings, on the Engage page I’ll be listing synopses of short stories seeking beta-readers, asking for pre-publication feedback to aid in honing my craft. If you’re willing to help me out this way, I’ll send the stories out to you by email.
I sure hope that many of you will say Make it so.
Check out my previous blog's by clicking below.
July 2022—The problem with what emerges.
June 2022 — So who am I doing this for anyway?
May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ...
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes.
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus.
September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
June 2022 — So who am I doing this for anyway?
May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ...
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes.
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus.
September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
- Published on
A novel I read a couple of months ago is still with me.
The backstory gradually emerged throughout the novel. The past undergirding a present-day story was intricate, ominous and convoluted. Aptly enough, that backstory took place on a lighthouse island, the sea around often cloaked in fog.
I strained to understand that backstory, an experience like trying to catch sight of a boat through the mists of Lake Superior. In a sense, all that makes for good fiction—that sense of something emerging, trying to figure it out.
However, in our culture we have a great deal of struggle with whole idea of things emerging. We like to think that something either exists or does not. We don’t think of all that is around—and within—as what comes to be, exists a while, and then fades away.
We want it to be simpler than that—things either are or are not.
Think about the debate on abortion and trying to fix when life begins. Historically there have been many answers—at quickening, or when a heartbeat can be heard, at conception. Maybe it’s when the mother begins to relate to what is happening in her womb as a baby rather than a health status. She should know, shouldn’t she?
And think about mass shootings. Apparently, research shows they’re the end result of a process—first a grievance, then an evolving mix of envisioning/planning/procuring, and finally the execution of the act. Mass shootings don’t just happen, there’s a consistent process as to how they emerge, each stage amplified or diminished by contextual variables.
Undoubtedly, countless potential shootings are somewhere in this process as you read this. Some will reach the tragic end state, some will not. When does society have a responsibility to intervene in that emergent process? Should we carefully consider grievances, work to resolve them just to keep the process from starting? Nah, there are too many in our frustrating, yet entitled world. By default, we seem to just wait until they occur and shoot the shooter.
Oops, I feel a digression coming on ... An eye for an eye just leaves two people half blind, impaired in both depth and peripheral vision. From that ancient adage of paying back harm for harm, different ways of considering morality and ethics thankfully have emerged. Well, at least for some of us anyway.
Getting back to the point … the unique problem that the USA has with gun violence emerges from a complexity of factors— a not-so-glorious founding history of racism and appropriation, cherished capitalist profit pushing the arming industry to thrive through political potentiation, a present culture emphasizing personal rights and entitlement over personal responsibility and civic wellbeing—even the ennui and frustration from a pandemic.
And then there’s an obsolete notion of when an adult has fully emerged from childhood. How similar it is to the abortion debate of when life begins! Is there any good reason to keep the age of majority in the teens? Perhaps as a society it’s time to consider that society has outgrown that notion like it has outgrown other things. For some reason the USA seems hellbent on giving the right to buy a killing machine to the consumer before he has the neurological maturity to handle it. Hellbent.
Put all these contributing factors together and you end up in a Buffalo supermarket with blood flowing in the aisles, or a Texas school with law enforcement cowering in the hall or a Fourth of July parade with bodies blown up by a young man in a sniper’s nest on the rooftop. These didn’t just happen. They emerged within a nexus of contributing factors.
Much of what occurs in our personal lives also emerges of complexity. There’s a constant flux of contributing variables that go together to create outcomes. These variables cycle around, come back on themselves, get morphed into expectations, habits and decisions. Then they become that observable something.
In western culture we’re largely blind to this. We cherish the notion that things happen as a result of deliberation and individual action. Outcomes are not supposed to just emerge, they are to be engineered. There are goals to be set and practical actions to be engaged to achieve those goals. Only when we look at outcomes will we know whether or not we are on track. We’re to think of ourselves in terms of what we have accomplished through planning and successful execution—not in terms of what had emerged from the fog of our lives.
But what has this to do with writing? After all, this is an author’s blog.
From the outset of my writing I made the decision in writing that I would not engineer the plot outcome in my novels. I wrote allowing my characters to speak and act with their own response to circumstance. My writing process was to set the stage and then listen to what my characters said and watch what they did.
Of course, this isn’t the proper way to be an author. I see lots of ads for workshops and courses on how to write a novel—apparently there is a linear system of literary engineering to get acclaim and sell lots of books.
I’m not interested. Such a novel doesn’t let the reader experience the complexity of human nature any more than what they have already experienced in all the other novels that followed the same plan.
The important things in life—values, beauty, meaning, presence, cherishing and loving relationships—don’t come from a simple how-to process (although don’t try to tell that to the self-help industry of books and workshops). We can’t engineer what is most vitally human. We can only cherish these things as they emerge from within, recognizing what is important comes from what we nurture rather than what we strive for.
And when we take a step back to look out through the fog of our own consciousness, we catch a glimpse of what has emerged there. Perhaps it’s a bit ethereal, but real none-the-less.
The backstory gradually emerged throughout the novel. The past undergirding a present-day story was intricate, ominous and convoluted. Aptly enough, that backstory took place on a lighthouse island, the sea around often cloaked in fog.
I strained to understand that backstory, an experience like trying to catch sight of a boat through the mists of Lake Superior. In a sense, all that makes for good fiction—that sense of something emerging, trying to figure it out.
However, in our culture we have a great deal of struggle with whole idea of things emerging. We like to think that something either exists or does not. We don’t think of all that is around—and within—as what comes to be, exists a while, and then fades away.
We want it to be simpler than that—things either are or are not.
Think about the debate on abortion and trying to fix when life begins. Historically there have been many answers—at quickening, or when a heartbeat can be heard, at conception. Maybe it’s when the mother begins to relate to what is happening in her womb as a baby rather than a health status. She should know, shouldn’t she?
And think about mass shootings. Apparently, research shows they’re the end result of a process—first a grievance, then an evolving mix of envisioning/planning/procuring, and finally the execution of the act. Mass shootings don’t just happen, there’s a consistent process as to how they emerge, each stage amplified or diminished by contextual variables.
Undoubtedly, countless potential shootings are somewhere in this process as you read this. Some will reach the tragic end state, some will not. When does society have a responsibility to intervene in that emergent process? Should we carefully consider grievances, work to resolve them just to keep the process from starting? Nah, there are too many in our frustrating, yet entitled world. By default, we seem to just wait until they occur and shoot the shooter.
Oops, I feel a digression coming on ... An eye for an eye just leaves two people half blind, impaired in both depth and peripheral vision. From that ancient adage of paying back harm for harm, different ways of considering morality and ethics thankfully have emerged. Well, at least for some of us anyway.
Getting back to the point … the unique problem that the USA has with gun violence emerges from a complexity of factors— a not-so-glorious founding history of racism and appropriation, cherished capitalist profit pushing the arming industry to thrive through political potentiation, a present culture emphasizing personal rights and entitlement over personal responsibility and civic wellbeing—even the ennui and frustration from a pandemic.
And then there’s an obsolete notion of when an adult has fully emerged from childhood. How similar it is to the abortion debate of when life begins! Is there any good reason to keep the age of majority in the teens? Perhaps as a society it’s time to consider that society has outgrown that notion like it has outgrown other things. For some reason the USA seems hellbent on giving the right to buy a killing machine to the consumer before he has the neurological maturity to handle it. Hellbent.
Put all these contributing factors together and you end up in a Buffalo supermarket with blood flowing in the aisles, or a Texas school with law enforcement cowering in the hall or a Fourth of July parade with bodies blown up by a young man in a sniper’s nest on the rooftop. These didn’t just happen. They emerged within a nexus of contributing factors.
Much of what occurs in our personal lives also emerges of complexity. There’s a constant flux of contributing variables that go together to create outcomes. These variables cycle around, come back on themselves, get morphed into expectations, habits and decisions. Then they become that observable something.
In western culture we’re largely blind to this. We cherish the notion that things happen as a result of deliberation and individual action. Outcomes are not supposed to just emerge, they are to be engineered. There are goals to be set and practical actions to be engaged to achieve those goals. Only when we look at outcomes will we know whether or not we are on track. We’re to think of ourselves in terms of what we have accomplished through planning and successful execution—not in terms of what had emerged from the fog of our lives.
But what has this to do with writing? After all, this is an author’s blog.
From the outset of my writing I made the decision in writing that I would not engineer the plot outcome in my novels. I wrote allowing my characters to speak and act with their own response to circumstance. My writing process was to set the stage and then listen to what my characters said and watch what they did.
