John Degen is the author of four books and is the head of The Writers’ Union of Canada and Chair of the International Authors Forum. He wrote his latest novel, Seldom Seen Road, entirely on his iPhone with Scrivener.
Show notes:
- John Degen
- The Uninvited Guest
- Seldom Seen Road
- Write Now with Scrivener Episode 63: Lili Taylor, Actor and Birder
- Jonathan Franzen: The End of the End of the Earth
- Shore Report — Covering Lake Huron’s North Shore
- Write Now with Scrivener Episode 42: William Shaw, Author of Crime Fiction and Adventure Thrillers
- Joanne Harris
- William Kent Krueger: Purgatory Ridge
Learn more about Scrivener, and check out the ebook Take Control of Scrivener.
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John Degen is the author of four books and is the head of The Writers’ Union of Canada and Chair of the International Authors Forum. He wrote his latest novel, Seldom Seen Road, entirely on his iPhone with Scrivener.
John has worked for many years for The Writers’ Union of Canada, “making sure that contracts are fair and remunerative for authors. We deal with national legislation around copyright, looking after the ownership of the work that our members do.”
This latter issue is quite important right now, as tech companies have been ingesting books to train their AI models. “Our work is out there. It’s publicly available to a certain extent. There’s not a lot of locks on it, so they just assume that it’s free.”
John has written two books of poetry, and his first novel, The Uninvited Guest, was about ice hockey. He explained the germ of this book. “David Letterman, the talk show host, used to do this bit on his show called ‘What About That Guy?’ where he’d hold up a photograph of a newsworthy event. There would always be someone in the background, and he wanted to know the story of the background actors. Hockey players in Canada are the superstar celebrities, but there’s this guy who carries around the Stanley Cup, which is the big trophy of professional ice hockey. It’s his job to just carry it from celebration to celebration. And he’s always in the background, this guy in a nice suit and white gloves who carries the trophy. And I wanted to know, what about that guy?”
His latest novel, Seldom Seen Road – which he said was a real road name he saw when driving the Trans-Canada Highway – is the first of a series involving the Roth family detective trio. I pointed out that detectives with sidekicks were quite common, but trios were not. “It’s an older guy, a retired widower who’s lonely, trying to figure out what he’s going to do next in his life. He indulges in his natural nosiness and busybodiness by nosing into the local mysteries. He’s got a daughter who’s trying to keep him out of trouble. You know, ‘Dad, please don’t investigate murders,’ that kind of thing. And then he has a cousin who is a highway patrol person up here in northern Ontario. He’s the connection to the crime-solving establishment that helps them out. It’s the interaction between those three characters that I’m really interested in.”
I pointed out that it’s an interesting dynamic, because each one of them has their own skills and their own way of looking at things. John said, “It’s also a feature of classic Nordic noir that I really appreciate. If you read Henning Mankel’s Kurt Wallander series, there’s this running relationship between the detective, Kurt Wallander, and his father, who is a landscape painter. So there’s all this emotional territory that can be used because of that relationship.”
John is also a birder: his website is called the book (& bird) room. He explained that he lived “on the edge of a vast wilderness” in northern Canada. “It’s the summer home of vast numbers of migratory birds. So if you live up here, you become a birder just by absorption.” He also wrote birds into his novel. “There’s a murder right at the beginning of the book, and the witness to that murder is a raven.”
I pointed out that the landscape in this novel almost seems like a character, and he said, “You can’t live where I live without being constantly aware that you’re surrounded by wildlife, sometimes wildlife that can kill you. You have to be aware of that when you live up here. And I think that the vastness, the darkness, the mystery of the wilderness up here; it’s more than mood in the background of a mystery novel. It becomes a character. And also it becomes this sort of imminent threat at all times.”
John’s use of Scrivener is unique. He wrote Seldom Seen Road entirely on his iPhone, using the iOS version of Scrivener. “There was always a lot of travel in the morning and evening. I found that in my very busy life, that was the best time for me to go into my brain and do my personal writing. I would stand on the subway in Toronto, tucked into a corner, avoiding the crowds, and I would write for the full morning commute. And then I would look forward to the afternoon commute so I could get back to where I had left off. In that way, on a day-to-day basis, I established a real routine for myself. Scrivener [is] like you’re carrying your entire filing system with you in your pocket.”
John is currently working on building a writing shed in Northern Ontario, where he lives during “the warm months.” Going into the shed to write will be, he said, “a way of crossing the threshold between the everyday and your imaginative life.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.