by Lawrence Hill
The prospect of writing my first novel terrified me. Surely I wasn’t sufficiently brilliant to write a novel. And I certainly wasn’t knowledgeable about all earthly matters. How would I envisage such a big project, or get every line just right? Eventually I would learn to narrow my focus, limit my anxieties, and just relax and let loose with the writing, page by page. But an ongoing problem was finding a means to live that would allow me the time and energy to write creatively and passionately.
After completing a BA in economics at Laval University in Quebec City in 1980, I took a couple of years to write short stories while working two days a week for my father, Daniel G. Hill III, who ran a small human rights consulting firm out of his home in Don Mills, Ontario. After that, I worked as a newspaper reporter, first as a summer intern at The Globe and Mail in 1982, and then as a salaried employee at the Winnipeg Free Press.
Reporting was, for me, an engaging and stimulating job. Time flew. Most days, I would start chasing stories at ten in the morning, and the next time I checked it would be six o’clock. An uprising in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, an Air Canada 767 running out of fuel in mid-air and making an emergency landing on a car-racing strip in Gimli, a freight train carrying hazardous materials derailing in the city…every week, it seemed, some exciting and unpredictable story pulled me deeper into the heart of Manitoba and its people. I loved the work. There was just one problem: I loved something else more. I didn’t dream of being a reporter for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to be a reporter for any longer than it would take to put aside enough cash to coast for a year or two and do nothing but write fiction.
I had been writing short stories since I was fourteen. I wrote them through high school and university, and I kept writing them at night and on weekends while I was a reporter. But spending long hours nailing down news stories in the streets of Winnipeg and hammering them out in the downtown newsroom crowded out creative writing. Frequently I would stagger home at night, exhausted after working for twelve hours or more. Reporting left no juice for vivid, imaginative writing. I didn’t know a single full-time reporter who was managing to write and publish fiction consistently.
I longed to write creatively, and found it painful to watch other artists in full flight. I went to see the movie Sophie’s Choice, which came out in the early 1980s while I was still in Winnipeg. It was a sad and troubling movie, and my eyes filled with tears over the story of the young writer in New York City who happens upon a family tragedy during the Holocaust. The beauty and art in Sophie’s Choice reminded me of everything that I was not doing in life.
At the age of twenty-seven, I finally decided that I was wasting my years and had better quit and write what I dreamed of writing before it was too late to change my life. It was a good time to leave the job. I had no mortgage, no car, no children, no debts and no pressing reason not to head off to pursue my dream. So I sent in my resignation letter and, soon after that, boarded an airplane for a village called Sanlúcar de Barrameda, on the Guadalquivir River near the Atlantic coast in southwest Spain. There, I wrote every day. I loved being in Spain, and much of my happiness derived from the daily pursuit of my own true working passion: writing stories. I finished a dozen or so short stories in the year I lived in Spain, and managed later to publish a few of them.
By the time I returned to Canada, I felt ready to begin writing the novel that eventually became Some Great Thing—but there still remained the small matter of earning a living while carving out time to write. I feared that a return to full-time journalism would throw me back into the familiar cauldron of that intense and depleting profession. And I knew that working as a freelance journalist would be unlikely to generate cash fast enough to suit my purposes. My vague plan was to earn money quickly and save it, then drop out and write fiendishly until I ran out of funds—and to keep on like this until I had finished the novel.
I sold my soul to the devil and started writing freelance speeches for anybody who would pay for them. I wrote speeches for the head of the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto, and for officials in private companies. I dashed off a three-hundreddollar speech for a man to give at his own wedding—he paid me cash to ensure that nobody knew he’d hired me to give him the words to say to his wife at the altar. But mostly, I wrote freelance speeches for senior bureaucrats and ministers of the Ontario government.
I didn’t feel proud of the work. In fact, I was disgusted with myself for writing speeches for people for whom I would never vote. But I kept on with it because it allowed me to stick with my plan. I would write a handful of speeches—which paid infinitely better than freelance journalism—and then for a few months live off my savings while madly writing fiction. And when the money ran out, I would repeat the cycle. I reassured myself every day that it was okay to keep at this wild creative dream and live like a student while other people my age were establishing themselves in careers, starting families and setting themselves up in houses.
Four years after I had dropped out of journalism, and the same year my first child was born, I managed to finish Some Great Thing.
I kept at the freelance speech writing for many years. It was like working to feed a habit—and my habit was writing books. It got me through the rewrites of Some Great Thing, which would finally find a publisher in 1992, and through Any Known Blood, and the first half of The Book of Negroes, until finally I climbed further out on my precarious limb and chose to forgo freelance work and live on savings so I could work full-time on finishing the novel.
Over the years, I’ve thought often of the many sorts of jobs that writers take on, striving to make a living while ensuring there’s enough left in the tank to keep writing with fire. In his big-hearted book On Becoming a Novelist, the late American novelist John Gardner speculated about the various ways that writers could make a living while practising their true calling. You could become a teacher, he said, but quickly rejected that option. Teaching, he claimed, would burn you out. You could become a journalist. But no, he concluded, that approach would cheapen your writing. The very best way to survive as a writer, Gardner suggested, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, was to live off your spouse. It’s too bad we can’t all do that. But to my way of thinking, ultimately it does not matter exactly how you make your living. What matters is that one takes the time to write. The greatest success an artist can achieve is the regular practice of his or her passion. If you can’t go after the very thing that you were born to do, you witness the withering of your private dreams, and you suffocate.
For those who struggle to make it in a creative field, my wish is that you find enough work to live with dignity and enough space to give yourself over to your artistic drive. It’s a risky way to live, I know. But for those who were born with a “loose chromosome” (as my father used to say) and who simply have to dance or sing or make music, or paint or sculpt, or write, it’s the only way to live.