Soon After First Light: James Cañón

Soon After First Light is a series where we talk craft, process, and pandemic with Columbia's accomplished writing professors. 

Here, we talk with alumnus and Adjunct Associate Professor James Cañón ’04—author of Tales from the Town of Widows & Chronicles from the Land of Men—about making routines, meditating, and overcoming creative blocks. 

James Cañón was born and raised in Colombia. His debut novel, Tales from the Town of Widows & Chronicles from the Land of Men, has been translated into eleven languages, published in over twenty countries, and was made into a film. It was also selected as one of the “Ten Best Books of the Year” by the American School Library Journal. James has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix du Premier Meilleur Roman Étranger, and the Prix des Lecteurs de Vincennes. His short stories and essays have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies in the US, Mexico, France, Belgium and Colombia.

What does a typical workday look like for you when you’re in the middle of a project?

James Cañón: I'm very organized. I'm like, borderline OCD and it works for me. So every Sunday I fill out this planner sheet for the week and it's not on my computer or my cell phone, but a physical sheet. I schedule my writing, my teaching work, but also physical exercise and socializing time. I always do that because those things are really, really important for me—to balance things out. It cannot be all about work, you know, you have to socialize as well. The physical exercise is also important for me. I try to stick to that schedule. There's something about seeing that sheet that kind of forces me to stay on track.

It sounds like you stick to a pretty set routine.

JC: Right. I'm a morning person. So I get up at 5:30, every weekday from Monday to Friday and I make my coffee. While I have it, I always read something positive. I like a few websites that put out motivational articles, and sometimes I just watch a Ted Talk. I do that for 20 minutes while I just enjoy my coffee, first thing. I used to read the news online, like first thing in the morning.

Oh boy.

JC: I know, I know. I thought it was important to be well-informed. Not anymore, especially with the kind of news we're getting these days. So after coffee, I get ready and have breakfast. By that time it's already about 7:30. Then I read for an hour or an hour and a half—just fiction, whatever I'm into, sometimes just a short story. Usually by 9:00 I start writing and I try to be really good about that. It's like a job. I always tell people, this is a job. You have to see it as that. So I start writing at nine and I never write for more than three hours. Never. I just can't, I lose focus; but I write every weekday pretty consistently. If I cannot write—there are some days when I just cannot write—I simply stay in front of the computer or I re-read a little bit of what I have written. It's just important to stay in touch with that project. I write until around midday. That's when I exercise.

In the afternoon, I read students' work—if I'm teaching—and sometimes I read from my own work, I alternate. When I read from my work it’s because I'm trying to clean up the language or make sentences more clear. It's not really editing, not yet. That's something that I do much later. That reading process takes another three hours and then in the evening, that's when I socialize. At least three times a week, I go out and meet people in the neighborhood, you know, for coffee or whatever—or before the pandemic, for a movie or something. Sometimes I just stay home and then I read more or I watch a movie. I love movies. The life of a writer is a solitary life; and because I live by myself, I have to do things. That's why I force myself to go out.

Considering that you’re as careful about scheduling exercise and socialization as you are about scheduling writing, would you say that those two practices are a vital part of your creative process?  

JC: It's more about keeping me sane. Like I said, writing is so solitary. I have no one to talk to, you know? I want to hear someone else besides myself and my own thoughts [laughs]. I try to go out every day—I did it even during quarantine, when I started volunteering.

You mentioned that sometimes when you sit down at 9:00 am to write, you can have trouble writing. How do you counteract those creative blocks besides resolving to stay at your writing desk, no matter what?

JC: I've had serious writer's block—the kind that I was always terrified of—I felt that at one point and it's horrible. It's paralyzing. I think the first thing you can do is try to understand where it is coming from. The experiences of our creative life do not exist in a vacuum. They're always interwoven with other aspects of our life and other emotions we experience every day. Those aspects can cause negative feelings that you end up associating with the writing, and that can really profoundly affect the way you feel in every other aspect of your life. So not writing affects your life and because your life is affected also, it's piling up against the writing. It's like a vicious cycle. The more negative feelings pile up, the more blocked you become and the more you beat yourself up emotionally—and that's the worst part, you know, when it becomes self-abuse. Writers tend to do that a lot.

