Interview with Alice Kuipers, Author of 40 Things I Want to Tell You.

We're excited to welcome Alice Kuipers to the blog today. Alice was born in London, England, and moved to Canada in 2003. She lives Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which took her a while for me to learn how to spell.  

Her first novel, Life on the Refrigerator Door, was published in 28 countries, won several awards and was named as a New York Times book for the Teen Age. Her second is called Lost For Words in the US, and The Worst Thing She Ever Did everywhere else. It won the Arthur Ellis Award, was shortlisted for the White Pine and Willow Awards, and was published in eight territories.  Forty Things I Want To Tell You is her newest novel for young adults.  The Best-Ever Bookworm Book by Violet and Victor Small is her first picture book.  It’s in production with Little, Brown Books For Young Readers, and a sequel will follow.

She's had non-fiction published in Easy Living Magazine, the Sunday Telegraph and the Bristol Review of Books; several short stories turned into radio productions; and one short story which was used to inspire a short film. She won the LG award in Saskatchewan for most promising artist under 30, when she was under 30, not soooo long ago. Please visit her website for writing tips, news about her books, and writing prompts!

Novel Matters: Alice, You recently completed a one year stint as Saskatoon Public Library Writer in Residence where you met with many writers to talk about their work. Tell us about this experience, and how it influenced you as a writer. Were there any patterns you saw as you read the work of new writers? Any advice you'd like to share?

Alice Kuipers: The residency taught me how much of a role writing plays in the lives of so many people in the community.  I was astonished by how many writers I met, and how many of them wanted to share their work with me. I divided the writers up in my mind into two groups – one group wanted to rush the work out to publication, and had no trouble writing loads of stories and ideas down, but needed to spend a bit more time editing, perhaps.  The other group felt overwhelmed by the blank page, wanting to get the words down but worrying that they weren’t good enough.  It seems to me that there are two stages to the writing process.  The first stage is when you write for yourself – and the first group was good at this.  The second stage is when you polish the draft for publication, so you write for someone else.  The second group was excellent at this, but they forgot the first stage.  I tried to encourage each writer I met to work hardest on the stage they found difficult.

NM:  What a great perspective. I don’t think I’ve heard it expressed that way before. Gets me thinking about which group I fit into. I think both at different times. With all your experience with new writers, what is the best piece of writing advice you have to offer aspiring authors?

AK: Write. Really, sit down and get writing. Your story is worth telling.

NM:  Deceptively simple advice, Alice, but that is what makes it the best advice. In the end, it takes a great deal of faith and self-permission to put your butt in the chair and write. Okay, what is the worst piece of writing advice someone ever offered to you and why?

AK: My art teacher insisted I had to do a sketch and preparation for every piece of art work at school. It was terrible advice for me as I never prepare.  I prefer to edit something a thousand times but the first draft is a thrilling ride for me alone.  My art teacher had a different way of working and tried to enforce her way of working artistically upon me.  I’d extrapolate from this that it’s not a good idea to try and follow someone else’s work practice when you’re doing something creative.  Find your own way.

NM:  Finding your own way is great advice. It’s time consuming, and even frustrating at times, but it’s the only way. So, when you need a break from finding your own way, what is the one non-writing thing you do that helps you be a better writer?

AK: Other than reading? I guess hanging out with my children.  One of them is yelling at me right now.  I’ll be back!

Yes, hanging out with my children is so time consuming that it involves all of my brain and I can’t think about writing at all.  When I get to the blank page, I sometimes feel like weeks have gone by and so I’m ready to work with new insights and able to see the page almost as if I hadn’t written it in the first place.

NM: I’m still thinking about your art teacher. There is a big different between being influenced in a positive way by other writers, and trying to bend ourselves into a pretzel imitating them. It’s almost like we need to read and read and be inspired but at the same time remain true to our unique vision and way of doing things. Which novels have informed you as a writer over the years? In what ways have they influenced you?

AK: I read as much as I possibly can, all the time.  The novel I most loved is called The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse.  A friend of mine read it after I suggested it and he actually thought I was joking, as the book is dense and hard work.  But there is a moment within the novel of such great beauty that I was profoundly moved when I read it and this moment has stayed with me.  Every year, I try and read the Booker shortlist, several of the GGs (Governor General—book awards for the best English language and French language books in Canada ) and I buy at least one young adult novel a week.  I’m just about to sit down and read a book called Mad Love as recommended by the fifteen year old I live with.  Books are the soil from which a writer grows.  My only writing rule is to read (50 pages a day) and from all those books, I think the words I write bear fruit.

