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" There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by. "

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" Now, as a writer, the whole world is your nail polish display, and what's more, you can help yourself. A thrilling, colourful array of gorgeous human peculiarity revolves before your eyes, and you still can't quite believe it's all yours for the taking. "

Lynn Coady

Help

Yourself

Eyes

" Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next. "

" However long, it's definitely the presence of other people that brings out the weirdness - that collision of your own way of being with the everyday lives of others, the abrupt awareness - always a surprise no matter how often it's happened - that their lives are very different from your own. "

" I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms. "

Lynn Coady

Matter

Certainty

" No one expects the doormat to stand upright, shake itself off, and amble down the street to seek its own happiness. "

" Something I've always written about is social expectations: that the eyes of the community are on you all the time, expecting you to line up with certain social norms, certain behaviours. Whenever you forgot about them, they'd be strongly reiterated to you, in no uncertain terms. "

" I should say I am not much of a gamer - anymore. The reason for this is that I have to make a living, and my body requires vitamin D, and I've come to value the heady pleasures of human interaction over the temporary exhilaration of reaching the 'next level.' "

" What I've learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that 'youthful energy' will only get you so far. "

" Sometimes I pine for the era of Miss Manners, when there were hard and fast rules dictating a well-bred individual's behaviour in any given situation. "

" I went into the world confident my tea training would open many doors. And I did particularly well with the Irish and fellow Nova Scotians over 60. But this only got me so far. It took a long time to cultivate the tricks of easy social interaction. "

Lynn Coady

World

Time

" Do not make the writer stand behind a podium. Anything but. A podium reeks of the lecture hall. A music stand, on the other hand, is nicely minimal and lends the writer - who usually needs all the help s/he can get - a musician's second-hand cool-factor. "

" In the late sixties, when revolution and upheaval were everywhere, feminists were ridiculed for focusing on housework. "

" I'm no atheist - I'm lazy. I really do like hassle-free Sunday mornings. I have a problem with organized religion, so I've simply opted out. Live and let live, I figure. "

" You can't hint a man into bestowing the ideal gift that displays all the love, appreciation and understanding you feel is lacking the rest of year. "

" You can catch a scent in the wind - an idea, or a concept - and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can't when you're writing a novel. "

Lynn Coady

Writing

See

" Here it is, 2011, and I feel zero shame when I tell you I would like to marry my smartphone. It is a handful of pure delight. "

" The masterstroke of male fraternity, I believed, was the practice of never speaking of anything remotely personal or related to one's emotions. That way, no one is ever made uncomfortable. Any such awkward moments can always be dispelled with a flurry of pretend-punches. "

" I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society. "

" I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender. "

Lynn Coady

Gender

Women

" It's the typical mid-life crisis kind of thing, where you just stop and wonder, 'Should I go back to university and get a law degree?' I kind of looked around me and thought, 'What kind of idiot am I that I've just spent the last 10 years writing novels? Financially, I'm pretty much where I was when I was 28.' "

Lynn Coady

Writing

Law

" Audience participation can often inject a dose of adrenalin into your average dial-tone literary reading, especially if a handful of audience-members are mentally unhinged, and let's face it - you can always depend on at least one crackpot at these things. "

" The process of writing a story isn't about fair. It's about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong. "

" Formalized rules of manners were so great because they left no room for basic human haplessness. They allowed us to circumvent our natural boorish tendency to disregard the feelings of others. "

" I started out in the journalism program, but I got kicked out. I wasn't very good at it. It wasn't where I wanted to be ultimately. "

" Anger is one of those emotions that doesn't follow the letter of the law. It speaks before it thinks. It rears up on its hind legs and charges. "

" Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game. "

" We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry. "

" That's what fascinates me about these writers' retreats: You're in these small spaces with small groups of people, and all of the sudden, the spotlight is shining on you harder than it normally is. "

" I come from a working-class background, and I thought I had to be studying something that would get me a job. "

" It's a moral absolute: If you are going to make a human being, you have a fundamental responsibility to that person - to honestly disclose exactly who they are and where they come from. "