Q How has being a father affected you? In the beginning and over the years?
A In the beginning, it allowed me to write. My wife worked, teaching ESL at UBC, and I was househusband, daytime single parent, and novelist. Not easy, but a surprisingly good fit in many ways.
Q Can you speak about the delights of getting to know your kids as they mature, without alienating your kids in public?
A I wouldn't want to. As parent, it would feel insufficiently respectful, and as writer, potentially cheesy.
From Colin:
Q So, about that terrifying process again. You have four or five people reading your daily output. Do you plow through the draft from beginning to end, or do these poor (and/or extremely lucky) souls have to read things out of order or the same page six times as you revise it?
A I show them the chapters as I write them, and I write them sequentially. If I don't get it right on the first try, I redo it and send it again. As I go along I revise the whole thing continually, piecemeal, but I don't update them on that. Finally I send them the manuscript. So they read it initially as a serial, every few days. I don't really do drafts, more a constant termite-like seething. I actually enjoy that aspect of the process. I feel like they're badly written but handsomely revised. Revision is largely stress-free. And they are, initially, in my opinion, not that well written. And while I know that they don't have to be, at that point, it still pains me.
Q Do you give them the first first draft of the pages, or the first draft after you've decided you're either not embarrassed or not going to worry about being embarrassed?
A I don't give them anything initially until I have what feels like a beginning. With Zero History, I think that was the first three chapters, which are longish, dense. That way, I feel like they know where we are. There's some kind of benchmark. Then we go on from there. Until recently, I could only have one outside first reader and my wife (and daughter, when she grew into it). Over the past decade or so, I've loosened up, found a greater degree of transparency, and I find that reduces the stress in some ways. For the past few months, writing daily, I found myself wondering what that would look like on a brain scan. I suspect there's some specific neurological activity, one that I can't necessarily produce at will. It's possible to get into a groove, though, and just do it, though at definite cost to everything else in one's life.
