Over the weekend, I read a friend’s manuscript. She is a published writer, and a fine one, but she had been working on this novel for at least 5 years, and I knew she had struggled with it. She is not a mystic, but despite many discouragements and setbacks, she soldiered away at her writing because she felt that somehow she’d been ‘given’ this story to tell.
I approached the manuscript with some trepidation in part because I knew what it had cost my friend to bring her novel so far. We both understood that my job was to keep her from walking into a propeller if that’s what I felt would happen when she sent her manuscript to a publisher. I had to be honest, even if that meant telling my friend that her book really didn’t have a future.
I knew the barebones of the story, of course. The narrator is a woman in her 80’s, still smart, funny and incisive, but she had a fall, so she is recuperating in a rehab hospital in Calgary. As part of her rehabilitation, she and the other seniors are taking a creative writing course where they are encouraged to do a number of assignments – all of which prepare them ultimately for writing their ‘real memoirs’. My friend’s protagonist, Kay, came of age just before the beginning of World War II. She is every Canadian, but her experiences have been far from typical: she flew one of the great Pan-American Clippers to Hong Kong; she was in Hong Kong when the city was attacked, by using her wits she managed to get some valuable Japanese art out of Hong Kong and back to its owner in Calgary.
The book is filled with incident, but as we all know, incident alone does not a fine book make. We have to care about the people whose world we enter, and I cared about Kay from the first page. The characters in my friend’s book are all sharply drawn, morally complex and dimensional. The Canada in which they live is very different from our own. Better in many ways, but in its treatment of minorities of women far worse. That said, I enjoyed my time there immensely.
I was about half way through the manuscript when I exhaled. I knew my friend had written a very good book indeed. I’m a working writer. I’m aware of the harsh realities of publishing today, but I always tell emerging writers that a good book will find its way, so I am optimistic.