THE EVOLVING NOVELIST

If life's a journey, the writing life is a filled with detours.

When I retired from news writing and embarked on a career as a novelist, I took so many back roads, I can't count them. I was technique-challenged. I knew the basics and the differences between writing novels and newspaper copy. The longer form, whether genre or literary, involves conflict, plot structure, character building, setting, plot and theme. News editors reject all that to crowd as much information into as small a space a...