Of course, this isn’t the proper way to be an author. I see lots of ads for workshops and courses on how to write a novel—apparently there is a linear system of literary engineering to get acclaim and sell lots of books.
I’m not interested. Such a novel doesn’t let the reader experience the complexity of human nature any more than what they have already experienced in all the other novels that followed the same plan.
The important things in life—values, beauty, meaning, presence, cherishing and loving relationships—don’t come from a simple how-to process (although don’t try to tell that to the self-help industry of books and workshops). We can’t engineer what is most vitally human. We can only cherish these things as they emerge from within, recognizing what is important comes from what we nurture rather than what we strive for.
And when we take a step back to look out through the fog of our own consciousness, we catch a glimpse of what has emerged there. Perhaps it’s a bit ethereal, but real none-the-less.
You can check out my previous blogs by following the links below.
July 2022—The problem with what emerges.
June 2022 — So who am I doing this for anyway?
May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ...
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes.
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus.
September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
June 2022 — So who am I doing this for anyway?
May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ...
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes.
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus.
September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
- Published on
When I was editing a few weeks ago, a tear came to my eye.
No, it wasn’t a tear of frustration or that gargoyle of self-recrimination over yet another surface error—you know, some poor word choice, some awkward sequence of phrases. Nor was it my typical consternation with punctuation marks. When I edit I constantly move about the dashes, commas, ellipses and periods—I can never seem to get the rhythm right for the reader to hear the cadence of the sentences as I hear them in my mind.
No, the tear wasn’t for those writerly things that an edit seeks to correct. It was for a character.
Let me explain. Effective story telling often has repeating plot elements, building over time, each repetition creating a heightened weight of emotional meaning. You might have noticed that in An Incoming Tide. I was noticing it in Undertow, the sequel novel now being edited.
It builds, folds in on itself, challenges the emotional equilibrium of the reader until it reaches its peak. When resolved there’s the emotional energy of circumstance and the character’s subjective experience that needs to be released.
And hence the tear.
It always catches me off guard.
An Incoming Tide had about two dozen editing passes. By the time I was willing to say enough and let it go to be published, three and a half years had passed since its initial writing. It was not until the last two or three editing passes that I no longer cried at Nate’s funeral.
What catches us in a good story is not the cleverness of plot twists, not the vividness of description nor the oddities of characters. Those things make the reading rich and help to propel the reader forward, tweaking the imagination. We might catch that cleverness. But what catches us is the humanity of the tale.
Perhaps by now you might have read An Incoming Tide. If you have, I expect what you will remember are the moments when the subjective humanity of my characters shone through. Oh, there’s other good stuff in there, too. I still marvel at how Leanne caught the family emotional dynamics in her portraits. It was—dare I say it?—a clever way to provide backstory. And, the scene in the Vancouver airport with Jackson’s experience of the public art there pointed out the paucity of character in a psychiatrist who just doesn’t get the entanglement of human emotional experience. It was like I gave the psychiatrist his very own Rorschach test and he failed! I like that part too, but it’s merely just clever.
What do you remember, what scenes caught you up emotionally? I suspect it was not the clever bits but the scenes when you felt something characters were feeling at that point in the story.
There’s a companion observation that came from my four decades of work as a psychotherapist. I sometimes asked clients returning after I hadn’t seen them for some time why they had chosen to come back to me, this rather than pursuing other options available. Only one ever said it was because of a particular brand of therapy I happened to use. One recounted that it was something I had said, repeating it. Much to my chagrin, that something sounded more like Dr. Phil than like anything I could ever have said myself!
No, typically wasn’t about therapy protocol or pronouncement. What drew them back was how they felt when they were with me—typically something like heard, or safe, or cared about. Often what was felt had been felt simultaneously by both my client and myself—attunement into the subjectiveness of each other. (And my spell check doesn’t like either of those two words, attunement and subjectiveness but I do, so I’m just going to leave them).
It’s like what I felt with the mourners at Nate’s funeral. Or when that tear came to my eye at the moment of relief in my editing of Undertow.
Perhaps you might imagine how tedious it would be to do two dozen editing passes of one’s own work. Truly it is a labour of love. But it’s not love not for the product—and to be honest, it is hard work to get my writing so it can say something powerful to you. No, not for the product, but my continuing love for the characters there.
They are who I write for … to tell their story … to have my own tear when they have theirs.
No, it wasn’t a tear of frustration or that gargoyle of self-recrimination over yet another surface error—you know, some poor word choice, some awkward sequence of phrases. Nor was it my typical consternation with punctuation marks. When I edit I constantly move about the dashes, commas, ellipses and periods—I can never seem to get the rhythm right for the reader to hear the cadence of the sentences as I hear them in my mind.
No, the tear wasn’t for those writerly things that an edit seeks to correct. It was for a character.
Let me explain. Effective story telling often has repeating plot elements, building over time, each repetition creating a heightened weight of emotional meaning. You might have noticed that in An Incoming Tide. I was noticing it in Undertow, the sequel novel now being edited.
It builds, folds in on itself, challenges the emotional equilibrium of the reader until it reaches its peak. When resolved there’s the emotional energy of circumstance and the character’s subjective experience that needs to be released.
And hence the tear.
It always catches me off guard.
An Incoming Tide had about two dozen editing passes. By the time I was willing to say enough and let it go to be published, three and a half years had passed since its initial writing. It was not until the last two or three editing passes that I no longer cried at Nate’s funeral.
What catches us in a good story is not the cleverness of plot twists, not the vividness of description nor the oddities of characters. Those things make the reading rich and help to propel the reader forward, tweaking the imagination. We might catch that cleverness. But what catches us is the humanity of the tale.
Perhaps by now you might have read An Incoming Tide. If you have, I expect what you will remember are the moments when the subjective humanity of my characters shone through. Oh, there’s other good stuff in there, too. I still marvel at how Leanne caught the family emotional dynamics in her portraits. It was—dare I say it?—a clever way to provide backstory. And, the scene in the Vancouver airport with Jackson’s experience of the public art there pointed out the paucity of character in a psychiatrist who just doesn’t get the entanglement of human emotional experience. It was like I gave the psychiatrist his very own Rorschach test and he failed! I like that part too, but it’s merely just clever.
What do you remember, what scenes caught you up emotionally? I suspect it was not the clever bits but the scenes when you felt something characters were feeling at that point in the story.
There’s a companion observation that came from my four decades of work as a psychotherapist. I sometimes asked clients returning after I hadn’t seen them for some time why they had chosen to come back to me, this rather than pursuing other options available. Only one ever said it was because of a particular brand of therapy I happened to use. One recounted that it was something I had said, repeating it. Much to my chagrin, that something sounded more like Dr. Phil than like anything I could ever have said myself!
No, typically wasn’t about therapy protocol or pronouncement. What drew them back was how they felt when they were with me—typically something like heard, or safe, or cared about. Often what was felt had been felt simultaneously by both my client and myself—attunement into the subjectiveness of each other. (And my spell check doesn’t like either of those two words, attunement and subjectiveness but I do, so I’m just going to leave them).
It’s like what I felt with the mourners at Nate’s funeral. Or when that tear came to my eye at the moment of relief in my editing of Undertow.
Perhaps you might imagine how tedious it would be to do two dozen editing passes of one’s own work. Truly it is a labour of love. But it’s not love not for the product—and to be honest, it is hard work to get my writing so it can say something powerful to you. No, not for the product, but my continuing love for the characters there.
They are who I write for … to tell their story … to have my own tear when they have theirs.
You can check out my previous blog posts using the links below.
May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ...
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes.
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus.
September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes.
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus.
September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
- Published on
When I was editing a few weeks ago, a tear came to my eye.
No, it wasn’t a tear of frustration or that gargoyle of self-recrimination over yet another surface error—you know, some poor word choice, some awkward sequence of phrases. Nor was it my typical consternation with punctuation marks. When I edit I constantly move about the dashes, commas, ellipses and periods—I can never seem to get the rhythm right for the reader to hear the cadence of the sentences as I hear them in my mind.
No, the tear wasn’t for those writerly things that an edit seeks to correct. It was for a character.
Let me explain. Effective story telling often has repeating plot elements, building over time, each repetition creating a heightened weight of emotional meaning. You might have noticed that in An Incoming Tide. I was noticing it in Undertow, the sequel novel now being edited.
It builds, folds in on itself, challenges the emotional equilibrium of the reader until it reaches its peak. When resolved there’s the emotional energy of circumstance and the character’s subjective experience that needs to be released.
And hence the tear.
It always catches me off guard.
An Incoming Tide had about two dozen editing passes. By the time I was willing to say enough and let it go to be published, three and a half years had passed since its initial writing. It was not until the last two or three editing passes that I no longer cried at Nate’s funeral.
