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In summer, relaxed more than I usually do, away from the city and the myriad ways in which it bleeds a person: contractors, idiot city councilors, parking enforcers giving tickets for leaving the car more than 14 inches away from the sidewalk (that one my favourite, as the ticket was given in the middle of January, the curb not visible, and immediately in front of our house).

There’s a mathematical formula to be worked out some time that compares the urban and the rural economy and illustrates the inverse relation of the factors of money and good will in the sum of daily exchanges we make. It’s not just a matter of the possibility of being kind being stamped out in the city, it’s about the way in which that kindness is actually currency – or takes the place of it. Margaret Thatcher, way back when, said that “there is no such thing as society.” She was looking for a way for her new Conservative Britain not to have to care for people who could not take care of themselves, and attacking socialist ideas of the common good was one step in that direction.

She was wrong, of course, for although yours and mine may be different there is absolutely something called “society” for each of us though it is really no more (and no less) than the sum of all those mundane transactions – on the street, with the neighbour, with the dry cleaner, the cashier at the grocery store and the streetcar or bus driver – that make up our day. We can gauge the quality of our life by the health and satisfaction we derive from these very ordinary transactions.

In the Nova Scotia village where I am fortunate enough to be able to spend time on a few occasions during the year, good will is not so much bartered as proffered in all sorts of ways, call them transactions, that not only cater to needs but strengthen the ties of the community. I write and, when I can, do so in the village’s and the region’s interests, and people are welcome to use my house for their friends or relatives and so on. One pair of friends, much more integral characters to the village than I could ever be, have a large and very beautiful vegetable garden and let their friends cook with the produce from it readily. (When it is suggested they might sell the vegetables, they pooh-pooh the idea. “That would make it work,” they say.) Others offer fresh fish, or labour. When my wife cracked a tooth, another neighbour – a dentist – insisted that she come out to his practice to have it done for naught. “That way, you’ll visit again,” he said. Last year we ferried stuff to Toronto for him, though we never did so with an eye to the future; we just did it because we could.

It’s a banal realization to see how frequently occurring and important to the health of the community these exchanges are but as I get on and am weighed down by the burden of worthless, meaningless and time wasting complexities that constitute my city day – all that shit in the newspaper that Olaf would not eat, all those exchanges with yet more rapacious conmen and people, even people I know, who say one thing and do another (something you would never get away with in a village where every one knows each other: you could do it, but you would be remembered for it) – I find myself not only wanting to state this banality but to work out that formula so I never let go of it.

And what is it?

The greater the number of people forced to live together, the more an impartial system of money and contracts will take the place of un-notarized human transactions and trust. It’s in the second part of that equation that we lose out, of course, as “trust” includes a whole packet of indices that we do not bother to quantify, let alone measure, because we cannot. They include things like admiration, affection and a sense of shared interests and outcomes – quantities that are vague not because we do not know exactly what they are (we do, and especially when they are transgressed) but because they do not need to be articulated in the sort of small community where every one is likely to meet the others regardless of whether or not they are “friends” with them. By contrast, contracts – agreements that, as W.G. Sebald said of tall buildings, invite their own destruction – seek to dispel these vague quantities from the realm of their consideration. Commodities from peaches to real estate have fixed prices because we assume the people who trade them have no personality, or at least not a personality that can affect the value of the exchange.

It is a model of surpluses, I suppose, that says where there is no perceived surplus, then everyone and their welfare will be seen as essential to the prosperity of the community – whatever meagre skills I have writing are seen to be as critical to the health of the village as my friend’s vegetables, another’s labour or somebody else’s wisdom. All these very different things are perceived to have a comparable and even equivalent value in the structure of the village and in the face of its real and hypothetical needs. A fancy way of saying someone will lend me his car or offer to pick stuff up in town if I am not going because that person may need me to do so in the future, but also because we position ourselves as members of a community that will only cohere if good will, and not currency, is the measure of our exchange.

At some base level, the members of a village know this; at some base level, the residents of a city forget this. The more a society grows, the more it depends on a system that uses money as the measure of surpluses and as a reserve against needs that by its very nature has absolutely no human quality. It provides no check on personal behaviour that might be described as moral. When I challenge the contractor, or the person taking my call at Shaw or Rogers, that person or the company they represent is free to move on without my views or feelings having any real consequence because there is always another transaction with another stranger to be had in which the exchange of money will take the place of trust and whatever reputation is accumulated from upholding or breaking it. All that is dealt in is money, and the pivotal place we in the city have given it makes me miss that place where other human qualities mattered. Where they “counted”. Like coins. Only better.

