Richard Scrimger.
Profile by Dave Jenkinson.
Books by Richard Scrimger.
Addendum: Since the interview, Richard says he's completed a second
Norbert book with the working title, "Norbert and Gracie," which is due
out in Fall, 2000. A sequel to The Way to Schenectady,
presently bearing the tentative title, "One Peeler Christmas," is planned
for 2001. Three picture books are also in the works. Richard's adult
title, "Mystical Rose, sans the Titanic theme ("thanks to
that movie," he says) should appear in 2000.
"As a child of nine, I wanted to be a paleontologist because it was a big long word and people were very impressed when you said it," says award-winning author Richard Scrimger. "When I began university, I wanted to be a lawyer which is a shorter word, and people were not quite as impressed, but Mom and Dad were pleased. Older friends of mine who'd become law students said, 'I haven't read a book that has nothing to do with law in two years.' I thought, 'Gee, these guys aren't having any fun.' So I had some fun for about 10 years. I decided to be a writer in my mid-twenties. It was a decision that I took haphazardly, and 10 years later I was an overnight success."
Born in Montreal, on April 5, 1957,
Richard's connection with the city ended when he was just two. "We moved
to Toronto, Scarborough actually, and then my parents moved 'downtown'
when I was about nine. Until about four years ago, I still lived in
downtown Toronto. Then my wife, Bridget, and I decided that our four
children were getting bigger and the house was staying the same size, and
so we decided to switch homes. Because Bridget, a moral theologian and
professor at St. Mike's and St. Augustine's, was commuting across town and
it would be easier to commute 'to town,' we moved east to the small town
of Cobourg. As I can work out of my home, that was fine for me."
Although Richard graduated from the
University of Toronto in 1979 with a B.A., his time there was a mixed
experience. "I didn't work very hard. I played a lot of cards and hung
around. I never handed a single essay in on time, but I finished with a
double major in English and history. Because I was going to be a lawyer, I
started out in history, but, about second year, when I realized that
'law's no fun,' I switched over to English because those were the courses
I was enjoying. I did a lot of serious reading, but university reading is
more the 'correct' reading you need to do to get the A on the paper. For
instance, I didn't read 'all' of Dickens, just the important chapters of
the Dickens' novels that I was writing essays on. It was only after
university that I sat down and read Dickens and had a great time. Perhaps
the picture I paint of myself is a little false. I was pushed a lot
through public school and was a scholarship kid. I 'made' money at
university and didn't have student loans."
"I didn't develop work habits as a
writer until my children were born. I'd have four hours in front of me for
writing, but somehow the coffee wouldn't be hot enough or the pencil
wouldn't be sharp enough. I'd sit down, write a sentence and then stroke
it out and write another sentence and maybe change the punctuation. I'd
get up, walk and scratch my head and write another sentence, and I'd look
up and the four hours would be gone. Then I'd go and play tennis or
something. When the twins, the first of our four children, were born,
suddenly my life had serious focus. The idea of having 40 uninterrupted
minutes for writing when the two of them were napping was tremendous. I
realized that, if I was going to write, I'd have to write during every
spare minute, and that's what I've done from the time the children were
born until now. If only I'd had these work habits when I was 12. My mom
would never have had to yell,'Richard! Go upstairs and do your homework!'"
After university, I went to Europe for a
year, I waited tables, and I started to write. Over a long period of time,
I wrote a long novel which one day might see the light of day. I made all
the mistakes that beginning writers make. I rewrote and rewrote it. Now I
know: the first novel is going to stink. Write it and throw it away, or
put it in a drawer and start the second novel. The other big mistake I
made was to write something I knew nothing about. I wrote an alternate
universe novel with rock stars, people from Greek mythology and people
with two heads. It took me forever, was very long and so damn 'clever.' I
was being Noel Coward with every single sentence. Then I finally wrote
Crosstown which was my first, I won't say success, my first book
that was published. The first draft of that happened in the early '90's. I
was married in 1985, a banner year for me because I got married, learned
to drive and got a computer. Actually my wife got the computer, but I
could play on it."
