The story of the story

As I write I am in the middle of a book tour, for my novel Dazzle Patterns (Freehand Books). At every reading I get a couple of predictable questions:

What are Dazzle Patterns? The colourful broken stripes which were painted on allied warships during the First World War, to create visual confusion as targets for German submariners.

How did you think of the story?

At this point I sigh visibly, not because I don’t want to share the story of the story but because it feels so muddled; the opposite of a well-planned trajectory. I also sigh because it’s such a long story: eight years of clumsy groping towards the shape of the book and two years of re-writes and edits. (Along the way I was fortunate to work with Gail, whose clear insistence on structure helped me find my way).

Dazzle Patterns started as a non-fiction, set in Vancouver in 1921. I read everything I could on the city at that time, visited archives, gathered up family history. It was to be the account of my grandfather’s two week voyage in a life boat launched from his foundering ship, a freighter carrying BC lumber across deserted shipping lanes to Australia.

All was ready. I began the book, set the scene, and then found myself in a life boat with ten sailors and my grandfather. What did they say to each other? How did they feel? I had no record, no notes or memoirs; my grandfather died before I was born. I started making up dialogue. And, on that slippery slope, I tumbled into fiction.

I was originally a biologist. Scientific writing is a beautiful and formal ritual which takes the reader of the scientific paper through hypothesis, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. But it’s not great narrative. Mentorship at the Banff Centre for the Arts helped me move my first book, “The Last Island, a Naturalist’s Sojourn on Triangle Island,” into creative non-fiction, shedding my pedantic scientific voice and turning to the tools of fiction. That book went on to win the Edna Staebler Award.

I felt ready to immerse myself in the imaginary world of fiction. And then, in a strange twist, I found myself literally at sea. My husband took a sabbatical and we set off in our sailboat for a year in the Pacific.

A forty-foot boat with 4 people on it leaves little personal space. Every day between watches I would curl up on a downwind settee with my back against the bulkhead and write. In those cramped quarters I entered the expanse of story, which now included a character, Harry, based on my grandfather, and a woman, Lena, he met in Halifax (loosely based on my grandmother). I’m not sure I would have kept my sanity without that escape.

Of course, though I didn’t know it at the time, the story would change dramatically. Harry, his ordeal in the lifeboat, and Vancouver itself, would be cut from a re-write. (I still feel I have abandoned Harry). Lena would metamorphose into a previously secondary character Clare, who loses an eye in the Halifax Explosion; the book would shift its focus from one of being lost and found, to one of learning to see. It would become a book about art (as well as war and love).

What is difficult to explain to people when they ask about the story of the story, and maybe this is really what they are asking—how and why did I keep working on it. When the final story emerged from the chaos of drafts, I was almost going to ignore it. I was fatigued. But I also knew that there was no denying its insistent voice and if I didn’t write it, I would always know I had ignored it, that I hadn’t done my “job” as a writer. At the time I had just handed the draft to my thesis supervisor, for my MFA. I remember waking in the morning, trudging to my office, opening my computer and writing: Dear Joseph, please ignore the draft I have just sent you. I have realized I need to re-write this from start to end. Talk to you in a year.

Alison Watt  is a writer and painter who lives on Protection Island, Nanaimo BC.