The first step I take to free myself from writer's block is recognizing the cycle of self-abuse when it is happening and forcing myself to put a stop to it. Then there are some things that I do in order to reestablish the habit—because I do have a writing habit. It became a habit after a long time, after many tries, but it is a habit now. So how do we reestablish it after writer’s block? At that point, my job is quantity, not quality. So it's about forcing myself to type—like free writing—without any expectations whatsoever. I also set reasonable goals. Instead of saying, I'm going to write for three hours straight, I say let’s do half an hour today, or a reasonable number of pages, whatever it is that works at that moment. The goal cannot be too big. If I miss my goal repeatedly, that means that the goal is too big, and then I just cut it in half for the following day or for the following week. There's no punishment—ever. There cannot be any punishment. Especially when you are in that cycle of self-abuse. Another thing that really works for me is choosing the writing area, or moving it to a different place—giving myself that physical space where I do nothing else but write. This is very important. You cannot write in the same place where you watch Netflix, where you pay your bills, where you watch porn [laughs]. You need a dedicated space just to write. That kind of trains your brain—when you sit down in that place, you start writing. I learned that from having trouble sleeping. My bedroom actually became something that I only use to sleep. I don't write in my bedroom, I don't go to bed with my cell phone or my laptop. So it's easier for me to sleep. It's the same with the writing. I do this really strictly when I'm going through those blocks.

I also have a practice that I call a “two for one.” Anytime I catch myself saying or thinking something that's critical of my writing, I have to look over my writing and find two positive things about it that I actually believe. So I look for things that are either really good or that have the potential to lead to something good, or that just appeal to me for whatever reason. Once you start finding the good things, that reveals opportunities in your own writing.

This really fits with the perception I have of you as a teacher and mentor who openly discusses what it’s like to be a creative person, psychologically. Is this why, in your workshops, you lead your students in a mindfulness exercise before the class begins?

JC: I took a philosophy class a long time ago which had a meditation component to it. We meditated every day in the class—at the beginning and then after the break and then before we left. After I finished the class, I incorporated that simple meditation exercise in my own routine. It really helps me to focus and to refocus, you know—if I go and make myself a coffee while I'm writing, when I come back, I just close my eyes and focus all my attention on the sounds in the room for 30 seconds. Then I go back to writing. It’s like resetting. For my students, I think it’s also good for resetting before class. You reset your day and become aware of any concerns, whatever is on your mind at that moment. Then you just let go and we begin our class. Then we can really focus on what's important in that moment, which is the reading that we've done and the discussion.

It’s a really nice thing to do before your piece is workshopped, too. It helps with the anxiety!

JC: The anxiety! Exactly, exactly. I have students who still write me emails, like after three years, just to tell me that it helped. It’s not that they’re still doing it, but they think of that and remember that it was productive.

Speaking of productive—you also ask your students to commit to writing a certain number of pages a week, then to report back on whether they succeeded. Why do you do this?

JC: When Binnie Kirshenbaum first offered me the opportunity to teach a workshop at Columbia, I immediately thought of the time when I was in the program as a student. I had no structure back then. A lot of the students come with no structure. I used to write in spurts, you know, whenever I felt inspired to do so. And I always had an excuse—I have a complicated schedule between full-time school and work as a bartender—but the truth is that I wasn't seeing writing as a career or as a job. I was afraid to think of writing as a career. I really liked it, but it was more like something on the side. I wasn't ready to admit that writing is what I really wanted to do. This made things worse for me in the program. I had a hard time meeting deadlines. Then I noticed that I wasn't the only one with a problem and many, many of us didn't really have a structure. I started to think that if you are going to succeed as a writer, you need someone to hold you responsible for hitting your goals and to let you know when you've done well—and perhaps to demand more from you as well. So when I started teaching, I decided that I would be the person to hold my students responsible for writing a number of pages a week. The students always decide the number they can write, each week. And if someone is going for 10 pages that week, and then come back with only two, then I suggest they try for two for the following week or maybe three. Like I said, the goal can’t be too big.

