Startle and Illuminate

by Carol Shields

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2016 Carol Shields Literary Trust

  Introduction Copyright © 2016 Anne Giardini and Nicholas Giardini

  Foreword Copyright © 2016 Jane Urquhart

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.​penguinrandomhouse.​ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Shields, Carol, 1935–2003, author

  Startle and illuminate : Carol Shields on writing / Carol Shields, Anne Giardini, Nicholas Giardini.

  ISBN 978-0-345-81594-1

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81596-5

  1. Authorship. 2. Reading. 3. Shields, Carol, 1935–2003—Technique. I. Giardini, Anne, author II. Giardini, Nicholas, 1991–, author III. Title.

  PN151.S53 2016 808.02 C2015-906419-8

  Cover photograph © Neil Graham

  v3.1

  For Don—husband, father and grandfather

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Jane Urquhart

  Generosity, Time and Final Advice by Anne Giardini

  Coming to Know My Grandmother through Her Writing by Nicholas Giardini

  1. Writers Are Readers First

  2. Myths That Keep You from Writing

  3. Boxcars, Coat Hangers and Other Devices

  4. To Write Is to Raid

  5. Be a Little Crazy; Astonish Me

  6. What You Use and What You Protect

  7. Pacing, Passion and Tension

  8. Where Curiosity Leads

  9. The Love Story

  10. The Short Story (and Women Writers)

  11. Writing What We’ve Discovered—So Far

  12. Open Every Question, Every Possibility

  13. Writing from the Edge

  14. Be Bold All the Way Through

  From the Letters

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  I’ve always believed fiction to be about redemption, about trying to see why people are the way they are.

  CAROL SHIELDS

  FOREWORD

  BY JANE URQUHART

  I CANNOT RECALL WITH ANY ACCURACY WHEN I FIRST MET Carol Shields. Was it at a book-tour reading in Winnipeg in the early 1990s, or that time at a Toronto Festival when she introduced me to her sister? Or was it at a prize dinner, or something similar? She was that essential, positive person who, had she not existed, I might have had to invent. I still can’t believe that she hadn’t been there forever, and wouldn’t be there forever. I already knew and loved her work—Swann, Various Miracles—before we met; that much I am sure of. And there is no question that familiarity with the work always makes one feel a kinship when one is lucky enough to come to know the author. But in Carol’s case there was more, much more. It was in her voice, not just in her writing voice, which was undeniably extraordinary, but in the sound of her voice. Her speech was bell-like, musical, and what she said would sing in the mind long after she had said it. She still speaks to me, an encouraging whisper in my ear. I quote her shamelessly, and as often as I can. There isn’t a distant acquaintance who hasn’t heard me utter a sentence that begins with the words, “Well, Carol always said that …”

  This book is a treasure, in that it captures the sound of that voice, that other, non-fiction voice, the voice of the spoken word. It is the voice that Carol used in conversation with her fellow authors and with her friends, the voice with which she pondered aloud what it is to be a writer. How we are drawn to use narrative, to examine and transform life, to revel in the construction of a sentence. Or what trails we might blaze in order “to shorten the distance between what is privately felt and universally known.” It is the voice she used to tell us that being on the edge actually gave us an edge, and that absolutely nothing should silence or stop us, that there were no viable rules about who should or shouldn’t be heard, and that there was never a story too small or ordinary, or a point of view too marginal, to be examined. “There is no such thing as a boring life,” she once said. Even people bored by life were interesting to her. Read the obituaries of so-called ordinary people, she instructs in these pages; pay attention. “I wanted Mrs. Turner,” she writes to a student, “with all her particles of difference, to shine.”

  Carol was a gifted eavesdropper and voyeur. Her ear and her gaze were both empathetic and penetrating. She was drawn to the stories of strangers and, while not unsympathetic concerning these stories, she was never sentimental. She was as fascinated by the dark as she was by the light. In these pages she explores the sun and the shadows of the writing life, and she invites us to join her in that exploration.

  A benign, though insistent, inquirer, Carol was relentlessly curious. About everything. “Why have you never written about your first husband’s death?” she once asked me. I had no answer to this question. “Well,” she said, “I think you should write about it now.” The gift of Carol’s advice, on any subject, was delivered with such positive energy that it was impossible not to take it and be grateful. I am not certain that “advice” is the right word, in fact, for it was dispatched so gracefully that it was more along the lines of wise observation followed by generous encouragement. Thanks to this book, these wise observations and that generous encouragement will be more widely disseminated.

  Carol wanted to know what made writers tick. She wanted to reflect upon what drew her to her own work and, at the same time, speculate about what it might be that would help another along the path to his or hers. Writing, in all its guises, or even the possibility of writing, fully delighted her. All through her career, her life, she amazed us with her eagerness and passion. The title of this book is perfect. Carol always startled us, in the best of ways, and then she illuminated. And she still does.

