Vancouver Province
for August 25, 2000

  This, dear friends, is a “how to” column – namely how to write when you have no talent for it.

  It is said that “Those who can, do, and those who cannot, teach.”  Might it also be said that those who can, write, those who cannot, edit. Well I’m bound to say, out of feelings of survival and dedication to the truth, that this is not true on this paper where my editor writes perhaps the paper’s most popular column. Moreover this editor is a “she” … and I’ve had a lot more success winging my stuff into print with “she’s” than “he’s”.

  I don’t pretend to be a good writer. As the great Robert Benchley said “I can’t write but by the time I found that out I was too famous to quit.” All I can hope for is that from time to time I provoke and entertain.

  I bring to my craft some timeless errors. I constantly find myself saying “between” when I mean “amongst” and I have a very bad “which” and “that” problem. And I constantly start sentences with “and”.

  For my second book, an almost revolutionary tract about how I saw my country, the publisher gave me an editor who profoundly disagreed with everything I said and excised about half of it on the first edit. I demanded to have my manuscript back – I’m not quite sure how you do that in this, the Computer Age – and was rewarded with a new editor who was prepared to allow my book of personal opinions to express some personal opinions. He was a young lad whose first edits asked the question “when was Roy Romanow premier of British Columbia and for how long?” Yeeesh!

  When I wrote for the late, lamented Financial Post I once lambasted the Toronto Globe and Mail for, amongst other things, its silly and unsustainable boast that it’s Canada’s national Newspaper. This was excised on the basis that the Financial Post thought it undignified to criticize competitors! They also “spiked” a column I did that mocked the Canadian flag on the basis that it was simply the Liberal Party logo – which it is.

  But editors can and often do save the day. My editor on this paper once called me up to say that she couldn’t understand what I’d written. (I’m surprised that doesn’t happen more often.) I re-read my column and could only respond by asking if it was the paper’s policy to censor plain, unadulterated gibberish? Which it was.

  The trouble with editors generally is that they hurt your feelings. I mean how would you like it if every time you opened your mouth someone un-split your infinitives, activated your passives, and pointed out that prepositions take the objective? (I digress to tell you that the editor of my first and my about-to-be-release third books once corrected me for saying “It is I”, probably the only time I have caught out this wonderful, patient lady.)

  But get on with it, you say. How do you write successfully?

  There is only one answer to that – be interesting unless you can write elegantly like, say, Bernard Levin, late of the London Times or Trevor Lautens of local fame. They are usually interesting too but can get away with not being. They can also get away with being long-winded because the wind is so much fun.

  Don’t use words no one understands. I once read a few pages of a book by Dalton Camp that could only have been understood by an English classical scholar. It made the remainder bins very early, as it should have.

  Be funny if you are naturally funny. Vaughn Palmer is a very funny, as well as being an incisive political columnist but the humour is always natural. Just like Andy Rooney – another of my favourites. But if you’re just going to write funny stuff make sure that you are truly a comedian like Eric Nicol. Being funny is very hard, both for a writer and an actor.

  There are lots of standard texts to help the budding writer – most of them are dry as hell and often outdated. Here is a great one. It’s called Woe Is I written by Patricia T. O’Connor and published by Riverhead Books in New York.

  When all’s said and done, though, you need two things above all else – a good editor. And a publisher.