What catches us in a good story is not the cleverness of plot twists, not the vividness of description nor the oddities of characters. Those things make the reading rich and help to propel the reader forward, tweaking the imagination. We might catch that cleverness. But what catches us is the humanity of the tale.
Perhaps by now you might have read An Incoming Tide. If you have, I expect what you will remember are the moments when the subjective humanity of my characters shone through. Oh, there’s other good stuff in there, too. I still marvel at how Leanne caught the family emotional dynamics in her portraits. It was—dare I say it?—a clever way to provide backstory. And, the scene in the Vancouver airport with Jackson’s experience of the public art there pointed out the paucity of character in a psychiatrist who just doesn’t get the entanglement of human emotional experience. It was like I gave the psychiatrist his very own Rorschach test and he failed! I like that part too, but it’s merely just clever.
What do you remember, what scenes caught you up emotionally? I suspect it was not the clever bits but the scenes when you felt something characters were feeling at that point in the story.
There’s a companion observation that came from my four decades of work as a psychotherapist. I sometimes asked clients returning after I hadn’t seen them for some time why they had chosen to come back to me, this rather than pursuing other options available. Only one ever said it was because of a particular brand of therapy I happened to use. One recounted that it was something I had said, repeating it. Much to my chagrin, that something sounded more like Dr. Phil than like anything I could ever have said myself!
No, typically wasn’t about therapy protocol or pronouncement. What drew them back was how they felt when they were with me—typically something like heard, or safe, or cared about. Often what was felt had been felt simultaneously by both my client and myself—attunement into the subjectiveness of each other. (And my spell check doesn’t like either of those two words, attunement and subjectiveness but I do, so I’m just going to leave them).
It’s like what I felt with the mourners at Nate’s funeral. Or when that tear came to my eye at the moment of relief in my editing of Undertow.
Perhaps you might imagine how tedious it would be to do two dozen editing passes of one’s own work. Truly it is a labour of love. But it’s not love not for the product—and to be honest, it is hard work to get my writing so it can say something powerful to you. No, not for the product, but my continuing love for the characters there.
They are who I write for … to tell their story … to have my own tear when they have theirs.
No, it wasn’t a tear of frustration or that gargoyle of self-recrimination over yet another surface error—you know, some poor word choice, some awkward sequence of phrases. Nor was it my typical consternation with punctuation marks. When I edit I constantly move about the dashes, commas, ellipses and periods—I can never seem to get the rhythm right for the reader to hear the cadence of the sentences as I hear them in my mind.
No, the tear wasn’t for those writerly things that an edit seeks to correct. It was for a character.
Let me explain. Effective story telling often has repeating plot elements, building over time, each repetition creating a heightened weight of emotional meaning. You might have noticed that in An Incoming Tide. I was noticing it in Undertow, the sequel novel now being edited.
It builds, folds in on itself, challenges the emotional equilibrium of the reader until it reaches its peak. When resolved there’s the emotional energy of circumstance and the character’s subjective experience that needs to be released.
And hence the tear.
It always catches me off guard.
An Incoming Tide had about two dozen editing passes. By the time I was willing to say enough and let it go to be published, three and a half years had passed since its initial writing. It was not until the last two or three editing passes that I no longer cried at Nate’s funeral.
What catches us in a good story is not the cleverness of plot twists, not the vividness of description nor the oddities of characters. Those things make the reading rich and help to propel the reader forward, tweaking the imagination. We might catch that cleverness. But what catches us is the humanity of the tale.
Perhaps by now you might have read An Incoming Tide. If you have, I expect what you will remember are the moments when the subjective humanity of my characters shone through. Oh, there’s other good stuff in there, too. I still marvel at how Leanne caught the family emotional dynamics in her portraits. It was—dare I say it?—a clever way to provide backstory. And, the scene in the Vancouver airport with Jackson’s experience of the public art there pointed out the paucity of character in a psychiatrist who just doesn’t get the entanglement of human emotional experience. It was like I gave the psychiatrist his very own Rorschach test and he failed! I like that part too, but it’s merely just clever.
What do you remember, what scenes caught you up emotionally? I suspect it was not the clever bits but the scenes when you felt something characters were feeling at that point in the story.
There’s a companion observation that came from my four decades of work as a psychotherapist. I sometimes asked clients returning after I hadn’t seen them for some time why they had chosen to come back to me, this rather than pursuing other options available. Only one ever said it was because of a particular brand of therapy I happened to use. One recounted that it was something I had said, repeating it. Much to my chagrin, that something sounded more like Dr. Phil than like anything I could ever have said myself!
No, typically wasn’t about therapy protocol or pronouncement. What drew them back was how they felt when they were with me—typically something like heard, or safe, or cared about. Often what was felt had been felt simultaneously by both my client and myself—attunement into the subjectiveness of each other. (And my spell check doesn’t like either of those two words, attunement and subjectiveness but I do, so I’m just going to leave them).
It’s like what I felt with the mourners at Nate’s funeral. Or when that tear came to my eye at the moment of relief in my editing of Undertow.
Perhaps you might imagine how tedious it would be to do two dozen editing passes of one’s own work. Truly it is a labour of love. But it’s not love not for the product—and to be honest, it is hard work to get my writing so it can say something powerful to you. No, not for the product, but my continuing love for the characters there.
They are who I write for … to tell their story … to have my own tear when they have theirs.
May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ...
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes.
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus.
September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes.
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus.
September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
- Published on
Over decades of psychotherapy practice I came to realize that timing was everything. Now as an author, I’m making that discovery all over again.
In the counseling office the therapist’s most insightful thought, that most profound gambit toward goodness, can trigger resistance in the client if spoken too soon. On the other hand, if things proceed too slowly a sense of discouragement and disillusionment blooms.
In all the books on psychotherapy I read (and there were dozens) I don’t think any author ever mentioned that. In all the studies of effective psychotherapy no one ever introduced timing as the independent variable to be manipulated.
Good timing is about reading the readiness, tuning into the anticipation of the other. Comedians can do it with the live audience. Hilarity intensifies with well-timed comedic lines. In the audience, all other thoughts are pushed from the mind, laughter becomes irresistible.
Of course, the room goes dead if the timing isn’t right—in the entertainment hall and the therapy office too.
The effective therapist not only saves the good stuff for the good moment, but knows how to cradle and gentle the client along until that moment comes.
And timing is not just important within the session, but also over the whole course of sessions that comprise the therapeutic relationship. Different stages in the healing process require different approaches, different timings. An effective therapist watches for whether the relationship is going stale, or unfocused, or uselessly repetitive, knows when to switch things up or when to settle in to the sustainable pace.
I practiced psychotherapy for 42 years—practiced, in both senses of the word, reflecting on the process and the timing, desirous of getting better at it.
Now I come to writing. The struggle of how to get the timing right is here too. I have read novels that do it, that keep you guessing and wanting until they froth you to stay up past your bedtime. Other novels simply get tedious, feel wordy or sparse, give you that get on with it sort of feeling, get you wondering what else you might read instead.
With An Incoming Tide I decided to set off the novel with a bang. Then what? I needed a sense of rhythm. The sequence of chapters based on successive days over a two week period established that for me. But to jump right in?
In composing jazz music there are times when I need a bridge. Chapter two, written well after the rest of An Incoming Tide, became that bridge. A transition between twenty-five years before and when the events of family life pick up again. But even that bridge needed to have its own timing—ah-ha! a series of seven portraits to carry both backstory and foreshadowing.
Did I get the timing right? I really can’t be the judge of that, only you can as the reader.
Now, as an author rather than a psychologist, I’m at a disadvantage. For all the years in the therapy office I could watch the telltale signs of whether or not my client was with me, whether I was getting the timing right. Now you go off and do your reading alone. As bizarre and intrusive as it sounds, I kind of wish I was there with you, watching your face, seeing when you get up to go because you really need to put in your laundry or water your plants. Then I’d watch to see how soon you pick up the novel again, settling back into your reading chair.
But I can’t.
I have to just let it be. I hope the timing will be okay, that it will keep you engaged without hurrying you along too much, that there will be moments to savour as well as those to propel you forward.
Hey, if you’ve read An Incoming Tide I’d love to know whether I got the timing right. And, I suppose at this stage, I can’t lose any more sleep over it—but maybe you will.
In the counseling office the therapist’s most insightful thought, that most profound gambit toward goodness, can trigger resistance in the client if spoken too soon. On the other hand, if things proceed too slowly a sense of discouragement and disillusionment blooms.
