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Learn how to craft compelling stories and bring captivating characters to life through hands-on lessons from acclaimed authors and industry experts.

Reimagining the Edit with Harriet Alida Lye

The first draft of a book is the clay, and in the edit, you sculpt your material into its final form. After your first draft is complete, you will need to figure out what questions your book is asking, and read to assess how, and whether, those questions are being answered. Freeing yourself of dead weight is exhilarating, but sometimes (every time, in Harriet Alida Lye’s experience) the editing process involves a somewhat terrifying openness to changing structure, characters and plot in order to transform the book you wrote into the book you wanted to write. To edit is to rewrite. Leslie Jamison describes the process in Splinters: “stop thinking of it as tinkering and start thinking of it as flight.”

All writing levels are welcome in this 90-minute creative writing masterclass.

Presented by TIFA in partnership with the Humber School for Writers.

Let It Destroy You: A Novel

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Harriet Alida Lye

Harriet Alida Lye is the author of two novels, one memoir and one children’s picture book. Her essays and reporting have been published in The Globe & Mail, The New York Times and more.

Read more about Harriet Alida Lye