? Book Prizes ?

Posted by

0

There is an article (quite long, but I have abbreviated it below) on Rebecca Makkai’s substack dated 2 June 2026 with the title “Book Prizes Don’t Work How You Think”.

.Rebecca Makkai is an American novelist and short story writer. She is best known for writing The Great Believers and I Have Some Questions for You, which have been positively received by critics and won awards such as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Libby Book Award.

Rebecca Makkia

She says, “I want to start by preventing some heart attacks and assuring the administrators of every book prize I’ve ever judged that I am NOT about to disclose any secrets of the judging room.

But authors and readers (and even editors) tend to have enormous, if understandable, misconceptions of how the prize-judging process works, and I’m happy to clear some of them up.

If I’m counting right, I’ve judged six book prizes in the past eight years, which is RIDICULOUS and no one in their right mind would ever do this. By “book prize,” I mean the kind where a panel of judges reads many, many published and eligible books and then comes up sometimes with a longlist, usually with a shortlist, and (almost) always with a winner. These would be prizes like the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, Canada’s Giller Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award—all of which, for confoundingly masochistic reasons, I’ve judged. (I was absolutely thrilled to be the chair of the Pulitzer fiction jury this year, and I’ll say more about that below.)

There are other kinds of prizes, too. There are ones where one single judge is sent three published books and picks a winner for, say, a state book of the year. There are others where a single judge reads a bunch of finalist manuscripts and picks one to get published by a small press. There’s the kind of prize you get when you’re a kid and you read twenty-five books in one summer and the library lets you pick out any book and they’ll order it for you, and of course this is the best possible prize in the entire literary world.

Every year, speculation articles appear with people guessing winners (for the Pulitzer and National Book Award and Booker in particular) based on absolutely irrelevant factors like whether an entirely different jury liked this author’s last book five years ago, or whether this book was on other juries’ lists for other prizes. Any article that gets people talking about books is a great thing, but the speculation part is, I hate to say it, useless.

Here are the things I’ve learned by judging.

There’s no “they”

Book prizes are nearly always judged not by the organizations that administer them but by small groups (usually 3 or 5) of authors and, occasionally, critics or booksellers. The organization itself (usually a small, underfunded but valiant nonprofit—yes, even the very famous organizations) is usually responsible only for screening submissions for eligibility: Was the book published this year, does the author live in the US, is the author indeed under 35 or Jewish or a debut short story writer?

In every prize I’ve ever judged or heard firsthand reports of, everything else is up to the judges and their idiosyncrasies. There’s no input from anyone else. The heads of these organizations often learn the winner at the same moment the rest of the world does.

So what the NBA* judges liked LAST time is completely irrelevant. The same five authors could just as easily be picked to judge the NBA as to judge the Pulitzer or the Story Prize, and what organization they’re attached to would have little bearing on the results. (Which makes it funny that there are vastly different levels of prestige associated with different prizes, right?)

I think this is healthy for authors to understand. Not being a finalist for something doesn’t mean that a whole organization found you lacking. It means that three or five individual human judges with idiosyncratic tastes didn’t mutually judge yours to be one of the very, very top books in the pile.

*I’m just going to say NBA throughout this article and trust that you aren’t picturing LeBron.

There’s an 11th place

Every time a longlist of ten books comes out, there was an 11th place book that almost, almost made the list. Three Pulitzer finalists are made public, but of course there’s always a fourth choice, and fifth, and sixth. And (unless an unscrupulous judge gets drunk and spills the beans at a party) those authors will never know it.

As a judge, this kills me. Someone’s life would have been changed, but just barely wasn’t. Someone out there is wondering if it’s all worth it, never knowing that judges fell madly in love with their work and were gutted not to be able to highlight it.

There are so, so many books

For a small ($0 to $500 to $5000) honorarium, you’re expected to get to hundreds of books within about a six-month period. Some prizes just ask you to read twenty books, or read what appeals to you, but the biggest book prizes can receive up to 600 valid submissions. This means two things, and I don’t think I’m revealing state secrets here: 1) Not every judge can look at every single book; and 2) When a judge realizes they don’t love a book, they can put it down.

I’ll touch more on the first point below. If the second point sounds unfair to you, I’ll explain below the breadth of what gets sent in… But also, listen, if the first paragraph of a novel is very bad (and so that I don’t hurt your feelings, let’s suppose it’s awkward, ungrammatical, sexist, opaque, and full of conspiracy theories)—why on earth would I continue reading in the hopes that somehow this book will become magically brilliant, brilliant enough to make up for that paragraph and be the winner of this major award? I have 100 other books to get to. I am not a fast reader. (In my experience, most writers aren’t.) Any good reason to put a book down is a blessing.