Now, it doesn't work for everyone, so it’s not imposed. I had a student who told me that it didn't do anything for him. So I stopped asking him and that was okay, because that student also had a serious routine that he had already established. He was producing, so he didn't need my help. But the truth is that the majority of students who come through the program don't have a set structure. So, you know, I keep asking them periodically, have you been working on developing your own routine? Because I understand it's very hard to establish. That kind of advice is very important for students when they arrive at the program—because it’s kind of taken for granted that you are already an established writer with a strong process, and it’s hardly ever the case.

Did it take you a long time to figure out your own process? What did you do while you were working on your first novel, Tales from the Town of Widows, for example?

JC: The project began as a short story—it was the first short story that I workshopped. I had read this piece of news in a Colombian newspaper, a story about a small town where the guerillas had shown up one day and had taken all the men. This was happening at least once a week or maybe even every day for a period of time—they would just take the men and make them join the guerilla. I noticed that the women were really not mentioned, and that's where my mind went. They took all the men…so what about the women? The truth is that the women would become displaced. They would immediately leave those villages and go to the big cities because they were afraid. I started reimagining that. I thought, what about if they stayed? I started playing with that idea and I wrote that first story; but it was so melodramatic. It was horrible! The workshop actually went very badly because they said, you know, it's very melodramatic. It was like a soap opera. So I just put it aside. In my second year I recovered that story, I made it better, and I decided to write another story that took place in that village—because that was the thing, that story was so rich. It had a village full of people, characters that were interesting already but just came and went. So I took another one of those characters and wrote another story that took place in that same village, where the men had been taken away.

I didn't really know where I was going with it. I thought I was writing a collection of short stories. After I left the program I kept in touch with one of my professors who read some of the stories. At some point she said, what I don't like about your novel is... And I thought…novel? She saw it as a novel. That was the first time that I thought, oh my God, this is a novel, this is like a novel in short stories. So I started filling in the blanks.

The process was painful. I couldn't write for periods of time or I would write little pieces here and there, but didn't take it seriously. I kept my job as a bartender. Thankfully I had “my reader”—another student from the program. We kept exchanging pages. At some point one night, I think it was around Christmas, I said, you know, we're never going to finish these books unless we take it seriously. How about we make a bet? I told her, let's set a date for us to finish the manuscripts. If I don't finish it, I will give you a thousand bucks. If you don't finish, you will give me $3000, because she had money [laughs]. That was the deal. It was really not about the money, but the shame. I didn’t want to be the one who didn't finish. I remember the motivation that I got from that. I was writing every night. I started around 10:00 and then I'd go to like 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, and towards the end I would go straight to like 8:00am. I would have a problem falling asleep because I had so much energy. I was literally living in that village. It was so intense and beautiful.

Has your process changed much since then, besides having a more concrete daily routine?