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Sandy Cove, an exquisite and storied fishing village halfway down the Digby Neck, on the Bay of Fundy in southwestern Nova Scotia, is the hideaway I could not do without. Were this an English village – and with its United Empire Loyalist history, it verges on being so – our house would be the pub. Such is the nature of the village, however, that a local would of course be redundant as friends gather on the beach, or come sunset at the bluff looking over it and the fishing weir on the western Bay of Fundy side, and then in their kitchens for a pot luck, a bit of a musical jam, or just for conversation. The fella who decided to charge for any of this would soon be bust.

My days have an idyllic rhythm here. The Neck is narrow, less than a mile wide, and at seven a.m. I have my morning coffee on the deck where I look east to the wharf on the Baie Ste Marie side – yes, I’ve started again (but I make my own espresso and not from any of those damn Nestlé pods) – and beyond, on a good day, the port of Weymouth on the Acadian French shore is visible. Then I’ll work until noon or so before taking the dogs and myself for a dip in the bracingly frigid Bay of Fundy and afterwards a more authentic “swim” in Little Lake. Then lunch – of fresh haddock or scallops from the local fish plant, so good I won’t eat either anywhere else – and then a little reading in the early afternoon before my eyes close: “research,” as I tell the kids. On a good day I’ll get a couple more hours’ work done in between four and six.

Life is good here, very good, and free of all the exhausting ways in which the city makes its demands. Here I am slowly but effectively catching up on all the work that was horridly not done in the last few months as my Toronto home underwent harrowing, over-extended and wildly over-budget renovations. (So common is this story, that I believe contractor estimates should be considered actionable examples of false advertising.) The book project that was in hand in March but out of reach from April through June is at last in view again and the other work that I have lined up – a few radio programs, a couple of essays – seems manageable and not the stuff of nightmare that has me waking up at four and feeling like a fraud – that spectre of French 432, again. Here I can give other authors the space and the faith they deserve without innumerable chores, bits of list making or seeds of rage busting in on every sentence.

This week I have been reading several novels – I keep different ones in different room – all of them Canadian. Not a plan, just the way it is, though, on the other hand, I also know how profoundly bored I am with the petty, invidious and misguided assailing of ‘CanLit’ in the media by a strident bunch of mediocre writers of little or no achievement. I can’t call them “critics,” because they aren’t. They are bitter little people with no idea of just how unoriginal they are. They do not see that they, rather than the novelists they are attacking, are the conventional ones. Typically, this bunch attack Canadian novelists for eulogizing place, the domestic life or, in this fallacious cartoon of an apparently clichéd literature, for being stuck in some house on the prairie and not, say, writing novels set outside the country or in cities. In truth they are the ones operating in a long line of self-loathing Canadians who wish they belonged to a club with its headquarters elsewhere. They are missing the point.

But, in truth, who expects much of books pages these days? The Globe & Mail, the other day, ran an editorial that declared the book not to be dead citing, with a spectacular lack of imagination, the success of the Stieg Larsson novels (“Reports of the demise of the book are greatly exaggerated,” August 4th 2010), but its book section is a far cry from what it was when, in 2000 or so, the newspaper rivalry with the National Post was at its peak and, true to form, on the day that Newfoundland’s Lisa Moore was long listed for the Man Booker Prize, the paper had dedicated precious arts pages space to Margaret Atwood. Again. (Their coverage of Canadian films is not much better, our movie-makers apparently limited to Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg and Deepa Mehta.)

Books coverage is no better in other papers. Back in 2000, the Toronto Star had just a few pages but a section that had a clear sense of national purpose and that gave Canadian stories proper and interesting attention; now these same pages are a lacklustre, pointless joke. Even the Quill and Quire, the magazine of the book trade, is a mess. I have no hesitation in saying that I have never seen the Canadian discussion of books in such a sorry state though I suppose I have only been paying attention to them for a dozen years – and the e-reader phenomenon is no excuse. Were I ever asked to be a books editor again (I was for a while and headed Canada’s first stand-alone all-colour books section with contributors from all around the globe, that was fun), I’d splash across the head of the opening page, the words: IT’S NOT HOW YOU READ BUT WHAT YOU ARE READING THAT MATTERS.

