Novelist, playwright and short story writer Bill Gaston ranks among the country's greatest storytellers. Gaston won the CBC Short Story Prize in 1998 and his previous two short story collections — Gargoyles and Juliet Was a Surprise — were finalists for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.

A Mariner's Guide to Self Sabotage is a collection of short stories populated by the lonely and alienated, holders of secrets, members (or would-be members) of shadowy organizations, screw-ups, joyriders and runaways.

Gaston, who lives in B.C., but who grew up living in Winnipeg and Toronto, reveals how he wrote the engaging A Mariner's Guide to Self Sabotage.

"I wrote these stories over a period of three years. It wasn't written as a book; it as written as a bunch of stories as they came to me. So they were all done completely discretely with no connection whatsoever. Every story announces itself to me in its own way — and certainly without any connection to a story that came before. And once I've had enough of them, I'll send them off to the publisher."

"You know that expression 'write what you know?' I kind of take it to heart, but it's also about writing what you know to be true. So that lets me branch out a bit. Living in British Columbia, I was a fishing guide and — I almost I hate to say it — but I was a logger for a while, helping deplete B.C.'s natural resources.

"So I know about those worlds somewhat and I didn't have to research any of that. Although, one of my son's best friends is a commercial diver and he worked for a couple of years a couple of summers at specifically those remote fish farms cleaning their pens. We spent an afternoon together — I had a lot of questions about it and he supplied a lot of answers."

"A lot of my short story characters aren't the kind of people you'd necessarily want to hang around with for a novel's length of time. Some of them are a bit unsavoury or problematic in some way, and I don't want to hang out with them either for longer than it takes for the story to unfold.

"A novel is quite different because I can stay very alert, aware and curious about what's going to happen to this character and they grow on me. I get quite fond of them and I care about them — even though I kind of torture them by laying out a bunch of obstacles and pain. I'm kind of torturing them but also very fond of him at the same time. I want to see how they how they act, how they respond, how they survive or not. How they cope. Either way, I'm writing the book — whether it is a novel or a collection of short stories — that I would most want to read right now."

"I do try to write every day. On the other hand, I try to almost perversely try to avoid making it special. I try to write in a crowded cafeteria, for instance, or if I have a whole house to write in, I'll write at the kitchen table instead of going to a nice desk, that kind of thing. I want to make it feel work-a-day right, like nothing special. I get up, I get my coffee, and I start in.

"I've found a writer tends to be more prone to writer's block if we treat it as a special activity — waiting for the muse, that kind of thing. Often we feel like need our special cup for coffee, or our special pillow behind our back, so I want to make it as much a regular work day as much as I can. It seems to work better when I don't get hung up. I just start typing and I trust that something good might come."