In most cases, judges split up the first round of reading, weeding out things they don’t want to consider and passing along to the group the ones they like. There are different ways of splitting the list—alphabetically, by interest, at random—but usually the best practice is to divide and conquer. Even so, depending on the number of submissions and the number of judges, each person might be personally responsible for 200 books. This means reading nonstop, screening things on audio when you shower, picking up your e-reader at red lights, bringing ten Advance Reader Copies for a weekend at your in-laws’.

While I do know one judge who claims to have read at least 20 pages into every single one of the 500 submissions for a major prize, he took a sabbatical to do it. Poetry judges have it the easiest; one poem can tell you a lot about whether to continue reading. YA judges at least have shorter books. Judges of adult fiction and nonfiction have by far the most work.

This means your book is always going to be a victim of fate

Not every book can be read under the ideal circumstances (hammock, margarita), and it’s also entirely possible that while four of the five judges would have loved your book, your first reader happens to be the one judge who really doesn’t connect with it and won’t pass it on.

Each panel of judges has its own ethos

While some prizes stipulate specific criteria (the Pulitzer fiction guidelines, for instance, state that the prize will preferably go to a book “dealing with American life”), most panels of judges are simply told to pick the best book of the year. That’s regardless of the author’s track record or fame or reputation. Simply the best book.

But what does that mean?

Judges usually communicate (on Zoom, and/or via spreadsheets and emails) throughout the process, and often at some point define their own criteria. Are they simply looking for the best-executed book in their genre? Or the most innovative? The book that everyone should still be reading in fifty years? The book that affected them the most?

And then there’s just the alchemy of the group itself. On one panel, we all discovered we’d grown up on farms* and so we were particularly drawn, as a group, to agriculturally-themed books.**

*absolutely not, this is a stand-in for the truth

**nope

The process is purer than you’d guess

Authors and readers love to assume some cronyism in the process, and while I can’t guarantee it’s never happened, I can say I’ve never seen it happen, and I’ve only ever heard of one instance anecdotally years ago, and that guy was publicly shamed.

A writer who has reached the level of prominence at which they’d be asked to judge a major prize has many writer friends; so being friends with a judge is not going to get anyone ahead. If 400 books are submitted, it’s likely that 75 are from people I know well, 50 are online buddies, 10 are from my press, three are from my agent, and one is that fun debut author who started the conga line at Bread Loaf. Judges scrupulously recuse themselves from reading or voting on authors about whom they don’t think they can be neutral, and they disclose personal or professional relationships. People will hand books off to other judges because the authors are former students, or close friends, or because they just can’t stand the guy. Recusals and disclosures continue up to the end.

I’ll also hand off a book because I suspect I might not be the right reader for it, but that the right judge might love it and really champion it. One such book eventually made it onto the shortlist for something I judged.

It’s also far more random than you’d guess

Because the very first round of reading often involves just one set of eyes on a book, whether a book makes it to the next round can depend entirely on the tastes of one person. One person! A person who also might not care for chocolate, or who loves ketchup on their eggs. A person who just was not up for this particular book at this particular moment. Or (see seven zillion books in six months) might not have had the luxury of putting a book down on a bad day and picking it up again in the right mood.

Conversely: It helps if the book sounds promising to a particular judge. (Literary sci-fi set in Paraguay? I was just in Paraguay! Give it here!) And yes, that “promise” could, even subconsciously, have to do with the author’s strong reputation or with a lot of praise around the book. (Some judges actively seek out book reviews to help them prioritize; others avoid them completely.) Of course, that huge reputation or excessive praise could backfire, too. And there’s a thrill to discovering someone new or overlooked. We were all new once. We’ve all felt overlooked. We’d all love to be the ones to find the best new thing.

It helps if the book came out early enough in the year that the judge might have picked it up before the judging period even began. (Although in the long run, it can help if a judge reads a book late in the process and is freshly in its thrall when the judging conversations happen.)

And then in the assessment itself, there’s a bewildering amount of randomness. Think of all the books you read in the past year, and pick your top five. Then think about it an hour later, and see if you’ve changed your mind or if you’re second-guessing yourself. Have a good nap and see how you feel about it then. What about a week from now?

I’m going to share an anonymous story from a friend who was judging a big prize several years ago: “We got on the phone to discuss our longlist. To fill one remaining spot, I consulted my reading notebook and named a book I was happy with. A day later, I realized I’d neglected to enter one of my favorites of the year into my notebook, and had forgotten it during our discussion. I might have named that work instead. But I didn’t.”

I’ve also heard about committees in which one judge didn’t pull their weight and the other judges weren’t able to pick up all the slack—meaning some submitted books barely got looked at.

You’d be amazed what isn’t submitted

Those last two details might have thrown you into panic mode, but I hope you saved some rage.

Some prizes require a submission fee, and some don’t. Some allow submissions directly from authors, and some require the submissions to come from publicists or editors. In either case, publicists and editors make decisions about which titles from their list to send in to which prizes. Even when submission is free, they want their nominations to mean something. If Random House sent in literally every one of its 2026 novels for a certain prize, it would overwhelm and probably annoy the judges.

