Issue #24: Summer 2009

The Conductor of the Cellist of Sarajevo

by John Vigna

The music of Steven Galloway’s third novel plays on.

The time after a book’s publication can be an intense, exhilarating, soul-baring experience for a writer. Book tours, public readings, fan mail, critical reviews all come in one big time-compressed period, then the writer returns to isolation and, hopefully, another book. But for Steven Galloway, one year after publishing his third book, The Cellist of Sarajevo, the accolades and demands haven’t stopped.

Galloway’s debut novel, Finnie Walsh, was published when he was a 25-year old student in UBC’s creative writing program, and was nominated for the 2000 Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Ascension, his second novel, was published three years later and revolves around a 66-year old tightrope walker who decides to walk on a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. It was nominated for a BC Book Prize.

The Cellist of Sarajevo borrows its title from the true-life story of Vedran Smailovic, a local cellist who played the Albinoni Adagio in G minor at the site of a mortar attack for 22 days in a row, in May and June 1992, to honour the 22 people killed in the blast. The novel traces the lives of three characters during the course of a few days: Arrow, a female sniper assigned to protect the cellist; Kenan, who risks his life every day by crossing the city to gather drinking water for his family; and Dragan, a baker, who is confronted with the everyday brutality tearing apart the city he calls home. The novel has been praised as “the work of an expert,” sparse and pared down with “the deceptive simplicity of a short story.”

The Cellist of Sarajevo has been published in 22 countries, is in its seventh hardback printing in Canada, and has been on the Canadian Booksellers Association bestseller list for more than 30 weeks. It’s appeared on just about every major literary award long list and is a finalist on the Richard and Judy Book Club in the UK (think Oprah). It recently received the 13th annual Borders Original Voice Award in the fiction category. Galloway has spent the last year in a whirlwind of global jet-setting appearing at writer’s festivals from Australia to Winnipeg, Edinburgh to Holland.

I caught up with Galloway at one of his favourite Vancouver haunts, Helen’s Diner on Main Street. He wore a T-shirt and cardigan, as usual. He pointed out a vintage car at a gas station across the street and launched into a story about electric cars and other modes of alternative fuel sources, Obama-mania, Stephen Harper’s prorogueing parliament and a brilliant idea for writing a non-fiction book. He’s not planning to write that book himself, but he feels it needs to be written.

This is how Galloway’s storyteller brain works. He circles a story from every imaginable angle, almost tortured with the notion that he won’t get it right. His motto, as friends and students of his know well, is that too many novels and short stories lack story structure. Instead, novels today mask themselves as lengthy characterizations or lyrical prose, usually about nature.

Galloway has been a sessional and assistant professor in UBC’s creative writing department since 2001. He reads his students’ fiction with a storyteller’s eye. He hopes that by focussing students on story structure, he is helping them produce more relevant fiction at a time in Canada when lengthy lyrical novels where nothing much happens is the norm.
We started our conversation by talking about how ideas move him as a writer.

What inspired you to write The Cellist of Sarajevo?
During the lead up to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I became interested in how war affects everyday citizens like garbage men or doctors. In 1992 I had come across an article about the cellist and it stuck around in my consciousness. Why he played wasn’t what interested me, or who he was. I was interested in the idea that when he played, he had an audience, that he performed a concert and I was interested in what effect, if any, his concert would have on others.

When I was thinking about civilians in war, I realized I could use the cellist as an entry point into the story I wanted to tell.

Can you describe your process in writing The Cellist?
I wanted the war in my novel to be as contemporary as possible. I read everything I could on Sarajevo, watched as many programs as I could find on the city, immersing myself in the country from a research perspective. I met and befriended ex-pats and experts in Vancouver and learned more through those discussions.

I don’t write well when I don’t know what I’m writing. I need a plan, an outline. I spent one year staring at a whiteboard, writing and erasing continually, constantly changing and updating it according to the research I was doing. I wrote three drafts before I went to Sarajevo. I knew that if I went without first writing the story, I would wander around like a kid in a candy shop without really delving into the country in a meaningful way. It was an expensive trip, which meant I could only afford to go once. I wanted to go and compare the imaginative Sarajevo that I had constructed with the real one.

During my time in Sarajevo, I was able to walk Kenan’s route with someone I met there, who took me through the details of what life would have been like then. These were the sorts of details I could not get from books. It was a three-week trip and afterwards I wrote three more drafts before getting to a line edit stage. It took about five years in total to write the book

Did you have a dark night of the soul when you felt you wanted to abandon the novel?
Nenad Velicaovic, a Bosnian writer, took me around Sarajevo and started shouting at me one day. ‘Go home and write about Canada,’ he said. ‘You know nothing about Sarajevo.’ And he was right. I was and am an outsider. But being an outsider allowed me to write about things I didn’t know and to learn things rather than just accepting them. The effort of overcoming ignorance helped me work harder to get it right.