  GENEROSITY, TIME AND FINAL ADVICE

  BY ANNE GIARDINI

  AS THE AUTHOR OF TWO NOVELS, WITH ANOTHER ON THE WAY, I am asked from time to time for advice on writing, finding time to write, starting, plotting, forming characters, finishing, publishing, and other aspects of getting one’s words into print. A year or two ago, it struck me that some of the best advice I had received was from my mother, Carol Shields, and that this advice might be useful to others. My son Nicholas was living in Ottawa at the time and I asked if he would dig into his grandmother’s papers in the literary archives at Library and Archives Canada to see what he could find on the subject of writing. He found a lot. There were more ideas about the process of writing than I had heard from my mother directly, and all of this was new to him. We jointly decided to create this book. In the course of working with Nicholas, and later our editors, Anne Collins and Amanda Lewis, I began to see that this book could never possibly be complete. I regularly run into people who delight in telling me—as I delight in hearing—ideas and advice they received from my mother about how to be a better writer (as well as how to be a better person, but that would be another book, and no doubt also illuminating).

  Throughout her writing life, Carol shared generously from her store of wisdom on writing; some learned from others, much of it her own di
scovery.

  We weren’t, however, generally an advice-giving family, at least among ourselves—although, perhaps because it was so rare, we didn’t mind receiving counsel from each other. The rare time we were tempted or solicited to dispense any opinion that might be construed as advice, we tended to water it down to the point of homeopathy and then administer it aslant, in a what-do-I-know-take-it-or-leave-it manner. We were not very much invested in our advice being followed; in fact, I think we were relieved when it was not, since we were then absolved of any responsibility for the consequences. But my four siblings and I did read and comment on what our mother was writing because she invited us to do so. She wasn’t secretive. She encouraged us to delve into her manuscripts and mark or suggest at will. Why she did this is clear to me now: she loved writing and thought we would too. I sometimes joke that writing is the family business in the same way that the butcher’s children might take up exsanguination, skinning, eviscerating, splitting, boning, cutting and trimming. When she asked us to witness the creation of her work, my mother was also welcoming us to consider taking it up ourselves. By opening the process to our view, she reduced the mystique of writing without in any way minimizing the wonder of making narrative from words, imagination, paper and print. Inoculated in this way, I felt fairly confident as a writer from earliest childhood, and later became a columnist and then a novelist, although my mother died before my first novel was written. My sister Sara has become an accomplished poet, essayist and writer of children’s books and has even, in some years, accomplished the feat of living from the proceeds of her pen.

  The best advice my mother gave directly to me on the subject of writing was this: to write as if you were spilling your story into the ear of a perfect listener, and in as direct and unmediated a way as possible. She made a gesture as she said this, placing two fingers against her lips, and then turning her hand and reaching toward that perfect ear, close and avid. Like many of the ideas in this book, this advice might apply as much to navigating life as to arranging words on a page or screen. Every storyteller, speechmaker or dinner table conversationalist should know this trick of speaking authentically, without artifice or impediment, to an enchanted listener. I wrote my first novel in this way, imagining that I was telling it straight into the ear of one of my sisters, who knew nothing of it during the writing—that was not the point. It was her imaginary ear I needed, and her imagined response. This approach completely changed how I wrote, since I could sense my sister’s reactions to every word as I typed. This sister is a good listener, with a keen sense of narrative and a fine and discerning sensibility. I also commandeer her acute eye before I allow myself to purchase any item of clothing. This is, it seems, a useful and expanding exercise, seeing, hearing, processing through the borrowed senses of a trusted other.

  Freydis Welland, daughter of Joan Austen-Leigh, and a niece of Jane Austen several generations removed, became a well-loved friend of my mother, and since she kept impeccable notes, was one of our most reliable sources during the collection of this book. “I have no patience,” she records my mother saying in October 2002, “with those who think novels write themselves. They don’t. They are not a mystical thing. But this last novel [Unless] almost seemed to. It grew organically.”

  Revising, because it is close, precise and persnickety, is frequently the opposite of writing, which can—at least on the good days—flow along like water. Freydis recalled my mother referring to the reworking of Unless as a process during which she had “taken it apart with jeweller’s tweezers.” Carol described to her the satisfying challenge of working through a complex paragraph or sentence, ending up with one “that bulges out in the middle and comes safely to completion.” In a letter to Freydis—my mother kept up a wide-ranging, lively correspondence with friends, readers, fellow writers and others—Carol referred to Virginia Woolf, who wrote this, of George Eliot: “The width of the prospect, the large strong outlines of the principal features, the ruddy light of her early books, the searching power and reflective richness of the later tempt us to linger and expatiate beyond our limits.”