In all the books on psychotherapy I read (and there were dozens) I don’t think any author ever mentioned that. In all the studies of effective psychotherapy no one ever introduced timing as the independent variable to be manipulated.
Good timing is about reading the readiness, tuning into the anticipation of the other. Comedians can do it with the live audience. Hilarity intensifies with well-timed comedic lines. In the audience, all other thoughts are pushed from the mind, laughter becomes irresistible.
Of course, the room goes dead if the timing isn’t right—in the entertainment hall and the therapy office too.
The effective therapist not only saves the good stuff for the good moment, but knows how to cradle and gentle the client along until that moment comes.
And timing is not just important within the session, but also over the whole course of sessions that comprise the therapeutic relationship. Different stages in the healing process require different approaches, different timings. An effective therapist watches for whether the relationship is going stale, or unfocused, or uselessly repetitive, knows when to switch things up or when to settle in to the sustainable pace.
I practiced psychotherapy for 42 years—practiced, in both senses of the word, reflecting on the process and the timing, desirous of getting better at it.
Now I come to writing. The struggle of how to get the timing right is here too. I have read novels that do it, that keep you guessing and wanting until they froth you to stay up past your bedtime. Other novels simply get tedious, feel wordy or sparse, give you that get on with it sort of feeling, get you wondering what else you might read instead.
With An Incoming Tide I decided to set off the novel with a bang. Then what? I needed a sense of rhythm. The sequence of chapters based on successive days over a two week period established that for me. But to jump right in?
In composing jazz music there are times when I need a bridge. Chapter two, written well after the rest of An Incoming Tide, became that bridge. A transition between twenty-five years before and when the events of family life pick up again. But even that bridge needed to have its own timing—ah-ha! a series of seven portraits to carry both backstory and foreshadowing.
Did I get the timing right? I really can’t be the judge of that, only you can as the reader.
Now, as an author rather than a psychologist, I’m at a disadvantage. For all the years in the therapy office I could watch the telltale signs of whether or not my client was with me, whether I was getting the timing right. Now you go off and do your reading alone. As bizarre and intrusive as it sounds, I kind of wish I was there with you, watching your face, seeing when you get up to go because you really need to put in your laundry or water your plants. Then I’d watch to see how soon you pick up the novel again, settling back into your reading chair.
But I can’t.
I have to just let it be. I hope the timing will be okay, that it will keep you engaged without hurrying you along too much, that there will be moments to savour as well as those to propel you forward.
Hey, if you’ve read An Incoming Tide I’d love to know whether I got the timing right. And, I suppose at this stage, I can’t lose any more sleep over it—but maybe you will.
Archive contents ... click on the link below to open
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes.
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus.
September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
- Published on
Yes, I was called a Nazi. Well, sort of ...
It happened in an unlikely place—the theatre on board a Viking Ocean Cruises ship.
Let me set this up for you. We were in the midst of a great cruise around the British Isles. Sure, we were nervous about traveling again with the sixth wave of Covid taking hold. But Viking was doing everything possible to make our trip safe and healthy.
Amongst the Covid precautions, all passengers were required to wear masks in all public areas except when actively eating. Unfortunately as the cruise went on, more and more passengers stopped wearing masks or left their noses hanging out over top of the mask. I know that sounds absolutely bizarre, that sticking out the nose like that, but it was quite popular with the group we were in.
I asked one of the passengers to put his mask on when he sat beside me in the theatre on the ship. That was when he called me a Nazi. Well, to be clear, he grumbled as he put it on, saying, “well, if you are going to be a Nazi about it.” Then he said that masks weren’t effective anyway. A few minutes later he got up and walked away, presumably so he didn’t have to sit beside me. I think I ruined his evening.
How did we get here?
We got here based on competing stories that different sectors of our society subscribe to. Stories. Not information. Not truth. Stories.
Stories are ubiquitous. Putin tells one story about Ukraine, Zelenskyy another. Republicans tell one story about January 6th, Democrats another. Anti-vaxxers tell one story about the effectiveness of vaccines, medical researchers tell another.
And we all live with the illusion that the story we subscribe to is what is true. If another person’s story differs, we dismiss or discredit that story as wrong, as disinformation or a lie.
But when it comes right down to it, some stories result in lives being lost.
As a novelist, I create stories. When you read my novel—if you engage with it, believe and identify with it, subscribe to it—I’m impacting your view of the world. And so, I have to think hard about my responsibility to my readers in telling the stories that I believe need to be told.
One of the plot lines of An Incoming Tide is a grassroots research study comparing pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical treatments for anxiety and depression. I even tell the fictional outcome of this fictional study. So what if a reader subscribes to that story, stops taking prescribed medication and has a bad outcome to that decision? Have I acted irresponsibly? On the other hand, perhaps by virtue of my story, someone might have the courage to break a toxic dependency on a pharmaceutical they don’t need and may be doing them harm.
What makes that story in the novel particularly seductive is that it contradicts the existing story of mental health treatment that dominates in our culture—the chemical imbalance story. Truly, there is no balance scale for chemicals in the brain. I know I am being a bit glib here, but the simplistic chemical imbalance story is much better at selling chemicals than it is at reflecting on the complexity of how the electrical/chemical process of the brain works (or at least, that’s what the story in my head is telling me!).
My years of working with those suffering emotional and interpersonal distress revealed that while some people with emotional and mental distress benefit from physical treatments (drugs and electroconvulsive therapy) others with similar life difficulties are harmed by them.
Of course, all of this is more complicated than two competing stories. We actually live in an ecology of stories, all interacting. Some stories contradict other stories and some potentiate other ones. Our story ecology is dynamic with new stories emerging, others dying out.
The field of psychology (and mental health) is very young, only about 100 years old. Over my career during the last four decades, there’s been an ebb and flow of prevailing stories about mental health treatment. Each time one of them strengthened we had the illusion that we suddenly had gotten it all right. Years later, each had faded to be replaced by another.
Stories are powerful because they connect things, they provide context to what we observe, they set an emotional tone for the external experiences we encounter. But stories are seductive, seeking to make us believe they are the truth even though they are just what we make up in our head to try to make sense of things.
No, that’s only partially right. While we do make up stories in our head to explain what we experience, many stories we subscribe to are served up to us by those with motives of power or profit. Searching to make sense of things, we sign on to them.
And so in the midst of this, what do we do to responsibly co-exist in the story ecology?
I believe that we need to look at the balance of benefit and harm that competing stories produce. A story that serves to dominate, control or devalue another harms—yes harms, no matter how seductive and ego-enhancing that story feels in the telling. Stories that promote compassion and inclusion smooth social cooperation and connection, help insure survival and individual wellbeing.
And so, “who was that unmasked man?” (apologies to the Lone Ranger).
I don’t know, but I suspect he was pretty miserable when it comes right down to it. Perhaps his story was telling him that he was a victim, that his freedoms were being taken away rather than his health protected, that he had the right to disregard the rules.
But maybe his grumbling made him feel powerful and superior for just a moment. I really don’t know. After all, what he experienced in this was just his own story about the world and his place within it.
oh, and by the way ... if you want to read more about my cruise around the British Isles check out the travel blog on this website.
It happened in an unlikely place—the theatre on board a Viking Ocean Cruises ship.
Let me set this up for you. We were in the midst of a great cruise around the British Isles. Sure, we were nervous about traveling again with the sixth wave of Covid taking hold. But Viking was doing everything possible to make our trip safe and healthy.
Amongst the Covid precautions, all passengers were required to wear masks in all public areas except when actively eating. Unfortunately as the cruise went on, more and more passengers stopped wearing masks or left their noses hanging out over top of the mask. I know that sounds absolutely bizarre, that sticking out the nose like that, but it was quite popular with the group we were in.
I asked one of the passengers to put his mask on when he sat beside me in the theatre on the ship. That was when he called me a Nazi. Well, to be clear, he grumbled as he put it on, saying, “well, if you are going to be a Nazi about it.” Then he said that masks weren’t effective anyway. A few minutes later he got up and walked away, presumably so he didn’t have to sit beside me. I think I ruined his evening.
How did we get here?
We got here based on competing stories that different sectors of our society subscribe to. Stories. Not information. Not truth. Stories.
Stories are ubiquitous. Putin tells one story about Ukraine, Zelenskyy another. Republicans tell one story about January 6th, Democrats another. Anti-vaxxers tell one story about the effectiveness of vaccines, medical researchers tell another.
And we all live with the illusion that the story we subscribe to is what is true. If another person’s story differs, we dismiss or discredit that story as wrong, as disinformation or a lie.
But when it comes right down to it, some stories result in lives being lost.
