When teaching authors how good fiction works, you can go through elements of writerly craft, and often that’s what they wanted and they’ll go away happy. Sometimes, though, they want more: how craft came to be and the secret mechanics underpinning it. Often, this ends with a recommendation to study…
Whatever else their concerns may be, horror authors care dearly about readers’ feelings. The genre is bigger than frightening tales, though; in fact, the presence (or absence) of fear is often the least interesting part of the story. Horror instead finds strength in what its many emotions teach us about…
Creative non-fiction (CNF) borrows techniques from fiction to tell true stories in a captivating way. But writing fact-based stories poses challenges that writing invented stories doesn’t pose. Lynne Melcombe covers perhaps the biggest and most important of these challenges, finding the narrative arc, in another Editors Canada webinar. But narrative…