The submission fee can be an obstacle for small presses, unfortunately. But why a major press would not submit a book from an established prize winner—a book that’s making all kinds of best-of-the-year lists—for a major prize, is absolutely beyond me. But those balls get dropped all the time.

Several years ago, I was judging a prize for which we split our initial reading by alphabet section. Let’s say I had A-G. Late in the game, a friend asked what I thought of the new Jane Doe. I texted back: “Jane Doe has a new book????” Jane Doe was a Pulitzer winner at the top of her career.

A friend was judging nonfiction for a major prize and the whole group agreed, over email, that there was a clear frontrunner, a book they’d all read and loved. Only then did they realize it hadn’t been submitted before the deadline.

Another friend judging one of the biggest fiction prizes tells me the book that won—a win that made the author’s career—was initially not submitted. One of the judges had read a great review of it, and reached out right before the deadline asking that the book be sent in. I’ve also heard of judges reaching out, asking for a book to be submitted, and the book still not being sent.

Perhaps the tedious task of filling prize entry forms gets delegated to interns. Perhaps there are gremlins in the system. But if I were an editor, I’d be breathing down the neck of whoever was responsible for submissions.

You’d also be amazed what is submitted

And then there are the times you have to ask yourself why on earth a press or an individual bothered submitting a certain title. I’m talking about, for example, book #3 in a children’s trilogy about dragons being submitted for a major adult literary prize.

When the book is wildly inappropriate to the prize (a steamy, formula bodice ripper sent in for the Booker), there are three possibilities I can think of: 1) The press is obligated to send the book in for all major prizes because the author, who sells a lot of books, got it in their contract. 2) An author sent it in not having researched what the prize is, the past winners, etc. or just having great confidence that THIS educational comic book about Christian frogs is going to win over all those cold, hard literary hearts. 3) The author knows damn well that this isn’t going to work, but wants to say the book “was nominated for the Pulitzer” in the hopes that people think this means it was a finalist. (This happens often enough that the Pulitzer website now states, “We discourage someone saying he or she was “nominated” for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us.”)

Panels aren’t gunning for forced diversity

Every couple of years, someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about complains publicly that judging panels are picking books based on wokeness or diversity quotas or some other nonsense.

Every panel I’ve been part of has paused for a second after we’ve chosen our list for a little after-the-fact audit, checking that unconscious biases didn’t make us notably uneven on things like gender balance, ethnicity, genre (Did we pick ten novels and no short story collections? Are we cool with that?), press size, and even topic. And not once have we ever needed to make an adjustment.

It’s true that longlists don’t look like they used to. This might have to do with prize committees themselves finally diversifying, which means a broader variety of opinions and tastes. And it might have to do with all of us preferring books that, you know, do not sound like every other book we’ve read.

It turns out that when we read broadly and fairly, it’s no longer true that 95% of prizes go to straight white men, go figure.

The Pulitzers are different

It’s worth noting that the Pulitzers have an unusual setup. For each category, a jury of five authors and critics nominates three finalists, and then sends them on to the Pulitzer Board at Columbia University—a board composed largely of journalists, with one resident poet, one novelist, etc. People tend to serve on this board for multiple years. The Pulitzer Board meets for two days on campus at Columbia, after having read all finalists, to make the final decisions on everything from fiction to photojournalism to regional news coverage.

Then there’s this, from the Pulitzer website (bolding is mine): “Awards are made by majority vote, but the Board is also empowered to vote ‘no award,’ or by three-fourths vote to select an entry that has not been nominated or to switch nominations among the categories. If the Board is dissatisfied with the nominations of any jury, it can ask the Administrator to consult with the chair to ascertain if there are other worthy entries. Meanwhile, the deliberations continue.” Among other things, this means the jury needs to have a secret fourth choice lying in wait. And it’s a fourth choice that will likely never be revealed. And it means that as a jurist, you don’t actually know if they’ll pick one of your books or go with something completely different. It also means that when you see three finalists plus a winner announced (rather than two finalists plus a winner) something interesting has happened.

Another difference: For most prizes, the identity of the judges is public. The Pulitzer jury for each category must remain secret until the prizes are announced. Many awards are announced and bestowed at a black tie event. The Pulitzers are announced in a livestream online, and then awarded at a lunch in a library on the Columbia campus. Finalists (I was a finalist in 2019) don’t get to attend, but are sent a nifty snail mail letter that’s framable.

Our reading as a jury ended in December, when we sent in our three finalists. We didn’t know the winner until the moment it was announced publicly last month. (Fortunately, I loved all three finalists equally, so I had the fun of sitting at my laptop with the StoryStudio staff, to whom I’d revealed my judging about five minutes earlier, waiting to whoop for joy regardless of the outcome. Indeed I whoopt.)

If you’re ever a finalist at a live ceremony, here’s what to do

That Pulitzer livestream is lovely, but it’s extremely fun to dress up and go to some ballroom where everything is announced live and you can pretend people care about this as much as the Oscars.

