Reading time: About 2 minutes
When he writes, Dennis Bock tries to keep the two most important qualities of his ideal reader in mind — intelligence and impatience.
Dennis Bock is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Dennis grew up in Oakville, Ontario and completed a degree in English literature and philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. He teaches at the University of Toronto and the Humber School for Writers. His newest novel, Strangers at the Red Door, was published in September. His previous book, The Good German published in 2020, was praised by Margaret Atwood as “a cunning, twisted, compelling tale of deeply unexpected consequences.” His other books are Olympia, The Ash Garden, The Communist’s Daughter, and Going Home Again, shortlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the 2014 Best Foreign Novel Award in China.
I was excited to talk to Dennis about how he approaches writing.
Q. Roughly how much time do you spend writing every day?
I usually start around six in the morning and write for five or so hours. I knock off for lunch and then switch over to my teaching responsibilities.
Q. What’s a simple activity or habit that makes you a better writer?
Routine and discipline are essential in a writer’s creative life. You really have to want it if you’re going to write a book, no half-measures. Work every day.
Q. What interferes with your writing?
In the real world, nothing. For me, what makes it possible to do what I do is the fact that I’ve gotten rid of anything and everything in my life that might get in the way. This isn’t to say I’m a writing machine. I have my slow days, like everyone else. But those slow days are self-imposed, not external. I’ll always sit down to write, though, no matter what.
Q. How do you persuade yourself to sit down to write on days when you really, really DON’T feel like doing it?
I’ve been doing this for a long time, so long that it’s an unnatural and uncomfortable feeling if I go for a few days without writing. I always want to write.
Q. Is there a particular motto or saying that you’ve found helpful for writing?
Yeah, I always keep the two most important qualities of my ideal reader in mind, which are intelligence and impatience. The former, for obvious reasons. The latter, because this keeps me on track by reminding me to strip away any self-indulgence in my storytelling.
Q. Which stage of the writing process do you enjoy the most: researching, writing or editing/rewriting and why?
I love the editing stage. I can spend hours on a paragraph. I love how every new tweak reverberates through the whole paragraph, causing the sentences on either side of the adjusted or edited sentence to demand their own changes, and so on and so on, until you finally nail it and the paragraph is perfectly balanced.
Q. What’s one of the best books you’ve read (either fiction or non) in the last five years?
The Master by Colm Tóibín is a marvelous novel. Canada by Richard Ford is fantastic, too.
Q. What book are you reading right now?
I’m re-reading Love in the Time of Cholera for its joyfully exuberant sentences.
Q. What do you think is the biggest misperception that new writers have about the act of writing?
It seems to me a lot of well-intentioned novice writers conflate story-telling in the movies with story-telling on the page. Writing fiction and making movies are two very different animals. Nowadays we spend so much time watching films we begin to believe that what we’re learning from that experience is transferable to our fiction writing. It isn’t. For a novice fiction writer to learn, they have to read the fiction that turns them on, not watch movies. They have to read it, first, for pleasure; then they have to read it a second time for craft, and so often that in the act of reading we learn to love the work and recognize and understand its craft elements at the same time. We have to read and study those writers we love before we can advance as writers.
