“My ideas usually come not at my desk writing, but in the midst of living.”

~ Anais Nin

This video has been taking the interwebs by storm and you’ve probably already seen it, but I absolutely adore it. It was filmed in one of Toronto’s finest independent bookstores, Type Books on Queen West. A team of volunteers spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking and animating the books. A few weeks ago, I shared this lovely video shot in the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, so it was nice to come across a video shot in my home town.

I’m as guilty as most of us in shopping in the big chain bookstores, mostly because their loyalty programs make it easy to save money. Since I buy a lot of books, this is important to me. But I shop at the big chain bookstore when I know exactly what I want, it isn’t the place I go to explore or discover new authors or new books. The big bookstore chains are designed to sell books and book-themed trinkets, they are not designed for book lovers.

But independent bookstores are designed for book lovers. Browsing in a store like Type Books or Nicholas Hoare is more like looking through the shelves of book lover’s library. Here the books are curated based on literary merit, not on saleability. I love shopping in an independent bookstore because I can count on discovering new books, new authors, or at least books and authors new to me. I love the sense of discovery. So, while I like to save money, I still splurge in an independent book store because I value the sense of discovery just as much as being able to take home a book (or three).

* I also adore this animated video based on the Charles Bukowski poem “The Blue Bird” (found via Brain Pickings).

Writing for me means humility. It’s a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you’re writing honesty.

~ Kiran Desai

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

As the holidays are upon us, I’ll be taking some time away from blogging until the New Year, although I might drop by once or twice.

Happy Hanukah, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

On the surface, living on a sailboat and sailing from Canada to Florida and the Bahamas sounds like a fantasy to most people. There were great time, but there were also some very difficult times. My parents got divorced just a few years after our trip and I have no doubt in my mind that the challenges of living on a small sailboat had a lot to do with that.

Last year, I decided to do NaNoWriMo, even though I was really writing a nonfiction memoir, although at the time I was calling it a novel. I achieved the 50,000 word goal just after the deadline. But without a deadline hanging over my head, I stalled and didn’t touch my memoir for months. Two months ago, I began seriously reading over what I’d written and was seriously bored. It was a faithful recounting of what had happened and each port of call we visited, but was all it was. There was no emotion in the story, no tension, no theme, no real story. I had an overwhelming urge to chuck everything I’d written and start over again. But how?

I dug Your Life as Story by Tristine Rainer out from my bookcase and started reading it again. In Chapter 4, I came across an exercise to “divide your life by pivotal events.” This sounded promising. The idea is to write down the pivotal events in your life. The second part of the exercise is to write down “I wanted” and think back through the different stages of your life and write down what you wanted at each stage. These exercises were meant for helping someone craft an autobiography of an entire life, but it got me thinking about how I could reframe my memoir of a short slice of my life, albeit one that has had a huge impact on my life. I though back through the trip and began listing on index cards the key memories that had the most emotional impact for me, instead of the places we visited. I want to write a memoir about my experience of living on a sailboat as a teenager, not a travel log of where we went.

After writing each memory down on a separate index card, I pinned them up to a cork board, organizing them chronologically. In separate columns, I pinned up the index cards on which I jotted down ideas for theme or description. Looking over my cards, I instantly felt better about where I’m going. I now have a rough path through my book. Plus, the index card methods makes it infinitely easy to add and subtract ideas or rearrange my thoughts. I’m a visual person, so this method is useful to me.

Writing is a process of dealing with not knowing, a forcing of what and how.

~ Donald Barthelme

A couple of months ago, I bought an iPad2. I’d looked at the first iPad when it came out and wasn’t that impressed, mainly due to the challenges of using the onscreen keypad.  Of course, you can add an external keyboard, but what’s the point? Why not just buy a laptop? Instead, I bought a MacBook Air.I love it and it is fantastic for travel or even just popping around to a coffee shop to do some writing. But reading anything lengthy isn’t the comfortable. Let’s face it, it is hard to snuggle up under a blanket and read a book on a laptop.

I was mainly motivated to buy the iPad because I was taking an online course and needed to purchase several books. The eBook versions were all half the cost of the hardcover/paperback versions. Plus, two of the books weren’t available in local stores and would take at least a week to be shipped to me and I didn’t want to wait that long. I chose the iPad over an e-reader because I didn’t want to be limited by the format or store. I needed to order Canadian books available for Kobo and books only available on the Kindle. An iPad gave me complete freedom to buy books from whomever I wanted. Of course, this freedom comes at significant cost. I bought the iPad model without 3G access, since WIFI is available just about everywhere these days (even McDonalds!), so I saved a couple hundred bucks there.