All the novels I have been reading this week are Canadian. The first of these, Piers’ Desire, is by Marianne Ackerman, a Montreal writer whose love of things French extends in this story to Avignon and a middle-aged male writer living there. Marianne, you should know, is my boss so I suppose nothing I say about it can be taken on faith but you know as well as I that I have to be able to stand by whatever I write in this small country so why would I bother mentioning it were my position not defensible? I liked Piers’ Desire very much. Its story is slightly redolent of another age when getting away to do anything, let alone write, actually seemed possible because the Internet had not yet reduced the idea of “away” to a fiction (this, at the very same time that its virtual world undermines the user’s state of being “here”) least in our psyches) though, on the other hand, its characters and situations render it most definitely a story of now. It’s winding narrow streets and architectural spaces, from Papal cathedrals to small rooms, are convincing but also her array of characters – the thriller writer, Piers Le Gris, who could use a little of Sandy Cove to win his writer’s routine back; the landlady, an older woman who played a part as a young girl in the French Resistance and who owes something to Simone Signoret in the film of John Braine’s Room at the Top; Magali, the wayward teenage girl who—he can’t help himself (this is France and, besides, the book is at its hardest point of being nearly done) – distracts him, and Moloud, an equally misguided adolescent whose troubles are amplified by being French-born but of Arab descent.

The other three speak to Canada directly. Summer is for picking up the unexpected and the first of these novels, Maclean, I bought because my wife Sarah, a publisher, had heard its New Brunswick author Allan Donaldson speak and spoke so interestedly of him. What a pleasing discovery the book is. Maclean is a crisply written novel – and, at 160 pages, short. It tells the story of a soldier returning to his New Brunswick village from the trenches of World War One and his alcoholism and his inability to fit in. There is, in a way, nothing “new” at all about the book (“novel,” after all, is a word that essentially means new), which leads me to admire it and its author all the more. Right from the opening paragraph, in which he describes the muddy battlefields of France, the reader senses he is in sure hands. Donaldson is equally adept at describing battle, the mill-town landscape of New Brunswick, and Maclean’s flashbacks and regretted life. There is the toughness of David Adams Richards here, and the eye for male despair of the early Richard Wright. And in all this weariness, there is light. Donaldson has another book out this autumn called The Case Against Owen Williams, and I shall certainly read it.

Kathleen Winter’s first novel, Annabel, is an altogether different creature that is also riveting from the very first page. I was part of a jury that awarded Kathleen Winter Newfoundland’s Winterset Prize a couple of years ago, and even I am taken aback by this book’s power. At its most basic, Annabel is the story of a hermaphrodite child raised in Labrador. It is about the struggle of genders within one child, and how that struggle makes the child another thing entirely, and the struggle of those around the child to come to terms or even acknowledge what can hardly be spoken. Kathleen Winter’s sense of place, of the landscape of Labrador and her sensitivity to the small numbers of people who make a bargain with it for a living there, is exceptional, and her subject is thrilling because – hard to manage these days – it really is new and has the consequence of making at least this reader look around himself at people and communities he thought he knew and wondering what secrets have been kept there. Yet neither is the book about being a hermaphrodite to the exclusion of other things. Annabel’s story is a metaphor for all kinds of suppression and utterly, deeply moving.

Kathleen is sister to Michael, an equally talented writer whose playful illustrations improved the only book I’ve written a few years back, and who also served as the focus of its Newfoundland chapter. One of the pleasures of getting on a bit is discerning those among the explosion of writers in their twenties and thirties who will stay the course and to be able to follow the trajectories of certain artistic careers as journeys in themselves. Michael Winter is, to me, a fascinating and highly original writer whose work must be noted on the one hand for its entertainment and, on the other, because every book he writes is at the same time, a declaration against his craft. In This All Happened, he played with the idea of writers making things up; in The Big Why, he challenged the conventions of historical fiction; and in his new novel, The Death of Donna Whalen, he inverts Jean-Paul Sartre’s view that the recounting even of “true” stories is fiction (if only because the mere act of selecting memories to recount them is an arbitrary one), and decides that the best way to write the novel of the murder of a woman who, in 1993, was stabbed 31 times in St John’s, Newfoundland, is to hand over all right of representation to the characters themselves. He has written his novel by selecting verbatim from the words the characters themselves used in the subsequent trial and, in a sense, making up nothing. True to form, Winter’s book puts the value of the novelist’s contribution on trial though it still doesn’t manage to convict him. There is artifice here, plenty of it – and, as with his sister’s and Donaldson’s novels, there is not just a rooting in place but an outright love of it. Pace CanLit’s tedious, baying snipers, there is nothing provincial at all about any of these books. You realize, the more you read, that whatever their universal truths, almost all great literature is local.

