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Writer’s Block: Andrew Forbes
While his latest novel The Diapause (Invisible Publishing) tackles coming-of-age and the end of the world by turns, Andrew Forbes instead chats with us about having multiple projects on the go, always coming back to Coltrane, and how waiting really is the hardest part.
All Lit Up: Do you have any rituals that you abide by when you’re writing?
Andrew Forbes: An early start—while it’s still dark out, preferably—coffee, music. The music is generally instrumental, unless I’m editing. While writing I listen to ambient, sometimes classical, often jazz. I almost always come back to John Coltrane.
All Lit Up: Why do you write?
Andrew Forbes: I’ve tried the alternative and found it not to my liking.
All Lit Up: Describe your perfect writing day.
Andrew Forbes: A productive one, whatever productivity looks like at a given point in the life of a piece or book in progress. Sometimes it’s hitting an arbitrary word count on a first draft—five hundred words, a thousand words, whatever goal I’ve set for that day. Sometimes productivity looks like solving the mismatch between an idea I’ve teed up in the opening paragraph and the things I’ve offered as support in the ensuing ones. Sometimes it looks like uncovering the nugget or fact or proof that I’ve been scouring old newspapers to find. Sometimes it looks like resolving all the editor’s notes in the doc we’re working on.
Whatever the particulars, any day that ends with the feeling that I’ve pushed things forward is a good day.
All Lit Up: Have you experienced writer’s block? What did you do about it?
Andrew Forbes: I don’t place too much importance on writer’s block. I generally try to have a few things going simultaneously, so if one project gets stuck I have something else to jump to. Especially good is if that other thing is in an earlier state of development, which for me means that the writing is freer. The closer a thing gets to completion the more beholden it is to its own rules. The new words owe it to the ones already set down to perform in certain ways. But new-ish projects haven’t yet established those rules, and as they’re further from the point where anyone other than me will read them I have a good deal more freedom to play with them. If all else fails, there’s always research to be done.
All Lit Up: What’s the toughest part about being a writer?
Andrew Forbes: It seems uncouth to complain about the inconveniences of something so inessential to survival, but if pressed I’d say the waiting. The wheels of publishing move slowly by necessity. Patience can be difficult to sustain.
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Andrew Forbes is the author of the story collections Lands and Forests (Invisible Publishing, 2019) and What You Need (2015), which was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and named a finalist for the Trillium Book Prize. He is also the author of The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays (2016) and The Only Way Is the Steady Way: Essays on Baseball, Ichiro, and How We Watch the Game (2021). Forbes lives in Peterborough, Ontario.