  “Ruddy light, yes,” my mother added. “We must make sure there is enough ruddy light in our books to keep them glowing.” Her wish as a reader and writer was for books that startle, illuminate, gleam with internal light.

  All of us, five children—a son, John (1958), me (1959), then Catherine (1962), Meg (1964) and Sara (1968)—saw our mother writing, and we read her work, as she invited us to do, often at its earliest stages. As children and then teenagers we watched her type the poems that won her first prize in the CBC’s Young Writer’s Competition in 1964 and found publication in journals and in her own collections, and then write the novels, short stories, plays and non-fiction that earned her recognition and awards around the world, among them the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Best Novel (1976); first prize in the CBC’s Annual Literary Competition (1983); a Canadian National Magazine Award (1985); the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Canadian Mystery (1988); the Marian Engel Award for body of work (1990); the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction (1993); the Canadian Booksellers Association Prize (1994); the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (1994); the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1995); the Orange Prize (1998); the Prix de Lire (France) (1998); the Charles Taylor Prize (2002); and the Ethel Wilson Prize (2003).

  Carol was often ahead of her time in discerning trends and interests that would fascinate and delight readers. She referred, for example, to a subset of her short stories as her “little weirdies.” I wonder what she would have made of the emergence of what is called the “new weird” category of literature. Hers tended less, perhaps, to discomfiting ends than the modern new weird, which often strives to unsettle. An example is her story “Flatties: Their Various Forms and Uses,” which describes a world in which children collecting eggs “never stumble, no egg is ever broken.”

  Dropped Threads, an anthology about women’s experiences that Carol co-edited, became a bestseller, to the (happy) surprise of her publisher.*

  Carol and her collaborator, Marjorie Anderson, had smartly seen the need for a book that examined the gaps in what women write about or say aloud. There was, as they discerned, a desire to read about defining moments rarely aired in common discourse, truths seldom shared, subjects that had not yet found a place.

  In an interview in The Vancouver Sun in 2003, a few months before my mother’s death in July of that year, I mentioned reading my mother’s writing when I was growing up, as the pages stacked up beside her typewriter. “It was sort of like running my fingers through silk,” I said. Then I described to the reporter how, after I moved away from home, it felt odd that some of her books came out before I had the chance to run my fingers through them. They seemed to me to have come out of thin air. I missed witnessing their creation.

  We children did from time to time, despite the family aversion to giving advice, tell Carol what we thought about what she was writing. Youth. Hubris. Families.

  I have an undated, typed letter from my mother when she was writing her novel Swann (1987) that contains an uncharacteristically detailed request for advice. I was in my early twenties then, and interested in a central character in Swann, Sarah Maloney, a young American feminist academic. In her letter, my mother wrote:

  I’ll thank you in advance, as they say, for reading my manuscript which is already on its way to you. I’m enclosing a fiver for return postage. Here are some of the things I’d like to know. Anything you find irritating? anything over-written? not sufficiently developed? overly clue-dropping? characters acting out of character?—not that this can’t happen. And, the big question, what do you imagine might happen next? I am not going to begin my edit of the last section until I hear from you. I am at that point that I reached in The Box Garden where I didn’t know if I’d revealed too much or too little. But the mystery element of this novel is not its main focus, as you will see, but more of a diversion. The focus, I like to think, is Appearance an
d Reality. Rather pompous that. Also interested in different ways of defining human personality, and different ways of formulating that definition—which is why the narrative approach is different in the four sections. The final section, as I think I told you, is a screenplay. (Still a little wobbly.) I’ll send it to you as soon as I hear from you because I know you’ll have suggestions. The [photocopied] manuscript is already so marked up it won’t do any good to write on it—I’d never find it. Perhaps you could use little posties (those yellow things).

  In handwriting, she added in the left margin:

  Sarah (recently renamed Sarah Maloney) is supposed to be slightly irritating. She irritates herself. Does this come across sufficiently?

  In a later letter she wrote:

  I want to thank you again for all your comments about the novel. I truly believe you’ve made me take a second look and see what was wrong. Your comments, which echoed Catherine’s [one of my sisters], have resulted in a reworking of the Sarah section. I took your advice about the beginning, and retouched, if that is the word, many other spots. I think part of the problem was a kind of heartlessness about other women, Rose particularly, perceived in cliché terms, slickly shallow. My dive into style, as well as my attempt to write “young,” led me astray I think. I also altered the Cruzzi sections as you suggested, which made a much more logical and appealing sequence. The whole thing was mailed off to my editor yesterday—we will have next Saturday in Toronto to go over it detail by detail. When Sara [another sister] read your letter she said, “That’s just what I felt.” All things considered, I trust you “blood critics” much more than these disembodied Toronto lit sorts. At any rate, I do send thanks.

  Far more often, as I was relieved to see when I revisited our letters, I sent letters of validation. My mother needed validation, after all, as all writers do.