30
Novels, day 16: Icefields by Thomas
Wharton
It
occurred to me that if I’m going to devote this blog all November to the novels that
shaped me as a writer, I shouldn’t forget this book.
This
was my own first novel, and it was important to me as a writer because, by writing
it, I proved to myself that I actually could
write a novel.
As I
mentioned in my earlier post on Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, I had a difficult time figuring out how to write a novel, let alone figuring
out what to write about. Creating an outline and working through it in linear
fashion didn’t work for me at all. I had to discover my own method of putting a
novel together. It was a messy, trial-and-error method, with a lot of dead ends
and blind alleys.
Sharon
and I were living in the small northern Alberta town of Peace River at the time
I was writing this book. Sharon was working at the hospital and I was an
unemployed at-home Dad, looking after our baby daughter and trying to finish my Master’s
degree (my thesis was the novel). From my little upstairs office in our
house I had a view of the local ski hill across the river, known as Misery
Mountain. It seemed an aptly-named landmark to write a novel in front of.
The
book is set in Jasper, Alberta, the mountain resort town that I lived in as a
teenager. I was already a big reader in those days, and my favourite reading
was fantasy. The forested hills and valleys around the townsite became a canvas
on which I could imagine the fantastical worlds I loved to read
about, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
It was in Jasper that I began to imagine I
might write my own fantasy novels some day. I didn’t think at the time that I
would ever write about Jasper itself, the actual town and wilderness around it.
But when I was working on the short fictions that eventually became my first
novel, that’s what began to emerge: stories about bears, mountaineers, explorers. And glaciers.
The
fantasy novels had to wait until years later.
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