Tag: writing

  • Newspaper Coverage of Crime Fiction

    I’ve been grumpy for some time about how diminished the Globe & Mail‘s book coverage has been, lo these many years. I miss having a Books section, with a weekly column on crime fiction by Margaret Cannon. (Dream job!) That’s down to once a month or less, and it’s more of a quick round-up. But…

  • Another Form of CNF True Crime: Trauma and Abuse Memoirs

    This isn’t material I would teach as mandatory reading in a creative writing class, and probably also not in a literature course, no matter how well crafted. Teaching fiction that deals with childhood violence has offered me enough instances where undergraduate students, many of whom are still teenagers, react strongly and not always predictably to…

  • Solving Plot Problems

    Most of my focus has been on revising a novel draft that I’ve despaired of, these past two years, since I completed my 75,000 or so words. [Worse than feared: 104,665, which is, for my chosen genre, a baggy monster of a book, and unpublishable as a first novel.] I could see the plot and…