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I’ve given up coffee.

From three short kick-ass double espressos to none, and this for a month now.

I know quite a bit about addiction – to drugs, of course; to sex, were I enough of a celebrity for my routine fantasies to be the stuff of scandal, get reported, and have me heading off to the clinic all contrite; to massage therapy, bogus treatments that I have mostly given up on (spas, in particular, being the great con job of our time, along with the pretence that sushi is actually a meal) – and, of course, to coffee.

I tell you, the withdrawal was something. It existed, for a start. I was crabby for a good ten days, the length of my legs ached and my head too. For a week I had so little to say about anything that my wife, Sarah, declared more than once that she preferred the caffeinated me – the one prone to rages concerning the news, considerable moodiness, and who was unable, ever, to sleep the night through.

In time, I’m sure, I’ll discover that most of these symptoms are not related to coffee withdrawal, though in truth they had little to do with my quitting anyway. Yes, my going cold turkey (well, tepid tea in fact, but you know what I mean) was more of an anti-corporate thing. It was the consequence of a sudden, growing and irrepressible dissatisfaction with how coffee was being sold to me, and an agitated awareness of just how much money was being made off the lemming procession of myself and billions of others into coffee shops for the sake of a habit that long ago become automatic. I’ll drink the stuff again but according to the principles of the impossible 100-mile diet, I’ll reserve my next for Mexico, perhaps, though more likely Italy. (The beans aren’t from there, but espresso is their invention and surely qualifies.)

So much of a good coffee, don’t we know, has to do with surroundings and memories. The espresso I had in Siena a bit more than a year ago was probably the last coffee I really enjoyed – standing at the counter of a small café in Italy, the country where men and women of all ages have a place, and watching the theatre of these people playing their parts. That I miss. That I can wait for. (I don’t believe in quitting absolutely, by the way, as addiction is only ever truly conquered when you are able to partake – but on your own terms. That may mean having none at all, which is fine, or a bit now and then, as another might smoke the occasional cigar.)

It took me more than those ten days to get over the seeming pointlessness of mornings, or at least the way they were no longer punctuated from sleep. That I’m still getting over, though I’m not wandering around for quite so long trying to figure out not just how to wake up, but how to mark the moment. On bad mornings before, I’d write my coffee in bold type by leaving the house, taking the dogs maybe, and heading to a Third Place – in my Toronto Cabbagetown ‘hood, the Rooster coffee shop on Broadview, the other side of Riverdale Park. It has the best view of downtown in all of Toronto, the city across the green and the Don River arranged on the distant plateau as if on a platter. And the staff is really decent, too. None of the cult of coffee shops in which it is apparently meant to be a part of the experience for the barista who serves you to be a complete psychopath who thinks it is de rigeur to be a rude asshole.

Most writers have a Third Place – not home, not the office – often among a crowd where it is possible to sink into a certain anonymity and find the head space required to get on and work. A Third Place that allows you to get away from distractions – bills, family routines, calls and e-mails – that can gang up on a writer from time to time. Invariably, in my case, the Third Place would go hand in hand with a good coffee, so this routine, too, has become a casualty of my quitting. Tea, as much as I now drink of it – having always loved it, but in the afternoon – just seems too prissy for the job. Now those feelings of pointlessness that were a part of the withdrawal, I thought, have extended to this decades-old habit. I am without a Third Place.

But this deprivation, too, may have to do with something else, for there is no longer the same possibility of getting away. Our offices are our computers and our mobile communications devices and they can be taken anywhere. The Third Place no longer offers the possibility of getting away and, worse, it is now the place to get away from. Tables of students wired up to their computers with their cheapskate coffees by their side, or the old man at the Rooster whom I think is not so much working as wanting company from behind his Mac. It’s no longer possible to sink into creative anonymity when you’re a part of the obnoxious majority.