If you are ever in the position of needing to dress up for a live awards ceremony where the winner will be announced and suddenly have to take the stage and say something, you need to do two things. 1) Actually write out a speech and practice it, even if you think you have no chance, and no, it’s not bad luck, what’s bad luck is getting up there and saying something you’ll regret. 2) Make separate afterparty plans with friends, in the likely event that you don’t win. Meaning: Get out of there pretty fast, go to the restaurant where you have reservations, and relax with people who love you. Because if you stay at the party, you’ll have people coming up to you all night with tragic pity on their faces, saying, “I am so sorry you didn’t win.” And you might have been feeling great, happy for the winner, so thrilled to have been a finalist, but these people are going to bum you out. Get out of there.”

There is more on Rebercca Makkai’s substack if you’re interested: https://rebeccamakkai.substack.com/p/book-prizes-dont-work-how-you-think

Novels vs Scripts

Posted by

0

Leslie Liautaud has an article on the Writer’s Digest website, undated, in which she points out the differences between novel-writing and script-writing.

Leslie Liautaud is an award-winning playwright and novelist and has been active in the performing arts for over 30 years. As a writer, Leslie has had several of her original full-length stage plays produced throughout the Midwest, including the multi-award winning immersive production, Southern Gothic. Leslie is the author of the coming-of-age novel, Black Bear Lake, which placed first in the Chanticleer International Book Award’s Somerset Contemporary and Literary Fiction division. Her psychological thriller, Butterfly Pinned, will be released on May 10th, 2025.

Leslie Liautaud

Leslei says,”The first time I stepped on stage, I was five years old. I might forget my anniversary or what I had for breakfast, but I will never forget the feeling the first time I performed in front of an audience. My role was “Little Girl” in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN. I remember that I had to wait for the lead actor to say, “Get out of here, little girl!” three times before running off stage. I remember being extremely nervous I would lose track of the prompts. I remember my eyes darting out to the audience and finding a sea of strange faces. But mostly, I remember being elated. Suffice it to say, I was hooked. From that performance on, I worked as an actor on stage and TV for the following 20 years.

I hadn’t ever considered becoming a playwright until my early 30s when, at a dinner party, a man recounted the love story behind the Taj Mahal. Immediately, I thought, “Why isn’t this a movie? Or a television series??” It was at that dinner I decided to write a script about Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. I poured over history books and articles and bled the epic love story onto page after page. When I finished, I held the script delicately in my hands like a newborn baby. It embodied a fresh creative energy that I hadn’t felt in years. Make no mistake, I had written what is quite possibly the worst script ever written in the history of writing. But I had done it! I had written a script. It was abundantly clear I knew nothing about the technicalities of writing a screenplay. However, I knew stage plays—the formatting, the structure, the heartbeat—like the back of my hand.

Time went on and after 15 years of writing for the stage and after the production of several full-length dramas, I decided to challenge myself by writing a novel. Much like screenplays, I was starting at ground zero. But I wasn’t worried, as I was an avid reader. I figured, “I’ll just write the story, expanding on my knowledge of dialogue, add some descriptors, and voila!” But voila, it did not. I found myself in the same predicament of inexperience I had been in with attempting to write a screenplay. While some of the practices and techniques I had honed as a playwright were valuable, there was much to learn.

As creative and curious artists, we are constantly experimenting with new techniques and approaches which keeps art in a constant state of flux. That said, after an ongoing career as a playwright and with my second novel, Butterfly Pinned, set for May publication, I can state with all certainty that there remain distinct and stark differences between writing a novel and writing a play.

Format

Formatting is the most obvious of the differences, but it is the foundation. A novel gives you free reign in chapter length and, in most cases, the only parameter you should abide to is writing in paragraph form. Plays, however, must be formatted into a preexisting, specific script form. There’s no getting around it.

Consider your script as an operating manual for the actors, director, set designer, etc. It needs to be cohesive, so all parties remain on the same page. (Pun intended!) The easiest way to achieve this is by using software designed to format for you, guiding you through dialogue, stage directions, and scene changes.

There are several reliable companies who offer formatting software specifically for playwrights, and which one is best for you comes down to personal taste. Some popular companies include Celtx, WriterDuet, and Trelby. My personal preference is Final Draft, which I’ve been using for over 20 years.

Setting

Again, the novel lends itself to more freedom when dealing with the setting of your story. It can include car crashes, explosions, and may span the globe. With a novel you can take your time describing the details of an expanse of land or the rich history of an ancient city. With a play, what you can convey beyond dialogue is minimal.

The main restriction is physical space. You must contain the setting to a stage. Unless the play is a big budget Broadway extravaganza, pyrotechnics, multiple scenery changes, and ornate sets are unrealistic. Rule of thumb is minimal is best. Most often, a stage production will have a hired set designer, so your sole job is to convey the setting you desire through the dialogue and stage directions.

