Last week, I spent a fascinating afternoon and evening at the University of Calgary, speaking to students in the English department. Instructor Margaret Hadley included Deadly Fall in the course syllabus for her two Detective Fiction courses this term.  What a thrill it was to see my novel listed with stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle,  Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, Georges Simenon and Raymond Chandler.  Hadley introduced Deadly Fall as an example of what modern authors are doing with the genre. She invited me in to talk with the class about the novel as well as my writing, since her students have the option to write a mystery short story as their major course requirement.

I began each session by describing my writing trajectory and must admit I was nervous facing the first group of 50 students who were mostly under age thirty, not my usual demographic. By the second group of 50, I was more relaxed. The students followed my opening by firing off questions that were interesting, intelligent and somewhat different from ones I’m used to.  Some had an academic slant: “What do you think Deadly Fall contributes to the genre?” Others simply surprised me: “Why do the swear words only start half way through the book?” They do?

I wrapped up the sessions with some writing tips and sympathized with their course assignment, as I’ve never written a successful mystery short story. How do you manage the surprises and twists with so few characters and little space to conceal clues?

I wish all of the students the best luck in the Detective Fiction course and in their academic careers. I’m so glad I had the chance to meet with this younger generation and hear their comments about Deadly Fall. If nothing else, I hope my appearance showed them that writers aren’t all dead white guys from other places. They can be ordinary people living in your own home town – your mom or neighbour or some day, perhaps, you.

On Saturday, I spoke to the Alberta Romance Writers Association about short story writing. To prepare, I took out a couple of books on the subject from the library and learned a few things.

Apparently, as late as the 1950s you could earn a good living as a commercial short story writer. Magazines like Redbook and Good Housekeeping published five or six short stories per issue and paid well. Now, they publish one, if any.  Other short story markets have also dried up during this time frame.  Two magazines that published my work within the past ten years are gone (Storyteller and Green’s). The cause of this demise is probably TV.  Today, people would rather turn on a drama or comedy than spend a relaxing evening reading magazine fiction. In contrast, literary fiction still flourishes thanks to journals produced by universities and literary groups. These magazines tend to pay poorly and are rarely read outside of the literary community.

If there’s little money in them and relatively few readers, why do people still write short stories? I came up with eight reasons. The class added two more.

1. If you take a creative writing course, you’ll be encouraged/required to write one. During the length of a six-to-fourteen week course it’s possible to write a short story, have it critiqued by the class in an evening and revise it for submission. Novels, in contrast, are difficult to critique in a course, since you can’t cover the whole work.
2. You like reading short stories. It’s always best to write what we read. You can have a fine writing career as a literary short fiction writer – and a spectacular career if you reach the top like Alice Munro.
3. Short stories and novels employ the same fiction techniques – character, plot, theme, setting …  By writing short fiction, you learn these elments and how to complete a story without getting bogged down for years working on a novel.
4. You can try out genres, types of characters etc. in a short story that you don’t want to tackle in a larger work. This can stretch you as a writer.
5. Characters, setting, plot, themes you’re comfortable with in a short story might morph into novel material.
6. You can get a story written and published in a much shorter time than it would take you to do the same with a novel. Publication feels good and validates you as a writer.
7. Short story credits create a track record that will help you get into writing programs and, when you submit your novel, will encourage publishers to look at it more seriously.
8. Short stories often translate better into screenplays than novels, where much material must be cut. There’s more money in film than in publishing any kind of fiction.
9. A short story track record can lead to gigs like teaching and speaking to the Alberta Romance Writers Association.
10. When you’ve written enough short stories you can collect them into a book of short stories –  that few people will read.

A comment by a member at Saturday’s session made me wonder if short stories are poised for a revival. Harlequin publishers has a call for short stories (upwards of 7,000 words) that they will sell in digital form with books they release. Likewise, anyone can sell a digital story on sites like Amazon or Smashwords. People who like a particular author or, in the case of Harlequin a particular type of book, might be willing to add 99 cents to their order for a story to read when they’re looking for something … ah … short.

