By Stuart Nulman
What turned veteran CFCF news reporter and Pulse anchor Bill Haugland into a short story writer? Was it the fact that revered short story writer Alice Munro just won the Nobel Prize for Literature?
Actually, it was a dusty old cardboard box that was tucked away in his Vermont home. The box contained a whole collection of written works that dated back to when he was a child.
“The box contained 20 story ideas and three novels that were years old in concept and human interest in nature, so I decided to pull out three of the stories and have them resuscitated,” he said.
The end result of this literary resuscitation is After It Rains, a collection of 14 short stories that is published by Vehicule Press, which Haugland officially launched at Paragraphe Bookstore on December 5.
Haugland admits that the book is an eclectic mix of stories and themes that tackle the human psyche and our human faults and foibles, whether it be what it’s like to be a death row inmate, or to lie in a coma, or plan a bank robbery. What he enjoyed about putting together the short stories for the collection was how he was able to complete a story in about three weeks and tell the entire narrative within 15-20 pages, as opposed to writing a complete novel, where he has to concern himself with constructing a plot, subplot, themes and characters and having the difficult task of trying to grab the reader’s attention within the first 50 pages.
“Writing a short story has a different approach to it. You can get away with that old adage ‘write what you know’ and let your imagination run free,” said Haugland, who read the short story collections of Ernest Hemingway and Alice Munro to familiarize himself with the genre. “The characters can drive the story line and take on lives of their own. And most of all, the protagonist doesn’t have to be a TV reporter.”
And speaking of fictional TV reporter protagonists, Haugland revealed that Ty Davis, the Montreal TV reporter who is the central character of his previous two novels Mobile 9 and The Bidding, will be back for a third novel. “I am convinced that Ty Davis has another book inside of him,” he added.
This article originally appeared in the December 14, 2013 edition of The Montreal Times.
