After my first term of writing courses, I signed up for the second level of Creative Writing, which was all about short stories. The instructor, Ray Beauchemin, was the husband of Denise Roig, my Magazine Writing instructor. Ray was as much into imagery as she was.

I faked it with my first story submission, starting my tale with a description of a jungle meant to symbolize something. Ray underlined a throw-away phrase in the story and asked me, “Was this the story heart, if this isn’t too personal?” The phrase referred to my narrator’s husband who had cheated on her and left. I said, “No, that’s not my true story. I made it up.”

I re-wrote the story, taking that phrase as a jumping off point while still incorporating the jungle imagery. Somehow, the concept of starting with an image clicked. Finally, I got it.

After the course, I had the notion to write the same story from the perspectives of three different characters — my narrator, her cheating husband and the Other Woman. The latter was only briefly mentioned in the original story, but she intrigued me.

I started to write from her perspective. The story began to change. I realized I couldn’t write the same story from three angles as each narrator would take it in a new direction.

The Other Woman’s story grew. I wondered if there was a category for long short stories. By page forty, I knew this was a novel. Moreover, it was a fully fictionalized story of the semi-autobiographical novel I had tried to write.

I kept going with this new novel. One development led to the next and built to a climax and resolution. A year after starting it, I had a book. The title was there from page one, “To Catch a Fox,” and stemmed from that jungle image. Well, a more northerly forest, since I was thinking of a fox hunt. The protagonist, Julie Fox, goes on a quest to learn what happened to her mother who walked out when Julie was young. Julie was the fox, with its double image of pursuer and pursued, since she is followed by her personal demons.

One problem with my manuscript: it was 1,000 pages, making it well over 200,000 words. Even I knew that door stopper needed serious revision.

I loved seeing my travel features in The Gazette, where my Montreal family, friends and neighbours would read them. But $300 payment every 6-7 months wouldn’t cover many bills. My Magazine Writing instructor had told us that magazines paid much better than newspapers. I researched some general interest and travel magazines and sent out a few queries.

No one was interested.If I’d been truly eager to forge a freelance career, I would have pursued it. Instead, I decided that if I couldn’t make money from writing I’d return to my first love — fiction.

Since the semi-autobiographical novel was toast, I took a stab at mystery, a genre I’ve enjoyed reading since childhood.

A Bobbsey Twins mystery might be the first novel I read on my own. I continued through the series and graduated to Nancy Drew, The Happy Hollisters, Trixie Belden and assorted British girl sleuths. My favourite of the latter was Susan, due to her name and flawed, pushy character. I read The Hardy Boys, too, but identified with the female heroines.

As I grew older, I moved on to Agatha Christie and the darker stories of Daphne du Maurier. I’ve sometimes called Rebecca the novel I wish I had written.

So, murder mystery novels were a natural choice. I started two of them at this time. With the first, I’m not sure I got past the thinking stage. For the second, I prepared a plot outline, but as I wrote  the first chapters the story kept changing. I’d think the plot through to the end to be satisfied it still worked, write more, encounter another major change and have to think it through again. At this rate, it would take me years to finish a draft. It didn’t occur to me that a mystery novel could be written without an outline, since the plot developments had to fit so precisely.

My second problem with the mystery genre was police details. Even though my protagonist would be an amateur sleuth, I’d planned to have a policeman as a secondary viewpoint character. I’d also need to know what the police were up to while my amateur was sleuthing to make the story believable. I didn’t know any policemen or women in my everyday life, wasn’t familiar with police procedure aside from what I’d seen on TV and wasn’t interested in researching this.

With reluctance, I abandoned my idea of writing a murder mystery. Any novel I wrote would have to involve characters and material I knew, or wanted to learn about, and it couldn’t be written from an outline. I’d start with a few details — protagonist, problem, setting, maybe an image — and let the story flow. For now, I had no inkling of what those details would be.

When my first writing instructor, Denise Roig, assigned us to write an article for a newspaper or magazine, I instantly lit on The Montreal Gazette. I was an avid reader of the newspaper’s travel section, being a keen traveller now spending most her time at home with two young children. The travel editor, Paul Waters, wrote a weekly column that I especially enjoyed. He often shared personal details about himself, his wife and their six children.

