According to Scrivener, my writing software, I have written 28,427 words of new fiction since we entered The Great Confinement. I’m not worried about getting in trouble for admitting this, with either colleagues or family, even though this productivity may suggest I’m not fulfilling more immediate daily duties. On campus, it’s long been public knowledge that the detailed notes that I take during meetings, as a university administrator, often have more to do with my latest novel than with the fine print of new curriculum proposals.
At home, I have always tried to work around family life and indeed, in the middle of it: the image of the writer that speaks most directly to me comes from Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.” It’s that of a minor character, Nick Greene, a hustling literary critic and family man, moving dirty dishes and diapers out of the way to keep working at the kitchen table of his crowded household. When I’m not waking up at 4 a.m. to write, I’m doing something like that (in pandemic times, it’s more often sourdough starter and swampy kombucha ecosystems that I’m moving out of the way).
But these days, being effectively attached to a laptop all day at a small desk in our bedroom, I don’t have the pretext or space for handwriting notes. Instead of my notebook, I have my Scrivener app open and active alongside my meeting apps; I add to my story any time an idea strikes me or a PowerPoint goes glitchy or long (or both).
Now, the only time I handwrite notes about characters and plots is just before I go to sleep. As a result, I have lost a lot of what now feels like the free flow of thinking and imagining about a story-in-the-making that comes from handwriting.
This isn’t surprising, upon reflection; what is surprising, however, is my discovering that I’m not the only serious fiction writer in our household; pandemic parenting and pandemic writing have come together this summer.
Each of our four children has at some point in their early lives declared plans to become a writer; the youngest, Imogen, 7, has lately become especially fixed on this plan. We find notebooks and loose-leaf sheets all over the house, full of character lists and story plans and various parts of various stories written in bold black pencil and bright markers.
The other night, I found her working at her desk, under lamplight, well past her bedtime, her older sister fast asleep on the other side of their bedroom. As a family, we’d just watched a new documentary about the life and work of the short story master Flannery O’Connor, and the viewing had inspired Imogen to something new.
Matching this intensity, she has also made daily, sometimes hourly requests to read my fiction. Working on a novel of her own, she wants to read mine just to get a sense of how much she has to write in order for her book to be published. I’ve pointed out there are other books she could read for this same purpose, but she really wants to read “Original Prin,” my latest. The main character is a bike-riding Sri Lankan-Canadian English professor and bad Catholic who lives in the east end of the city with his American wife and their four daughters.
Here’s the opening line: “Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family.”
I let Imogen know she can read it in about ten years. She accepted this and in turn asked me to tell her the story, confident I’ll make it age appropriate.
Instead of doing so directly, alas, like most parents looking for a way to get past a child’s persistence while trying to work or pick up or whatever else, eventually I reached for a device. I let her watch a couple of YouTube clips of my discussing the book, one from an event at the Toronto Public Library and another made by the University of Toronto. Afterwards, when I asked her what she thought my book was about, I was struck less by what she said than by how she said it. My daughter answered me with the airy confidence and self-deprecating stylings of an author being interviewed.
I dropped my dish towel and sat down on the couch beside her. Adopting the thoughtful, quizzical tone of an interviewer, I began to ask her about her own new novel. She responded immediately and with ease, launching into the story. After a little while, however, I sensed the onset of a big ellipsis: she hadn’t written more than a few pages of her latest effort and, I suspect, didn’t know where the story was going. I asked her why the main character, Katie, had decided to visit her grandmother and why readers should be surprised by what Katie’s grandmother gives her. Imogen looked troubled, even suspicious. Was she trying to remember if in fact that was her plan for her character? Or was she trying to figure out if I was patronizing her? That’s the worst possible feeling for a small child, never mind the youngest in the family, and especially in the midst of imaginative play.
Thankfully, she sensed I was proposing something else altogether. She explained why Katie had decided to visit her grandmother by introducing a new set of motives and mysteries to her work-in-progress. Staying in interviewer mode, I took the story in a new direction with my next question. She came right back at me, with fresh turns and unexpected events.
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And so we continued very happily that night, and have since then, with father-daughter author interviews. Each time, she starts explaining — creating, on the spot — a story by taking it one direction, and I ask followup questions that move things in different directions, sometimes randomly throwing in a new character or event to see what she and her imagination will do with it. The result is wonderful: here is a child’s living inner life expressed as storytelling; our back and forth is defined by a combination of her creative license and my creative constraints on it.
Compared to me and my flat, efficient writing app, Imogen’s vital, sprawling, spontaneous approach to storytelling on and off the page has refreshed my own sense of how to write during these confined times. Here’s hoping, whenever we finally emerge from the pandemic, it’ll be with plenty of new fiction from two members of the Boyagoda household.
