If you’re in the second or third act of your life, as in fully- or semi-retired, what are the chances you can write that book you’ve always felt you had in you, and find a real publisher to buy it?
From what the audience at the final reading event of the 2021 Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts heard on Aug. 15, the chances might be slim, but with determination it is possible.
The New Voices event at the festival features authors who began writing after successful careers in other fields. This year, in a panel moderated by Powell River writer Megan Cole, those writers were Coast businesswoman Claire Finlayson, who for decades helped run Finlayson Goldsmiths, and Michelle Good, a Saskatchewan lawyer and member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation.
Finlayson has gone on to write the well-received memoir, Dispatches from Ray’s Planet: A Journey through Autism, published by Caitlin Press, of Halfmoon Bay. The book traces her relationship with and struggle to understand her much-loved autistic brother, Ray.
Good’s first novel, Five Little Indians, tells the stories of five residential school survivors who grapple with the cruel traumas of their childhood as they fight to make headway in their adult lives.
Good’s book has had success most first-time authors of any age can only dream of, with a string of nominations for prestigious prizes while winning the Harper Collins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award, and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Five Little Indians, as Good announced at the event, has also been optioned for possible production as a TV mini-series.
When asked for their advice to aspiring writers, Good quipped, “Just write the book,” a reply that prompted a laugh from the Rockwood Pavilion audience. “It’s funny, but it’s not meant to be funny,” said Good. “I get a lot of emails from aspiring writers that want to write, and they immediately make the connection from writing to publishing. And people really need to absorb that those are two very, very, very different things.
“Writing the book is the art,” Good continued. “It’s the art of telling your story. And that story is what should be driving you, not the idea of publication. Publication is nothing until you’ve got that story down in a way that it’s living inside you. Then see what happens.”
Finlayson said she agreed with the distinction Good had made, adding that it’s also crucial “to get yourself in a writing group, a critique group. You know what’s in your head, and nobody else does, [so] it’s too easy to write a story and gap out, or belabour a point, or say too much about something, or not enough.”
Finlayson said that once she managed to earn a seat in one of legendary Coast author and mentor Betty Keller’s writing groups, “then I had to get thick enough skin to take criticism, proper critique from other writers in my group and to really listen to them, not just defend my darlings,” she said.
“Get your work in front of other writers who will give you honest feedback.”