I installed the Kobo app and was immediately disappointed to discover that I couldn’t purchase books within the app (unlike the laptop/desktop version), but was forced to purchase them in Safari. Apple forced this restriction on Kobo, as well as Kindle. This was annoying, but workable.

There are some things I liked about reading a book on my iPad – being able to change the font, font-size, highlight text and being able to get a book in seconds. I also enjoy reading classics and was thrilled to find a huge number of literary classics available free of charge.

But within two days of installing Kobo, I discovered some of the drawbacks. While I was on the subway – and far away from a WIFI signal – the app suddenly shut down and logged me out of my account. This meant that the book I was reading had disappeared. I was able to download it again from my account at no extra charge the next time I was in WIFI range, but it meant that I suddenly didn’t have my book to read during a long subway ride. This happened twice and each time, my notes and highlights also disappeared. This was very annoying and just doesn’t happen to paper books. The Kobo app also has a notification system that sends pop up messages at weird times related to the time of day or how far I’d gotten in my book. It took me a little clicking to figure out how to shut this off.

The latest version of Kobo also allows for more integration with Facebook, Twitter and the Kobo online community. While reading, I can see what others are saying about the same book. Some people might find this exciting, but I don’t. For me, reading has always been a solitary pursuit. I dive into a book to leave the world I’m living in to discover a new world. I don’t want to be interrupted.

This also related to the biggest drawback of the iPad – it can do everything. I find it easy to be distracted by checking my email, Twitter or Facebook accounts. Reading on an iPad just isn’t relaxing in the same way as reading a traditional book. Plus, I’d freak out if I dropped it into the bathtub!

I’m finding I’m using my iPad more for checking my Twitter stream and reading/bookmarking blog posts and articles. The Dropbox app has made is easy to read my files, especially works in progress, and the Instapaper app makes web articles I book mark accessible even when I’m offline. I hate the clutter caused by stacks of magazines, so I think the Newstand add will be useful too.

But, I have to say I still enjoy reading an old-fashioned book more than I enjoy reading on a screen. I love the solidity of a book and being able to see how far along I am in a book. Reaching the last couple of pages of a book just doesn’t have the same thrill on a device like it does in a paper book. Plus, I love being able to open a book at a random spot and flip through the pages until an image or passage catches my attention. This isn’t as easy to do in an e-book. Plus, there is compelling evident that being able to pay close attention to a book and read deeply improves your brain.

I’m not a complete luddite and I am aware that in the not-to-distant future, most books and other media will only be available electronically. Eventually, I’ll get used to reading on electronic devices, but paper books will continue to be a very important part of my life.

I envy those writers who say they can just start writing a novel or short story and the story reveals itself as they write. There are writers who claim that they don’t know the ending until they write.

Then there are writers like John Irving who apparently don’t start writing until they know the ending. They then write to discover how to get to that ending.

I’ve been struggling to write a memoir for years. A few months ago I even quit my job to devote my time to writing. You’d think a memoir wouldn’t be so difficult. After all, it is about events that happened. I know how things began and how things ended. But a story, even a non-fiction one, is about so much more than just how things happened. I have a first draft of my memoir—over 50,000 words of what happened during the year and a half that I lived on a sailboat with my family as a teenager. I recently read over everything I’d written to date and frankly it is just a list of events with a little bit of description and a little dialogue thrown in. I find it boring as hell and I was there!

So, I’ve been seeking ways to find a way into the real story behind the events of our sailing trip. I dug out a book I bought a few years ago, Your Life As Story by Tristine Rainer. I’d read this book before, but I guess I wasn’t ready for it at the time. Chapter 3, “What Is Story?” has been helpful. I’ve been thinking about “character arc” —how did the sailing trip change me as a person? How did it change my family members? At the beginning of our voyage I was a child from rural Canada and I returned as a woman who’d seen and experienced many things (good and bad) that most people need a lifetime to achieve.

I’m going to continue working my way through the exercises in the book before I attempt my second draft. I’m one of those writers who needs to have at least a rough map in order to proceed. I don’t need to know what is around every corner in the road, but I have more faith in the process if I at least have a rough road to follow.