Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game.
— Lynn Coady
Grownups, as a rule, should always be ready to pay for their own meals - or else ready to graciously accept their date's insistence on paying. The point is, one doesn't sit there batting one's eyelashes, fully expecting someone else to claim the bill.
That's all small talk is - a quick way to connect on a human level - which is why it is by no means as irrelevant as the people who are bad at it insist. In short, it's worth making the effort.
Here's the thing about lingerie: The only time we see it outside our own bedrooms, it is on women who are gloriously freakish in their physical perfection.
I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance.
Sometimes I pine for the era of Miss Manners, when there were hard and fast rules dictating a well-bred individual's behaviour in any given situation.
I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society.
I just have to trust that the story is going to shake out in such a way that's going to be palatable to readers.
I guess you could say I'm 'kind' to my past books in the way you might be kind to an old boyfriend you still quite like and bear no grudge against but with whom have absolutely no interest in getting back together.
What I've learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that 'youthful energy' will only get you so far.
When writing sex scenes, there is often no pleasing anyone, except perhaps the writer herself.
My dad was a real man's man, and so were my brothers, in a small town where hockey is king. It's a masculine culture. It made me really attentive to what it meant to be a guy.
When revising, consider whether you have written anything that will hurt or offend a member of your immediate family. If the answer is no, go back and add something.
I decided a long time ago to be myself and not worry too much about cultivating some kind of personality that didn't feel natural or true to who I am.
I started out in the journalism program, but I got kicked out. I wasn't very good at it. It wasn't where I wanted to be ultimately.
The fundamentals for me are character and conflict. I put character first because readers will be indifferent to conflict if they are indifferent to the character who is experiencing it.
It's kind of sad, the way we've turned the entertainment of reading into a kind of psychic broccoli - something to feel guilty about if you don't force it on your face-making children while dutifully consuming a few token florets yourself.
I should say I am not much of a gamer - anymore. The reason for this is that I have to make a living, and my body requires vitamin D, and I've come to value the heady pleasures of human interaction over the temporary exhilaration of reaching the 'next level.'
Let's not confuse traditional behaviours with good manners. The definition of etiquette is gender neutral - it simply means we strive at all times to ensure a person in our company feels at ease.
I went into the world confident my tea training would open many doors. And I did particularly well with the Irish and fellow Nova Scotians over 60. But this only got me so far. It took a long time to cultivate the tricks of easy social interaction.
Filtering can be a very good thing when it comes to human relationships and familial harmony. Yeah, filtering is often an absolute necessity.
Flowers are an easy, eloquent expression of love at a time when words can seem clumsy and inadequate.
The masterstroke of male fraternity, I believed, was the practice of never speaking of anything remotely personal or related to one's emotions. That way, no one is ever made uncomfortable. Any such awkward moments can always be dispelled with a flurry of pretend-punches.
Somewhere in our cultural subconscious, we crave these figures that are big and strong and unassailable, like masculine fortresses. It's like how the 9/11 firemen were venerated.
You can catch a scent in the wind - an idea, or a concept - and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can't when you're writing a novel.
Ever since 'Strange Heaven,' I haven't really reread my old work. Not so much because I don't like the writer I was, or because I find flaws in the writing, but more because I get so burnt out on a novel once I've finished writing, revising, editing and copy editing it that I genuinely never want to look at it again after it's gone to press.
The creative process taps into our deepest subconscious, and we are each of us sex-crazed - products of a shame-based Judeo-Christian culture that has irrevocably warped us all to varying degrees.
I still find the idea of a research-heavy or historical novel daunting. That's something I've had in mind for a while: like, would you research for a year and then start writing? I sit down, and I just don't know how to write it.
I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.
It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.
I think authors like me are always struggling with the idea that they should have a brand and a Facebook author page and they should get Twitter accounts. I don't know what to do with them.
We thought we'd name the magazine for the number of bridges within Edmonton's city limits. We thought this number was 18. Much later, we learned that the number is actually 21. But we didn't like the sound of that so much.
You can't really go into TV thinking, 'Maybe I can make a few bucks doing this thing I'm only kind of interested in to support my one true love, which is prose fiction.' I think you have to love what you're doing to do it well.
Here it is, 2011, and I feel zero shame when I tell you I would like to marry my smartphone. It is a handful of pure delight.
To buy dinner transmits that you feel time spent in your date's company has been a pleasure and a privilege.
Dating, like almost every other male-female interaction in present-day society, is based on outmoded and unequal social roles and expectations.
You don't need to have Asperger's to feel bewildered in a culture that relies so heavily on inconsequential chit-chat to grease the wheels of day-to-day life.
We allow ourselves to unclench when we're home with our families, which is one of the truly wonderful advantages of human intimacy.
Formalized rules of manners were so great because they left no room for basic human haplessness. They allowed us to circumvent our natural boorish tendency to disregard the feelings of others.
There was a time when I thought dudes had friendship all figured out. The focus on eating things in front of giant screens, pretending to punch one another, competing over who can utter the grossest and most profane personal insults imaginable - this struck me as the very apex of human social exchange.
The one thing I've always done as an author is talk to my publicists. Because they have all the best stories - and they have all the dirt on other, more famous and important writers. They're not supposed to talk about it, but sometimes you can get awesome little tidbits from them.
I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.
There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by.
I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms.
I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender.
Never use dogs to symbolize anything. That is ridiculous. Always ensure that any dogs are just dogs; i.e., characters in the story who happen to be dogs.
Keep a copy of 'Islands in the Stream' by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald's 'The Crack Up' on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes.
I come from a working-class background, and I thought I had to be studying something that would get me a job.
We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren't enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase - long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.
A novelist's sense that he or she is 'above' a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form.