So now the cafés don’t cut it. On top of everything, they feel like a cliché, and so now when I want to get away it’s usually to a kitchen table with all the hullabaloo of kids making pleasant pandemonium about me. I need a Third Place, but I don’t know where it is anymore. This much I do know: plugging out is the thing. A year ago I gave up another bad habit – my cell-phone. How pleased I am that it’s hard to get in touch. But that’s a story for another day.

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So for a month or two I am, of necessity, in a ‘Third Place.’ As the simple replacement of windows in my Toronto Cabbagetown home has turned into a predictable morass of repairing a century’s shoddy construction and fly-by-night adjustments to a house that was never anticipated to be the swell and gentrified place it is now, I find myself a refugee staying a few blocks away. Me and the animals, and my morning dogs’ walk back to the house to see how it is faring.

A couple of days ago I dropped by and thought I was in Texas after a hurricane – wondered, for a moment, about that work permit I did not get. One of the back walls entirely missing and the contractor, not a con artist, was explaining to me why it needed to be rebuilt. Now this is the sort of stuff that breaks many couples up – and cuts into decent writing time, that’s for sure. Fortunately, some time back, I studied archaeology and so I’ve been able to come to terms with this ballooned and expensive undertaking as a sort of late post-secondary entertainment. I learn the terms of carpenters and, reminded of those McGill student days, try and divine just what was intended by the tenants and builders of three, five, seven and even ten decades ago. Never thought the archaeology would come in handy in this way.

Or the psychology, for that matter. I have what I call ‘Dreams for Cretins’, they are so simple to interpret. One stream has me in houses that typically have a handsome front but cardboard thin walls or the torrent of some underground spring rushing through its basement and eroding the foundations. In either case, it’s easy to see that the total collapse of my life as a charade is what’s at issue, though on the bright side I often wander out through rooms that have the possibility of being grand and a back garden that stretches out into some extended, rolling field, like some seigneurial strip in Kamouraska, reaching down to the bank of a stunning blue river.

So I’m afraid my house is falling down but I dream of golden pastures anyway, what else is new? The house is a particularly Canadian literary metaphor – previously occupied by tenants long since evicted in B.C., a paradise built over First Nations guilt; vacated by departed generations in the prairies; filled with family secrets in the Atlantic provinces; and the place of refuge against a threatening outside world in Québec – but in my case, and I’d hazard that of many other writers, it’s just about feeling like a fraud. I’m okay while I’m doing the job, am very invested in it to the point of being somewhere else completely (the world of words), but at that moment where I come out of the glorious solipsism that allows an author to work at all, I can feel as vulnerable as a turtle on its back.

Curiously, it’s a feeling I get with jet lag – day two flying west against the clock, to be precise. It’s on this day that I routinely have another of my Dreams for Cretins, this one where I get the call from the Ministry of Education examiner who says to me, regarding the course that used to be a mandatory requirement to graduate from Québec high schools, “Mister Richler, you did not pass French 432.” Immediately, the house comes crashing down: not having French 432 means I did not graduate, go to CEGEP, to McGill or Oxford, work at the BBC, in newspapers or become an author afterwards. I know enough about this dream, by now, to expect it – and to make a point of staying home in the comfort of my house on that difficult second day.

And so, despite the massive expenditure on my house renovations, I am, at this point, curiously okay with it all. I’ll be left with a house looking no different, attracting no more on the market (which was never and is still not the intent) and with nothing peachy like a new kitchen to show for the trouble. But a part of me, I know, like a mild version of Ken Kesey’s Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, previously imagining doom and conspiracy in the walls, shall sleep better, knowing they are just a bit likely to come tumbling down. Maybe even write more confidently, who knows – until, that is, the fella who left the Ministry of Education sometime back for a job in the Ministry of Labour calls me in the middle of the night to say, “Mister Richler, you do not have your Work Permit no 432.”

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Three weeks and no column, eh? Not for want of writing, I can tell you that. Apologies. As my wife is fond of saying, I’ve had my head up my ar—, indicating by popping a thumb out of her mouth that it’s high time I pulled my head out of it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Back from Ukraine, where I’ve been on assignment for Canadian Art magazine shadowing Donald Weber, a talented Canadian photographer who is perhaps better known in Europe than here. Donald takes photographs of shortchanged Ukrainians living miserable lives — in Chernobyl, for his book Bastard Eden, and now of Brechtian down and outs in the city of Dneprodzherzhinsk, a steel and chemicals factory town principally remembered as the place where Leonid Brezhnev was born. (This, to be distinguished from Dnepropetrovsk, the larger regional capital renowned for its university chemistry department but also the unfathomably savage teen killers known as the ‘Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs’ who were finally imprisoned last year.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Today, I thought I’d share with you some thoughts about work at the bottom end of the pay scale—and, in particular, commissions or the work we do of our own volition for the web. Most of us are getting more and more of these sorts of jobs or feeling compelled to try. Those who aren’t, or who are just starting in the writing business, should, to my mind, make a point of considering web work and at the very least be excited at the prospect of it. Read the rest of this entry »

