"The More Fun I am Having, the Better the Writing" Novelist Susan Swan on Finding Joy in the Writing Process

In Susan Swan's newest novel, The Dead Celebrities Club (Cormorant Books), readers meet charismatic, high-flying financial conman Dale Paul. When Paul's empire is revealed to be an exploitative sham, his connections to the rich and powerful can't protect him from a prison sentence. But instead of soul-searching, Dale finds fertile new ground for his old tricks on the inside, starting a clandestine inmate lottery based on guessing celebrity death dates. 

Timely, witty, and incisive, The Dead Celebrities Club explores family and redemption, ambition and arrogance, and the complex role money plays in all of it. In Paul, Swan has created an unforgettable character, and we're excited to welcome her to Open Book today to talk about the process of writing the novel. 

She tells us about the real-life dead pool (and the well-known inmate) that fired up her imagination for the book, the questions about redemption that drove her writing process, and the CanLit icon who offered her valuable editorial advice along the way.

Open Book:

Tell us about your new book and how it came to be.

Susan Swan:

My new novel The Dead Celebrities Club is the story of a Waspie Toronto hedge fund manager who starts a dead pool involving aging or frail celebrities after he’s been locked up for fraud in a New York state prison. I began thinking about dead pools when my brother (who lives in Midland) started betting on celebrities with his friends at the local bar. Here were all these ordinary people putting money down on which of the celebrities in their dead pool would be the first to die. For them, celebrities were a form of currency, like poker chips. I was also fascinated by the story of media scion Conrad Black who was sent to a US prison for fraud. How was someone of his background going to cope with jail? My novel tries to answer that question.

OB:

Is there a question that is central to your book, thematically?

SS:

I had the question before I started my novel. That is, can someone who exploits others change for the better? For instance, could the anti-hero in my novel, Dale Paul, admit that what he did was wrong, and repent? It was amazing how difficult it was for me to accept that a character like mine could learn from his mistakes. I think the novel took me ages to write because I kept going back and forth in my mind. No, he would never change. Well, perhaps he will evolve. Psychologists told me there are lots of examples of people changing in prison but at first my cynicism stopped me from imagining that possibility.

OB:

Did this project change significantly from when you first started working on it to the final version?

SS:

The story and its setting didn’t change but two years ago I added more voices to the novel as a balance against the relentless self-absorption of Dale Paul, who comes across as a poncy version of Mr. Magoo.  I’d also been having trouble getting the ending right. Then Margaret Atwood gave me a tip about the plot that solved the problem with the end of the book. (I can’t tell you what the tip is without giving away the story.)

OB:

How long did the project take from start to finish?

SS:

Hard to pin point because I’ve been thinking about the book for a long time. The actual writing took five years but in 2006, I started researching the stories of Conrad Black and other business types like the German investment banker Florian Homm. Business types charged with fraud fascinate me. I came of age in the 1960’s when young people like myself thought we were building a more progressive world. That didn’t happen. We’ve moved from the age of protest to the age of fraud. How did we get from there to here?

OB:

What do you need in order to write – in terms of space, food, rituals, writing instruments?

SS:

Solitude and the feeling that I won’t be disturbed. I write in a journal every morning before I start to write. That puts me in a meditative mood.

OB:

What do you do if you're feeling discouraged during the writing process?

SS:

Take a break from it. When I was younger, I used to keep writing doggedly no matter what but the writing was always terrible when I forced it. I need to be in a state of mental relaxation. In fact, the more fun I am having the better the writing.

OB:

Do you have a method of coping with the difficult points in your projects?

SS:

I write out dialogues with my characters if I get stuck. I treat them like real people and ask them questions about whatever difficulty I am having. This really works but you have to write down the first thing they tell you. I can turn a writing block into a character, too, and do the same thing.

OB:

What defines a great book, in your opinion? Tell us about one or two books you consider to be truly great books.

SS:

A great book will un-thaw the frozen seas within you, as Kafka once said. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a great book. So is The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy. These books are great not only because they are beautifully written but because they challenge some of the fundamental principles about the way our society operates. Okay. I admit it. I am partial to writing that takes our cultural temperature.

OB:

What are you working on now?

SS:

A memoir about the period when I enjoyed acting the part of being a famous writer without actually doing any writing. I have a tentative title: The Joys of Being Fameish.

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Susan Swan is the author of author of eight books of fiction, including The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, which was nominated for both the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award; the internationally best-selling Wives of Bath; and The Western Light, selected as one of the top ten novels of its year by the Ontario Library Association. Born in Midland, Ontario, she attended McGill University, was professor at York University, and chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada. She lives in Toronto with her partner, Patrick Crean.