As a novelist, I create stories. When you read my novel—if you engage with it, believe and identify with it, subscribe to it—I’m impacting your view of the world. And so, I have to think hard about my responsibility to my readers in telling the stories that I believe need to be told.
One of the plot lines of An Incoming Tide is a grassroots research study comparing pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical treatments for anxiety and depression. I even tell the fictional outcome of this fictional study. So what if a reader subscribes to that story, stops taking prescribed medication and has a bad outcome to that decision? Have I acted irresponsibly? On the other hand, perhaps by virtue of my story, someone might have the courage to break a toxic dependency on a pharmaceutical they don’t need and may be doing them harm.
What makes that story in the novel particularly seductive is that it contradicts the existing story of mental health treatment that dominates in our culture—the chemical imbalance story. Truly, there is no balance scale for chemicals in the brain. I know I am being a bit glib here, but the simplistic chemical imbalance story is much better at selling chemicals than it is at reflecting on the complexity of how the electrical/chemical process of the brain works (or at least, that’s what the story in my head is telling me!).
My years of working with those suffering emotional and interpersonal distress revealed that while some people with emotional and mental distress benefit from physical treatments (drugs and electroconvulsive therapy) others with similar life difficulties are harmed by them.
Of course, all of this is more complicated than two competing stories. We actually live in an ecology of stories, all interacting. Some stories contradict other stories and some potentiate other ones. Our story ecology is dynamic with new stories emerging, others dying out.
The field of psychology (and mental health) is very young, only about 100 years old. Over my career during the last four decades, there’s been an ebb and flow of prevailing stories about mental health treatment. Each time one of them strengthened we had the illusion that we suddenly had gotten it all right. Years later, each had faded to be replaced by another.
Stories are powerful because they connect things, they provide context to what we observe, they set an emotional tone for the external experiences we encounter. But stories are seductive, seeking to make us believe they are the truth even though they are just what we make up in our head to try to make sense of things.
No, that’s only partially right. While we do make up stories in our head to explain what we experience, many stories we subscribe to are served up to us by those with motives of power or profit. Searching to make sense of things, we sign on to them.
And so in the midst of this, what do we do to responsibly co-exist in the story ecology?
I believe that we need to look at the balance of benefit and harm that competing stories produce. A story that serves to dominate, control or devalue another harms—yes harms, no matter how seductive and ego-enhancing that story feels in the telling. Stories that promote compassion and inclusion smooth social cooperation and connection, help insure survival and individual wellbeing.
And so, “who was that unmasked man?” (apologies to the Lone Ranger).
I don’t know, but I suspect he was pretty miserable when it comes right down to it. Perhaps his story was telling him that he was a victim, that his freedoms were being taken away rather than his health protected, that he had the right to disregard the rules.
But maybe his grumbling made him feel powerful and superior for just a moment. I really don’t know. After all, what he experienced in this was just his own story about the world and his place within it.
oh, and by the way ... if you want to read more about my cruise around the British Isles check out the travel blog on this website.
Contact form.
- Published on
Hmm, I haven’t told many people this. Somehow though, it’s time to put it in a blog.
So here goes.
Throughout my decades as a psychologist I had a nagging doubt about what I was doing, how I was doing it, whether or not I even should be allowed.
You see, I had no formal clinical education—the kind that teaches diagnosis and how to do treatment. I got my graduate degree in research psychology, not clinical. True enough, both my undergraduate and graduate degrees were from a well-recognized Canadian university. I had a great grounding in what the science of psychology had discovered. And, I did meet the requirements of registration as a psychologist in the Canadian province of Alberta. But all of that applied stuff, what gets taught in graduate programmes on how to be a clinical psychologist … well, I basically picked that up as I went along. Sure, I did some trainings to get certifications and had some supervision. But colleagues would come along who had taken those essential graduate school courses in applied clinical psychology that I never had—I would see them and realize that I never had that same formal foundation in the profession.
To be frank, the doubt that plagued me was whether or not I was a fraud, that people would find out, think that I was an imposter. Eventually, I learned that this had a name: it was called, simply enough, imposter’s syndrome. I also learned that it could be a good thing.
Apparently, a study some decades ago found that professors who suffered from imposter’s syndrome were actually rated better on objective criteria of their profession than those who did not. It turns out that those who doubt themselves, despite being well-educated and trained, don’t take doing good work for granted. Perhaps if they were like me, they self-reflected and self-corrected to do better.
By the end of my career I had lots of feedback from clients that what I did was helpful, for some even lifesaving. I had feedback from colleagues that my passion for doing good work as a psychotherapist was inspiring to them. I was instrumental in setting up a competence cooperative where like-minded psychologists could receive support and enhance practice capabilities. For twenty-five years, I wrote a column for other psychologists that focused on the humanistic foundation for our work. Funny thing that—I trained in science but ended up being a humanist! Anyway, in response to that column, other psychologists told me that they always read it first when the publication came out.
But still the doubt plagued me. I would confess it to colleagues, good colleagues who I respected as doing great work. And they would confess they had those same doubts too—not about me but about themselves.
Now in the field mental health field, there are also other psychologists full of confidence. They show no doubt that they are doing it right. They can even attract a following, rise within the hierarchies, seek attention for themselves as experts. They expect trainees and colleagues not to stray from their protocol despite what the client might say. In the therapy room they are always smarter than their clients, or at least think that they are. The therapy relationship becomes about what they do for the client. In the guise of helping the client, therapy comes to be all about the effectiveness of the treatment they provide. Therapy is not about emotional engagement with the suffering of the client, it is about symptom control and goal accomplishment. To get the end they seek, such professionals diligently push what they are doing because they believe what they are doing is the right thing to do—undoubtedly for them, the only right thing to do. If clients don’t get better, well, that’s about something wrong with the client because there’s nothing wrong with them as the professional service provider.
Professionals like that can hold others in their thrall—that web of loyalty and interpersonal control. They are much the opposite of those suffering from imposter’s syndrome.
Dare I say it? Even in the mental health profession there are narcissists.
You might recognize one such mental health professional and the theme of narcissism in An Incoming Tide. Narcissists never admit to doubting themselves, in psychology terms, they are far too well-defended against that.
My greatest fear, greater even than being found out as a fraud, was that I would become narcissistic. So there I was, caught between two fears—of being under qualified at one extreme, an arrogant egoist at the other.
And so now I come to writing. The last course I took in English was, let’s see, more than 50 years ago. Aside from a weekend workshop on editing one’s own work I’ve taken no formal training to be a writer. My university studies focused on the sciences rather than the humanities or the arts.
Gosh, didn’t I learn my lesson the first time around?
But I have two novels out there. A third is on its way. And I’ve learned that I don’t follow the rules of genre very well. Alas. I didn’t follow the protocols of psychotherapy that well either. I think I was more human, more creative, more sensitive to my clients because I didn't. I can only hope that is the same for writing now, too.
I remain aware that there are aspects of my craft as a writer that are lacking. And so I work on it, afraid that others will find out that I have no degrees in English Literature, no workshops or university courses behind me in creative writing, no accepted credentials that give me the right to do this.
I hope you have read the parable “Creation with a Little Help” posted in the March 2022 Fourth Comings. It’s about this, about the need to embrace one’s own doubt and then push the creative process forward with courage. A courageous little piece that is. Rather creative, I think. And I hope, fully human too.
So here goes.
Throughout my decades as a psychologist I had a nagging doubt about what I was doing, how I was doing it, whether or not I even should be allowed.
You see, I had no formal clinical education—the kind that teaches diagnosis and how to do treatment. I got my graduate degree in research psychology, not clinical. True enough, both my undergraduate and graduate degrees were from a well-recognized Canadian university. I had a great grounding in what the science of psychology had discovered. And, I did meet the requirements of registration as a psychologist in the Canadian province of Alberta. But all of that applied stuff, what gets taught in graduate programmes on how to be a clinical psychologist … well, I basically picked that up as I went along. Sure, I did some trainings to get certifications and had some supervision. But colleagues would come along who had taken those essential graduate school courses in applied clinical psychology that I never had—I would see them and realize that I never had that same formal foundation in the profession.
To be frank, the doubt that plagued me was whether or not I was a fraud, that people would find out, think that I was an imposter. Eventually, I learned that this had a name: it was called, simply enough, imposter’s syndrome. I also learned that it could be a good thing.
Apparently, a study some decades ago found that professors who suffered from imposter’s syndrome were actually rated better on objective criteria of their profession than those who did not. It turns out that those who doubt themselves, despite being well-educated and trained, don’t take doing good work for granted. Perhaps if they were like me, they self-reflected and self-corrected to do better.