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A rough patch: all those January plans and nothing adding up. No money coming in, no big thoughts, not even small ones that are all that interesting, and a newspaper editor who’s sat on your good piece for six weeks and counting. Not even yours truly would run it now. My major obsessions these last couple of weeks? The Olympics, of course, there’s a distraction from having to see the bank manager about extending the line of credit and a leaking bathroom that has cost me twelve hundred dollars for four plumber visits and isn’t fixed yet. More folk asking me about the next book. A nice two sheets of plans but bad days, plenty of them.

About those Olympics: Alistair MacLeod, in his wonderful story “The Closing Down of Summer,” writes a paean to the coal miner as silent athlete, the mountaineer who works under, not over, the ground but who pursues his excellence to no applause. It is an elegy to physical work as it used to be performed, and MacLeod’s miner laments, with a certain irony, the sort of work that the subsequent generation does. The sons and daughters have become “successful” in a material manner in which the miners who made it so are not. Work of the physical kind has become, for the newer generation, a pastime—something that is done at the gym. They are doctors and lawyers and dentists moving “their fat pudgy fingers over the limited possibilities to be found in other people’s mouths.”

Or they are writers such as this one, realizing in a bad moment that that they have been sitting not for days but years at a desk and that, in my case, the father who was the example died at seventy because his atrophied body simply packed it in; that it has not so suddenly come to that point where exercise as something that might have occurred in the ordinary working day has not been a fact of this writer’s life for a couple of decades. Time to look around for something more to feel shitty about, which is not hard—not on oneself, anyway, but tough on the loved ones around you. Think, for instance, of François Hamelin skating his way to lithe and speedy victory on the short track and Marianne St-Gelais, his silver medalist partner, wildly applauding his success from the stands. “Now how come you don’t cheer like that when I finish an article?” I say to the wife—a joke of course, though maybe a fantasy, too, from time to time, and funny enough. But shit, did I really have to blow up and make a fool of my stupid selfish self when I told the kid in the morning that not quickly washing a dish that she had only used for a slice of toast, instead of putting it in the dishwasher, was pathetic? Man, I have to learn to keep this misery to myself.

Lumpen I may feel at times like these, in more ways than one, and so it was that I did eat humble pie and take my wife’s instruction and go out and get a little exercise. Let the cold morning air do what I’ve been depending far too much on shorter and shorter espressos to do. Certainly, exercise helps. It gets the blood rushing and improves the mood, if not the thoughts.

And as I head to the gym myself, one of MacLeod’s city Canadians whose privileges have estranged him from physical work, it strikes me that there is at least one way in which writing is actually quite like an athletic endeavour after all—though I think less of the mountaineer than of the baseball or hockey player in a slump. Hitting badly. Not scoring goals. Only nobody’s going to bench me but myself, and there’s no one else on the bench to come forward. So what can you do but keep playing and shoot through it. Exercise, sure, but keep writing. Find the groove again. Endure the bad days. Believe there are more good ones around the corner.

What you can’t do is quit.

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Well, just how did I manage this? I’m on the West Coast of Mexico, at the moment, staring out over the Pacific lapping at sands just a hundred yards away, here on assignment for a Toronto magazine. I’m writing a profile of a fella hard at work, just finishing a novel, and know enough about the writing life to take him at his word when he says he’s not to be disturbed until three. You would expect as much, really, given that I grew up in a novelist’s house and have had a head start on what it actually takes in the unfolding of a day, week, month and year for a writer to be able to write.

I’m talking about time—or what I prefer to think of as ‘time around time’. That’s the cushion a writer really needs in order to be able to produce.

Any of you who writes or perhaps wants to and has spoken to a writer will likely have had a conversation in which words along the line of “I would be writing my novel, if only I had the time.” This is a notion Margaret Atwood famously mocked when, a doctor having said as much, she replied, “And I’d have been a brain surgeon if only I’d had the time.”

