Beyond the first draft: Carter Vance on the craft of writing

Author Carter Vance

Carter Vance is a writer and poet originally from Cobourg, Ontario, currently resident in Gatineau, Quebec. His work has appeared in such publications as The Smart Set, Contemporary Verse 2 and Plentitude, amongst others.

His latest novel is Smaller Animals, a story of living, loving and growing up on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, published by Collective Ink. In this interview, Carter shares his thoughts on the craft of writing, authors he likes and those who have influenced his writing, and a quote from a professor that has guided his writing.

Making a contribution, authors who influence, and the craft of writing

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

CV: The key question to any form of writing, any form of art at the end of the day, in my opinion is, what shall we do and how shall we live? That can take many forms, but it is the question that I find animates the writing that I really connect to in a deeper way and what I try to convey in my writing.

I think everyone wants to believe that they are living in a good, moral way, or at least trying to as best they can and we look to various things for guidance in that. For some it may be religion, for some it may be cultural codes and ethics, for some it’s being active in politics or public life, for some it may simply be doing right by your family and friends. I’ve tried to make a mark on things in different ways through my life thus far, and I’m sure I’ll find new ones as I grow older, but my writing in one small way to do it.

The first draft of the novel was written in 2019, during a time I was working on a development project overseas. The separation from my previous life in Ottawa gave me the chance to reflect on what the city, the politics and the people had meant to me and develop the themes and characters in the novel. I felt that I wanted to capture and preserve some of what had happened to me and my peers in a form that could speak to others

OCW: Which authors and/or types of books do you like to read?

CV: In terms of stylistic approach, I am most indebted to Adelle Waldman (particularly her debut novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.) and Sally Rooney (particularly Normal People), as well as an older novel by the name of Prague by Arthur Phillips. All these novels deal with characters in transition in their lives, as well as sense of generational ennui. In some sense, they have a debt to “lost generation” novels, such as Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises (which is one of my favourite books since reading it in high school) and Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere, though I don’t know if I would dean to place my work in such august company.

Outside of those direct inspirations, I’m a huge fan of Kurt Vonnegut (particularly Player Piano) and Raymond Carver for short fiction (most of my high school short stories were, in retrospect, fairly blatant attempts at Carver knockoffs). For non-fiction and historical writing, I love Tony Judt’s work (particularly Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945), and that of Eric Hobsbawm, who managed the unique feat of making sometimes dry historical matters sweeping and magisterial.

The evolution of a project: Navigating the craft of writing for publication

OCW: If you’ve been published, how did you find your first publisher?

CV: My first book was a chapbook of poetry released in 2017, which was definitely a smaller release though it did get some notice at the time. It was honestly a very surreal process in some ways – I submitted to it directly to a publisher without much knowledge about the process and certainly little expectation that I would be successful. It didn’t feel real until I actually had the paper copy in my hands. Though I wouldn’t say it was life-changing in a broad sense (I still had to wake up and do my day job after, you don’t get rich writing poetry!), it did give me the confidence to continue pursuing other longer-form projects.

The process of writing and ultimately publishing my new novel has definitely been different. For one thing, I planned it as a conscious singular project from the beginning and I was engaged in a deliberate process of submitting it to publishers for over two years after the manuscript was substantially completed. In that sense, it was a project I had greater confidence in and that I believed was worth other people reading from an earlier date. The fact that it’s getting a full print run and a bigger push from the publisher is definitely a change from my first book, which was with a very small independent press based in Windsor, Canada.

Released rather than finished: Advice on process and perfection

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

A university professor once told me (paraphrasing), that there are two kinds of thesis: the kind that is perfect and the kind that is done. That has really stuck with me in guiding how I write. There will be always something more to add and in a sense a work of writing is never truly “done” as the engagement and interpretation of every reader is part of the work.

It’s helped me to keep this in mind when I struggle with completing something and whether it’s ready to go out into the world, that the only way something is ever perfect is as an unfinished entity, because it contains the possibility of perfection still within it. In that sense, I prefer to think of my published works as being “released” rather than “finished”, in that I’ve turned them over from my mind only to that of the wider reading public.

OCW: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

CV: It very much depends on the project. For poetry, I tend to find it’s a matter of inspiration striking and just getting pen to paper quickly. I will usually do some small edits when I transfer from handwritten to typed for poems but beyond that the finished product is quite similar to the first draft. For short fiction or non-fiction, I tend to edit my drafts as I go, which can be a bit of a frustrating process, but it does mean that my first draft is more-or-less as I want it to be once completed. That said, I try to welcome feedback from others so it may go through some changes on that basis.

Writing the novel was a bit of different process – I had a general outline or roadmap of the way I wanted my story to go, where the characters would start and end, and it kind of became a matter of filling in the blanks and getting from point A to point B. I wrote some of the middle chapters before I had an idea of how they would link together, so, I had the key events and added some of the connective tissue afterwards. The novel also went through a more extensive external review process than any other previous work I have done, both formally with my publisher and informally with friends and colleagues. This was particularly helpful in refining the development of the characters in the novel, and making them more well-rounded and naturalistic. Readers were able to see gaps in character motivation and journeys that were not immediately apparent to me.