January was a productive month of writing for me.  After the holidays, I plunged into the second draft of my novel-in-progress.  In the past, I thought I enjoyed writing first drafts best for the discovery and because it doesn’t matter if your sentences are shoddy or if everything is accurate and fits together perfectly. With Deadly Fall, I found some of my revision drafts harder work than the initial one and took longer to write.

Now, I’m finding this second draft not nearly as difficult as pulling a story from the blank page. It’s going more quickly than I had expected and I’m surprised to find myself past the mid-point.  I think much of this is due to what I learned about structure and pacing while revising and editing Deadly Fall. This enabled me to get it more right the first time. At least, I hope I did and I’m not deluding myself in this revision.

All novels, including contemporary ones, require research, that is, information you want in the book but don’t know enough about. While writing, I try to limit my research and often insert guesses I’ll look up later. This way I can get to the end of the novel and not latch onto research as a writing avoidance tactic.

After the first draft of this current book, I felt there were two matters I needed to know more about before getting into the second draft. The first was insurance. My protagonist, Paula Savard, is an insurance adjuster. I didn’t do a lot with her profession in Deadly Fall, but in this second book her job is central.  I worked in insurance some thirty years ago and my knowledge of it has faded.

At a Reading I gave last November, a man in the audience mentioned he was retired from an insurance career. After the question and answers, I gave him my business card and invited him to e-mail me, which he did.  I sent him numerous insurance questions. He answered in detail and assured me this wasn’t a burden; he enjoyed reminiscing. I did too and found it fun to refresh myself with the familiar insurance information and lingo.

A second topic prominent in the novel is hoarding. This was inspired by my  uncle and the details in the first draft came from my experience of him and other family members including, a little, myself.  To get a more professional and broader take on the subject, I read two library books and have a memoir to read next. I wrote copious notes on the psychology of hoarders, their personality profiles and details about their hoarded homes. Awhile back, for research, I also watched the Hoarders TV show, which features a real-life hoarder each week and goes through his or her cleanup. Why do people enjoy watching these things? For me, this is too close real life.

While revising my first draft chapters I’ve been surprised – pleased, alarmed? – by how much I knew about hoarding before going in. I’ve enhanced details, but this research was more about confirming my experience rather than correcting or developing information, as my insurance research did.

Also while writing, I created a folder of various research matters I plan to tackle when I’ve finished this draft. I think these are all minor matters that won’t impact the story much.

I’m currently reading The First Stampede of Flores Ladue, a biography about the founding of the Calgary Stampede, another important feature of my book that I wrote from experience. As with hoarding, this research isn’t essential, but it might lead to my adding a few more pertinent details.

Friday evening, I spent a thoroughly enjoyable time at Calgary’s Pumphouse Theatre, watching the opening performance of  Front Row Centre’s Assassins, Stephen Sondheim’s Tony award-winning musical. I found it a well-performed, intriguing piece of theatre that is much edgier than most of the musical genre. Fans of dark stories will appreciate the glimpse into the minds of people our society generally views as evil. While Assassins in no way praises these people who murdered or attempted to murder U. S. presidents, all through the show I pondered the ethics of even portraying them as the anti-heroes in a play. 

The villains were entertaining, funny and often sympathetic. Was I wrong to laugh at their antics and, at moments, root for them?  How did I feel about the guns they kept shooting and pointing all over the place, including at us, the audience? And, most of all, might watching Assassins inspire some nut-bar to seek immortality through a similar, notorious deed?    

It’s quite a feat for a show to make me think like this, when I generally take the view that writers shouldn’t hold back on hard material.

 Front Row Centre’s Assassins is a steal at $22 (top price) a ticket. It will be playing at Pumphouse  Theatre until January 28th .  Unless you think the subject matter would totally put you off – and I’m sure it would do this to quite a few – I highly recommend seeing it.

