Editor’s note: Well-known Canadian author Alan Cumyn was on campus on March 8, 2005 to speak with students in the children’s literature course given by Professor Aida Hudson. This is her account of the session during which Cumyn answered questions about his craft from a keenly interested audience.
“How do you start writing a story?” asked student Valerie Doré.
Alan Cumyn, visiting author, answered:
“I think of it as planting a seed. I start with an interesting character in a compelling situation: Where are they? Who are they? What are they doing? And then follow through using the logic of that situation. What do they say to one another? What must happen next? And so one scene turns into another and the story builds from there.”
Certainly, Cumyn has written two of the funniest and most compelling novels for children in recent memory. The Secret Life of Owen Skye won a Mr. Christie’s Book Award and was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, and After Sylvia, its sequel, came out in November 2004. Valerie and her classmates are studying the latter work and it seemed only fitting that they should meet and hear the author himself read from it.
“You have written novels for adults and novels for children,” said Dania Azzi. “Where do you draw the line? How did you know you were going to write a kid’s book when you wrote The Secret Life of Owen Skye?”
The novel grew out of Christmas stories he had written for his two daughters, Cumyn replied. “I was short of money and had just finished a draft of a very dark and intense novel, Man of Bone. My eldest daughter had begun reading on her own and I wanted to write something for her that would be light and fun and that would let her know a bit about the way boys grow up. That’s how the chapter ‘Valentine’s Day’ in The Secret Life of Owen Skye came into the world. But I have two daughters and each of them needed a present, so I wrote a second story. I didn’t have time to invent other characters and another world, so I wrote more about Owen Skye and his brothers. And when their birthdays came, they each wanted another story. Over a few years I built up the collection and once they were accepted by a publisher, I worked to link the stories together into a novel.”
“But when I write a story for children, it isn’t just for them; it’s for everybody. I love to write stories that can be understood at different levels and have different meanings.”
“Where do you get your ideas? Are your novels based on other authors’ works?” asked Stephanie Bell.
“When I was going to university and read eight to ten hours a day, what I wrote sounded like the writers I read. But when I left school and really took a shot at writing creatively, I wrote about life, as I knew it. When you do that, when your stories grow out of experiences you have had in life, they have to be original, because they happened to you, and nobody else experienced them.”
“Where did Sylvester the dog and his magical rock in After Sylvia come from?” asked Tyler Shaw. “That dog is brilliant and he’s always wanting to have that rock—only that rock to fetch in all his games. [It’s] hilarious.”
“Sylvester is based on the family dog. He was crazy about rocks, but unlike Sylvester, he didn’t have any particular one. Once, and I have never heard of a dog doing this, he dove into a lake and found the rock that I threw into it. He became an underwater dog. We timed him once. He held his breath for thirty seconds and still came up with the rock! But Sylvester in the novel just had to have one pet rock. That was him.”
“Do you plan what your characters will do?” asked Ruth Boyd.
“I try very hard not to plan. It takes a year for me to write a novel. For a year, I have to be creative every day. I find that if I have a plan, say a plan that I conjured in a weekend, well, it looks engineered. Some people like their books engineered, but I like to grow books. I want them to feel organic, like trees with deep roots and strange twists to the limbs.”
Some of the students elected to write stories for their last writing assignment and were keenly interested in how to be published. Cumyn told them about the years he wrote and how many unpublished novels he penned before his first adult novel was accepted.
To the delight of the class, he talked about the unusual acceptance of The Secret Life of Owen Skye. In the great tradition, it was rejected up and down. However, Cumyn knew one particular publisher who had rejected the book ought to have accepted it because of its strong record of publishing literary fiction for children. Therefore, a few years later, he sent it back to the same publisher without giving any clue of the previous rejection. The manuscript was accepted over a weekend!
With wit, heart and humility, Cumyn told students what it takes to be a writer: believing in your own work, and being extraordinarily patient.
