Caroline Adderson

A Canadian story writer I greatly admire once declared that “plot is plod.” This was back in the last century, around the time my first collection was published. He seemed to mean that the things that happen in fiction are secondary to the language they’re written in and that everyday life with its tiny psychological shifts is the real stuff of…

In my 2010 novel, The Sky Is Falling, I tagged a pair of characters as “a Jo” and “a Beth.” If you’re a fan of Little Women, you’ll get the reference. You might also assume that I had read the beloved American classic. I hadn’t. I consulted Wikipedia’s plot…

Literary fiction has a lot to learn from genre. I discovered this myself when I started moonlighting as a children’s author. Genre I define as a form of writing that follows certain unbreakable rules, and kidlit is one. Like a lot of genre publishing, not only is kidlit going strong, but it is liberatingly versatile and form pushing despite its…