NM: One thing every writer loves is another title to check out and add to their to-be-read pile. I know I’ll be adding The Glass Bead Game. With all the reading you do, is there a writer in history, or living today, you’d love to sit down and chat with? Who would it be and why?

AK: Well, other than my darling boyfriend (Yann Martel), I think I’d enjoy hanging out with Tennessee Williams.  I’m sure the way he spoke would teach me so much about writing dialogue and I’d love to ask him about The Glass Menagerie, my favourite play.

NM: Tennessee Williams wrote brilliant character studies, rich, complex, dark, and utterly human. When you begin a book, do characters come to you first, or does plot, themes, or something else?

AK: Titles come to me first.  Often I end up changing the title later on, but something about the selection of words giving me the framework for the story helps me get started.  There’s often a feeling too, a question I want to answer for myself.  Everything else follows.

NM: Was the title what came first for you when you began your latest Novel, 40 Things I want to Tell You? (amazon link)

AK: The title paired with the name of the character.  I liked the juxtaposition of a girl who wants to fly being someone who is terribly controlling because she’s scared of letting go.

NM: 40 Things I Want to Tell You (kindle link) is about a girl who seems to have the perfect life, until the perfect storm of problems, including a love triangle, start cracking her perfect world. What do you hope your readers to carry away from reading your novel?

AK: I think it’s important to be okay with not always being in control.  Trust what your instincts tell you.  It takes Bird a long time to realize this.

NM: I’m still working on that one myself. Writing a story like this one obviously took courage on your part. You had to trust your own instincts. What did you gain from writing 40 Things I Want to Tell You? (Canadian link)

AK: I learned a huge amount about rewriting with 40 Things and with the book before it, The Worst Thing She Ever Did.  A good editor should be brave enough to ask you hard questions and a writer should be brave enough to find those answers.  I was lucky to have a good (different) editor for each novel.

NM: This year, our blog is exploring the question: Why does the novel matter? How do you answer this question?

AK: The novel matters to me on many levels.  Personally, the thrill of reading, of being consumed by a story so much so that the real world ceases to exist, is one of the great joys of my life. Intellectually, it allows me to live other lives, explore other realities, exist in places and in ways I never could otherwise.  Emotionally, I have experienced things that buffer me for the challenges and joys of my real life.  Novels matter to my family because both my partner and I live by our writing, and because our children are at the stage where they are learning to speak so the words and sentences they hear from us are inspired by the words we read and write.  As a form, the novel matters because it is one of the best contemporary ways to encapsulate story without visual influence – letting our imaginations as readers do the work that other mediums may not allow.  Story is essential to being human, I believe, and novels give us those deep, meaningful, powerful, crazy, life-enhancing stories that make us who we are. 

Thank you so much, Alice, for being here today. Your insights are inspiring, and we all appreciate your encouragement and positive out look.

As always, dear reader, we welcome your questions, comments, ideas, insights, and chocolate chip cookies.

Christian lit in Post Modernity

Don't forget it's BFF month. Until the end of January include a shout-out to your best friend in your comment and be entered in a draw for one of Sharon K. Souza's fab-o books!

Mark your calender and warm up your typing fingers - Monday, January 26 will mark our first ever Novel Matters Round Table discussion. On that day all seven of us will discuss that burning question: What do we really like in stories, that we would like to see more of? We'll post our zany ideas, and we want to hear from YOU! Join the Novel Matters round table, we're saving you a seat!

Post Modern Christian Literature?
Post modern literature is making an impact in the world of Christian publishing. Interestingly, its influence is seen most often in Christina non-fiction than fiction. Brian McLaren’s pushing and pulling, Donald Miller’s meandering phrases, Rob Bell’s distracting formatting, they all lean toward the post modern approach to writing – at least in attitude, titling, and packaging (content? Not so much, save Miller’s stream of consciousness style that, even though he and Billy Graham could wear each other’s theological hats, has ruffled conservative feathers. Funny how the way you say something can carry more punch than what you say – ah, but this is what the post modern book does.).

So, where are the post-modern CBA books? On their way, I suspect. But there is work to be done. First up? Discussing the meaning of post-modern literature. What is it? How would I recognize it? So glad you asked.