If holidays are breaks from routine, I’ve been on holiday for the past month. During this time, I haven’t done any creative writing or attended any writing-related events; I’ve eaten too much food and way too many sweets, slacked off on formal exercise, played numerous board and card games and hosted four guests: my sons and two cats.

The weather has been so good it’s hardly felt like Calgary winter. Am I refreshed, holiday-ed out and eager to return to normal? Not really, but I hope to be there next week.

The first step will be to start work on draft # 2 of my novel-in-progress, with the goal of finishing this draft some time in the spring. My first writing event of the year will be the Instructors’ Reading at the Alexandra Writers’ Centre on January 11th, where I’ll talk about the mystery writing workshop I’ll be teaching on Saturday, January 21st. The AWCS website offers information on the workshop and their interesting array of winter courses.

February begins with the Writers’ Weekend at the Calgary Library central branch. The event features booths by various writing organizations and sessions on such topics as 10 Ways to Kill Your Writing, Historical Research, Publishing and Editing, Magazine Writing and writing about love and sex – all of this for free. Check out the Calgary Public Library website for details. I’ve registered for several sessions.

Saturday, February 11th, I’ll be speaking to the Alberta Romance Writers about short story writing. The discussion will include such questions as ‘What is the difference between short stories and novels?’, ‘How do you know in advance which one your story will be?’ and ‘How can short story writing benefit your writing career?’ I’m looking forward to this change of focus from writing mystery novels.

Back to mysteries, with a twist, on February 22nd I’ll be meeting with students in the University of Calgary’s two winter Detective Fiction courses. Professor Margaret Hadley has included Deadly Fall in this term’s syllabus. Cool. After reading the classics: Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie and Hammett, students will go contemporary with Deadly Fall. Professor Hadley has invited me in to answer their questions about Deadly Fall and the how of writing – most of the students will submit an original short story for their major course assignment.

February 23rd will be another change of pace with Montreal Night at Calgary’s Shelf Life Bookstore. I’ll read, discuss and answer questions with three fellow ex-Montrealers: Rona Altrows, Barbara Schleifer and Julie Sedivy. Since Paula Savard, my Deadly Fall heroine, is a former Montrealer and all my writing is informed by that city I could read from the novel, but I think I’ll read from Grand Jete, my one and only short story set in Montreal, which won the 2007 Other Voices Short Fiction contest and was published in the magazine.

Thinking about these upcoming events is getting me excited about my return to routine. Maybe I’m almost there.

Here’s some writing advice for the new year from my favourite columnist, Russell Smith.

November is National Novel Writing Month. I haven’t participated in NaNoWriMo, but this November turned out to be my novel writing month for 2011.

My latest novel writing binge began around October 20th, after I returned from a holiday in Ontario and Quebec. I usually have trouble getting back into writing mode after a break. From experience, I’ve learned to simply plunge in and work my way back into the groove. Sometimes it’s only taken a couple of days; this time took much longer.

I had left my novel-in-progress at the mid-point of the first draft. Normally, the story starts to pick up for me from there. This time, I found writing the third quarter of the book a chore. I told friends I felt like never writing another a book. Had I felt that while in the midst of earlier works-in-progress? I don’t recall, but perhaps I did. I kept working because I’d set a goal to finish the first draft by Christmas and, ideally, my birthday on December 13th. There were moments when I felt the goal was a real stretch.

Around the 3/4 point of the book, I snuck in a Sunday writing day and, to my surprise, finished an entire chapter. From then on, the story started to come together; through the last half of November I was accomplishing about twice as much per day as I had during the preceding weeks. As a result, I finished the first draft on November 30th.

Yay!!!!

I still have bits and pieces and organizational work to take care of before Christmas, but am looking forward to giving the major work (and myself) a rest for the next month, which will be busy in other ways: celebrating my husband’s and my birthdays, preparing for the holidays and spending time with with friends and family, including my two sons who are coming from Toronto.

I shouldn’t be surprised to discover that sweating out a first novel draft doesn’t feel too bad now that’s over. I may even do it again.