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Tonia Cowan/The Globe and Mail

Russell Wangersky once worked as a volunteer firefighter, leading to the publication of his 2009 memoir, Burning Down the House. His four previous books have been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others. His latest, Walt, is a thriller with grocery lists at its centre.

Why did you write your new book?

Wow: that speaks to a level of preliminary planning that I don't think I really have in writing. Usually, I get hung up on something and worry away at it in words the way a dog can gnaw for hours on a beef bone until the idea finally finds a shape. I guess I started Walt because I was stuck on two different issues – one came from covering court as a television reporter, the other a frustration over the apparent public belief that, before we started having concerns about electronic privacy, we actually lived in a sort of privacy utopia. For the first, I was always surprised by the way that people could be charged with the most horrible of offences, yet still have caring and even loving family members in court supporting them. It got me thinking about how it's possible to be accepted and loved despite your clearly hideous behaviour. I also wonder how they can look in the mirror and accept themselves? How do they justify their own behaviour? I wanted to walk in those shoes for a while. On the privacy side, I wanted to look at the way we preach privacy while shedding concrete private information every day – being careful with online passwords, yet being willing (or oblivious enough) to drop a grocery list written on your credit-card statement without a care in the world.

Whose sentences are your favourite, and why?

I've never thought of breaking work down to sentences: I do love magnificent word usage, though. Cormac McCarthy has a wonderful way of building sentences with obscure and underused language that you'd think would interrupt the flow of reading: instead, I find I almost assume the meaning of a odd or unknown word because it dovetails so nicely into place, like cabinet carpentry. I often stop reading and think, "I wish I'd thought of it that way." Also, Roddy Doyle, for his ability to make every word feel like his characters are right there in the room, talking in front of you. I lurch around on what I like best: often, it's the thing I'm reading right now, where the writer is pulling off something I don't think I could do.

What's the best advice you've ever received?

Three things: write every

day(and in that I'm pretty lucky, because my day job – almost all Canadian writers have them – is as a newspaper news editor, writing editorials and columns every day, so I'm always exercising words), find your own voice and read everything you write out loud. I've had 30 years in the media, writing under all sorts of conditions, so deadlines and noise don't bother me. The second one took longer: it's always tempting to look at work that you admire and find a way to echo it. Problem with that? Whatever you're writing ends up being as thin as any echo. The third? I even read my editorials out loud, and I've read every book I've written out loud at least three times. It really helps with pacing – if you run out of air before the sentence ends, your reader might also run out of interest by then.

Which historical period do you wish you'd lived through, and why?

I'm pretty happy with the right now – there are a lot of benefits. Humans are lucky enough to be able to (mostly) forget the intensity of physical pain. It lets us sugar-coat things in history. Would I love to have been digging up huge nuggets of gold near a historical Dawson City? Absolutely. Would I like to find no gold, come close to freezing to death and then die of tetanus from a silly little open cut on a pinky finger? Not so much. Everybody thinks they'd go back in history, be Charles Lindbergh and fly the Atlantic – no one sits around and thinks "I'd like to have been a starving six-year-old in a 1930s Chicago cold-water apartment." So I'll take right now, thanks.

Would you rather be successful during your lifetime and then forgotten, or legendary after death?

I don't remember anything from before I was born. Nothing. Not a single pre-birth experience. Likewise, I don't imagine I'd be out in some dimension looking around at things back down here once I'm dead, so legendary after death would be a bit like winning the lottery on the day after you've been struck by a car and left completely paralyzed, only able to move your eyeballs. Actually, it would even be worse. (Don't anybody use that – it feels like it could be a short story.) I'd rather be successful enough during my lifetime to have the freedom to work the way I want to.

What agreed-upon classic do you despise?

I was a philosophy student in university, way back in the 1980s, so I have had to read some absolutely impenetrable material from cover to cover. Just about any classic seems feathery-light and wonderfully tasty after you've struggled all the way through Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. The term "despise" is also mighty strong. If there is a classic work that left me completely cold and wondering what the fuss was about, it would be Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Please don't force me to try to read that one again.

Which fictional character do you wish you'd created?

Just about any one of the characters in Ferdinand Von Schirach's short story collection Guilt. It's a book I found by accident in the "to-be-reviewed" pile at work. It's a hard and often-shocking book, but its characters are a real lesson for writers – Von Schirach has mastered the ability to tell just enough, never too much about his characters, so that each one is in perfect balance for the length and heft of each of the stories. I'd love to learn how he does it, but I think it's in-born.

Which fictional character do you wish you were?

Any of Raymond Carver's hard-bitten unnamed main characters – from Preservation or Chef's House, even Lloyd from Careful. Matter-of-fact men who just expect the clock-turns of their lives, however lousy the clock turns out to be. For nine hours a day during the week, I'm supposed to be just like that at work – "Just the facts, ma'am" skeptical and hard-edged. Truth is, I'm just a big marshmallow – I want to believe everyone who wants me to assign a reporter to a story, I want to cover everything someone begs me to cover. I think every sob-story is true when someone tells me about it. And I hate myself for getting sucked into it every time.

What question do you wish people would ask about your work (that they don't ask)?

"What are you trying to do – globally?" I'd like them to ask that so I could pull on my imaginary deep-thinking beard and say deeply, darkly "To explain," and then refuse to say any more about what I meant. (Actually, I'd probably intend to say that, and then blather on about trying to write something that resonates completely with even a handful of readers. I'm an excellent blatherer, especially when I'm nervous.)

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