Subscribe Now!
Writing Tip – How to Not Engage a Reader
An ongoing problem with the novel I’m working on has been a tone that feels detached, almost reporter-like, which makes it hard for a reader to engage with what one of the point-of-view characters especially is feeling. Much as I enjoy the revision process, I sometimes shy away from dealing with global problems like tone and voice.…
Read More...
Writing Communities
At this month’s CANSCAIP meeting, a former participant at the Seaside Writing Workshop/Retreat that my partner and I offer in Nova Scotia each summer announced that we are now accepting applications for this years workshop/retreat. Since it involves living and working with five other participants (plus Peter and me), a lovely sense of community tends to…
Read More...The Joy of Cutting Words
The last thing that a poet learns is how to throw away, And how to make you thrill and creep with what he doesn’t say. — J.R. Lowell Every writer, including me, knows the thrill of seeing words accumulate on the page. But a morning cutting 1000 words from a project can be just as satisfying as…
Read More...Where do you get your ideas?
Ideas are everywhere and anyone can catch them if they practice watching and listening to what’s going on around them. Sometimes ideas come to me from my own experiences, sometimes from other people’s. Sometimes they come to me when I’m reading a book someone else has written, sometimes when I’m in the middle of writing…
Read More...What's your favourite book that you've written?
Hm. With that question I feel a little as if you’re asking me to say which of my children or grandchildren is my favourite, and of course there are different things that I like about each of them. Books I haven’t yet begun to write are somehow always more perfect than all the others. Of course,…
Read More...
Why did you want to be a writer?
I’ve loved reading books for longer than I can remember. (That’s me in the picture, reading in my gramma’s backyard.) As an adult, I started to wonder if I would like writing them, too. I wondered if I could write something that people who didn’t know me would like reading. I was almost 30 when…
Read More...
A National Poetry Month Guessing Game
April is National Poetry Month and as it happens, the book I’m reading at the CNIB right now is a novel written in poems, and so is the book I’ll be reading next. The stories in both are told from the points of view of different characters, so it’s been fun trying to match my…
Read More...
"Lead with your heart"
It’s still just once a week that I login at Yoga Today for an hour of yoga practice – usually on Monday morning, before I get back into my work and think I’m too busy to fit it in. But there’s one instruction that the women leading the online classes offer that stays with me…
Read More...
What do you like writing better? Picture books or novels?
I love the spareness of a picture book, paring down sentences to their bare essentials. It’s a bit like writing poetry. But I also like being involved with characters for long enough to get to know them really well, the way I do when writing a novel, and I like trying convey them through words…
Read More...Is my ship sinking?
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a comparison between writers writing in the early 21st century and the passengers in The Poseidon Adventure. Some passengers on the sinking Poseidon insisted on staying put, believing that someone would come and save them. Others insisted on taking matters into their own hands on what they knew was a…
Read More...