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Reforming the Senate

1/31/2010

WARNING: This article is about reforming the Canadian Senate. Reading it may result in narcolepsy, high blood pressure (if you’re from Alberta), contradiction of your preconceptions, and a rude awakening to the harsh reality of reforming anything at the Federal level.

For the last eight years I have worked as a policy advisor to the Senator of the Northwest Territories, the Hon. Nick Sibbeston. He is a Liberal Senator appointed by Jean Chretien in 1999. The views expressed in the following article are my views and do not necessarily reflect on his beliefs or opinions.

Working at the Senate was not the culmination of a life-long dream. True, I do have a Masters in Political Economy, had worked in government for 12 years, including a stint as a Cabinet advisor, but I had been a New Democrat pretty much all my life. My general view of the Senate, when I thought of it at all was that it was full of political hacks and should be abolished at the first opportunity. So what happened? The Senator in question had previously been the Premier of the Northwest Territories and I had been asked to be his executive assistant – plucked from the bureaucracy because of my analytical skills and writing ability. For two years, I worked for and with him, writing speeches, travelling the North and attending numerous high level political and constitutional conferences. These were heady times, including efforts to expand the constitutional rights of Aboriginal people (since left to the courts) followed immediately by the proposed Meech Lake Accord. After our two years together, Senator Sibbeston and I went our separate ways. I returned to the bureaucracy for four years and eventually left government to try my hand as an actor and playwright. He left politics and went into private business. But we stayed in touch and after he was appointed to the Senate in 1999, even discussed briefly the idea of me working for him. But neither of us pursued it.

Then on September 13, 2001, I was sitting at home in Calgary, the Edmonton SF conference I was to have attended having been cancelled (Allen Steele was the guest of honour, I think). I was talking to my wife about the events of the last few days. By then I was working as the program director in an artists in schools program. Although I thought the work I was doing was valuable, I suggested that maybe it was time to return to government and work on bigger issues. At that moment the phone rang. Senator Sibbeston wanted me to come to Ottawa to work for him. What could I say?

At the time, I thought I’d work in the Senate for two or three years and then move into a policy shop in a Federal department. As it turned out, I enjoyed the work, found it challenging and interesting and generally felt I was doing more good where I was than by moving somewhere else. The hours were long when the Senate was sitting but flexible when it wasn’t. I got to travel the country, met many interesting people, and worked on some very interesting files in Aboriginal policy, the environment and natural resources. The money isn’t as good as I might make in the public service but overall the benefits outweigh the liabilities.

There, now you know why I think I have something to say about Senate reform.

Senate reform has been the mantra of western conservatives for more than twenty years. The idea of the Triple-E Senate (equal, elected, effective) has many fierce adherents, especially in Alberta. One of them even sits in the Senate. I won’t try to do their arguments justice but generally they think Senators should be elected for fixed terms, that each province should have the same number of Senators (usually 10), and that the Senate should play a significant role in the Federal Parliament. There seems to be some debate as to whether the current powers of the Senate should be retained or modified. This is a significant issue – and probably the most contentious.

The current Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, has proposed two pieces of legislation to amend the Senate. With prorogation, both of these Bills will need to be introduced again. That doesn’t matter though – neither had got past First Reading. And not because the Liberal-dominated Senate had stopped them. But I’ll get back to that.

The first Bill would limit Senators to a renewable eight-year term. This is a significant change. Currently Senators are appointed and stay in office until they reach age 75. Theoretically, that means a Senator could sit for 45 years (you have to be 30 to be a Senator) though in fact terms of 10 to 20 years are most common, as Senators are often in their late-fifties to mid-sixties when appointed. But the length of office is not what is most significant about the change. It is the potential renewability of the term.

This bill would not create an elected Senate. The Governor General on the advice of the Prime Minister (which she would never refuse) would still make the appointments and re-appointments. It is the second Bill that deals with elections, though it doesn’t create an elected Senate either – at least not in the way most people think of elections, i.e. the people vote, the politician takes office. The proposed Bill would establish advisory elections at the provincial level. These would be similar to the elections now held in Alberta that led to the appointment of Senator Bert Brown – except it would be the Federal government holding and presumably paying for the elections. Popular votes would create a list of possible appointees from which the Prime minister could, if he so chose, make recommendations to the GG for appointment. I say could because he also could recommend someone completely different. And if you think that would be political suicide, imagine the impact of a federalist Prime Minister appointing an avowed and open separatist from Quebec (or Alberta for that matter) to the Senate.

