Reading time: About 3 minutes
Susan Sanford Blades says she pretty much NEVER feels like writing, but deals with the challenge by being obedient to her writing schedule…
Susan Sanford Blades’ debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award in the novel category and was a finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories 32: The Best of Canada’s New Writers, and most recently been published in Gulf Coast, The Malahat Review, and The Masters Review.
I was excited to talk to Susan about how she approaches writing.
Q. Roughly how much time do you spend writing every day?
I actually don’t even write every day! I split the days of each week up into “creative days” and “business days.” I spend the business days doing everything I have to do that is not creative writing (so, everything that makes money, basically). I keep two days per week as “creative days” and on those days, I write for probably only even a couple of hours, and spend the rest of the time doing research for the project I’m working on. So, I spend the entire day on the book or project, in some way.
Q. What’s a simple activity or habit that makes you a better writer?
I would say the simplest thing is reading. Reading work that inspires me and lets me see what other authors are doing, what boundaries or rules they’re breaking and how, always helps my writing. That and maintaining a writing group with my local writing friends. Reading helps me to improve my work, but my writing critique group improves my work and helps me to keep going.
Q. What interferes with your writing?
Haha. Literally everything. Where do I begin? Kids, family, friends, relationships, hockey, paid work, the need to eat and exercise … everything!
Q. How do you persuade yourself to sit down to write on days when you really, really DON’T feel like doing it?
I pretty much never feel like doing it. I mean, I do on a grander scale, I want to be writing. But when it comes down to sitting and writing on any given day, there’s a terror I have to get over — the terror of writing something bad, of not knowing where to go from where I left off the last time, of steering my novel in the wrong direction. I’m very obedient to my schedule, though, so if it’s a scheduled creative day, I will sit and write, and inevitably, once I get going, it all feels good.
Q. Is there a particular motto or saying that you’ve found helpful for writing?
Not really, but I do always think about what John Barton, who was my boss as the editor of The Malahat Review, said once: those who make it as writers are simply those who didn’t give up.
Q. Which stage of the writing process do you enjoy the most: researching, writing or editing/rewriting and why?
Definitely the writing, even though I know I just said I dread it. Once I’m into it, it feels so good to hit the perfect sentence and to tweak it to perfection or to tame the idea that’s swirling in my mind into words. I write and edit at the same time—generally, I’ll write less than a page per session, but it will be a perfect page, at least to me, at that moment.
Q/What’s the best book you’ve read (either fiction or non) in the last five years?
The book that absolutely astonished me was Daughter, by Claudia Dey. I love her writing, her sentences. I love her as a reader and envy her as a writer.
Q. What book are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m reading The Cobra and the Key, by Sam Shelstad. It’s a satirical writing guide in the form of a novel, and it’s laugh-out-loud hilarious. Sam’s humour is unmatched, and he has this fantastic way of poking fun at the world through his hapless, incorrigible characters.
Q. What do you think is the biggest misperception that new writers have about the act of writing?
Honestly, this sounds harsh, but I think the misperception is that people are going to care about your work once it’s published. I would’ve loved it if someone had told me before my book came out how hard I’d have to work to get people to notice it. We see the rare times when someone does get noticed without having to really try, and we think that’s what it’s like for everyone, but that’s not the case for most writers.