Despite Richard's seemingly omnipresent
sense of humour, he claims he wasn't the class clown. "In school, I was
too busy working for the marks. I was the guy who knew all the answers but
was not quite seen as the teacher's pet because I did manage to have a
peer group and have some fun. I envied the class clowns because they
seemed to have a much easier time of it. Whenever I'm giving a talk to a
big bunch of kids and some are a little too old for the book and I can't
pull them in with the book by itself, then I use my personality to pull
them in. I just pick the guy who's going to make the fuss, the class
clown, and bring him on side. This is fun for everybody. Those are the
talks that really work."
As a child, Richard was an habitue of
libraries. "Both my parents worked, and so, from about the age of eight, I
was a latch-key kid. It's not as though I have any horrid childhood
memories to think of, but it was kind of an empty spot at home, and I
liked the library and all its books. My friend at the time was another
sort of nerdy guy, and we hung out at the library and read books like
Freddy the Pig. I also have very many happy memories of being
read-to. My dad used to do Winnie the Pooh, and my brother and I
would be in stitches as he read."
According to Richard, the decision about
who would be the stay-at-home parent was very easy. "When we had children,
neither of us had a 'real' job right away. Bridget was a doctoral student
and was giving lectures, and I was writing so we both took care of the
kids. Within the year though, Bridget got offered a job as a clinical
ethicist at a hospital, and suddenly there was a real salary when I was
not making even a pretend salary. I don't know that we even actually
discussed my being the 'home' parent. I always say that it's not the
career that I planned, because I was going to be a 'literary success' a
lot earlier, but I can't stress enough how happy I am now to have had the
five or six years when the kids were small because those are years you
only get once. The youngest is now into grade one, and I have much more
time to write than I've ever had. I'm frightened that I'll relapse and
fall into old habits: the mornings will be so long, but somehow the coffee
won't be hot enough or the computer won't be going the right speed, and
there will go the morning."
"The watershed in my writing career
happened about 1994 or '95. I went to the intensive one-week program at
the Humber College School for Writers. This was at the same time as I sent
Crosstown, my second novel, off to an agent who had rejected my
first novel. I said, 'OK, this novel is totally different. If you don't
like it, I'm not going to send you anything else because this is the ying
and yang of my writing style.' Every night at the course, there were
student readings, and the typical reading consisted of some person getting
up, sweating bullets, and delivering a passage about some tragedy that
happened in their childhood, like their dog dying. And I thought, 'Gee
whiz. All these downers. I don't know what to say.' Instead of reading
from another novel that I'd started, I read a humorous story that I'd
written about going shopping with my kids, and it brought the house down.
Joe Kertes, the person who ran the program and who has since become a good
friend, asked me to see him after the program was over. He suggested a
couple of places to send the shopping piece, adding, 'I know these people.
Mention my name.'That same week, I got a call from the agent, saying, 'I
like your novel. We have to talk.' All this happened within a three week
period in September of 1995. I got the funny piece published in the
Globe and Mail. I sent the editor another one, and she liked it
too. The following year, I ran a series of these pieces in the Globe
and Mail,, and someone from HarperCollins contacted me, asking, 'Do
you have any more of these?' And I lied through my teeth and said, 'Oh,
I've got about 40' when I really had two. So then I sat down to write
them. HarperCollins really liked them, and they came out as a collection,
Still Life With Children.
"The Still Life stories were a
mixture of fact and fiction. Most of them happened, but I don't know that
any of them happened exactly word for word. Certainly, the whole year did
not did not occur in the sequence found in the book. The great thing about
being a writer is that you get to write down all the funny things that you
think of 10 minutes after the event is over. 'If only I'd been able to
come up with that devastating bon mot to use on the bank manager.' Well,
when you're writing the event down, you can make it as if you did.
'Wouldn't it have been funny if your kid had actually climbed on to the
toilet seat at the plumbing store and pulled his pants down and finally
got potty trained?' That isn't quite the way it happened, but it
practically did, and anyone who has kids and is reading the stories will
recognize that these are perfectly plausible stories."
Serendipity also played a role in
Richard's transformation into a writer for juveniles. "Claire McKay, the
well-known children's author, is one of my mom's best friends. When Claire
was putting a collection together called Laughs, she called me up.