With post-modernity, one thing springs to mind – academics pounding lecterns in universities everywhere, hollering, “There are NO absolutes.” This bothers Christians. They holler, “God is absolute.” I took a university English course a number of years ago and our professor had stated those same passionate words with the ardor of a lover. Until I raised my hand and pointed out that when he says, “There are no absolutes”, he is, in fact, postulating an absolute. I said, “Maybe what you mean to say is, “There are no OTHER absolutes.” Poor man was left stuttering. Quit teaching after that. Went back to Ontario to do post-doctorate work.

Happily, we can dispense with that bothersome thorn in our understanding of post-modern literature. We can get over it - so to speak. So, what is post-modern lit?

Volumes have been filled discussing that question, but we can skim the surface by looking at two aspects that shine in post modern lit.

One is self-consciousness. Another is deconstruction.

The self-conscious (or self-aware) novel
The post-modern author will slid into the seat next to you, give you a sly wink and say, “Hey, we both know it’s a book. Let’s stop pretending.”

Let’s look at Yann Martel’s fantastic book Life of Pi. It opens with an “Author’s Note” – the story of how the story came into being. A book gone bad, a trip to India. But we, the readers, know it’s just a tale. He tells us the story was told to him by Pi himself – but, of course it wasn’t - not really. Naturally this as-told-to story is written in first person. (see, isn’t this fun? It’s a book, you know, with words that can do anything we want them to do!)

Martel, or the author, or the narrator, warns us on the first page that “A story set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939.” But of course Life of Pi is a story set in India. The book is divided, very roughly, into thirds. The first third of the book is a “telling” (My oh my, so very little “showing” ) of how Pi became a devout follower of three religions. Impossible? Ah, well, they’re only words on a page, no? The narrative flows back and forth from present to past, then to the further past and back to present.

Then comes Pi’s terrible adventure in the middle of the book. Here are great gobs of “showing” details, oh the agony of the details as one by one his beloved ideologies are carved off his bones in the name of survival (there is a tiger in the boat, after all – but, of course there isn’t really, not really. Well, maybe. Do you think there is a tiger in the boat?).

The last third of the book is written loosely in the format of a screen play using different fonts for different characters. At least some of it is. And this is where Pi, or the author, or Yann Martel, explains what the book was really all about. Except he never says what the book is really all about – because you dear reader *wink* already know.

With each step, even as you become immersed in the story, bathed in the adventure, you are being made aware this is a book you hold – you know it, I know it, we all know it. Isn’t it grand?

The deconstructed novel
The goal of the deconstructed novel is not to destroy the form of the novel, but to examine it, pull out parts and see how the whole thing runs without them. And then to pose questions. How many cues do we really need? What is it to be understood? How can we change the way we say things and still be understood.

To treat the page itself as an art form – the arrangement of words as a communication.

The first thing to go in a deconstructed novel, often enough, is those pesky quotation marks, you know the ones, they tell you when someone is speaking. “Buzz off,” Michael said to the quotation marks. Sometimes they are subsituted. Replaced by the dash, as Michael Ondaatje did with In the Skin of a Lion.


-There was no record kept.


- Turn off the light.


- What?


- Turn you light off.

Or, perhaps they are ignored entirely as the same author did in his fantastic memoir Running in the Family. Here, Ondaatje opts to deconstruct the story by creating the work in a series of paragraphs. Each paragraph belongs to the actions and words of one character (actually it's better than that because much of the action is confined to the dialogue - making the story snap with virve). New paragraph, a different character’s actions and dialogue (except of course for the last bit of the story which is a telling by the author of how the whole thing wound up – because exceptions prove the rule, right?) Watch how he does it:

Wait a minute, wait a minute! When did all this happen, I’m trying to get I straight. . .

Your mother was nine, Hilden was there, and your grandmother Lalla and David Grenier and his wife Dickie.

How old was Hilden?

Oh, in his early twenties.

But Hilden was having dinner with my mother and you.

Confused? Not in the least. Able to follow the conversation? Naturally! Now tell me, did you have a little picture in your head – forming, people around a table maybe? Chatting away, a family gathering to sort out the business of familiar lore?

Of course there is much more going on here than just dropping some punctuation.

Naturally, there are vats and vats left to say about what the post-modern novel is, what it accomplishes, and how it influences literature in general. But today is just a taste. I hope you enjoyed the morsel. Hope it’s enough to get us thinking about the nature of our work – the norms by which we write, format, assume, and type.

The story is art, but so is the text – it is visual, rich, bizarre.

Challenge yourself to read widely - and to study the form of the novels you read. Your time is an investment that will pay in your work.