André Narbonne: crafting characters who project and miscommunicate

Author André Narbonne

André Narbonne is a scholar, writer, and the publisher of Conspiracy Press, based inWindsor, Ontario. His short fiction has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, won the FreeFall Literary Contest, the David Adams Richards Prize, and the Atlantic Writing Contest. A first collection, Twelve Miles to Midnight, was shortlisted for the 2017 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His first novel, Lucien & Olivia, was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. His new novel is Those Are Pearls, published by Palimpsest Press. In this interview, André explores his fascination with love and communication in human relationships, and characters who project and miscommunicate.

Crafting characters who project and miscommunicate

OCW: Can you trace any common themes across your writing?

AN: The most common theme in my writing is communication/miscommunication—projection over reception. I am principally concerned with character. As readers, we understand individuals like Harry and Margaret in Those Are Pearls through their knowledge of each other. The novel opens in 19th-century South Africa. Harry Short, a boilermaker who can quote Browning and Tennyson, is romantically in love with Margaret Roll, the rich daughter of a prosperous doctor. Harry is invisible in Cape Town – another labourer in a cheap suit. What he wants more than wealth is to construct an identity for himself as a husband and a family man. Margaret is utilitarian about her affections; she wants to escape her family. She assumes Harry understands. I use their inability to communicate with each other as both a thematic concern and a source of conflict. Inner conflict magnifies outer conflicts. Harry, who begins the novel a working-class romantic, will, in 1914, lie about his age to fight in Belgium. Anything to get away from his disastrous marriage.

OCW: What advice/guidance would you give to writers?

AN: I give the same advice other writers give. Read. Read a lot. Make a study that goes beyond plot and genre of the writers you read. Consider their phrases and paragraphs. As a writer, you can’t tell everything. To a large extent, writing is the artful management of omissions. When reading, pay attention to what gets left out and to how a writer gets you to assume things that go unwritten. How does the writer get you to empathize?

The architectural approach to the first draft

OCW: Are you a plotter or a pantser? Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

AN: My practice is to never sit at a blank computer screen wondering what to write. I don’t sit down until I’ve walked a good distance inside my story and know it. I’m what some people call an architect. If I’m going to invest the time to write a short story, I don’t want to not finish it. Alistair MacLeod, who was a friend, often used the analogy of a carpenter: measure twice, cut once.

After walking around in my stories a lot, I write them quickly: try to complete a first draft of a shorter work (something in the 5000-word range) in three days. I might keep working on the story for months – “pearl” it – but that first draft is my honest draft, the one that knows what the story is supposed to be. If my rewrites go astray, I go back to that save, which I see as authoritative. Whatever it says is what I’m doing.

I gave the same advice to my father when he was working on his memoir: “Wherever you go with this, save the first draft.” He did and he finished his book.

I don’t type as often as some people, but I consider the time I think about and research a story as writing and, in that regard, I put in the work, although a lot of the work involves walking/jogging/biking along the Detroit River, which is a block away from my house.

Novels are of course different. When drafting my first novel, Lucien & Olivia, I wrote the beginning and the ending first, like I was marking out space in a field. Then I started to write important scenes. After I had a few, I found the narrative voice I wanted and could start writing in order. All of this allowed for considerable play within the space I’d mapped.

OCW: Do you see generative AI as a threat or benefit to writers?

AN: I see generative AI as a threat to readers. My concern is that it will be all candy and no substance, nothing difficult. In literature, meaning is made in difficulty. In the sense that it might play to passivity, conformity, escapism, creating readers who prefer comfort over emotional range, yes, I see it as a threat to writers of literature.

How sailing and family shaped a style of sentimental realism

OCW: What life experiences have shaped your writing style?

Those Are Pearls, the new novel by André Narbonne

AN: Like pretty much any youngest child, my first education in reaching audiences came at the dinner table. Trying to get my point across when I was the youngest of six, gave me rhetorical strategies beyond raising my voice. My siblings also shaped my reading. I come from a family of readers and we shared books. I think we all read The Tin Drum shortly after the movie made us aware of it. We talked about books and we talked about writers. I never wanted the conversation to leave me behind.

My first job out of high school was particularly formative on my writing. For ten years, I worked at sea as a cadet, then as a marine engineer. Sailing from the age of eighteen to twenty-eight again broadened my sense of audience. Being at sea in the 80s was like living in two different centuries at the same time. I worked on bulk carriers on the lakes, then on tankers, fishery patrol, and hydrographic vessels on the East Coast. It was an experience, but not really an adventure. The 19th-century isolation still held, but not the newness of discovery. The world is mapped. As Lucien says in Lucien & Olivia, “They don’t build refineries and container docks in the best part of town. The grain elevators are crawling with rats.” Even my brush with history might not have included me. I was in the vicinity of the Challenger shuttle when it exploded in 1986. I was 23, the third engineer on a pocket oil tanker returning from Texas. I didn’t witness what was happening above because I was below in the engine room. I’ve often wondered whether that is or isn’t part of my experience.

When I caught my first ship at 18, I was living near the Welland Canal in St. Catharines, Ontario so I had a sense of what the job looked and sounded like. But I could not place myself in it. I grew up, became an adult at sea. When I did, I learned to communicate and empathize with people whose education and history and expectations were alien to mine.

I write about love a lot, as one does who is interested in communication. I’m the father of four. Having a family has taught me things about love I would not have otherwise known. My writing style is what my wife calls sentimental realism. I recall vividly the first time a classmate in high school told me my writing had made her cry. I thought, “Okay. I can do this.” The principal role of literary sentimental fiction of the type I engage with is that of witness. Sentimental realism attempts to broaden the reader’s horizon of empathy, not confirm their borders.