The previous summer, my husband and I had travelled with our sons to Alberta. We arrived in Calgary the last day of the Stampede and went to the rodeo and fairgrounds. We loved them. I’d had no idea an event this huge was happening out west and wondered if other Montrealers were equally in the dark.

For my course assignment, I wrote a travel piece about the Calgary Stampede, describing the rodeo and other fairgrounds activites we’d liked and mentioning the many more we’d missed because we hadn’t allocated enough time. I then drafted my query letter, which was a challenge, particularly the paragraph explaining why I should be the one to write this article when I had no writing credits or other qualifications. In the end, I suggested a story angle about a family visit to the Stampede.

Denise, my instructor, edited the article and added a note that she could see it in The Gazette. Her main comment about my query letter was to change the last paragraph so it wouldn’t sound like the article was already written. For non-fiction, you pitch and write later or you’ll never make money.

With some confidence, I mailed my query letter to Paul Waters and waited for a reply. Several months passed. I grew discouraged. One night I went out to a parent and school committee meeting and returned to find a sign on my front door. Congratulations! My husband told me that Paul Waters had called and wanted me to phone him back that evening.

I phoned right away. Paul said he was interested in the piece. What sold him was the family angle. “Most writers I hear from are yuppies,” he said. He suggested I add a few additional points that I’d already included in the piece. He’d pay $300, but had to ask me to write it ‘on spec.’ From taking the magazine writing course, I knew what that meant.

I touched up the article and sent it to him. A few weeks later it appeared on the travel section’s front page. This writing business would be a snap, I thought. My decision to become a writer was right.

Over the next couple of years, I pitched Paul three more travel pieces. Rather than send a query letter, I waited for an excuse to call him. Typically, this involved a glitch with the newspaper sending my payment cheque. “And by the way,” I’d add, “would you interested in an article about …”

Like the Stampede article, two of the others were the front page travel feature of the week. The fourth, a shorter one, was on the back travel page. It was about The Fundy Isles, where I spent my summer holidays as a child and visited regularly after that. My cousin who lives there said this was her favourite of my articles. ‘Europe with Children,’ the last one I wrote, was likely the best of the four. I found ‘Atlanta: Progress is her Middle Name” the hardest to write, as I struggled for a connecting theme. ‘The Calgary Stampede’ was special because it was my first. I had no idea when I wrote it that I’d move to Calgary a few years later.

I also had no clue that my writing road that had started out so well would become rocky.

Does the name Calgary mean clear running water or cabbage patch? For sure, both would be useful in pioneer days.

My first creative writing courses, taken through Concordia University Continuing Education in 1992, required students to submit final assignments. For Introductory Creative Writing, this was a portfolio of poems and/or short stories up to a specified number of pages.  Magazine Writing required a short story and a magazine or newspaper article, with a query letter.

During that fall term, I only came up with one complete short story, which I handed in for both courses. This felt like cheating, but I ultimately found it helpful to get comments from the two instructors. Gerry, the poet teacher of Intro, wasn’t impressed with my poems, but he liked the story. Denise,  the Magazine Writing teacher, read my scene of group dialogue to the class. I later sent the story to a literary magazine and received a hand-written rejection saying the story was well-written, but they weren’t able to publish it. I was crushed and never sent the story out again. I didn’t know then that any rejection beyond a form letter was a positive.

Denise’s fiction instruction focussed on imagery. She urged us to start with an image and write the story from there. I didn’t get what she was driving at.  That final story I gave her used an image of a ferris wheel, but imposed it on the story after I had the basic plot, characters and theme. Denise’s approach would have been to start with the wheel and let the story evolve from it. Despite the kind words of the literary magazine, my story probably wasn’t very good. 

Denise also advised us to write in the first person to practice getting into the narrator’s head, a writing concept I wasn’t aware of before taking the course. I was used to stories in distant third person. Once upon a time in a land far away … After a few assignments where I tried first person, I grasped what she meant and was soon able to transfer that skill to third person.

Today, when teaching courses, I sometimes feel like a point-of-view Nazi, harping on students to stay with a third person narrator and get deeper into his or her thinking and speech patterns, rather than shift all over, so readers will engage with the POV character.