This Writer’s Life: The Practice of Fiction

Novelist Carolyn Chute used to say that she spent eight hours a day talking to little people who weren’t there. Fellow writers in the audience would laugh—a little nervously. Because of course the little people are there. And they don’t go away—until we give them voice and a chance to make a mess of their very own lives and—who knows?—maybe even a chance to redeem themselves.

That’s what keeps us writing. We want to find out what happens next.

The novella I’m working on began with a voice in my head. A character was beginning to tell me her story. I couldn’t figure out where she lived, so I ignored her because I was at work on something else. But she persisted, and when I made my first trip to Quebec City, I realized she lived there. Everywhere I went, I found her story emerging—so fast and so vividly, that I had to drop what I was writing and attend to these places she had lived and worked.

I am not a writer of historical fiction, yet this character lived in a city I didn’t know at the end of World War II and spoke a language I speak poorly and read almost not at all.

Now what? She wouldn’t go away, and so I got out a pen and notebook and started to follow her.

Stories seem to come from one of three different sources: image, situation, or voice. Of course any story involves all three, but each tends to have its beginning in one. And this story began with a voice.

A colleague in California who is beginning to write fiction keeps asking me which is more important—character or plot? She took a course in plotting, and the teacher gave her all sorts of good advice about outlines. But she keeps getting thrown off course by scenes that occur to her which don’t appear in her plan.

I say, “Follow the character, and you will find the plot.” For me it is almost never the other way around.

All fiction has both; it’s merely a question of where you begin. If you follow one, you run into the other. Characters do things. Plot is a way of describing what characters do. And in following what they do, we discover more and more about who they are, what drives them, and what, in the end, might redeem them. Or to put it another way—what, in the end, they may come to understand about themselves and the world.

Characters have minds of their own, and it’s my job to follow them. Not the other way around. At some point in the writing of my current novella, it made sense to me to move the story to Montreal, the centre of a group of painters, Les Automatists, with which my narrator was obliquely involved. She wouldn’t budge, however. She lived in Quebec City. So in Quebec City she remained. 

It’s a curious act of surrender for a writer—sensing when to follow and when to lead. As much as we may talk about following our characters into the story, there does come a time when we have to make certain decisions. In the interest of accuracy, at some point, I had to research the politics and culture of post-war Quebec.

But I had to temper my research with my imagination and the integrity of the narrator—what she knows to be true about her life and her times in spite of the research.

I have no idea if I can actually pull this thing off. But I reckon if I’m not writing the thing I think I can’t possibly write—why am I writing at all? 

For it’s not only to find out what happens next that keeps most of us scribbling and typing into the wee hours. It’s also to see if we can create something out of thin air that is compelling and complete.

So that the little people who aren’t there can quiet down. And make way for the next group.