Ali Bryan
/How did you become a writer? I took a community college night course when I was pregnant with my first child and while it would take me years to develop my craft, that class showed me that I had a knack for comedic writing. That was twenty years ago and I’ve been writing ever since.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). David Sedaris was one of the first writers to genuinely make me laugh out loud. I picked up Naked at an airport bookstore not knowing anything about Sedaris or the book. I laughed myself sick. Having spent years reading mostly (depressing) literature in high school and university, Sedaris radically changed my views on writing, mainly that it could be smart, outrageous, wise, poignant, and funny. It was probably my first experience reading “literary humour”, and what I now (mostly) write.
When and where do you write? Usually, first thing in the morning in my home office. I’ve been getting up at 5:00am as long as I can remember, but I’ve also trained myself to write where and whenever I find myself. With three sporty kids, that means I’ve cranked out novels in arenas, parking lots, gyms, hotel rooms, airplanes and on the sidelines of about every sport possible.
What are you working on now? A dual POV dark comedy about a middle-aged terminally ill couple who make the joint decision to use MAID (medical assistance in dying) with the intent of ‘meeting up on the other side.’ It all seems to be going as planned until the wife (who is first to go) ends up in Hell for what she assumes is a mistake.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes, but perhaps not in the same way others experience it? On occasion, I experience story blocks. As someone who doesn’t outline, but uses the protagonist to generate the plot, there are times when I make the wrong choice and the story consequently fails to move forward. When this happens, I delete the most recently written scene back to where the book last made sense. It’s an intuitive process that I wholly trust. When the writing is ‘right’ it flows effortlessly. When it’s ‘wrong’ it comes to a crashing halt. The other experience of writer’s block isn’t necessarily that I can’t write or come up with an idea, but that I’m not writing the ‘right’ thing. For me, the ‘right’ thing is that which I’m fully, obsessively engaged in. Sometimes I’ll start a series of different projects until the ‘right’ one demands to be written. If I’m not excited about a work-in-progress, neither will a reader when it becomes a published novel. Again, I rely on intuition, but it’s taken years of craft, trial and error, and experimentation to get to this point.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? An editor once told me never to be ‘one of those writers who just writes.’ It was baffling at the time. I’d only written one novel and wasn’t that the goal of all writers: to get to a point where they didn’t have to do anything but write? I was five novels in when I really understood what she meant. Not writing – living, engaging with the world, travelling, working, volunteering – all those things inform, deepen and enrich a writer’s work. Disassociating from the world to ‘just be a writer’ might produce a work of genius in the short term, but over time the work becomes boring, similar, predictable, stale. I’m not begrudging authors who write full-time, but those who write full-time at the expense of really living.
What’s your advice to new writers? A writing career is never linear (careers in the arts seldom are), and nothing is guaranteed. The industry is fickle and nearly impossible to predict so take the time to really enjoy the moments of success, whether that’s a new book deal, a positive review or a major award, and then detach from it. Do not make the mistake of having your entire identity wrapped up in the idea of “being a writer” (which is ironic because oftentimes that’s what all new writers want – to finally be able to say “I’m a writer”), because the second that goes away – your next book doesn’t sell, or you fail to even get nominated for an award, it feels catastrophic. I’ve seen this happen to writers again and again. It also links back to the advice that the editor gave me above. I’ve been (mostly) able to weather my own non-linear career because writing is just one of many things I do in my life.
Ali Bryan is a novelist and creative nonfiction writer who explores the what-ifs, the wtfs and the wait-a-minutes of every day. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, longlisted for both the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing prize, and has been optioned for TV by Sony Pictures. Born in Halifax, she now lives in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies on Treaty 7 Territory with her family, and a dog named Lemon.