Still, the two Bills together would create a quasi-elected Senate with reasonable terms of office. Who could object to that? As it turns out, lots of people. But so what? Why shouldn’t the democratically-elected (albeit minority) government at least make an effort at piecemeal reform. After all, that’s sort of how the American people got to elect their Senators directly – a process that took nearly 70 years to accomplish. Direct Senate elections only became universal in the USA with the 17th amendment in 1913.

Here’s the difficulty. Any attempt to change the Senate through legislative means is almost certainly going to meet with a constitutional challenge. Even if a province agrees with the proposed changes, they might well challenge it to prevent a constitutional precedent being set. Several provinces have already served notice they will go to court if either of these Bills are passed. And, the general view of constitutional experts is they will probably win on the term limits and almost certainly win on the elections.

Why would the government propose something that would almost certainly be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional? Far be it for me to impute motive, but if I were a gambling man, I’d bet it’s because promising Senate Reform is far more politically beneficial than actually delivering on it.

So what is the problem with these proposals? The government argues it has the power to change the term of Senators. They point to the amendment in 1965 that changed “life appointment” to one to age 75. This was done by the Federal parliament acting alone and was considered constitutional at the time. However, in a 1979 Supreme Court ruling, the judges determined that change was about as far as the federal government could go. On a reference from Pierre Trudeau's government, the court said 9-0 that Ottawa could unilaterally do almost nothing to the Senate. In particular, Ottawa could not unilaterally abolish the Senate, change the powers of the Senate, alter the number of senators from each province or fiddle with the method of selecting senators. The key element of that ruling was that the Senate was an integral part of the federal system (not just the federal government) and therefore changing it required a change to the constitution.

But what about the change in terms? Surely we could do that much. But central to permitting the change from life to 75 was that it did not alter the fundamental character of the Senate. Senators’ terms were long and they were non-renewable and so once appointed they were, at least in theory, independent of the Prime Minister who appointed them. Because, he or she might still be in power when the time for reappointment came up. Whether you think that is a good thing or a bad one, it does change the fundamental character of the Senate. And that requires the agreement of seven provinces representing fifty percent of the population (See Part V of Constitution). As for abolition, which the Prime Minister likes to threaten, many experts think that would change the Royal prerogative. And that requires unanimous consent of the provinces.

Good luck with that.

That deals with the elected part of the Triple E. Next time I’ll look briefly at Equal and Effective before throwing out some ideas for a really radical reform of the Senate. And yes, they do include elections. And they will have just as much chance of being implemented as Prime Minister Harper’s proposals. That is, next to none.

On Character

1/29/2010

The most scathing review I ever saw contained the line, “to say the characters were two-dimensional is an insult to the second dimension.” It may have been Dorothy Parker – it certainly sounds like her. Another of my favourites runs: His dialogue is so wooden, I got splinters listening to it. Character isn’t everything – just look at some of the people we let run our country – but it is a critical, though clearly not essential, aspect of fiction. Though there are lots of stories where the revelation and development of character is the raison d’être of the work, there are lots of successful books and movies – however you might want to define success – where characterization takes a back seat to plot, idea or atmosphere. Genre fiction is famous, some would say infamous, for the willingness to neglect character development in favour of other elements of storytelling.

For example, in many mystery series characters may or may not be well-developed but they seldom change over the course of a book and sometimes not even over the course of the series. The use of stock characters in science fiction and fantasy are not limited to red-shirts doomed to die at the end of the first act. And romance novels seem to revel in the use of stereotypes and clichés. And really, as a reader or viewer, you can enjoy a piece of fiction enormously even if the characters are little more than cartoons (witness the recent success of Avatar). Nor does the lack character development and transformation limit a work from taking a major place in the history of literature. Sherlock Holmes is essentially unchanged from the first story to the last and yet is viewed as the quintessential detective character. I would argue it is his lack of change, his solidity of character, you might say, that makes him so appealing over the decades.

In my view though, a story, and particularly a novel is not complete if there is not a character we can get inside of, can follow through his journey, and at some level can care about. This is not about likable characters – indeed some of the most memorable characters in literature are not particularly likable. Yet they all face real human dilemmas and how they solve them (or don’t) not only reveal something about their character, it reveals something about ours.

So how do you begin to give life to the characters in your novels? I think the first rule to remember is that character is not unchanging. Every human being is a work in progress. At least I like to think so. We are impacted by the events of our lives and changed by the choices we make. No doubt our experiences are mediated by our genetic make-up and our up-bringing but nature and nurture in themselves only take us so far. There is that spark, that essential “I,” which in the end helps use find out not only who we are but why we are who we are? And that is the interesting part.