'Richard," she said. "I've seen you at parties. You're a funny guy. Do you
have a funny story that you could submit?' And again I lied through my
teeth and replied, 'Got a lot!' Claire approached Kathy Lowinger at
Tundra, saying, 'The son of a friend of mine is kind of a writer." And
Kathy said, 'Oh great. Just what I need. Somebody else's best-friend's
kid.' But when I wrote the story which first introduced Norbert, the alien
who lives in a kid's nose, Kathy really liked the concept. However, she
sent back a whole list of problems that she had with the story. Claire
said, 'Look, you also wrote a funny poem. We can stick it in and forget
about the Norbert story.' I responded, 'No. I'll see what we can do.'
"I took a few days and rewrote the
story, 'Introducing Norbert,' to Kathy's specifications and realized,
'This is a really good editor.' I'd already had some success with my adult
books, Crosstown, and Still Life, and I'd had a good time
with the editors I worked with on those books, but, with Kathy, I was
really aware of someone with her hands on the editorial reins, taking over
and saying, 'This can be a good story if you do this.' I've been in awe of
her ever since. She and I have wrestled a few stories into the ground, and
her ideas are almost always good and worth listening to. I'm very much
aware of being in the hands of someone who takes me seriously and knows
exactly what they're doing with the book."
The impetus for the transformation of
Norbert from a character in a funny short story to one in a humorous
novel, which later won the Mr. Christie's Award, Richard claims as his.
"During a chat, Kathy asked, 'Have you ever thought of writing one of
those funny stories you write in the newspaper from a kid's point of
view?' Again I lied. 'Yes, of course. In fact, I think that's a great
idea. But I also have this other story. You know that Norbert story that I
wrote for Claire. I think that could be a novel.' And Kathy said, 'No, it
couldn't.' But she added, 'We'll give you some money, and you try them
both and we'll see which one we like.' Even though I was a relatively
untried author, at least in the children's field, Kathy was prepared to go
out on a limb with an advance. 'I'd like you to do the "travel" story
first,' she said, and I replied, 'We'll see.' I wrote the Norbert story
first, and, when Kathy read it, she said, 'This is good. It works. Do you
want to change this, this, and this?" The story was way better when I took
her suggestions and rewrote it."
In the very funny and cleverly written
The Nose From
Jupiter, Norbert, the extraterrestrial, not only
takes up residence in the nose of Alan Dingwall, 13, but he also becomes
the new 'voice' in Alan's life, a voice which causes Alan to have to do
things which would not normally be part of his "boring old Allan Dingwall"
existence. The school bullies, Larry and Garry, and Alan's classmate, the
smart, pretty and athletic Miranda, along with Alan's quarreling divorced
parents, all find that they are dealing with a new Alan.
Converting a short story character into
one that must sustain an entire novel is potentially fraught with many
difficulties. "I suspect that unknowingly I walked through a minefield and
just did not know the mines were there because I didn't have that many
problems. When you sit down at the keyboard, you can't just go and type
the first words that come to your mind. You sit and 'listen' and see what
comes to you. As I was typing the first scene of a story that I thought
would be light and fluffy involving these happy noses from Jupiter, the
parents wrote themselves in, and they were darker characters, and the book
just got darker right there. I wrote the first chapter and said to myself,
'Gee, these are good characters. I should probably keep them. This is a
situation that I can I work with.' Similarly, the two bullies wrote
themselves in, and they were gruesome. I wanted them to be funny, and they
wrote themselves just a little darker, and the things they did were just a
little bit grottier than I thought they would be. I was almost surprising
myself as I wrote. While you can't redeem everybody in a story, I did
think one of these bullies could be saved. I wanted that, and Kathy didn't
try to talk me out of it."
"Kathy would love to bring Norbert back,
and so would I because he's such a good character and he and Alan work
very well. We just have to figure out a way to get him out of k.d. lang's
nose and back with Alan. I chose k.d.'s nose because I wanted a Canadian
symbol and somebody who's really cool, and I think of k.d. lang as the
icon of cool. I love going around to schools and asking the kids what
characters they would like to see come back and how they would rewrite the
story. Very often another character from Jupiter is mentioned as way to
go. Maybe Norbert's girlfriend, Nerissa, from the short story will come
in. In the original draft of the book, Nerissa was a prominent character
and so was Nerbert, Norbert's evil twin, but Kathy made me take them out.
