All In His Imagination - Page 2
© Paula E. Kirman
So, when I was sitting on my porch one night, and I heard a dog barking up the street, and for some reason I found myself daydreaming -- thinking if I had bought a brand new house, if I was a new homeowner and had just coughed up a half a million bucks, which is what an average house in Toronto costs these days, and I had that dog barking, I might well speak the guy who owned the dog once, but if he didn't quiet the dogs up the second time, I probably would kill them. And honestly, I'm not a dog hater, but I just had one of those daydreams, the kind that you do when you're at a stoplight or something. It was a particularly irritating kind of dog too, sort of a 'yap yap yap,' but also I remember thinking, "Jesus Christ, who is the guy who owns that dog? He must hear that."
I just went upstairs and I got a notepad and I wrote that entire chapter, and I wrote it very much the way it appears in the book, and it was just fun. And the voice, which is not my voice, and not the voice of any of my other novels, just came with the telling of the story, because it's not really like me to go out and off a couple of dogs. But I can imagine very clearly a part of me, in five or six years, doing something like that. Not all of me, but just a part of me, the part of me that was having that daydream. I just thought, "What is that part of me that was having that daydream, what if that was all of you?" And then the rest of the book just came because I was free from writing fiction, free from having to write a novel. It was just a creative exercise; it was an exercise of imagination which is something I had never really used before in my earlier novels because they were tied, more or less, to the events of my life. So I found it an enormously liberating experience and wrote it very quickly as a result.
Paula: I certainly felt that the voice in Sparrow Nights was very, very different from your other novels and I just have to ask, when it comes to the main character Darius -- how did you come up with this guy?
