Winning the CBC Short Story Prize paved the way for Leah Mol's debut novel
Eva Zhu | | Posted: October 19, 2022 7:47 PM | Last Updated: September 21, 2023
Leah Mol is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She won the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize for Lipstick Day. In 2022, Mol took her writing career a step further and published her first novel, Sharp Edges.
Sharp Edges centres around Katie, a teenage girl who is used to being let down. Her best friend ditched her for a boy, her mom is a hypochondriac who spends most days on the couch, and the guys at school can do whatever they want while the girls are stuck following the rules.
If you're interested in building a writing career like Mol, the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is open now for submissions, and the winner will receive a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. They will also receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books. You have until Nov. 1, 2023 to submit your original, unpublished fiction that is up to 2,500 words.
Mol spoke to CBC Books about how she honed her writing talent and why she wrote Sharp Edges.
From short stuff to a novel
"I started writing Sharp Edges about a month after I won the CBC Short Story Prize, and I had never thought I could write a novel because I would write when I felt like it. Usually short stuff. For this, I sat down and wrote 500 words a day, every single day. I did not let myself off the hook any days. I also tried not to go over that 500 words any day, because then the next day, I'd always have somewhere to start.
I sat down and wrote 500 words a day, every single day. I did not let myself off the hook any days.
"Throughout the rest of the day, I would make notes for myself. Then my writing for the next day was basically done for me. I did not know where it was going to go. Those 500 words were all over the place until I had about 60,000 of those little pieces. Then I put them all together. It took two years."
Being allowed to make bad choices
"I know that Katie makes a lot of very bad choices. I am not arguing with that at all. She makes a lot of bad choices, but she also makes a lot of choices that me and lots of my friends made. There's such a push to find some kind of belonging as teenagers. And one way to do that is to make bad choices.
"Even up until I wrote the book, there were a lot of things that I was upset with myself for doing when I was a teenager. Then writing it as Katie, I was able to look at it as an outsider and see, 'Oh, she made these choices, but this is a situation that she made and she did the best that she could.' I think Katie makes bad choices, but people also do a lot of bad things to Katie. I wanted it to be less about Katie's choices and more about how people deal with things when they're sad and when they're lonely and when they don't know what to do.
There's such a push to find some kind of belonging as teenagers. And one way to do that is to make bad choices.
"At the end, I don't know what's going to happen to Katie. But I also don't think that she's going to be destroyed by the things that she does in the book."
Let's talk about sex and sex work
"For teenage girls, there's so little of an outlet for that sexuality. And we don't talk about it. With teenage boys, there is more of an openness of them talking about sex and getting lots of girls, and that's totally fine. But when a teenage girl sleeps around, she's a slut. It's disturbing to me that teenage girls are almost not allowed to make bad choices in the same way that teenage boys are. Teenage girls are discovering their sexuality and they are figuring out what sex is and they are having sex. So it's strange to keep it a secret.
I hope that what I've done is made it a very 'sex work and sex positive in general' book.
"Sex work is work. But I needed to be very careful because she's a teenager. I hope that what I've done is made it a very 'sex work and sex positive in general' book. That was important to me. But also framing it in a way that the reason that this is bad is not because she's developing a certain kind of sexuality. It's because she's 16 years old.
"To bring those topics together was tough. But that was part of what inspired me to keep going for the book, because I just find that world so interesting."
Winning as a path to more writing
"I don't think that I would have written this book if I hadn't won the CBC Short Story Prize. At the point when I sent a story in to that prize, I was ready to just not write anymore because it's so hard. I was thinking maybe I should do something else. Maybe I should go back to school. Winning that prize made me feel like I had a future in writing.
Winning that prize made me feel like I had a future in writing.
"I was always the kind of writer who felt like I had to put everything into a story or everything into the piece that I was working on because I would maybe never get another chance to publish something. Winning the prize made me feel like it's okay to just pick and choose what you're putting out there. It feels like confirmation that there's always another chance.
"Sometimes it's enough. This was a story that I wrote and it didn't feel perfect. And I wrote that story quickly and it felt very raw at the time. And it was still a good story."
Leah Mol's comments have been edited for length and clarity.