Novel Genesis

Painless, perhaps. But death by drowning is surely one of the most feared fates.

When I was eight years old I almost drowned in a lake at a summer camp in Ontario. I was surfacing from a long underwater glide when another boy dove from a makeshift raft onto my head. As I submerged under his weight, the air in my lungs burst through my mouth. Moments later, the lifeguard hoisted me onto the raft and I flopped about gasping for breath. I've never forgotten the rush of panic that flooded through me.

When my son, Adam, was thirteen years old, I watched from the Oak Bay marina as he and a dozen other boys were learning winter sailing skills. Two-by-two, pairs of boys were required to sink their skiffs next to the docks, adapt to the freezing waters, right their boats, climb back into them, and bail the seawater until the boats were stabilized.

As his Laser 2 tipped over, Adam became tangled in the rigging and was caught under water. His mate surfaced immediately, teeth chattering. Just as I was about to dive in to retrieve him, Adam rose to the surface. The effect of the cold on him was shocking. His face drained of colour and he could barely talk coherently. He quickly pulled himself together and within minutes he had the boat righted and clambered aboard.

For my birthday a few years later, my wife purchased kayaking lessons for both of us. We trained in the local pool, graduated to paddling around Willows Beach, and then completed the course with a daylong expedition to Discovery Island. The morning of our trip, my wife came down with the flu. I made the journey on my own with a group of teenagers, the kayak school guide, and two other adults. The weather was drizzly, cold, foggy, and on our return to the marina we confronted a harem of terrified sea lions.

Drowning is one of the most common causes of teen deaths, and those who live next to the ocean, as I do, routinely hear of tragedies on the water. An episode that occurred in 2000 was particularly dramatic: a young girl drowned due to the depraved indifference of one of the men in her boat.

Taken together, these ingredients formed the genesis of The Good Lie. To develop the opening incident to suit the narrative, I changed things considerably. The sailboats became kayaks. Instead of my son saving himself from a terrible accident, I substituted a thirteen-year-old girl (Jenny Jensen) whose panic became contagious. Her panic infected one of the men with her (Paul Wakefield)—and inspired his unwitting response to their situation.

I knew I had a solid premise to start the story, but like any novelist, I wanted more to work with—a second and, if possible, a third act. I decided that the second act would come from a twist: a protagonist who decided to lie about what happened—in such a way that it would benefit the victim. The moral dilemma presented in this strategy was so complicated, I realized, that I could weave it through to the book’s conclusion.

Unlike the interior psychological dilemma of Paul’s "good lie," the third act was guided by the physical threat presented by the victim’s father, Reg Jensen. Here was a man with an alleged history of violence, whose temper begins to flare, and whose actions are unpredictable. As I began to work this dynamic through the novel, I had no idea where it would take me or how the novel might end.

I was now at the point every novelist cherishes: a story with characters based on emotions I understood, moral questions that have no clear answers, and characters who lead the action to an unknown conclusion. I set a course through the uncharted waters ahead and could not stop until I reached the destination guided by these uncontrolled forces.

I was in a kind of heaven. I knew I was lucky to be there and I was thankful for every moment of it. The Greeks gave blessings to the Muse for such good fortune. So did Jack Wise. And so did I.