At its most basic, time is, of course, of the essence. Nothing at all gets written if a writer does not actually put pen to paper and do the work. It is in the nature of the job that life itself has manifold means of getting in the way. Hence the English critic and novelist Cyril Connolly’s remark: “There is no more sombre enemy of art than the pram in the hallway.” This is a very amusing statement and it has been much quoted but should be taken with a grain of salt as Connolly, a member of London’s upper-classes, also declared, after his marriage, that “the problem is, I am still homosexual, emotionally” and probably had in him a degree of English aristocratic contempt for children, best dispatched out of the house and to boarding school at, say, the age of six months. Still, there is truth in Connolly’s little aphorism: as I say, life gets in the way—as, closer to home, Alice Munro knows all too well, having been, for this reason, especially sympathetic to women wanting to write and having to cope with being mothers at the same time—though I don’t actually see Connolly having pushed that pram around a lot.

Even in my own family’s case—my father Mordecai having been of that generation we all envy, where one job was enough to keep most households afloat—there was a division of labour that saved the author upstairs from the prams in the hallway (five, over time) and did not exactly fill the children with pride. It used to drive my elder brother Daniel, in particular, quite batty when my father would brag that he’d never changed a nappy in his life. Good on him, I suppose, and right up his alley of humour. But it left his kids, the boys especially, with a virtually un-winnable task of proving to their wonderful partners that they did not need a social revolution to split the chores, do the shopping, cook and then wash the dishes and change the diapers, etc. (In fact, my father was not oblivious to this, just unable to do anything about it. In Joshua Then and Now, the scene about wife Pauline’s meltdown over bags of groceries and whatever has happened to her life was played out in my own house a few times.)

But, in truth, all that life getting in the way is actually the point of it. I’m sure that miserably sequestering oneself away as a writer is a very viable option for many, but then you have to ask yourself if you really want to be that person. Don’t you want to go down to the market on a Saturday morning, hang out with the kids and then the teenagers when you’re not exhausted, and have family time in the evenings or on a Sunday when your partner is not working and the young ones are not at school? Isn’t that the point of making a living as a writer? (Frankly, I even see writers’ retreats as dyspeptic kinds of places heaping the blame on the people you leave behind.)

Yes, I’d say, which means that understanding and then managing the conditions that allow you the cushion of time around time and then the creative possibility of that precious kernel of clear time itself is all the more important. How do you do this? Well, I’m approaching fifty and I’m still learning or, more honestly said, still having trouble aligning what I know about how I work with the way I work when I do, but mostly it all comes down to the howlingly banal.

Drink less, if you want to get up in the morning and the morning is when you write. Don’t waste precious time answering e-mails or surfing the web for headlines or a bit of permissible peeping first thing in the morning—after the kids have gone to school and the wife has left for work and the animals have been fed and the cat let out and the dogs walked and the humidifiers filled and the kitchen cleaned and the Mom dealt with—if first thing in the morning is when you do your best work.

Don’t schedule your appointments for then and don’t, if you do have one away from home (and home is where you work), decide that you’re actually making an economy of time by shopping at No Frills or wherever because it’s right there, because then that clock in the corner will have chimed twelve and you’ll know that it’s only reasonable, now to feed yourself—maybe down at the Chinese on Broadview because you can do it for six bucks, though you haven’t actually earned any money yet this week, besides you can take the dogs who are looking up at you plaintively and with disappointment because they can’t quite come to terms with just how boring a master you are and next thing you know you’ll be on the couch having a nap—doing some research, whatever you choose to call it—and the day will be mounting towards its four o’clock fury and then the kids and the wife will be back home and you’ll be hollering at the kid for not walking the dogs as if that short task and not all the other stuff you did is why you’ve managed to reach the end of another day with not much to show for it.

Get to your desk at four or at nine, sitting or standing but do it, and know that not just the Wednesday but the Tuesday and the Thursday play into it. (Write longer days than you’re used to, and I’ll wager that often you’ll blow the day afterwards because you really are spent and the mind, like the body, needs replenishing.)