If you don’t care about the character, it hardly matters what happens to them; if nothing happens to the characters it is hard to care about them at all. So this is the task of the writer, to present people who seem real, that other people can care about and then over the course of the novel, show how they change in the face of the events they experience.

Let’s start with the first part: creating real people. When I used to act and direct, one of the ways in which we were able to flesh out characters was to create back story. Ideally, this was completely grounded in the text; at the very least, not contradicted by it. Back story may be details of education or family background implied by the way a character speaks or the kind of stories they tell. Some actors would develop lists of favourite foods, music, clothes and so on. My job as the director was to make sure that this supported the performance and didn’t get in the way of it. As a writer, my job is pretty much the same – develop sufficient character details to create a sense of verisimilitude without letting the exercise get in the way of the story.

As soon as I have an idea of the broad plot outline and who the main characters are, I begin developing character bios. Starting with a name and an age, I then outline the characters early life, their education, work history and life, their physical characteristics and social life and then move on to their internal life and values. I finish with three brief writing exercises – a 250-word obituary, a 500-word typical day in the life of the character and the response in as many words as it requires to the question: What happened a week, a day and an hour before the story starts?

So what might that look like? Here is an excerpt from the character of Grace Patterson from my play, “The Infallible Laws of Love.”

NAME: GRACE PATTERSON

AGE:         25                                  BIRTHDAY:                          FEBRUARY 29, 1892

EARLY LIFE

WHERE WAS HE/SHE BORN?       Maccan, Nova Scotia

WHAT SOCIAL CLASS?                   Working

FATHER'S NAME:                          Robert James Patterson

FATHER'S OCCUPATION:              Various, Coal miner, carpenter and, in his later years, gardener.

MOTHER'S NAME:                        Sarah Anne (McLeod) Patterson

MOTHER'S OCCUPATION:            Seamstress

BROTHERS AND SISTERS:              Seven brothers, all older (David, James, Robert Jr., Andrew, Douglas, Michael, Steven)
                                                          Six children died in infancy - four sisters, two brothers.

EDUCATIONAL LEVEL:                    Four years of formal education (age 7 to 11), but she can read and write quite proficiently and has a solid grasp of basic mathematics. She reads widely.

SUCCESS AT SCHOOL:                     Did very well in her four years - actually completing at an informal level the first eight years of instruction. Being in a one room school house helped this process. Her eldest brother, David (6 years older than James and eighteen older than Grace) grew up when the family was more prosperous and actually went to school for seven years. He works as an accounts clerk in Amherst and helped Grace with her studies.

DID SHE SOCIALIZE?                        Grace was very tomboyish and big for her age. She gathered quite a following of children, including for a few years Winnie who attended the same elementary school for two years. Though two years younger than Grace, Winnie was in the same age cohort. This early experience as a leader and organizer was an important factor in her present activism. The two years with Winnie is the first building block in their present day relationship.

DESCRIBE FIRST DATE:                    Grace went to a church social with a cousin when she was fourteen. He raped her on the way home. She never told anyone but several years later had an opportunity for revenge that left the cousin permanently lame but unable to assign blame to her. Since then she has been wary of men - though she doesn't hate them. She sees her cousin as a bad sort - representing only a certain type. Her "fraternal" relations with union members has shown her both the possibilities and limitations of equality.

If you want to see the full list of questions, you can find it here.

Once I know the starting point of my character, the next step is to figure out how they will be changed by the actions of the plot. These changes cover the gamut from physical to financial as well as changes to their emotional life and value system. This is called the character arc and I’ll talk more about that in my next post.

Editing - A Second Look

1/23/2010

When Ernest Hemingway lost all his manuscripts (technically, his wife Hadley left them on a train), Ezra Pound told him to quit whining and re-write them. “Memory is the best editor,” said Pound who was wrong about a lot of things but probably right about that. ‘Drawer-time’ is how a lot of writers describe it – that period of time between the completion of the first draft and the beginning of re-writing. For some writers, that time is a few days and for others a few weeks, depending on how quickly they can forget enough of the fine details of the work to be able to look at it again with fresh eyes. Certainly with the passage of enough time, any piece of writing will begin to seem as if it had been written by someone else, an earlier version of yourself no doubt but a different one in some respects. I certainly recommend the distancing process as a good way to begin to see the flaws in your own writing and to learn how to correct them.