By the end of my career I had lots of feedback from clients that what I did was helpful, for some even lifesaving. I had feedback from colleagues that my passion for doing good work as a psychotherapist was inspiring to them. I was instrumental in setting up a competence cooperative where like-minded psychologists could receive support and enhance practice capabilities. For twenty-five years, I wrote a column for other psychologists that focused on the humanistic foundation for our work. Funny thing that—I trained in science but ended up being a humanist! Anyway, in response to that column, other psychologists told me that they always read it first when the publication came out.
But still the doubt plagued me. I would confess it to colleagues, good colleagues who I respected as doing great work. And they would confess they had those same doubts too—not about me but about themselves.
Now in the field mental health field, there are also other psychologists full of confidence. They show no doubt that they are doing it right. They can even attract a following, rise within the hierarchies, seek attention for themselves as experts. They expect trainees and colleagues not to stray from their protocol despite what the client might say. In the therapy room they are always smarter than their clients, or at least think that they are. The therapy relationship becomes about what they do for the client. In the guise of helping the client, therapy comes to be all about the effectiveness of the treatment they provide. Therapy is not about emotional engagement with the suffering of the client, it is about symptom control and goal accomplishment. To get the end they seek, such professionals diligently push what they are doing because they believe what they are doing is the right thing to do—undoubtedly for them, the only right thing to do. If clients don’t get better, well, that’s about something wrong with the client because there’s nothing wrong with them as the professional service provider.
Professionals like that can hold others in their thrall—that web of loyalty and interpersonal control. They are much the opposite of those suffering from imposter’s syndrome.
Dare I say it? Even in the mental health profession there are narcissists.
You might recognize one such mental health professional and the theme of narcissism in An Incoming Tide. Narcissists never admit to doubting themselves, in psychology terms, they are far too well-defended against that.
My greatest fear, greater even than being found out as a fraud, was that I would become narcissistic. So there I was, caught between two fears—of being under qualified at one extreme, an arrogant egoist at the other.
And so now I come to writing. The last course I took in English was, let’s see, more than 50 years ago. Aside from a weekend workshop on editing one’s own work I’ve taken no formal training to be a writer. My university studies focused on the sciences rather than the humanities or the arts.
Gosh, didn’t I learn my lesson the first time around?
But I have two novels out there. A third is on its way. And I’ve learned that I don’t follow the rules of genre very well. Alas. I didn’t follow the protocols of psychotherapy that well either. I think I was more human, more creative, more sensitive to my clients because I didn't. I can only hope that is the same for writing now, too.
I remain aware that there are aspects of my craft as a writer that are lacking. And so I work on it, afraid that others will find out that I have no degrees in English Literature, no workshops or university courses behind me in creative writing, no accepted credentials that give me the right to do this.
I hope you have read the parable “Creation with a Little Help” posted in the March 2022 Fourth Comings. It’s about this, about the need to embrace one’s own doubt and then push the creative process forward with courage. A courageous little piece that is. Rather creative, I think. And I hope, fully human too.
- Published on
In An Incoming Tide the protagonist, Estelle, is hit by a succession of adverse events. Finally, one overwhelms her. She’s broken. My publishable 300 pages leaves her shaken. I suspect my readers had been cheering for her, eager that she’d be okay. But they are left with, well, you know … (or will, once you have read the book!)
I had no idea that was also going to be the plot line for my publishing journey.
Sunny skies and a sense of buoyancy marked the early stages of the publication process. The editor’s evaluation of the first draft was very encouraging. She got the story and believed in me as a writer. But there was a reality I had to deal with—cutting what was a 450 page novel to 300. I found a way of doing that, one that I really came to love.
And there was the quick settling on a fabulous cover for the novel. Wow, what a great visual image for the book. Buoyancy indeed.
An edit and a proofread corrected many writing glitches. Then the novel was back to me for any needed finishing touches. Just a few more editing passes and it was off for reviews, reviews purchased through companies that provide that service.
The reviews were to provide positive comments that would be useful for the marketing of the book. They didn’t. One, and then the other a month later, knocked me off my feet, as if hit by two powerful waves. Both of them contained errors in their plot synopsis. Neither of them caught the meaning and depth of the story. It was devastating that they could get it so wrong.
Once I had picked myself up, brushed myself off, I poured over those reviews to start all over again. Starting all over again didn’t mean a re-write, but it did mean some very focused editing. In retrospect, those awful reviews (and in reality, they really weren’t completely awful) have made me a better writer. I came to terms with my own writing as a craft that still needed work. I went back to my novel and did the work. It is better now as a result. But when I went back, as determined as I was, I was still shaky, quite shaky.
Finally, mid-December the book published. I was so eager to hold my work in my hands as a book, not a manuscript. My first look would be in the eBook format.
So eager!
Bam! Down I went again. Another wave.
Not only did this one knock me off my feet, for a while it put me under. Both Kindle and Kobo editions contained significant formatting errors that severely compromised the reader’s experience. By the time the publisher’s staff had gone for what seemed like an interminable Christmas break, the formatting of the eBook was still wasn’t fixed.
To be transparent here, there were other factors in my going under at the time—the December dark of a northerly latitude, bitter cold temperatures, intensely painful sciatica.
I was as under water as my poor protagonist in Chapter Seventeen.
Then weeks later, a steady hand pulled me out, let me catch my breath again. The Senior Operations Manager for FriesenPress ably got the formatting errors corrected. Within a few days the eBooks looked great. A paperback copy of the book arrived and it looked good, too.
I was on my feet again, still a bit shaken, but on my feet again.
Like my protagonist, I guess.
And to finish the story, a couple of weeks later yet another of the Senior Managers from FriesenPress spent time with me—going over feedback to the company I had provided, validating my experience, helping me to move through it all. I am deeply grateful to the work of these two members of the FriesenPress team.
I started this blog with the adage that life can imitate art. Really it doesn’t. The circumstances and complications of life on their own don’t strive for resolution and meaning as do the arts. We, us humans, have to do that. Life is a merely succession of events. What we make of them makes the difference, makes it a story.
But art does help.
I love doing photography. Somewhere I read that great photography (and the other visual arts) help us to see the world around us, to find beauty in it, to deepen our appreciation of what is there. And, I compose music. I have a piece entitled Rain which is now a reference point for the way that I hear the sound of rain around me. And another, River, that makes even more beautiful my memories of riverboat cruising in Europe.
The storyline of An Incoming Tide has turned out to be the template for understanding the publishing journey for An Incoming Tide. It helps me to see one of my own life’s stories in a different way.
Strange, eh?
One more thing. I am editing the next novel. It documents the healing process for my protagonist left in such an precarious state at the end of An Incoming Tide. That’s life too, isn’t it?
P.S. I, too, was once knocked over by a hightide wave on the Pacific Coast. Completely submerged in the brine with an undertow pulling at me. But that is another story.
I had no idea that was also going to be the plot line for my publishing journey.
Sunny skies and a sense of buoyancy marked the early stages of the publication process. The editor’s evaluation of the first draft was very encouraging. She got the story and believed in me as a writer. But there was a reality I had to deal with—cutting what was a 450 page novel to 300. I found a way of doing that, one that I really came to love.
And there was the quick settling on a fabulous cover for the novel. Wow, what a great visual image for the book. Buoyancy indeed.
An edit and a proofread corrected many writing glitches. Then the novel was back to me for any needed finishing touches. Just a few more editing passes and it was off for reviews, reviews purchased through companies that provide that service.
The reviews were to provide positive comments that would be useful for the marketing of the book. They didn’t. One, and then the other a month later, knocked me off my feet, as if hit by two powerful waves. Both of them contained errors in their plot synopsis. Neither of them caught the meaning and depth of the story. It was devastating that they could get it so wrong.
Once I had picked myself up, brushed myself off, I poured over those reviews to start all over again. Starting all over again didn’t mean a re-write, but it did mean some very focused editing. In retrospect, those awful reviews (and in reality, they really weren’t completely awful) have made me a better writer. I came to terms with my own writing as a craft that still needed work. I went back to my novel and did the work. It is better now as a result. But when I went back, as determined as I was, I was still shaky, quite shaky.
Finally, mid-December the book published. I was so eager to hold my work in my hands as a book, not a manuscript. My first look would be in the eBook format.
So eager!
Bam! Down I went again. Another wave.
Not only did this one knock me off my feet, for a while it put me under. Both Kindle and Kobo editions contained significant formatting errors that severely compromised the reader’s experience. By the time the publisher’s staff had gone for what seemed like an interminable Christmas break, the formatting of the eBook was still wasn’t fixed.
To be transparent here, there were other factors in my going under at the time—the December dark of a northerly latitude, bitter cold temperatures, intensely painful sciatica.