She was right. It's a better story now."
"Ask me where my characters come from,
and I'll answer that they are people I know and they are me and where the
one leaves off and the other starts in the mix I couldn't say. The
Nose's Alan is a representative every-boy kind of character. I
borrowed the book's setting, and I even cheated there. Some of the rivers
and bridges aren't named correctly. I make a little cameo appearance with
my family at the end of the story. There's a reference to this funny crazy
family with lots of kids that lives down the street from Allen. The dad
runs out and picks them up when they fall down and carries them inside.
That's my role."
In his second humorous novel, The Way to Schenectady
Richard elected to use a female narrator, Jane Peeler. "I've written six
or seven books, and, in at least two or three, I've been a woman. I'm
quite comfortable 'being a woman.' I suspect each of us has male and
female characteristics in us, and most of us have been brought up with men
and women. I'm much more comfortable having a female voice than I would be
having a voice of different ethnicity or an ethnicity that I was not
comfortable with. I haven't yet had a kid who's had a problem believing in
Jane as writing the story."
Attending a funeral doesn't seem to be
the stuff of humour, but, in Richard's hands, it becomes so in The Way to Schenectady. A
family vacation takes on an added dimension when Jane, 12, hides a tiny,
smelly old derelict, Marty Oberdorf, in the back of their van. The
family's trip from Toronto to Massachusetts includes a Jane-orchestrated
sidetrip to Schenectady, New York, so that Bill can be present at his
brother's memorial service.
"The hardest thing to do in Schenectady was to get Dad
into the background because I was giving him funny lines, and Kathy said,
'The kids don't care. Lose him.' In fact, Kathy was pushing me to a place
where the comedy was kid-centered. I guess there was too much of me
involved. The stories in Still Life With Children are told from the
dad's point of view, and Dad gets all the good lines or gets to be the
crazy, harassed person who has all the horrible things happen to him. If
you think about your favourite kids' stories growing up, adults were not a
large part of those stories. What I did with Dad in Schenectady would be a
painting technique. He was strong in the first draft, and all I did was go
over him with a 'sponge,' and, if you 'lighten' him, he goes 'into' the
picture. I did it once, and Kathy said, 'He's still too present.' I took
the sponge out and did it again. But Dad's the same character. I didn't
change the essence of Dad. I just pushed him farther back into the
picture, away from the camera. I like to work within a very consistent
character framework. If the character has a strong tone, then every time I
bring the character back, he's going to be working on a variation of that
tone or maybe a subtle movement within that tone. So Grandma can certainly
change. She can be a grouchy, crabby person, but she's never going to
become a nice soft person."
"When I was busy raising children, I
used to make time to write, and I still worked at restaurants until only a
few years ago. I found I was doing a lot of writing from the time the kids
went to bed until the time I went to bed. I would write from 10 p.m. until
2 a.m. every day, and then I'd get up at 6 a.m. because one of my
children, Ed, gets up early. For a couple of years there, I truly don't
know when I was sleeping. I don't have a particular ritual time for
writing. I'm not that organized, but I do try to write every day. When I
first started writing, for years it wasn't real unless I was writing with
a pen on the paper. I might then type it in the typewriter or enter it
into the word processor, but, since getting the computer and getting used
to it, now it's only real when it's on the hard drive and backed up on a
disk."
"I try to get a few pages done every
day. One of those novels for children is about 40,000 words which means
that I could write it in 60 working sessions - unless deadline pressure
comes up, and I have to do it in 40 sessions. On my own devices, it would
be 60 sessions which would probably be spread over a couple of months. I
will work on two books at the same time, but I'm not in the creative
process on two levels at once. When Schenectady's deadline was
due, I was in the middle of writing Mystical Rose. I said, 'OK,
stop!' I sort of ran around the block for a day and then said, 'Ok, my
head's clear, and I'm ready to go. I sat down and wrote Schenectady and put
Mystical Rose on hold until I finished Schenectady and handed in
my draft. Then I took a few hours off and sat down at the next session and
started back into Mystical Rose."
