Can you agree that writing comes easier to some than others?

Creative writing instructor Meg Howald, a former teacher at H.B. Beal Secondary School, has a long history of writing, which started at a young age. Most recently, Howald signed three contracts with Solstice Publishing to immortalize her characters in print.

But the grandmother of three shows zero signs of slowing down — she told me she has 30 novels left to write.

“I've always written,” she said. “I love dialogue; I love people and having them speak.”

But she didn't always write novels.

“The poetry and the screenplay [writing] came first,” she recalled. “When my agent said, ‘Eighty per cent of all films are based on novels,' I decided I'd better write a novel, even if it takes twice as long as a screenplay!”

“I'm warming up to the process [of writing novels], but it is a long commitment.”

Her novels not only require a commitment from the author herself, but also from her readers.

“They have to have a certain amount of an intellectual and emotional commitment to read my stuff,” she said. “It's very deep, it's symbolic...I love to use figurative language and illusions.”

“They're not easy reads,” she added.

Her novels are often classified under the mystery/thriller genre; a label that she isn't necessarily fond of.

“It's terrible [my books] have to be labeled, but there were murders and killings in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret [Atwood], and you don't want to label it as an easy read. But it can't be literary because it has a murder in it,” she divulged.

“It just so happens that when I do research and I find things that are historical and there could be an opportunity for a murder to take place, then bingo — I have a setting.”

The truth of the matter is, her books are riddled with historic events and details; all of which she devotes hours upon hours of research into.

In one of her upcoming novels, The Drowning of Margaret Hannagh, she modeled the setting around the sinking of the Victoria steamer, which happened in London.

“I had to do a lot of research on clothes, foods, alcohol, patterns of behaviour ... to make the mystery authentic,” she said.

Research ties into her characters as well, making them “I do more research on [characters'] roles, on their jobs; then my imagination kicks in to give them a background story,” she said.

Howald then takes time to bring a visual component to her characters. “Now I take the time to get some imaginative narrative about how they look and how they move,” she said. An artist in her own right, she said describing characters seemed like a waste of time, but is something she has to do.

Keeping ideas fresh and original is not easy. Howald said ideas are done over and over again. But one thing she tries to do is withhold information from her readers.

“You do want to seduce the reader into [the] world you're creating. And then you want to hit them with all sorts of revelations they're not expecting,” she said. “My one goal, to be masterful of delaying the impact of the outcome until the last two or three pages — that's what gets me excited about writing.”

Howald expressed that she would for like her novels to be put into the awards circuit, but doesn't hope for one. “I have a love for the process, the invention of creativity,” she said. “If someone likes what I do, then that's a bonus.”

She also finds inspiration in the creativity of her colleagues and her students.

Howald's first novel published by Solstice, Are But Shadows, will be available on Amazon on October 30.