Eight years ago, a woman named Laurene asked writer Richard Kelly Kemick to finish her late husband's novel, a book he had planned to finish upon retirement from his career as a surveyor, but never got the chance. Out of embarrassment and naivety, Kemick accepted. "The hard part was already over —the labour of birthing an idea — and all I had to do was towel it off and spank a bit of life into it," he writes for The Walrus.
Here's more on his efforts to finish a dead man's novel and what he learned along the way. "The briefcase novel has taught me nothing about writing; it hasn’t taught me how to sculpt a sentence, how to develop character, not even how to craft a sex scene (from the notebook titled “Personalities”: “They made love, and she died.”). But the briefcase novel, and the surveyor who made it, has taught me everything about being a writer," he concludes.
