From Smut to Adult Diapers: The Young Novelist's Life

By Vanessa Richmond, The Tyee. Posted July 19, 2007.

With writers such as Zadie Smith and Kiran Desai snapping up book prizes and moving heaps of copy, the young novelist's life can seem as glamorous as Paris Hilton's, just a tad smarter. But the reality for most trying to break into the trade is more long hours on outdated laptops than it is million dollar checks and cocktail receptions.

So why do they do it?

On a recent Thursday, we gathered six young B.C. novelists and asked them just that. Amidst the dingy but lively Legion on Vancouver's hip Main Street, Kevin Chong, Steven Galloway, Anne Stone, Elaine Corden, Michelle Kim and Nathan Sellyn spoke about writing degrees, writing porn and how, despite rain and rents and often rotten pay, B.C. has become a hotbed for Canadian up and comers.

On why B.C. is a hotbed:

Michelle Kim: "I lived in London for a while and worked at the books department at the BBC and brought in a bunch of books by young Canadian novelists like Sheila Heti and Michael Winter, and they just were totally blown away. They'd never seen anything like it. It was completely fresh and completely new. I think in the language there's a simplicity and a clarity and a resonance of universal truths that just gets everyone feeling something."

Steven Galloway: "I think part of it is that Canada doesn't have a mainstream publishing business. There's no giant publisher of smutty detective novels, for example. If you want to be a writer in Canada, the literary example is what you go towards, generally speaking, as opposed to the States and Britain, where they have more markets for more populist forms of writing that you can fall into easily. I mean, to be a science fiction writer in Canada, you have to be extraordinarily dedicated to the idea of science fiction because it doesn't exist for you to just join."

Kim: "When I was in England, we did a program on where is the best place for a writer to live in the world -- looking at things from the cost of living, to whether the culture accepted someone being a writer, to the amount of money you get from grants -- and it was Canada. I thought it would be Ireland, but it was here. And everyone joked they were going to move here."

On being the anti-trend:

Galloway: "I think the perception that nonfiction is exponentially hotter than fiction is a false one. And anyway, for most fiction writers, it's not a choice: You take away their ability to lie and there's nothing left."

Kevin Chong: "They always say that the publishing industry is dying, but they put out more and more books every year. It survives. There are more and more people publishing books and wanting to be writers."

On making pennies an hour:

Elaine Corden: "It's a cliché for a reason: If you're doing it for the money, you're always going to be hooped. People are going to smell that. You aren't doing it to make a living at it; you're doing it because you have to, because there's a story in you that has to come out."

Chong: "I know a lot of people talk about how terrible being a writer is, but it's terrible having a nine-to-five office job that you hate; it's terrible doing a lot of things. And it's terrible not to be able to do what you really want to do. And the fact that you're able to keep writing is a small success.

"Talking about being a writer shouldn't be like talking about having a chronic illness or about how to survive a bear attack."

Galloway: "If you ask any writer who just sold a million copies what they gained, it wouldn't be the million nickels they got from the royalties; it would be the million readers."

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