Finding the Form with Laurence Lumsden

Real writers carry notebooks, so I’ve heard. You never know when inspiration might strike. You might observe someone behaving oddly and think they’d make a great character in a story. Sometimes people say the strangest things on the metro. Walking behind someone you might be struck by their clothes, the scent of their vape, their swagger – all of this is great raw material for a writer. But there’s something a bit creepy about a middle-aged guy taking out his notebook in public and scribbling with intent. I could use my phone, but when it comes to typing on a phone, I’m all thumbs. So my method is to try to memorise everything (hopefully without my lips moving) and then type furiously on my laptop when I get home. If nothing else it gives me some reassurance that my memory hasn’t failed yet.

One afternoon I was at the eco-centre on Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges, my minivan loaded with recyclables and assorted detritus from my basement, and I was struck (not literally) by one of the employees. He looked like Kurt Cobain and was full of wild grungy enthusiasm, bouncing around to make sure the patrons put their items in the correct recycling bin. To be perfectly honest I was a bit afraid of him, and he in turn seemed quite irked with me. Didn’t I know the difference between hard and soft plastics? Between chipboard and solid wood? Eventually he grabbed a box from my hands and sorted it himself. Afterwards I drove home at reckless speed and created a new Word doc with a character description for Marcus of Montreal. But I didn’t have a story for him.

What I did have was a bunch of old drafts of stories, each of which I’d started in a rush of enthusiasm but never finished, their energy somehow fizzling out as I wrote. Always be escalating is George Saunders’ advice to short story writers, but how? In a moment of inspiration or desperation I wondered what would happen if I introduced Marcus into some of those moribund stories, not as the central character but as a kind of catalyst, a provocateur, challenging the other characters in some way. The result was three completed short stories (two of them now published) and a draft novella. So Marcus of Montreal doesn’t have his own story; instead he’s a part of many stories.

I usually begin writing a story with a vague intention to go somewhere, but the better ones develop like accidents in ways that I would never have foreseen. Marcus is like a reckless driver who arrives from nowhere, mid-journey, forcing all the other characters to swerve. I’ve become very fond of him.