Terry Fallis - A Novel Journey

The idea for this post came to me last week while appearing at a wonderful writers’ festival in a beautiful setting on Canada’s west coast. More on that later. But first, a look at introverts, extroverts and those of us in between. Back in my earliest days promoting my debut novel The Best Laid Plans in 2008, I discovered I love writers’ festivals—still do.

Rather than focusing on a single topic or event in this post, I cover below a collection of quick and somewhat disparate hits. Sometimes that’s what life gives you. Work continues apace towards the November 3 launch of my eleventh novel, An End in Itself. Here’s what’s unfolded in the last several weeks. My editor, Joe Lee, sent me a three-dimensional rendering of my new novel. I think it looks great—deliberately different from my other novels—but great.

Here’s something a little bit different. I thought I’d share a story from my past that remains so fresh in my memory that it could have happened yesterday, and not more than fifty years ago. I figure everything I’ve experienced in my life has somehow come together to make me the person—and more to the point, the writer—I am today. This is just one of those experiences… and it was wild.

My eleventh novel, An End in Itself, will be published and in bookstores on November 3, 2026. As I know I’ve mentioned at least a few times in this space, this novel is a departure for me. Click here to read more about why this is true, in my earlier “Departures” post. Appropriately, the cover is also a departure. So here we go… I know what you’re all thinking. This doesn't look anything like my other covers. You’re right. Here are my five most recent covers.

I realize that my last four posts have arguably been more directed towards writers rather than to the broader audience of readers. I also realized that it’s been a while since I reported from the road as an itinerant writer. With this in mind, here’s a snapshot of a two week stretch in my happy writerly life earlier in June. I’ll start with the most recent event my wife Nancy and I attended.

It’s complicated. And as a member in good standing of what I’ve always called the “write what you know” school of writing, let me try to tackle this age-old, very cyclical, debate—it just keeps coming around again and again. Of course “write what you know” has long been among the aspiring writer’s foundational axioms. But for at least the last ten years or so, it’s become increasingly fashionable for some in the literary establishment to question and undermine this writerly convention.

Writing life: 110 Recently, my good friend and fellow writer, Stewart Goodings—check out his great novel—who divides his time between Comox and Denman Island in BC, emailed me with a suggestion: “You might want to write sometime about the importance of venue/location in fiction writing and the new online opportunities for doing the research, instead of, or as a supplement to being there 'in person'.” “Great idea!” I replied. And voilà, a new post written. Thank you, Stewart.

We’re all familiar with actors, painters, musicians, and yes, writers, who have established themselves in one particular form or style, but then found themselves feeling a little cramped in the box they created for themselves. So, somewhere along the road, they take a slight or sharp turn. They do something that seems like a departure—hence the title of this post.

I found it when writing my first novel. And I’ve stuck with it in nearly every one of my novels since. Back in 2007, I’m quite sure my friends and family figured out the secret as soon as they started listening to the podcast edition of my debut novel, The Best Laid Plans, or reading it when it became a book later that year. But readers who don’t know me personally probably don’t know—hence this post. “Narrative voice” is a writerly term that members of the scribe tribe toss around quite often.

For several years now, audiobooks have been the fastest growing segment in publishing. In fact, in Canada, the number of readers who prefer audiobooks has risen from 8% in 2019 to 13% in 2023. Over the same period, the number of readers who prefer print books declined from 65% to 59%. That alone makes this topic important to writers, readers, and publishers. Audiobooks often provide lapsed readers with a more convenient—and arguably less demanding—return to books.