Books Take the Time They Take, with Christine Fischer Guy

Some books arrive quickly, and some books take their time. In this week’s episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show, I’m talking with Toronto writer and journalist Christine Fischer Guy about her new novel, The Instrument Must Not Matter—a literary coming-of-age story about a gifted young classical pianist named Lila who leaves Toronto for New York City after being chosen to study with a prestigious mentor. But this is not only a story about ambition or talent. It is also a story about music, silence, artistic inheritance, and what it means to carry the unfinished dreams of those who came before us. I loved hearing Christine talk about how her novels always begin with character. For this book, the first spark came from walking past the statue of Glenn Gould outside the CBC building in Toronto one too many times. A little curiosity turned into one biography, then eight biographies, and eventually Christine realized she was writing a novel about music. And because research can be such a delicious rabbit hole, Christine didn’t stop there. She even took piano lessons while writing the book and learned to play a Bach Partita in C, which she played over and over again while living inside the world of the novel. One of the most moving parts of our conversation is Christine’s discussion of Lila’s grandmother, a violinist in Prague in 1968 during the Soviet invasion after the Prague Spring. On the night before her debut, she goes out after curfew and plays the music she was meant to perform—an act of resistance that leads to her arrest and to a lifetime of artistic silence. We also talk about one of the great challenges of this novel: how do you write about music, something that exists beyond language, using only language? For Christine, one answer came through Lila’s synesthesia. Lila experiences sound as colour, which gives the novel a gorgeous way to bring music onto the page in a way readers can feel. And of course, we talk about process. Christine describes herself as a discovery writer. She does not begin with an outline. She writes messy first drafts to find out what happens, then shapes the book through revision. The Instrument Must Not Matter took ten years and at least ten major revisions. At one point, the pianist at the heart of the story was a man—and when that changed, the novel truly began to open up.