getting started

As any writer knows, the hardest part is getting started. After looking forward to this trip for months, today I found myself struggling for a number of reasons.

First of all, I chose to get started by re-writing instead of writing, which was a bad idea. Re-writing is a soul-sucking, discouraging process because it's all about judging yourself. After spending the good part of the day nit-picking the screenplay I've been working on for the past year, by mid-afternoon I had the blues and decided to get out of the house.

It doesn't take long to familiarize oneself with Eastend; all told, it probably has only a half-dozen streets and a half-dozen avenues. On my way to the drug store to pick up a new notebook, the few people I crossed gave me the three-finger wave from their pickup trucks. It made me realize how disconnected I had become from this pace of life; although I had spent almost 20 years of my life in a small town such as this, it suddenly felt alien to me. That in-between sense of displacement suddenly became acute. I decided to go back to the Stegner House and recharge my batteries.

After a nap, a meal and a long evening walk down a gravel road, I felt much better. Tomorrow I will start fresh with a change of tactic. I am here to write, not re-write. Perhaps I can use the strange emotions percolating in me as fertilizer for my brand-new screenplay.

a land to mark the sparrow's fall

Snow! When the plane broke through the clouds at Regina Airport, the fields were a patchwork of white. In places, flood water came right up to the roads, reflecting the steel-gray sky. Normally by this time the farmers would be seeding; this year, some may not be able to seed at all. Everywhere we went, people bemoaned the weather. 

But this morning, as I headed West on the Trans-Canada and turned South towards Eastend, it was sunny and snowing. The gleaming hills were veiled in a luminous white fog. Water stood steaming in the summerfallow. It was magical.

Once settled in our final destination, Wallace Stegner's childhood home, we took an evening walk along the swollen Frenchman River and breathed in the quiet. Not two minutes from our door, a pair of courting bush rabbits scampered through the wolf willows as though we weren't there; a scattered herd of mule deer stared as we passed, unalarmed. The air was cold and clean as a butcher's blade.

My writing room looks out on the river and the steep, silent hills. With the lamp turned off, I pull back the curtains to let in the dying light. I can't wait to begin.

"Desolate? Forbidding? There never was a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drought or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don't get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don't escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.

It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones. At noon the total sun pours on your head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long. It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe of impotent man. Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow's fall."

 - Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

home again

"Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend," wrote Wallace Stegner in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose.

I have always had an affinity for Stegner, that "Great American Author" who actually grew up in a small Saskatchewan town not too far from where I was raised. He kept returning to themes of roots and place over and over again in his books; even though he called his birthplace a "dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere," I think his writing owes much to its character. I would even go so far as to say that it, and his self-imposed exile from it, defined him as a writer.

My own artist's voice is also influenced by displacement. My family were pioneers who came to Saskatchewan at the turn of the last century to make a better life for themselves and their descendants. Four years ago (almost to the day) I moved far away from them and everything they had built in order to pursue my own dreams, only to be clawed at by guilt and homesickness. After confessing this to my grandmother over the phone, she said wisely, "Just do what you have to do." Her comforting words made me feel like a pioneer in my own right. 

Coming full circle, this spring I will revisit my home province and spend a week writing in the childhood home of Wallace Stegner himself, now a residence for artists and writers. Perhaps my work will benefit from rediscovering my roots as much as his did.

Stay tuned for my dispatches from the Great Southwest.

slice of life

I recently had the opportunity to attend a sneak preview of Shannon Walsh's collective documentary À St.-Henri le 26 août, which will have it's première at Hot Docs next month. Loosely based on the NFB classic, À St.-Henri le 5 septembre (made almost 50 years ago), the film is a lovely, many-sided portrait of a Montreal neighborhood and the characters who inhabit it.

There is nothing better than a good documentary. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is just as entertaining. Some of the people we see in docs are so over the top that if they were fictional characters, no one would believe them. As a seasoned NFB veteran once told me, good characters are what make good documentaries.

The so-called "slice-of-life" genre reminds us of what life really is. Pursuing goals, chasing desires and battling antagonists takes up only a small percentage of real life, and yet these are the driving forces to which most fiction is chained. Real life is about minutiae: going to the convenience store, washing your car, getting ready for school or work. Our lives slip away unnoticed if we don't get enjoyment out of these moments. When we take the time to attune ourselves, we can get immense pleasure from the in-between times that would otherwise be forgotten.

emerging artist

A younger friend recently asked me if I had any words of advice for negotiating the transition between university and making a living as a creative type. Although flattered, I approached with caution, since it's easy to dish out advice from your armchair while the other person puts it all on the line. I don't want to be responsible for anyone else's life decisions--my own are enough to contend with.

