Monthly Archives: March 2015

Spring is here – I think.

About other things

It’s March and in Toronto the temperature has finally climbed well above the minus double digits. It’s been a cold winter. Toronto is not as cold as other parts of the country but it seemed that this year at least we could legitimately share the national pastime of complaining about the cold.

Let’s start again. I went and checked the historical temperatures for December, January and February. February was cold – double digit cold. The other months, not so cold. It looked to me that last year was colder for January at least. But what I remember of last year was not the cold but the snow. What does this tell me.

Cold is relative.

Cold is what others tell you it is.

Let’s take the second point first. If someone tells you something, which you can experience for yourself, who would you believe? This year the weather people kept saying how cold the winter has been, over and over and over. Well, yes it was cold this winter but colder than normal? not according the historical data I looked at. But when you are in the middle it’s hard to see the relativity of it all. So you buy into what you hear. It’s cold out there, really, really, cold. Well yah, duh, it’s winter. What do you expect. Colder than previous years. Well maybe for February but not over all. Perspective is what is needed. Perspective and long underwear.

But now we are into March and the first point comes into play. Spring is around the corner and the glories of having four seasons is unfolding before me. The temperature is above zero, – say 4 to 5 degrees C and what do you see: people running in shorts, people in light jackets, people  out and about. And I love it because I know that if this was November  and it was 4 or 5 degrees, people would be looking for their winter coats, staying in or dragging out their winter running tights. It’s all relative! The temperature is the same but what we feel is so completely different that reality is warped. 5 degrees in November is NOT 5 degrees in March.

Expectations are also different as spring unfolds. One of my daughters is on Vancouver Island and I was talking to her last night.

Me – “The snow is melting like crazy. It’s amazing how quickly it goes.”

Her – “The trees are blossoming here.”

Me – “What?”

Her – “What are those big pink blossoms, sort of like cherry blossoms?”

Me – “Magnolia?”

How on earth can it be so different from one part of the country to the other – the world I can understand but in one country that is supposed to be part of a northern climate! (Of course I understand the meteorological reasons – she’s on an island in the pacific and it’s going to be significantly more moderate there – but really!)

So spring is relative – here in Toronto hope springs in it’s inhabitants breasts and in Victoria it’s already sprung.

Learning about writing from reading … or not

About writing

I received the edited version of my book Beast Master. It was rather depressing all the changes that were suggested, but that is why you have an editor review it. Nina Munteanu made lots and lots of useful comments and even pointed out a grammatical usage which is different here than in the UK (which goes to show that spelling is not the only thing which is different). It will take a while for me to get through them all but one comment really stood out. She felt there wasn’t enough physical description, both for place and character. I found that both amusing and lowering because I had realised there was very little description of any kind and had done a huge edit to include description (mostly physical I have to admit), obviously not very successfully. Thinking about how important description is led me to think about why I didn’t include it in the book from the get go. That led me to thinking about books I read and the descriptions in them.

There is a lot of encouragement for budding authors to use literature as models for their own writing. In fact there are courses which are based around using the classics to help writers improve their own writing. I read a lot but physical description has never really impacted on me. I read for the story and the action. I couldn’t tell you what the main character of any of the books I read looks like, or what the land they are living in looks like. But I appreciate description which adds to suspense such as:

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
         Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door. (Alfred Noyse, the Highwayman).

The suspense in this first stanza is wonderful.  This is followed by the highwayman’s description which I could care less about. I wanted to know what was going to happen, so although I read the next stanza, I barely paid attention. Why? The only reason I can give is that I am a greedy reader and want to know what happens next NOW! As a result, all those little details describing the highwayman are ignored by me, skipped over, consigned to the background, in my hurry to get to the action. And the upshot is I ignore them in my writing. So now, I have to figure out how NOT to ignore them and believe me, I find it difficult, very, very difficult to describe what I see in my mind’s eye.

PS Loreena Mckinnitt has put the above poem to music. It’s worth a listen.