Content

A novel offers you a wonderful opportunity to tell a multi-layered, in depth look at the world through the lens of one character, many characters, or as an observer. A reader can hear inner monologues and passing thoughts of the characters. A novel allows narration to guide a reader through the story, gently pushing and pulling whichever direction you, the writer, intends.

A play relies solely on dialogue and action to convey the story. Every spoken word must count, and unspoken words carry as much weight. I like to think of plays as deep dives into human psychology. Where a novel can be either plot or character driven, a play is, with few exceptions, character driven.

And your character driven story must be succinct. While a novel has the breadth of 400 pages to express the Hero’s Journey, the psychological voyage in a play must take place in approximately 80 pages. Every line of dialogue and every stage direction must directly correlate to a particular character’s conscious or unconscious motives.

End Result

Whether you finish writing your novel or writing your play, please give yourself a pat on the back. It’s a huge accomplishment!

Naturally, your next step is to share your work of art with friends, family, or the world at large. This, too, differs when speaking of novels vs. plays. In the ever-changing landscape of publishing, there are now several outlets to share your book. Self-publishing is a wonderful option for those who are interested in a small batch of copies or for those brave enough to handle the entire process of selling books themselves. Hybrid publishing is another route for those who still would like to maintain control of the book itself but would like help in the physical publishing and distribution. And for those with perseverance, after obtaining an agent, traditional publishing is an option.

For plays, publishing is possible, but it is not the end game. Production is the goal. As with novels, there are many roads to production. I began my career by lending a script to a local community theatre. They did not have to pay a royalty fee, and I was granted live productions to gauge what worked and what didn’t in my writing. It was a win-win for all. Playwrights can submit to local and regional theaters. You may even put sheets up in the backyard, or apartment basement, corral some willing friends, and stage your own low budget (free!) production.

Whether you choose to write a novel or write a play, I wish you joy in telling your story!

Plagarism: HowBig a Problem?

Posted by

0

There is an article on this subject by Joseph Epstein in the July/August of Commentary magazine.

Joseph Epstein has written for Commentary for more than 60 years. His most recent book is Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life (Simon & Schuster).

Joseph Epstein

Mr Epstein says,”After writing for publication for nearly 70 years, I ask myself: Have I ever committed the sin of plagiarism? I hope I haven’t, but I shouldn’t be entirely shocked to learn that somewhere along the way I have. Writers much better known than I have been accused of plagiarism. Among them have been Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Benjamin Franklin. Vladimir Nabokov admitted to “unconscious plagiarism,” as did Helen Keller, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Beatle George Harrison.

No surprise to learn that the greatest amount of plagiarism occurs in schools, in high schools but chiefly in colleges and universities. I’m pleased to report that over 30 years of university teaching I never caught a student plagiarizing in any of my courses. Was I, though, insufficiently on guard? Should I have been more suspicious of that young woman who sat in the back of the classroom scarcely saying a word all quarter long and yet wrote a quite brilliant paper on Joseph Conrad? Or of the young man who, when he did speak generally revealed his ignorance, then wrote a quite good paper on Portrait of a Lady? 

I have been told by colleagues that catching a student in plagiarism can be a complicated experience. Suddenly the student’s fate, at least his or her fate as a student, is in your hands, for to report a student for plagiarism could mean expulsion from the university. 

I was, of course, aware of plagiarism but failed to comprehend the extent of the phenomenon. Roger Kreuz, author of Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, a recent book on the subject, claims to have found so much of it in researching his book that, as he writes, “I must confess that this odyssey has dented my faith in human nature.”

Kreuz, a professor of psychology and dean at the University of Memphis, in scanning the broad fields of plagiarism, reports that he hoped to provide “an exploration of plagiarism’s psychological and cultural aspects [that] can help us make sense of what it is and why it happens so often.” Kreuz’s index, extending from Shakespeare to Martin Luther King Jr., from Martial to Joe Biden, from Jesus (Jesus, for Chrissake!) to H.G. Wells, reads like the table of contents of Who’s Who. The claim against Jesus as a plagiarist was made by a second-century Greek philosopher named Celsus, who argued that Jesus plagiarized Plato. Others, meanwhile, have claimed that Plato himself plagiarized from earlier philosophers. 

In his preface, Kreuz notes, “I’m still surprised by who has engaged in this practice. Yes, this group includes plenty of hacks and students. But they are also joined by the highest elected officials of several countries, as well as Nobel and Pulitzer Prize recipients, bestselling authors and artists, and distinguished faculty at elite universities.” The book’s epigraph is “Plagiarism: it’s not just for mediocrities anymore.”

Plagiarism is the appropriation of the words of another without acknowledgement. While it may be a sin, it is not a crime, though infringement of copyright rights, which constitute real property, can be criminal. How many words are appropriated is crucial in determining true plagiarism. Kreuz quotes the poet Sheenagh Pugh on the point that those who plagiarize generally do not do so only once but are, in effect, repeat offenders. He adds that “the internet has made plagiarism far easier to commit, but it has also made it much easier to recognize.”