My problem, as anyone who has every played trivia games with me will attest, is that I have a great memory. It can take months for me to forget enough of the details for drawer-time to be helpful. Fortunately the remarkable length of time editors take to reject stories can help with this. After three or nine months in someone else’s drawer, it’s easy to forget you even wrote the story in question.

Fortunately, what is a curse is also a blessing, especially when I’m working on a novel. I do a lot of my editing and re-writing as I write. As I ‘discover’ something new about a character or make an adjustment in the plot, it isn’t hard for me to remember exactly where I dealt with that issue before and go back and fix it. To reinforce that process, when I have the time, the first thing I do every day is read what I wrote the day before or, for multiple point of view novels, what I wrote the last time I was in that character’s head. It also gives me a chance to clean up some of the barbarisms as I go along – fix grammar, eliminate clichés and make better word choices. So my second recommendation would be to re-work your material, or at least re-read it, as you go along. It not only improves your draft, it also improves your craft. If you keep finding the same problems in your writing you can set yourself some exercises that will fix it over time.

For those who don’t have as good a memory, there are things you can do that work the same way. Keeping file cards or, for the technically sophisticated among you, internal document notes that describe each character’s physical description, basic or detailed history and major (and minor) personality traits is a good idea. These aide-memoires can be modified and updated as you write. You can also keep track of each place in the manuscript where you accessed the information, making re-writes on the fly easier to do. It also helps you keep voices consistent. You can do similar things with your plot outline, tracking back the inevitable changes in the story and making the needed changes while they are fresh rather than weeks or months later when it becomes truly onerous. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I don’t think you should be too rigid in your plotting. But you should have an outline that maps out the major landmarks on your journey from beginning to end. I also recommend spending a fare amount of time developing character background – I use a set of questions that establish a lot of details about the back story of each character, with a special focus on how they got to where they are at the start of the novel and what key values motivate their behaviour. I also write a brief bio in their own voice so I can get used to their rhythms of speech.

Once the first draft is done, which for me is quite polished, I do a quick edit to catch as many typos, grammatical blunders, weak word choices or awkward passages as I can. Then it’s off to my first readers. I try to get a real mix of people to read my book – other writers, editors, SF fans and non-SF fans alike. I’m very lucky to have a circle of friends who will take on the task and be tough on me while doing it. Right now about ten people are reading the first draft of Stealing Home. In a few weeks I’ll get back a bunch of marked up copies and many pages of comments and critiques. I’ve reached that stage in my writing life where I am generally unfazed by criticism and so can benefit from it. I know not everyone is going to like what I write or at least not all of it. I also know that I make mistakes (yes, you heard it here first) or go astray with plot and character. At the same time, I do not lack confidence. Critiques are not blessed with special wisdom and sometimes what they have to say is just a matter of opinion.

So what good are they? At a trivial level, First Readers are great for picking up the writing errors and flaws that I missed in my first two go-rounds. They are also fabulous fact-checkers and point me to sources so I can get it right. More substantively, some observations and ideas are so immediately obvious in their brilliance that I wonder why I didn’t think of them myself. Then there is the power of collective wisdom. While I may and often do reject the criticism of a single reader, if two or five or all of them point to the same scene and chapter and say something is wrong here – even if they differ somewhat as to what – I know I have to address that section in the re-writes.

In summary, re-writing or editing requires time away from the text, honing your craft, attention to details, and the ability to accept and learn from criticism. Once you get all that down, you’re on your way to being a writer. For me, it’s still a work in progress.

Plotting and Spontaneity

1/22/2010

In his book, How Fiction Works, James Wood has chapters on narrative, character and dialogue but nothing on the lowly plot. This is no accident. Wood considers ‘plot’ juvenile – too much frantic action, too many happy coincidences leading to too many tidy endings. Obviously Wood may know how fiction works but not how it sells. Or as Ernest Hemingway once said to an interviewer for a literary journal – What? You think you can do better?

There are those who suggest that even if a story has a plot when it’s done, this shouldn’t concern the writer overly much when he’d writing it. Concern for the plot will activate the writer’s internal editor, leading to a stifling of creativity and falsity of voice. W. O. Mitchell (Who Has Seen the Wind?) developed a style of writing called Free Fall which called for writing without editing, moving forward as thoughts and sensations occurred in the writer’s mind. While I’ve found this to be occasionally useful when writing short stories or when suffering from writer’s block, it doesn’t seem to work all that well when it comes to novels. When I’ve tried, I usually wind up with a big mass of text in desperate need of an editor. Or a story. I am well aware of Ezra Pound’s admonition that the three rules of writing are: Re-write. Re-write. Re-write! However, since I happen to really hate re-writing I generally rely on plotting to keep me on track.