I was as under water as my poor protagonist in Chapter Seventeen.
Then weeks later, a steady hand pulled me out, let me catch my breath again. The Senior Operations Manager for FriesenPress ably got the formatting errors corrected. Within a few days the eBooks looked great. A paperback copy of the book arrived and it looked good, too.
I was on my feet again, still a bit shaken, but on my feet again.
Like my protagonist, I guess.
And to finish the story, a couple of weeks later yet another of the Senior Managers from FriesenPress spent time with me—going over feedback to the company I had provided, validating my experience, helping me to move through it all. I am deeply grateful to the work of these two members of the FriesenPress team.
I started this blog with the adage that life can imitate art. Really it doesn’t. The circumstances and complications of life on their own don’t strive for resolution and meaning as do the arts. We, us humans, have to do that. Life is a merely succession of events. What we make of them makes the difference, makes it a story.
But art does help.
I love doing photography. Somewhere I read that great photography (and the other visual arts) help us to see the world around us, to find beauty in it, to deepen our appreciation of what is there. And, I compose music. I have a piece entitled Rain which is now a reference point for the way that I hear the sound of rain around me. And another, River, that makes even more beautiful my memories of riverboat cruising in Europe.
The storyline of An Incoming Tide has turned out to be the template for understanding the publishing journey for An Incoming Tide. It helps me to see one of my own life’s stories in a different way.
Strange, eh?
One more thing. I am editing the next novel. It documents the healing process for my protagonist left in such an precarious state at the end of An Incoming Tide. That’s life too, isn’t it?
P.S. I, too, was once knocked over by a hightide wave on the Pacific Coast. Completely submerged in the brine with an undertow pulling at me. But that is another story.
- Published on
The most powerful line in An Incoming Tide was not there in the initial writing.
It didn’t even appear in the first twenty revisions.
But when I finally wrote that line—and it was just one short, compound sentence—it hit me as the author. It was so obvious, so powerful, but written to hardly be noticed at all.
“He had to do it, and I had to help him do it.”
You probably didn’t make note of the line. It was deeply embedded in Chapter Nine. Protagonist Estelle (a psychologist) didn’t catch the significance of it either as it was spoken by a female client— well, not consciously anyway. Subconsciously, it triggered her. And, the reader doesn’t see why until several chapters later in the novel, an echoing from twenty-five years earlier in Estelle’s life. The line is there too, in Chapter Sixteen as it flashes back to when she was seven—there it’s no longer in the third person but the first, no longer in the past tense but the present.
It is about gender and power.
If you have already read An Incoming Tide, you may want to go back and find those two lines. In Chapter Nine it recounts a male supervisor forcing a female, front-line worker to act contrary to the needs of her clients—he did so to meet his own management goals. In Chapter Sixteen it is about a child forced to be the proxy for another powerful male in abusing a little girl, even begging her cooperation in doing so.
As an author my life experience of gender bubbles up in my characters and plot. Writing is a bit like a Rorschach Test—you know the one, the inkblots. What is within me, what arises from my socialization and lived experience, gets projected into my work of fiction. Truly, it wasn’t the reason I wrote the story. But it’s there when I go back and take a look at how it all unfolds.
I was certainly raised with gender bias—cloaked in religious fervor, preached by suited men holding floppy Bibles while they denied women a voice in the pulpit and at the decision-making church board table. Women could teach children, sing in the choir and make sandwiches for luncheons, of course.
Furthermore, gender bias infects the power structures of my former profession. One horrific example came a few years ago in a meeting to welcome newly registered psychologists, the vast majority of which were female. Only one female spoke from the lectern that night, this in contrast to the several esteemed males. That one female who did speak was a staffer reading the words of yet another older male, a guy unable to attend to receive his award.
I do have hope that this might be changing. Here in Alberta Canada, the Psychologists’ Association of Alberta (PAA) now has a female CEO. The PAA plays a support function province’s psychologists. On the other hand, the Regulatory College for the profession—the body with the power to set the rules, determine membership and discipline—has two males in the top positions. Oh, there is a female psychologist there too, but her role is primarily advice giving on ethical matters.
So even though things might be changing, are you detecting a pattern here? Those who support and help are females, those who have power are males.
Yes, I’ve been immersed in it—gender bias as the water in the fishbowl that I happen to swim in.
So what can I do as an author?
First of all, I can believe in fiction. The most powerful voice, the one that moves us most to respond with passion, is storytelling. And, it is not just the stories we hear, but also the ones that we tell about ourselves, like those two quick anecdotes above.
Storytelling provides a unique and essentially human way of knowing. In contrast to storying, logical thought requires training and discipline. We have to teach it in formal education and consciously practice it when we face life’s complexities. What comes more naturally to us all is the story of our lived experience. We like to think that we are rational, but in reality our experience of the world is how we story what happens.
With all the options of writing, I choose to write a novel—not a self-help book or theoretical text. I can only write as a white male (read “privilege”), but I hope one who is sensitive to what is happening around me, conscious of the water in my fishbowl.
And, so …
The villains of An Incoming Tide are male—Jackson, Pierre and, of course, the murderer (no spoiler alert, eh?). The courageous and constructive characters are female, the strong characters—Estelle, Leanne, Dodi and Nali.
Of course, a novel has more characters than just the heroic, caring ones and the bad guys. In An Incoming Tide, Gordon is an exception to this pattern, but then, he is a jazz musician! I’ve also written in Nate, Nate who has taken responsibility for his own life. And Merrill, who manages to manage in an accommodating sort of way. These healthy males act as foils to the male villains of the piece. But I also hope they give a bit of hope to it all, too. Oh, and by the way, none of them hold positions of power.
And finally, I can be self-reflective. In designing the website I have chosen to post fresh material twice a month—once as fiction, the other time as first-person reflection in this blog. I have three female characters in this month’s Fourth Comings and three male characters in next month’s story. Perhaps you might want to check those out. Do some self-reflection for yourself.
And maybe you might also reflect on what the water is like in your fishbowl—gendered power dynamics are probably there, and likely other toxic stuff too.
It didn’t even appear in the first twenty revisions.
But when I finally wrote that line—and it was just one short, compound sentence—it hit me as the author. It was so obvious, so powerful, but written to hardly be noticed at all.
“He had to do it, and I had to help him do it.”
You probably didn’t make note of the line. It was deeply embedded in Chapter Nine. Protagonist Estelle (a psychologist) didn’t catch the significance of it either as it was spoken by a female client— well, not consciously anyway. Subconsciously, it triggered her. And, the reader doesn’t see why until several chapters later in the novel, an echoing from twenty-five years earlier in Estelle’s life. The line is there too, in Chapter Sixteen as it flashes back to when she was seven—there it’s no longer in the third person but the first, no longer in the past tense but the present.
It is about gender and power.
If you have already read An Incoming Tide, you may want to go back and find those two lines. In Chapter Nine it recounts a male supervisor forcing a female, front-line worker to act contrary to the needs of her clients—he did so to meet his own management goals. In Chapter Sixteen it is about a child forced to be the proxy for another powerful male in abusing a little girl, even begging her cooperation in doing so.
As an author my life experience of gender bubbles up in my characters and plot. Writing is a bit like a Rorschach Test—you know the one, the inkblots. What is within me, what arises from my socialization and lived experience, gets projected into my work of fiction. Truly, it wasn’t the reason I wrote the story. But it’s there when I go back and take a look at how it all unfolds.
I was certainly raised with gender bias—cloaked in religious fervor, preached by suited men holding floppy Bibles while they denied women a voice in the pulpit and at the decision-making church board table. Women could teach children, sing in the choir and make sandwiches for luncheons, of course.
Furthermore, gender bias infects the power structures of my former profession. One horrific example came a few years ago in a meeting to welcome newly registered psychologists, the vast majority of which were female. Only one female spoke from the lectern that night, this in contrast to the several esteemed males. That one female who did speak was a staffer reading the words of yet another older male, a guy unable to attend to receive his award.
I do have hope that this might be changing. Here in Alberta Canada, the Psychologists’ Association of Alberta (PAA) now has a female CEO. The PAA plays a support function province’s psychologists. On the other hand, the Regulatory College for the profession—the body with the power to set the rules, determine membership and discipline—has two males in the top positions. Oh, there is a female psychologist there too, but her role is primarily advice giving on ethical matters.
So even though things might be changing, are you detecting a pattern here? Those who support and help are females, those who have power are males.
Yes, I’ve been immersed in it—gender bias as the water in the fishbowl that I happen to swim in.
So what can I do as an author?