Along with standard plagiarism, in which a writer copies another person’s words without acknowledgment and claims them for his own, there is unconscious plagiarism, subconscious plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and what Kreuz calls “Teflon plagiarism,” the last being plagiarism that doesn’t seem in the least to hurt the reputation of the perpetrator. Kreuz’s prime example here is Ronald Reagan. 

Unconscious plagiarism entails committing plagiarism without being aware one is doing so. Mark Twain, Helen Keller, and Vladimir Nabokov serve as notable examples of unconscious plagiarism. In the case of Nabokov, Kreuz adduces a story with the same subject as Lolita, an older man transfixed by a female child, that Nabokov read when a young man in Berlin. He discovers another story the Russian had to have read, this one with the actual title “Lolita,” and still other stories by Salvador Dalí that likely unconsciously influenced the writing of Lolita. Finally, at his death, Nabokov left behind an unfinished novel, translated, edited, and published by his son Dimitri, also about a middle-aged man and a nymphet, which shows among other things Vladimir Nabokov’s obsession with the subject. 

Self-plagiarism exists as well, though it’s an odd charge, since how can one steal from oneself? Kreuz’s first example of it is that of the student who uses the same academic paper for two different courses. Perhaps the most notorious instance of self-plagiarism, noted by Richard Posner in his The Little Book of Plagiarism, was that committed by Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy,who is said to have sent the same love letters to his wife and his mistress. I offer another example—myself. A few months ago, I sent an opinion piece to the Wall Street Journal, only to be told that it was remarkably similar to a piece of mine they had printed seven years earlier—a case, you might say, of self-plagiarism and unconscious plagiarism combined. The greatest self-plagiarizer, surely, is Donald J. Trump, who seems never to tire of giving the same speech, a speech that might carry the title “America Has Never Been Greater Than Under My Presidency, and It Figures Only to Get Better Yet.” 

Still, unlike other forms of plagiarism, self-plagiarism remains for the most part plagiarism without a victim. Self-plagiarism may kick in especially in old age, one of the less pleasant of whose attributes is the slippage if not serious loss of memory. (I have myself in the past month struggled to recall the name of a high school classmate, the actress Celeste Holm, and the Nixon plumber G. Gordon Liddy.)

Punishments for plagiarism differ in different realms. For scholars, they can be serious. In The Little Book of Plagiarism, Posner cites the case of Julius Kirshner, the University of Chicago historian, who published under his own name a book review written by one of his graduate students and was penalized by the university by not being permitted to teach graduate students for the next five years. 

For politicians, plagiarism tends to be viewed as less serious. Since most politicians use speechwriters, it isn’t always clear that the responsibility for their plagiarisms, when they are discovered, is truly theirs. In any case, for politicians, plagiarism doesn’t compare in seriousness, as Kreuz points out, with philandering or financial finagling. Yet, as he also notes, the accusation can be used against politicians by their enemies. Here he cites Senator Rand Paul, in a campaign speech in support of the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, comparing pro-choice advocates to eugenicists in the very same language written in a Wikipedia entry on the subject—a plagiarism happily pointed out by Rachel Maddow. 

Joe Biden was found guilty of plagiarism on more than one occasion, once in law school for copying a paper written by someone else and at other times in his campaign speeches. None of this, though widely known, prevented Barack Obama from choosing him as his vice president or kept Biden himself from becoming our 46th president. For those of us who prefer our heroes pure, the discovery of their plagiarisms, as is the case of Martin Luther King Jr.’s on his doctoral dissertation, comes as sad news. 

Another large realm for plagiarism is the commencement speech. Perhaps this is because there is not all that much beyond clichés that can be said on these occasions. Just now, the great subject for commencement speeches is artificial intelligence, but it, too, will doubtless soon be worn out and devolve into elevated platitudes. I have myself given only one commencement address and am unlikely ever to be called upon to give another, for my presence is sure to arouse the ire of the wokesters and bring out protesters. I have also written in mockery of the honorary degree, part of every college commencement ceremony, which is certain to keep me home during the months of May and June, where I am happy to be.

_____________

While plagiarism is not a crime, for those caught at it, it is a disgrace. As Posner writes, “The stigma of plagiarism seems never to fade completely, not because it is an especially heinous offense but because it is embarrassingly second-rate; its practitioners are pathetic, almost ridiculous.”

The disgrace is easily enough avoided by attributing to its true, or original, author the words appropriated, either through quotation marks or, if the material has been paraphrased, through footnotes or endnotes. Merely changing the words slightly through the use of synonyms—known as Rogetting, after the compiler of the famous Thesaurus—won’t do and can bring on its own complications. Like nearly everyone else, I on occasion turn to Google and Wikipedia to check birth and death dates and other facts used in my own writing. In doing so, I generally attempt to change the wording of material I use. Whether this Rogetting frees me from the charge of plagiarism, I am less than certain, though I hope it does. 