Consistency is what the writer needs, consistency is what he must build, and he needs the time around time to do it if he has any chance of becoming that fella who really is quite boring—the one your disappointed dogs are looking at. After a while the intelligent writer knows that, barring the occasional Hunter Thompson and other cowboys, writers are boring. They have to be, if there is to be any actual excitement on the page. And what that really means is understanding that anything, even Mexico, that takes you away from your desk is going to rip into that time around time and make the time itself laggard and tarnished and bad. Sure, I get to be here (though with the wife and the kids would have been better) but the likelihood is that the days traveling here and back, the jet-lag and the poor performance afterwards and then the few days it will take to get back into the seemingly dull but absolutely essential and precious routine of the same thing happening, day in and day out for (wouldn’t it be glorious) a few weeks is the real cost of these glorious surroundings.

So I’d better make the best of it, work as I do uninterrupted—keep that time around time, and one day perhaps I’ll even have the courage to say, “No. Sorry. Can’t go to Mexico, there’s a book I’m writing and I don’t have the time.”

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This last couple of weeks I’ve been writing at the dining room table, partly to keep the spread in view, but also because damn city life gets in the way, most recently with plumbing that isn’t working and the smell of urethane as a couple of painters work on the stairs. Any stronger and this could be the alley behind a gas station. So it goes.

One project will never truly get underway until I’m in the right place for it, which is Nova Scotia. I can write in a train station at rush hour and at the family table before dinner with a dozen kids around, but this overdue book, for some reason, demands I be in the place I’m writing about, an opportunity I am trying to put into play later this month. A travel assignment is twisting me up more than it should. A couple of straightforward journalism pieces (that never are) beckon. A lecture due this spring – a first written assault on an idea that no publisher wanted but just won’t go away (a good sign) – deadlines are colonizing my desk at the moment.

If you’ve been following these postings then you’ll know I’ve been trying to – what’s the word Mr. Harper’s put in vogue? – recalibrate. Note, however, that in mine as in the case of most writers, that involves making an assessment for the New Year, estimating what I am capable of, trying to improve my productivity and working practices – rather than, say, skiing in Val d’Isère or somewhere, as apparently one hard-working Tory MP paying attention to his constituency is doing, or preparing for the Olympics as our PM will be doing soon enough. I’ve talked about how (1) how writers tend to gauge their success, and (2) how too much emphasis on the barometer of financial returns of whatever it is we do to get by can usurp vital time and energy and get in the way of what, if we think back to why we started, is the primary aim – all those lofty and difficult projects and ideas that prompted us to become a writer in the first place.

As far as income is concerned, it took me a while to come to the admittedly banal realization that writers are not like oil riggers or cops or plumbers or painters (you will understand if, what with the air sharp in here and it being too cold to open the windows much, tradesmen are on my mind). There is no benefit in overtime for us. No time-and-a-half after eight, double after ten and triple on bank holidays, or whatever it was I got paid in seismic, way back when. Even at their most efficient, writers face a ceiling on their revenue, because after so many hours in the day we just get stupid and write badly. Understanding the limitation this simple fact puts upon decent work will affect how a writer chooses projects and how well they are done.

If, for instance, you are a little bit presbyterian and so are hard put to say ‘no’ to anything, then you will probably learn that the cost of taking on too great a quantity of work, whatever that benchmark is for you, will be that the quality will suffer and that perhaps just one but more likely some of these projects will turn out sub-par. And, of course, this is bad news for a writer who is judged especially harshly by his or her last undertaking. In other words, if typically I am able to write twenty-five different newspaper pieces and ten other bits of work, but take on fifteen, then it is likely that I shall have a desk as I do today, with a couple of late pieces of work on top of many more. If, however, I recognize my ceiling, then I can choose more carefully, perhaps for the money or the travel and treats that come along with some assignments. Or reduce my targets because I understand that for a given time some less remunerative piece of work will require concentration. But in all of these cases I am better off if I have some idea of what that ceiling is – and whether or not I can raise it.

This year, despite having a surfeit of the overdue very badly paid labours-of-love and other work like this blog which pays very little. (I like Rover and have good reasons for doing it but we’ll get into all those web-led arguments another time.) I have raised my benchmarks and the revenue ceiling that goes along with it, mostly because it seems to me that this is what you have to do in hard times – i.e., not make excuses for yourself but leap at opportunity and make the best of it. It’s taken me stupidly long years – Malcolm Gladwell suggests what, it takes at least ten? – to figure out how I might actually manage to do this. But even sage analysis cannot for a moment guarantee better performance.

I have a couple of techniques for that which I’ll be happy to share next time. But another deadline looms.