First of all, I can believe in fiction. The most powerful voice, the one that moves us most to respond with passion, is storytelling. And, it is not just the stories we hear, but also the ones that we tell about ourselves, like those two quick anecdotes above.
Storytelling provides a unique and essentially human way of knowing. In contrast to storying, logical thought requires training and discipline. We have to teach it in formal education and consciously practice it when we face life’s complexities. What comes more naturally to us all is the story of our lived experience. We like to think that we are rational, but in reality our experience of the world is how we story what happens.
With all the options of writing, I choose to write a novel—not a self-help book or theoretical text. I can only write as a white male (read “privilege”), but I hope one who is sensitive to what is happening around me, conscious of the water in my fishbowl.
And, so …
The villains of An Incoming Tide are male—Jackson, Pierre and, of course, the murderer (no spoiler alert, eh?). The courageous and constructive characters are female, the strong characters—Estelle, Leanne, Dodi and Nali.
Of course, a novel has more characters than just the heroic, caring ones and the bad guys. In An Incoming Tide, Gordon is an exception to this pattern, but then, he is a jazz musician! I’ve also written in Nate, Nate who has taken responsibility for his own life. And Merrill, who manages to manage in an accommodating sort of way. These healthy males act as foils to the male villains of the piece. But I also hope they give a bit of hope to it all, too. Oh, and by the way, none of them hold positions of power.
And finally, I can be self-reflective. In designing the website I have chosen to post fresh material twice a month—once as fiction, the other time as first-person reflection in this blog. I have three female characters in this month’s Fourth Comings and three male characters in next month’s story. Perhaps you might want to check those out. Do some self-reflection for yourself.
And maybe you might also reflect on what the water is like in your fishbowl—gendered power dynamics are probably there, and likely other toxic stuff too.
- Published on
Everything human takes time . . .
This wisdom was given to me more than forty years ago when I was just starting out as a mental health therapist. This mentor must have sensed impatience in me. Indeed, assisting individuals with mild to moderate severity mental health issues is a very human endeavour, requiring both time and patience.
Now as an author, I realize the essence of fiction—both in its writing and also in its reading—is a very human activity too. It is about finding meaning, about relationship and companionship, about the good and the harmful bumping up against each other. You know, the stuff of being human.
And it takes time. If you rush it, you lose the essence.
The restructure, revise, edit, proof and polish phases of writing An Incoming Tide involved daily work for months on end–—actually, ten months oozing into an eleventh, twice as long as the initial writing. At times it just felt technical: about things like verb tenses, and commas and annoying little wording booboos. But at its heart, it was about the characters there—the ones I cared deeply about, and even the ones I despised. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my future reader’s subjective experience of them. For them, both my readers and my characters, I needed my writing to be clear so meaning and relationship, and that way good and harm bump up against each other, would shine through.
It has been a very human endeavour, and it has taken lots of time.
Being human is also about individual subjectivity, both mine and yours, in worlds both fictional and otherwise. Our subjective, internal map of the world dictates how we make it through the outer world of circumstance and our engagement with others. And those others too, of course, are navigating from within their own subjective, internal maps of the world. Each reader of An Incoming Tide will bring their own subjectivity to their experience of the characters there, their story, and the humanness depicted.
It is that internal subjectivity that guides us—desperately or disappointedly at times, delightfully at others— guides us to discover meaning, experience companionship, and responsibly bring goodness into the world.
But we can get impatient, or at least I can.
Everything takes longer than it takes . . .
After the mentor’s magic of the first adage, this second one came to me as a result of my own experience of elaborating my inner world while engaging with the outer one. I was sensing my own impatience.
Part of one’s internal world are expectations: what should happen and when. We don’t always get those right. Life doesn’t go exactly as we predict because other humans are involved—and, even our internal maps of what should be can lead us astray.
I have had great work done for me on An Incoming Tide by FriesenPress. You get to experience that good work when you look at the cover of the novel—I still get captivated by the hovering eye over the incoming tide depicted there. As you read this blog on an elegantly designed website, you are reaping the benefits of a Designer and a Promotional Specialist who were willing to take the time to make beautiful the ideas I had.
At the outset, I didn’t understand why it would take the length of time that the consultant and Publication Specialist at FriesenPress said it would. They said, it just would. And in the end, it did. They were right. That, and a little bit more.
Initial estimates were that I would publish early November, then by the end of November, then early December. It turned out to be mid-December, not in time for Christmas gift giving. Alas. But it is here, and because we took the time, I can be really proud of the book you now (or soon) will be able to read.
These two adages, Everything human takes time and Everything takes longer than it takes stayed with me for over forty years on the frontlines of helping those with significant mental health difficulties. And now they flop over into my world as an author.
As much as impatience, and frustration, and bewilderment about the human condition of others (and I guess, of myself) has been part of that journey, ultimately it has been a very human endeavour—full of meaning, and companionship, and taking responsibility to bring goodness into this world.
I will never get it completely right—my expectations of others and how long things take. But I hope through my humanness I can bring wisdom and grace to the art of my living and writing.
This wisdom was given to me more than forty years ago when I was just starting out as a mental health therapist. This mentor must have sensed impatience in me. Indeed, assisting individuals with mild to moderate severity mental health issues is a very human endeavour, requiring both time and patience.
Now as an author, I realize the essence of fiction—both in its writing and also in its reading—is a very human activity too. It is about finding meaning, about relationship and companionship, about the good and the harmful bumping up against each other. You know, the stuff of being human.
And it takes time. If you rush it, you lose the essence.
The restructure, revise, edit, proof and polish phases of writing An Incoming Tide involved daily work for months on end–—actually, ten months oozing into an eleventh, twice as long as the initial writing. At times it just felt technical: about things like verb tenses, and commas and annoying little wording booboos. But at its heart, it was about the characters there—the ones I cared deeply about, and even the ones I despised. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my future reader’s subjective experience of them. For them, both my readers and my characters, I needed my writing to be clear so meaning and relationship, and that way good and harm bump up against each other, would shine through.
It has been a very human endeavour, and it has taken lots of time.
Being human is also about individual subjectivity, both mine and yours, in worlds both fictional and otherwise. Our subjective, internal map of the world dictates how we make it through the outer world of circumstance and our engagement with others. And those others too, of course, are navigating from within their own subjective, internal maps of the world. Each reader of An Incoming Tide will bring their own subjectivity to their experience of the characters there, their story, and the humanness depicted.
It is that internal subjectivity that guides us—desperately or disappointedly at times, delightfully at others— guides us to discover meaning, experience companionship, and responsibly bring goodness into the world.
But we can get impatient, or at least I can.
Everything takes longer than it takes . . .
After the mentor’s magic of the first adage, this second one came to me as a result of my own experience of elaborating my inner world while engaging with the outer one. I was sensing my own impatience.
Part of one’s internal world are expectations: what should happen and when. We don’t always get those right. Life doesn’t go exactly as we predict because other humans are involved—and, even our internal maps of what should be can lead us astray.
I have had great work done for me on An Incoming Tide by FriesenPress. You get to experience that good work when you look at the cover of the novel—I still get captivated by the hovering eye over the incoming tide depicted there. As you read this blog on an elegantly designed website, you are reaping the benefits of a Designer and a Promotional Specialist who were willing to take the time to make beautiful the ideas I had.
At the outset, I didn’t understand why it would take the length of time that the consultant and Publication Specialist at FriesenPress said it would. They said, it just would. And in the end, it did. They were right. That, and a little bit more.
Initial estimates were that I would publish early November, then by the end of November, then early December. It turned out to be mid-December, not in time for Christmas gift giving. Alas. But it is here, and because we took the time, I can be really proud of the book you now (or soon) will be able to read.
These two adages, Everything human takes time and Everything takes longer than it takes stayed with me for over forty years on the frontlines of helping those with significant mental health difficulties. And now they flop over into my world as an author.
As much as impatience, and frustration, and bewilderment about the human condition of others (and I guess, of myself) has been part of that journey, ultimately it has been a very human endeavour—full of meaning, and companionship, and taking responsibility to bring goodness into this world.
I will never get it completely right—my expectations of others and how long things take. But I hope through my humanness I can bring wisdom and grace to the art of my living and writing.
INDEX OF PREVIOUS BLOGS
(click on side panel to open)
September 2021. "It is beautiful because it tells the truth."
Beauty is not just about pretty, beauty can reveal the subjective experience of external realities.
October 2021. "Flow versus Focus"
As an author, I reflect on these two vastly different aspects of creating readable fiction.
November 2021 " Not a tidy little murder mystery"
My reflections as the author on the themes and uniqueness of plot in An Incoming Tide.