Not all plagiarism is literary. Music can be plagiarized and so can painting. Martha Stewart was accused of plagiarizing recipes for her famous cookbook. Of his nearly 18,000 Peanuts cartoons, Charles Schulz, Kreuz reports, was caught out self-plagiarizing one. Some classical music is said to contain “quotations” from other musicians, but since musical notes do not allow for attributions, why this is not a form of plagiarism is less than clear. When one thinks of the scores of paintings of Mary and Jesus, mother and child, one wonders why all but the first are not acts of plagiarism. 

Then there is inadvertent plagiarism, where one forgets that one had read something elsewhere and that what one writes is one’s own. “A bookkeeping mistake made by one’s mental accountant,” Kreuz calls it. “This can result in a genuine belief that an idea, a phrase, or a melody is the product of one’s own mind instead of someone else’s.” 

Perhaps most complicated of all is the plagiarizing of ideas. On some rare occasions two people—one thinks here of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution—will come upon the same or a highly similar idea at roughly the same time. Others are only too pleased to take up the ideas of someone else and claim them as their own.

Some plagiarisms constitute creative improvement. Both Kreuz and Posner cite Shakespeare here. After quoting from the descriptions of Cleopatra on her barge from both Plutarch and Shakespeare, who appropriated it from Plutarch, Posner notes that “if this is plagiarism, we need more plagiarism.” He prefers to call it “creative imitation.” In this category he adds portions of Tristram Shandy and, closer to our day, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Eliot it was, in his The Sacred Wood, who wrote that “immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” 

As “unrepentant plagiarists,” Roger Kreuz cites Susan Sontag and Bob Dylan. Both, in their different ways, claimed that such appropriations of the words of others—Sontag in her fourth novel, In America, Dylan in his various songs—made possible,à laShakespeare on Plutarch, improvements upon the originals. Dylan’s response to his accusers was “All those evil m——f——s can rot in hell.” Ms. Sontag, more measured (it would be hard not to be), held that on this matter of appropriating other works for one’s own, “there’s a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions.” She has a point. As style is the man (or woman), as Buffon had it, so for the literary, reading is coterminous with actual experience. 

Posner notes, rightly, that creativity is not the same as originality. One can be the former without being the latter. Looking back upon my own decades of writings, I find little original in them. I believe I have acquired a style, or “voice,” as it is often called in academic writing programs. I choose my own words, I deploy them in sentences of my own fashioning, I have my own point of view. But I have set out no new ideas. Many of the ideas I have acquired derive from my reading of those essayists I admire, among them Michel de Montaigne, Matthew Arnold, Max Beerbohm, George Orwell, Michael Oakeshott. I hope that their influence, if not of course their words, turns up in my own essays. Does the influence of other writers, writers better than oneself, constitute yet another form of plagiarism? If so, then perhaps almost all writing is essentially plagiarism. In which case, I say, don’t evade your eyes, just plagiarize. As Tom Lehrer put it.

Bookstore Boom vs Literary Decline

Posted by

0

There is an intriguing article on the Literary Hub website by Ellen O’Connell Whittet, dated 16 June 2026 in which she explores the above contradiction.

Ellen O’Connell Whittet is  an essayist and continuing lecturer who teaches in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her debut novel, Book of Hours (Dzanc), is forthcoming in 2026. Her memoir, What You Become in Flight (Melville House, 2020) was named a most-anticipated book by Refinery 29 and Chicago Review. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She co-hosts the podcast Good Moms on Paper with writers Annie Hartnett and Tessa Fontaine.

Ellen O’Connell Whittet

She says, “I was standing in line at Chaucer’s Books, my local indie, when it occurred to me that the line was longer than usual. This has been happening regularly enough that I’ve stopped being surprised—Chaucer’s business is downright defiant. But just that afternoon I had read something about declining literacy rates, and the cognitive dissonance was hard to shake. I mentioned to the woman at the register that I was glad to see the place so full. “I keep waiting to read the worst news ever in the local paper,” I said, meaning the store’s closure.

She didn’t hesitate. “Not gonna happen,” she said twice, shaking her head.

I wanted to believe her. I still do. But I’ve been turning that contrast over ever since.

Here are the two facts, sitting in apparent contradiction. Reading scores for American high school seniors recently fell to their lowest point since the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) first administered the assessment in 1992. Only 35 percent of seniors tested as proficient in reading. Nearly a third scored below basic—meaning they couldn’t reliably locate details in a text to understand its meaning. The decline precedes the pandemic and is steepest among students who were already struggling. Meanwhile, the American Booksellers Association reports that the number of independent bookstores in the United States has grown by 70% since 2020, from roughly 1,900 to more than 3,200. In 2025 alone, 422 new independently owned stores opened nationwide. Barnes & Noble opened more than 50 new locations in 2024 and has plans for 60 more. The line at Chaucer’s, it turns out, is part of a national phenomenon.

