What inspired you to become a writer?

Reading as a child introduced me to a vivid world of the imagination. Travelling with my parents as an adolescent revealed the richness of a wider world of real experience. Writing combined both those pleasurable realms. Then after a while I discovered I could get paid for it.

Did you have a mentor, or was there a journalist who you particularly admired?

We never met, although I interviewed him once by phone, but Pierre Berton was my model: a wonderful story-teller who found material on every street corner and in the neglected back-closets of history. He also encouraged me to believe (against the odds early on) that a fellow could be a financially successful writer without either being an academic or an employee of some large corporation.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?

Do it: write. Write at every opportunity. Write for an audience, write for a teacher, a client, a friend or yourself; but write. No one ever got good at anything without spending a lot of time being bad at it first. But never, ever, write carelessly. Write about something; observe it closely. Choose every word with precision. Make every phrase you write, whether it’s in an email or a novel, the very best you can make it at that particular moment. Then go back later and see how you could have said it better.

Is there a particular ritual involved in your writing process?

I plan. I imagine the story then think about what I will need to know in order to write it. Then I go and learn that. Then I draft an outline and organize notes around it pointing to the relevant parts of the research material I’ve collected. All this can take between weeks and months.

Then one day I start at the beginning of the outline and start putting the real words down. When I’m writing for a project, I usually begin writing sometime between eight and nine o’clock each morning and continue until around five. I take several short breaks during the day to fix coffee or a soup or salad, but seldom a longer one. I eat at the keyboard. I usually work six or seven days a week until a manuscript is complete.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a major magazine feature that will extend the ideas in DRY SPRING into a new area, and on a novel that imagines how far someone might go who truly believed some of the darkest predictions being made for our climate future.

How do you relax?

A lot of what I do for my work is huge fun. Reporting, for example. I don’t really need to ‘relax’ from it. But at the end of a writing day I do like to veg in front of a good TV crime drama (Numbers, the various Law and Orders and Without a Trace are all faves). My hobbies are creative woodworking and (not so creative) home repairs. Now and again, not as often as I’d like, I cook in a style I call bistro improv!

What books are you reading at the moment?

Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, about the worldwide flowering of groups seeking ecological and social justice; James Lee Burke’s Louisiana-set Dave Robichaud mystery Pegasus Descending (I’m a long-time fan); Partha Dasgupta’s disarming A Very Short Introduction to Economics (from a series of such useful ‘very short introductions’ published by Oxford Press); an assortment of other books about the economics of the environment; El Reino del Dragon de Oro, an adventure for adolescent readers by Isabelle Allende (with my Spanish dictionary in hand).

Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?

For people who are concerned about our future and the planet we are creating, I recommend the philosophical groundwork laid by Thomas Berry, who reconciles today’s most urgent tasks with the ongoing story of mankind and our sense of the divine in his The Great Work.

For people interested in how Canada deals with the environment, I recommend Elizabeth Brubaker’s short book Property Rights in the Defence of Nature (Earthscan, 1995). It made me think differently about our legal approach to protecting the environment, and it’s well written.

Thanks Chris!

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Click here for part two