"How did your first novel come about?"

Transcript

How did your first novel come about?

Um, it was in Toronto. I don't remember the exact year, but it was around a time when I was kind of economically stable.

I was living with my partner and I felt like I wanted to express myself.

I felt this really strong angst coming out of me, and I tried to take voice notes or speak into a recorder to express myself, and it was kind of doing it but I was never hitting the spot. And just out of the blue because I love the movie The Count of Monte Cristo, and the story, because revenge is fucking awesome - well righteous revenge right - my partner at the time, she bought me a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo (the novel) and back then I never really read too many novels because I'd been burnt out by bad novels, and when I read I get really immersed so anyway I read the novel.

And I just really tried like I stuck to it and I was kind of bewildered because a lot of it was really bad - like there was like really shitty boring effusive passages in the story, and um I just pushed through it and then at some point I remember getting this one chapter where I think, um I forgot what the main character's name was - he had a great name - I forgot - anyway, um he gets arrested and then you're just excited about seeing what's next right and then it goes to some other political thing that relates to Napoleon, and I just suddenly closed the book. And I just had this epiphany where I'm like I knew with certainty that it was poorly written and I couldn't believe it because it's a classic novel. And then I researched it and found out that back then authors were paid by word - but the fact that it was considered a classic, just suddenly I realized that my quality control with regards to writing was so up to the level that I could criticize a classic novel.

But I became fully, supremely confident that I was at the level where I could write a really good novel because it was at that point.
And prior to that point, I thought I could write little things here and there, and even though they were good, different kinds of people wrote novels.

And so that's what spawned it.

And then it just was nonstop because I was so confident about it.