JC: I miss the way I wrote my first book, but I could never repeat it, even if I wanted to. That's the magic of the first book. You have zero expectations, and that allows you to write freely and find things that are funny. You don't mind mixing things up. You're more creative that way. It’s not that I have a lot of expectations now—I’m trying to not even think about that—but now I'm more professional. Especially about editing. Back then, I didn't really have a process or a good understanding of what drafting or editing was, so the drafting was piece by piece. I would draft every chapter. I would think okay, what do I want to say now, what do I need here and which character can do that better? I would just pick the character and start working on the character first. Then the story would come. Now, my editing process begins with a theme. I ask myself, what is this story really about? I don’t ask: what could it be about, or what was I trying to do when I first sat down to write—no, it means seeking out what's already been built, whether consciously or subconsciously, in the pages that already exist. What are the ideas that keep coming up again and again, page after page? What are those questions that seem to tie together in those really important scenes? Then, I write out the theme. It’s like pitching a story. How would you sell this to someone? You write out the pitch, and you start condensing it and making it smaller until it is hopefully just a line or two. That line or two is exactly what the novel is about; and you keep that theme next to you whenever you feel like you're getting blocked. If you have no idea where to go, you just look at that pitch. The theme is like a North Star to me when I’m editing now.

I attended the virtual conversation you had with Michele Morano the other day for the launch of her new book. You spoke at length about the importance of character and that most story ideas, for you, start with envisioning a character and figuring out what they want more than anything in the world. Is it difficult to imagine new characters and their situations now that the pandemic has limited exposure to crowds and new people?

JC: Most of my ideas come from books and films, actually. I love foreign films especially. I see some amazing films from China, from Africa, and I see things that people do differently and think this is fantastic—I might borrow ideas from that. With books I’m not necessarily talking about fiction books either—I read history and I read anthropology books. Anthropology books are amazing—I get so many ideas. I used to read books by anthropologists who’ve spent years in communities that do things in a completely opposite way than what we are used to. That gives me ideas, you know? I also feel that I’m feeding my brain when I’m doing these things, and then my brain does its own thing. It makes connections here and there, and suddenly I get an idea for a short story or even for a book. So I think the important thing is to be open-minded and to be patient also.

I keep a book of ideas. I think that’s important. When I have an idea, I go to the book or sometimes I have a file on the computer and I just type the idea up and give it a context, otherwise I forget what I wanted to do with it. Sometimes I go back and think oh my god, how could I even think of this, this is ridiculous! But sometimes I think wow, this is an amazing idea.   

What are you working on now?

JC: I've been editing and re-editing this novel and I believe I'm editing the last draft, but even if it isn't, I'll go back to it. This is something that I've been writing for a long time, I’ve been working on it off and on. I stopped this project for almost three years to work on something I had to write. So for me to reconnect with this project was complicated. I did it and the project changed, it became something different, but I'm happy. I’m also working on short stories. I have a theme for these short stories. I only have four stories right now but when I’m not editing the novel, I go back to those stories and the ideas I have for stories. Those might change too. That’s the thing, you know? You start writing, you start working on something and at some point you discover that it’s not going anywhere. Yann Martel, who wrote Life of Pi, I think he was working on a book for like, three years. He went to India when he was working on that book that didn’t go anywhere, and in India had the idea for Pi—sometimes when you are working on something and it’s not going anywhere, you have to understand that and let it go. Still, it’s never wasted time. The writing doesn’t have to go to waste—you file it away. You might use it at some point.

What advice would you give to artists who are just starting to figure out process and routine?

JC: I think that the most important advice is give yourself the permission to write badly. All writers write badly all the time—even the best writers, they leave hundreds of discarded pages in their hard drives that never see the light of day. Accepting that is a natural part of the process. It allows you to focus your energy where it belongs, not on judging the pages, but on creating them. So when you give yourself permission to write badly, you're actually allowing inspiration in. You will notice that when you write, it becomes more fun and exciting, and before long, you'll discover that you no longer have to drag yourself to your computer in the morning. You actually want to write. Of course, there is a time when judging your work will be important, but save that for later, for the editing process. In the beginning, just allow yourself to write badly.

Also, in regards to routine. The best advice is to be consistent and to be very patient. Establishing a routine is vital for a writer, I think; but it's very difficult to make it a habit. It takes time and effort, and it takes many tries and sometimes even years. You're going to fail many, many times. That's when the patience and the consistency come in handy, I think it's really important to keep in mind that it's not going to come easily—that’s why you have to start small.