This month Susan is propping up the saggy middle of her work-in-progress Brandie Sagadore.

Commit to the Basics and Get Shit on your Shoes

Warning: this article contains four celebrity references, one drug overdose and a variety of personally-embarrassing moments. Plus the word shit.

Q: How do you become a capital-W Writer?

A: Anyone can become a decent Writer over time. Anyone. All you have to do is commit to the basics of the craft and get more than a few miles on your feet. There you have it: the answer is Craft and Life Experience. In a strange way the two are inextricably linked. So, dear gingerheart reader, strap yourself in and stay with me while I tie these two concepts together.

Commit to the basics of the craft. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Deceptive little sucker, though. Craft refers to all the basics in the writing arsenal, including grammar and spelling, flow and pace, structure and character. A Writer commits to a lifetime of learning these things and more.

I can spot serious Writers if they shudder every time they encounter a grammatical error. My current shudder-maker is Gatorade’s ‘G2’ commercial which features the tag line:

Less calories.

Are. You. Kidding. Me? Two words and they still manage to come up with a grammatical error? I wrote a snarky note to the good people of Gatorade. A polite young man explained that while the company knew it was a grammatical error – and that the correct version was indeed ‘Fewer calories’ – the decision was made to play up the less and more aspect of the campaign. Then he blamed the advertising department.

Get more than a few miles on your feet. As a television news director once told me when he turned me down for a big city newsroom job, “Susan, ya gotta get more shit on your shoes.” Trust me, I have stepped in a good many piles over the years.

Capital-W Writers pay attention to their life experiences. They hoard them. They embellish them. They relish the quirky, beautiful, heartbreaking and difficult moments in life.

My personal bag of experience is wide, deep and eclectic. I regularly dip into that bag of people, places and things. My characters often begin from the clay of people I’ve met. Scenes are carved from the places I’ve been. Symbols and icons are related to the things I’ve known. Within my manuscripts the actual people, places and things morph into something else entirely – but my own remembered experience is an invaluable starting point.

What kind of experience am I talking about? Here are ten random memories that spring to mind:

1. Happy Birthday, smack! I attended my great great grandmother’s one hundredth birthday party. I was four and too young to realize how amazing it was that five generations of one family were together in the same room. I do remember that my grandmother smacked my hand when I swiped a finger-full of icing off the massive birthday cake. (A kid has her priorities.)

2. My first summer job: I was a fish-gutter. This job paid extremely well; however, I began to smell like the fish plant. After one week I was offered a job selling clothes in a department store. It paid one-tenth of the fish-gutting job. I made the switch.

3. Fifteen minutes of fame: I recorded a song that got regular air play – for a limited time – at the Vancouver radio station where I worked. Read: nepotism. I performed the song live in a night club, scared out of my mind and fortified with Grand Marnier. (I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for the band members who allowed me inside their world. Thank you Shama which became Trama.)

4. The overdose story: I spent a night with a musician who was in the throes of an exquisite cocaine overdose. He refused medical attention. Our brilliant solution was a late-night walk through the streets of downtown Vancouver. Doesn’t that sound like the safest option?
PS The musician survived and is still going strong.
PSS One of the band’s backstage regulars was a biker whose livelihood was ‘chainsaw art’.
PSSS I was young. And an idiot.

5. Celebrity moment #1: When I was on a press junket in Seattle, Ray Bolger – the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz – gave me career advice. He had his limousine take me to a press party. Ray Bolger was a peach.

6. Celebrity moment #2: My tape recorder gave up and died during a hotel interview with Joan Armatrading. She immediately agreed to hop in my car and go to the radio station where she delivered what can only be described as a post-modern interview. Fab.

7. Celebrity moment #3: I was ten minutes late for an interview with Charlton Heston. Yes, I was late for Moses. He was extremely gracious and, to compound my sense of guilt, he sent a handwritten thank you note. That’s Old Hollywood for you.

8. Celebrity moment #4: I interviewed Dorothy Stratten a few months before she was killed. She was all of twenty years old and had just become Playboy’s Playmate of the Year. (For the record she was beautiful, had a great alto voice and probably would have had a solid acting career.) One of the most poignant moments was when her mother, Nelly Hoogstraten, asked me what I thought about what her daughter was doing with her life.

9. My first and last parachute jump: In the seconds before I landed it felt as though the ground was rising to meet me, a sensation know as ground-rush. It’s best described as an out-of-body experience. I got back in my body when ground-rush caused me to forget to drop and roll once I hit the ground. I landed straight-legged and hurt my lower back. I still get twinges.

10. The Oh-I-can-hardly-bear-to-tell-it career shame winner: When I was a television news anchor my hands-down very-best on-air mistake was: “The provincial government announced a new round of cunding futs today.” I said it twice before I figured out where I was going wrong. From my perch at the studio news-desk I could hear the people in the control room laugh long, laugh loud, laugh uncontrollably.

All right. I promised to tie these two distinct categories – the craft of writing and life experience – together into one major point. They do intersect.

Here we go:

Regarding craft: Writers learn to avoid ‘ing’ words. ‘Ing’ words tell about the story. For example, my spectacular parachute landing is better written as “She writhed in pain…” rather than “She was writhing in pain…” The latter is less visceral. It distances the reader from the incident. “She writhed…” gets us directly into the experience. Read my ten examples above. Note the spare use of ‘ing’ words.

Regarding experience: Get some shit on your shoes. Real life experience helps a Writer to write inside the scene rather than around and about it.

The moral of the story: Don’t be an ‘ing’ Writer.