Fortunately, I write genre fiction where plot is not a dirty word. Science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thriller, romance – you know, the books people want to read – all require a greater or lesser degree of plot to work. Genre fiction has been described many ways but I like to think of it as ‘practical problem’ fiction. The main character is presented with a problem – say, a dead girl in a locked room – and by the end of the novel, the problem should be resolved. If it’s not, the reader will be disappointed and is unlikely to buy the next book in the series.

Having said all that, the question remains: how much plot is too much? For the writer, the issue is simpler. Am I bound by the requirements of plot to deliver the goods in a particular way? Where does the creative spark come in – that eureka moment that makes the act of writing worthwhile? Because face it, if all the decisions about a book are made before the writing begins, having to spend four to six months to deliver a dead work of art would be far too oppressive to bear. It would also begin to seem an awful lot like hackery.

Fortunately, I continue to discover that the relationship between plotting and writing is, like any good relationship, flexible, changing, passionate and often filled with spontaneity. I’ve just finished my third novel of The Steele Chronicles, a trilogy of near-future noir police un-procedurals (as a friend of mine has dubbed them) set in a very dystopic Calgary. Titled Stealing Home, this third volume had the fairly substantial task of not only solving its own particular crime but with wrapping up the broader themes and story arcs that run through the entire set of novels. Someone other than me will have to judge if I succeeded.

Unlike the second book, Steel Whispers, which really was a dream to write, I struggled with Stealing Home. Thematically it was more abstract and obscure and the plot itself was more complex. I spent several weeks working through the various character arcs and developing a chapter by chapter plot outline which I thought would lead me to a satisfying conclusion. I fully expected that I would have to tweak the plot from time to time – that had been my process in the last three books I’d written. I had made changes to the middle parts of the plot but the beginnings and ends of the books were pretty firmly set. Not so with Stealing Home.

My first discovery was that I had too much plot. The outline called for 55 chapters and probably more than 110,000 words. But as I went along I found that some of the minor stories resolved themselves much quicker than expected. I began to trim chapters, eliminating some and combining others. Lengthy exposition transformed into crisp scenes of character revealing itself through action. The second discovery was much more painful.

At seventy thousand words I realized I was only twenty thousand from the end and I still had a big problem. I didn’t really know how the novel would end! This came as a bit of a shock. I thought I knew whodunit and why and how but I was feeling less and less happy with that certainty and my writing speed had slowed to a crawl. Of course, a mystery is not a mystery if it is obvious what happened from the start. I had deliberately created several possible explanations – all but one of which would be eliminated as the mystery rolled to its conclusion. But it all seemed wrong somehow and that troubled me to the point it kept me awake at night, something that work of any sort seldom does. Then , like Archimedes in the bath, it suddenly came to me. I won’t say what came to me since I’d prefer you read the book and find out for yourself. Suffice it to say, all my problems were suddenly resolved and I wrote the rest of the first draft in less than a week.

I now had to go back and fix the plot so the ending made sense. Except when I did, I found I barely had to change anything at all. My conscious rational mind may have thought it was doing all the work, creating a brilliant outline that dealt with all contingencies, but my creative mind – the one apparently engaged when I’m actually writing rather than thinking about writing – had been taking care of business. Part of me apparently knew the answer right from the start but decided to keep it from me so I could have my moment of joyful resolution.

What do I conclude from all this. Certainly not that I should do away with plotting or the development of elaborate outlines. Rather, to remember that outlines are not carved in stone but rather are traced in the sand. One must always be open to the creative moment. Sometimes you’re lucky and your subconscious prepares the way and sometimes, as was the case when I wrote the first book of the trilogy, you have to delete the twenty thousand words you just slaved over and start again.

Why are you reading this?

1/10/2010

Well, why not really?

If you've bothered to come here at all, it is presumably to see if I have anything interesting to say. No guarantees. Certainly I'm not going to say any thing interesting today but I did want to get started here -- mostly to let you (whoever you might be) know that I do exist and I will from time to time say something, interesting or not, in the firm expectation that you will want to read it. Hence, Hayden's Hubris.

Reforming the Senate

On Character

Editing - A Second Look

Plotting and Spontaneity

Why are you reading this?

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