That being said (my favourite expression, the perfect segue from a disclaimer), it got me thinking about that crazy period in your mid-twenties when you're fresh out of school. You have followed this rigid routine for as long as you can remember and then suddenly you're cut loose, floating in space. You are (at least I was) up to your ears in debt and acutely aware of the need to make money, but you are not yet jaded enough to give up on your dreams. It is a scary, exhilarating period that I have just barely left behind.

I can't really offer advice, but I can recount my own experience. I moved to the big city, got a day job that I enjoy well enough, and work like a maniac on the side trying to get my projects off the ground. So far so good.

I suppose there is one key idea in there that could qualify as advice: work like a maniac. Don't just dream--do! It is essential as an artist to never stop producing, no matter how busy you are trying to pay the rent. Productivity is creativity; you need to have something to show for all your talent. If you lose your momentum, it's tough slugging getting it back so keep at it, even if all you can muster is six hours a week.

By the way, if you entertain notions of going on non-working holidays or owning a home any time soon, you may want to choose a different career path. Maybe one day you will be able to have it both ways, but as an emerging artist you still have to prove to the world that you are worthy. Now is the time to get cracking.

viewing distance

Please excuse my absence these past two weeks--I have been extremely busy in all spheres of my life, both the day job and the filmmaking (travel, grant deadlines, frantically rewriting in order to shop the script around, etc.). Anyway, hopefully the busy-ness will pay off with some opportunities down the line.

In the game of endless second-guessing known as rewriting, there comes a time when you have to step back. At this point, you cut things out only to turn around and put them back in, you rearrange things only to realize that you've killed the momentum, you endlessly say to yourself "what if I did _____ instead?" and follow dead leads until you drive yourself crazy. You absolutely hate what you've written and can't imagine why anyone would want to read, let alone make, your script. This is when it's time for a break, some viewing distance, so that when you come back to it after a while, you can make objective judgments or maybe even feel a sense of pride over that pile of paper you slaved over.

This is where I'm at with my latest project. But it's ok; I've got another one that's been calling my name for some time now. After a couple of weeks of resting my weary brain (and hopefully getting outside for a change), I will sit down give it the attention it deserves.

how to write a (good) grant

Even though I'm totally exhausted after once again rushing to the finish line on my grants (many of the deadlines are on March 1st), I thought I would share a few things I've learned from my almost 10 years of experience writing applications and being on juries. (You'd think after that long I'd have learned to finish before the deadline, but so far it hasn't happened....)

Peer assessment juries are like lotteries. Sometimes you get one that just understands your work, and sometimes you don't. The reality is that usually no more than 10% of applications will get funded, so they have to unanimously love your proposal for it to make the cut. Unfortunately, success often has little to do with the actual idea and a lot to do with the way it's presented.

When getting started, pay special attention to the application form for each agency, and read ALL the guidelines carefully (I would even suggest printing them off so you can have them beside you as you write). NEVER re-use a grant you wrote for the Canada Council when applying to SODEC, and vice versa. You can recycle some of the content, but always be sure to present it in a way that follows exactly what is on the form, in the same order. This simple step will help you immensely, as jurors will quickly be able to skim through and see that you hit all the marks.

No matter how good your idea, one thing alone will ensure that you stand out from the crowd: great writing. I can't stress this enough. Not only must you be a competent filmmaker with a track record and a clear concept, you must also be a good writer in order to get money. 

Make sure to edit what you've written. Ask someone to read it (preferably at least 24 hours before the deadline) and LISTEN to their suggestions. If something doesn't make sense to them, cut it or change it. Most of all, have someone else proofread for you; you'd be surprised how many things you'll overlook when you've been working for the last 14 hours straight and are running on no sleep. Juries hate spelling mistakes because they demonstrate sloppiness and a lack of commitment--they'd rather give the money to someone who is meticulous and hard-working.

Jury members usually receive a binder with 300-500 pages of reading material. They will thank you for being concise, not using a $10 word when a $2 word will do, and making sure that every sentence presents a clear idea, rather than running around in circles. If your writing flows like water and the concept is easy to define, they will see that you worked hard on your application and will most likely recommend you for funding.

If you should receive a rejection letter (a "Thin Letter," as a prof of mine used to call them), it might not be because they didn't like your project, but because you failed to explain it clearly. They should be able to visualize it as if it were right there in front of them. Call and ask for the comments so you can improve your submission next time, and never submit the same application at future deadlines without making changes. Whatever you do, don't unload a bunch of negativity on the funding officer because, although they don't decide the outcome of a grant, they can still be of help to you in other ways if you're on their good side.

Finally, remember that these are your peers and chances are you might know a person on the jury; I always caution against making enemies in this business, and now is the time when you really don't want personal disputes to come back to haunt you.