Sunday 28 July 2019

Working on crime fic

Yesterday, I went to the crime fiction workshop again. Unlike the one I had three months or so ago, this one went really well. I showed them the second part of a draft novella I had already finished. It had all the ingredients of the synopsis of novel I wanted to write: set in Montreal, local organized crime, local colour, private eyes, etc. But obviously, as I already worked extensively on it (instead of a few lines written on a table corner), it is far better constructed. So I received a lot of good advises, but also a few praises: my characters are well rounded and the dialogues are sharp. Better still, the woman who criticized me for writing a chauvinistic dinosaur as a main character said that she found him well rounded, however masculine and macho he may be. Even better: another woman even noticed a certain sexual tension between two characters, something that is meant to show up later in the story (albeit not in the way that she'd expected), but that I had not forecast at all when I was writing that scene. So I must have done something right. I will work on polishing the novella for the next workshop, where I intend to show them two different scenes of 1,000 words each, at the same time working on the novel, which right now is being written at a snail's pace.

1 comment:

Debra She Who Seeks said...

Bravo, Guillaume, sounds like a real triumph!