After the trip, when I was trying to write the book, I’d hear Nenad’s words ringing in my ears and doubted whether I could tell this story. I had already abandoned a novel 300 pages in, I had a new-born daughter, bills to pay, both my father-in-law and my mother-in-law died and my wife and I moved. Plus, I was teaching. For a semester, I taught three classes at UBC, another one at UVIC and one more at SFU – the equivalent of two full-time jobs.

I got up and wrote from 5:00 to 8:00 am every day; sometimes I had until 9:00 am before the demands of my life required my attention. The deal I made with myself was that if The Cellist didn’t make forward growth, I’d turn to something else. I thought I might drive a cab.

Can you talk a bit about how important story structure is to your writing?
With each book I’ve written, I’ve become more concerned with large-scale structure. My only plan when I wrote Finnie Walsh was that I didn’t want it to suck. I had been wait-listed for the MFA in creative writing program at UBC. In response to that I wrote a draft over the summer not knowing if I’d get into the program. Finnie Walsh was a voice-driven novel. When I wrote it, I barfed it out, then went on a forensic expedition to mine out the themes, to see what was there and work with that.

I thought more about structure when I wrote Ascension and tried to set the story around a gypsy folk tale. But to this day I’m still not sure what I wanted to accomplish or whether I was successful. The first half is stronger than the second half. I often think it could have been another 100 pages long.

For The Cellist I wanted the story to be structured around a trio sonata, which is three parts: one melody and two bass lines. Each of the lines are more or less weighted equally. They follow the same structure as a sonata, and each can work on their own as a separate entity. This structure, which follows the novels three main storylines – Arrow’s, Kenan’s and Dragan’s – also helped me divide the characters into thematic models: food, water, violence.

I can’t do as much writing on gut impulse anymore. I’m hyper-aware of what I’m doing, how each sentence is used, how the tools are used. I had the structure for The Cellist in place before writing one word of it and it turned out 99 per cent exactly the way I wanted it to be. The idea in my mind matched the final outcome. That may never happen again.

Does this hyper-awareness come from the experience of having written two previous novels?
Probably. In addition to Finnie Walsh and Ascension, I’ve abandoned three novels, one which has been totally destroyed because it was so awful. The last novel I abandoned came right after I wrote Ascension. I got to page 300 and realized it was terrible and gave up on it. Kurt Vonnegut’s rule number one: ‘You probably learn more from failed novels than successful ones.’

By the time you’ve written three novels, you’ve written all the subconscious gut stuff. Whatever worked for you the last time won’t work the next time. It gets harder because you (and others) want your book to be better.

Three published novels in eight years and another three novels that haven’t seen the light of day. Some might say you were born to write novels. But that’s not quite the truth, is it?
Back in high school, I skipped an English class. As punishment, the teacher said if I attended a Young Authors Conference I could make up for the skipped class. So I attended the conference and met Ian Weir (UBC playwright) there. After graduation, I enrolled at UBC as a psychology major but then I dropped a course, saw that Ian Weir was teaching an introduction to creative writing class so I decided to take that. When I finished the course I applied for the BFA program but I didn’t get in. I applied again the following year and got in. After my BFA I applied to the MFA program at UBC but I was waitlisted before getting in a few days before the start of classes. I entered the MFA as a playwright but left as a novelist.

You’ve recently been named the Arnold and Nancy Cliff Writer in Residence at UBC and appear to be on track for a faculty position. With nearly 14 years in the creative writing department, as both a student and teacher, what do you notice about today’s generation of new writers?
It makes me sad to hear writers ask how long they think they will write until they are done with a book. If you’re writing to be done, why are you writing? Publication, readers, reviews, awards and any other so-called good thing are secondary to the act of writing. You don’t know while writing whether the book will be lauded. You must be alone and go through the hellish process. I worry about students who expect it to be less and who expect more from their writing.

I can teach students how to make themselves better but they have to accept responsibility for it. I don’t line-edit their workshop drafts because I don’t think they will learn that way. All they will do is fix those edits and feel that the story is done, when it is not. I read as a reader and critic and offer some notes as to what’s working, what are the patterns and try to articulate to that person so they can see it in their own writing. Some are open to it, some are not.

What’s next for you?
I’m not sure yet. I’m done traveling for the moment. I suppose it’s time to stare at my wall and see what I come up with next.

John Vigna is a Vancouver writer.