“Uncommon Love”

In Emma Donaghue’s latest novel, a simple room becomes Room: a womb, a school, a cell, a universe. In the end, a woman and a boy emerge, breathless and hungry to begin again. The reader lingers in the doorway, musing.

I write fiction in search of such thresholds – where the clay weight of the ordinary lifts in an unknown light, where Yann Martel's Beatrice meets Dante's, where my little story brushes against someone else’s. "What is autobiography,” Anne Michaels writes, “but everything written around what has been left out? The missing electron that gives the molecule away. Heisenberg's hide-and-seek. For the reader, this is everything; the way another's words illuminate our privacy. For the writer too. Whether we know it or not. Much better to try to know." (“The Least of It,” Writing Life)

Join a writing community in your area (in Victoria, try the Victoria Writers' Society), or connect on line. For instance, short story writer Sarah Selecky offers a lively interactive site for fiction writers.

“I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream.

Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading; & pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. I think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I don’t care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there.”

(The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3, 1925-30)

“When you write a story and you sense a drift coming on, follow it where it takes you – it’s probably a clue as to where your story is really going. The trick is to go where it takes you before your logical mind can rationalize you out of that direction: “It makes no sense,” your mind will say. “You’ve completely gone off track.” But the art happens when you go off track. You must have faith! And you have to practice the art of writing without knowing.” (Writing Practice course, Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts, 2011)