Ann Birch will talk to Writers' Craft students at Silverthorn Collegiate,
Toronto, early in November. In an interactive session, they'll discuss
the challenge of researching a period that a writer knows nothing much
about. There'll be a quiz to give the students an idea of what Ann had to
discover in order to create a convincing background for her historical
novel Settlement. In addition, she and the students will talk about
building character through distinctive speech patterns. Finally they'll
discuss the writing of effective endings without using the dread deus ex
machina favoured by writers like Arthur Hailey who once killed off the
major characters in his novel Hotel by putting them into a defective
elevator. There are no easy routes to effective writing: that's the
message.