"When I start to write a novel, I start
with the whole thing. I have to have the whole idea. That doesn't mean I
finish where I start or that I know at the beginning how it's going to
end. I start with a 'ball of plasticine,' and the novel is in that ball of
plasticine. When I start, I want to realize, 'This is the amount of
material that I'm going to use in the novel. This is the kind and colour
of material,' and then I start to shape and rough it out. As I write, I'm
being more precise in my shaping of the plasticine. Maybe I'll roll out a
bit and reshape it as I go, and an idea will occur to me, but I want to
start and always have in my hand the amount of plasticine that I'll be
working with so that I'll have a sense of what the book is about. I have
to start with an idea, a hook, a what-if. It just sort of pops into my
head, and then I wriggle it around a bit and try it out and see, 'Where
can we go?' I think of three or places to go, and then I sit down and
write, but I certainly hold myself open to new ideas. As I said, I had
The Nose From
Jupiter set up as a light fluffy comedy, and it wrote
itself dark."
"Pace is something I'm very aware of. I
have to remind myself at all times, 'How's the pace going? Is it fast
enough, too fast? Do I have to throw in some description or make the
dialogue take place over a longer period of time?' I'm also very aware of
pace from scene to scene. Often when I'm blocked, it's because I'm taking
too much time on a segue. I'm much better off using a director's
terminology to 'cut.' So, if I'm blocked, I just say, 'Go to the next
scene. Forget this. You're done.' Within the scene, if I'm reading it over
to myself, I will continue to be concerned about pace. 'Does that read too
fast? Are they getting too many funny lines in a row. Do I have a sense of
the time, of the place?' That's important for me."
Richard has a number of completed and
on-the-go projects. "I've finished a grown-up novel, Mystical Rose,
about an old lady talking to God. I think of it as the Virgin Mary and the
Titanic which are the themes in it. A small publishing house is
interested in turning that very first novel that took me so long to write
into a book, but I have to lose an entire plot line. I have two more
children's novels. One, with the working title 'Glittering Scales,' is a
high end novel about a character who receives a couple of coloured scales
in the mail. He uses them to go into literature so he disappears into the
books. He goes into several books including the book he's studying, a
Greek legend and the Bible. The other book is the return of
Norbert. I also have a cartoon series that I'm working on, and Norbert may
be turned into a TV show. We've signed an option agreement with Salter
Street Studios, and I think they want to turn it into 13 episodes. I will
get a chance to write those so that may take up more of my time. As well,
Linda Granfield wants there to be more Schenectady. Kathy called,
saying, 'I just talked to Linda, and I quite agree.' I'd love to do more.
I think they're a great family. I don't know if I might tell them from a
different point of view because there are various family members."
"My favourite comedy is a triangle
because you have to have the two forces competing over the source of
tension. You have to have a foil, you have to have the guy that gets the
funny lines, and you need to have the source of tension between them.
Laurel and Hardy are a great buddy team, but it's no good if they're just
standing side by side. They have to have a piano between them that they
are moving or a girl that they're fighting over. It's something that
happens in my writing. I look for it backwards and say, 'I wonder where I
stuck that triangle?' I don't consciously try for it. I write the scene as
funnily as I can, and I find that, often when the scene really works, if
you go back and examine it, it works because there is a triangle."
"I think of humour like sweat. If you
run around, you're going to sweat. If I put words together, humour's going
to be there. For example, Crosstown is not a comic novel for
adults. It's a novel of search and redemption and spiritual growth.
Fortunately, it reads fast, but there is comedy in it, and there's comedy
in places you wouldn't normally expect to find comedy, including a rape
scene. When I'm talking to kids, it's going to be comic. Certainly, it's
going to be me, and my tone with my own kids is predominantly comic. I
don't try and teach them the depth and horror and seriousness of life. I
try to be with them in a way that reflects the joy of life, and, if I can
bring joy into kids' lives, that's a gift I'm delighted to have."
*This article is based on an interview held in Winnipeg on November 19, 1998.
