Michael Winter
Michael Winter
canada country great grow joined lives men might somehow sort success talk
Before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, there was the same sort of talk of young men sacrificing their lives so that a country might grow - that somehow it had been a great nation-building success for Newfoundland.
jurors literary mercenary stands venture
I approached writing a story for the CBC Literary Awards as a mercenary venture - $5,000 for one story, not bad. Now, how do you win it? Jurors are wading through skyscrapers of paper, looking for one story that stands out.
characters cups head
If I didn't write sex scenes, all my characters would head to the kitchen and make cups of tea.
relationship war
I've grown up, luckily, with only a distant relationship to war and soldiering.
death life major stories
You can't go wrong with major life and death stories when it comes to a competition, so I thought I'd have a go at writing one.
bad everybody falls literally truth
The truth is, everybody falls into an incinerator of some measure or other. Not literally one. The question is what are you going to do with those bad times? Are you just going to let them gnaw at you?
ridiculous
The greatness of being an artist is the kind of ridiculous guffaw you can have at one's own misery. 'That was miserable! Now how can I write about it?'
antidote footage giddy trench
If you look at footage of the Newfoundland Regiment, you see they are at rest and giddy and being silly with one another. Silliness is the antidote to trench warfare.
examples fantastic germans less lined memorial preserved
The fantastic thing about the memorial to the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel is that it's one of the rare examples where they've preserved a battlefield more or less as it was. You can see all the trenches, where the British were, where the Germans lined up.
behind crooked deeply frozen invented large limbs merely organizing ourselves personal pluck skate sleeps stick
Hockey wasn't invented but discovered. The game, and the large organizing idea behind Stephen Smith's deeply personal 'Puckstruck,' sleeps in ponds and in the crooked limbs of trees overhead; we merely pluck a stick from the sky and skate over the frozen world to find ourselves and each other.
If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.