Craig Spence

My job as storyteller is to trick you into imagining places and events that don’t exist in the ‘real’ world. Which means I get to go to those places first, experiencing the laughs, horrors, passions, thoughts and schemes that make for what I hope will be compelling and entertaining fiction. But once I’ve typed ‘The End’ onto the final page of a manuscript, the story becomes yours. That’s what I love about literature. It’s a creative activity that involves the audience as much as the author. Every reader brings a book to life in his or her own imagination, and every iteration of the tale is unique.

Two of my novels – Josh & the Magic Vial and Einstein Dog – were published by Thistledown Press in Saskatoon, SK. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with a very respected publishing house, and hope to have more books produced that way. Publishers select submitted manuscripts, then help authors improve them before printing and distribution. They insist writers carry the process I call ‘whittling and wedging’ to its best possible conclusion.

At the same time, however, I want to venture off the ‘conventional’ path with a literary enterprise I call Books Unbound. I have come to see storytelling as an ongoing event that can be shared from the outset with audiences and collaborators. My novel The Mural Gazer (MuralGazer.ca) was written episodically online in real time in the form of an evolving website – the 21st Century equivalent of an author writing his story in a department store window.

The potential of digital and online technologies as creative channels that can seamlessly transition to publication, distribution and marketing stages is breathtaking, and I think writers and publishers have to seize the day. To those who fear a deluge of half-baked, substandard works I say we have to go where audiences are gravitating if we want to uphold literature’s vital role. As much as possible, fill those channels with the same ‘compelling and entertaining’ content that has always been the hallmark of literature.

You can find out more about me and my work at CraigSpenceWriter.ca