One version of the story is about access and class. The bookstore boom is a story about a certain educated, culturally aspirational demographic doing what it has always done, while the literacy crisis unfolds elsewhere, namely in under-resourced schools, rural communities, and households without the discretionary income to browse a charming bookshop on a Saturday afternoon. Jen Lemberger, co-owner of Chaucer’s, makes this point plainly. “Books are a luxury item for many,” she told me. She noted that the bookstore resurgence also reflects demographics—millennials and Gen Z, the highest users of libraries, are now at ages where they have the means and motivation to open small businesses and spend on books. Nicole Vasquez, who works at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, corroborates the geographic dimension. “Those living in rural parts of the country who don’t have access to bookstores or libraries have lower literacy rates,” she told me. “I would say that is a lot of America—more than people think.”

The numbers bear this out. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 88% of college graduates say they’ve read a book in the past year, compared to 60% of those with a high school education or less.

But there’s something else happening too that complicates both the optimistic and the pessimistic readings. Miranda Sanchez, owner of Epilogue Books in Chapel Hill, notes that the boom is heavily concentrated in niche stores—forty-three romance-specialty shops opened last year alone—and in bookstores that function primarily as third spaces, places to be seen and to belong. The nature of what’s selling has shifted too. Sprayed-edge limited editions bought and re-bought for the shelf, not necessarily to read; BookTok-fueled titles that sell out for months on the strength of a viral video.

The boom, Sanchez says, is “often centered around a book as a product, not as literature.” Books carry a cultural prestige that television has never had, according to Sanchez, a cachet that makes them a powerful vehicle for identity-making. It’s why influencers and actors want to become authors even after they’ve already achieved fame. When the aesthetic of literary life becomes the point, something about the relationship between books and the expansion of one’s inner life shifts. The bookstore stays full. The tote bags are beautiful. And it becomes harder to notice what’s changed.

Sarah Arnold, at Parnassus Books in Nashville, offers what I find to be the most humanly persuasive explanation for why people are flooding into bookstores even as reading scores fall: loneliness. “Technology and social media promised to bring us together,” she told me, “but more often it feels like they siphon each of us into a solitary lifestyle, and it’s hurting us.” Bookstores are filling a social void. People can come to Parnassus on almost any given night for an author event or a book club meeting, or simply browse and strike up a conversation. This helps explain how the bookstore boom and the literacy crisis can coexist.

People are coming for community and the experience of being around people who care about the same things they care about. The act of reading, which is slow, solitary, and at times, demanding, is a related but separate transaction. And yet, for all the talk of bookstores as gathering places, only 7% of American adults participated in a book club in the past year, suggesting that what people are seeking may be the feeling of literary community more than its sustained practice.

Mike Gustafson, co-owner of Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, frames the phenomenon in explicitly political terms. Gustafson believes people are “desperately trying to support environments of books and literacy” while watching the infrastructure of public reading get dismantled. He’s not wrong. School librarians are being pressured or removed. Library budgets are first to be cut  when municipalities face deficits. California’s adult literacy programs, Lemberger notes, are not guaranteed line items in the state budget. In this reading, people flooding into bookstores may represent something more than lifestyle preference—a kind of cultural self-defense, a community’s attempt to preserve the infrastructure of reading at the precise moment that infrastructure is being defunded elsewhere. The bookstore boom and the literacy crisis may not be the contradictions I originally thought they were, but symptoms of the same underlying pressure.

The optimistic version of this story is that bookstores can do some of the work that schools and libraries are being prevented from doing. Arnold talks about adults who started reading during the pandemic and found, in places like Parnassus, a community that extended and deepened that habit. Vasquez credits TikTok with giving Gen Z a genuine entry point into reading culture. If a twenty-two-year-old comes in for a romantasy and leaves with a staff recommendation that surprises her, that is the system working.

But the less optimistic version is harder to dismiss. If a third of American high school seniors cannot reliably comprehend what they read, then the customers filling bookstores on a Saturday afternoon are largely not the people at risk, and the beautiful new bookstore opening in a walkable urban neighborhood is not reaching the communities where the crisis is worst.

I still believe the line at my local indie represents the desire for community and the experience of being somewhere that takes the written word seriously. Lemberger, for her part, is cautiously hopeful but honest. According to her, “As economics change and political policies are implemented, there is definitely concern about folks adjusting their spending habits and focusing on needs such as housing, food, and health over that new book they may want. We’ll see what the landscape shows in two to three years.” The bookstore boom is happening, but it’s fragile in ways the attendance numbers don’t reveal. Meanwhile, the literacy crisis is not fragile at all. I believe the bookseller when she says Chaucer’s isn’t going anywhere. But the line at a well-stocked bookstore in a prosperous coastal city is not the same thing as a reading culture, and we should be careful not to mistake one for the other.”

Can Men Take the Female POV on Sex?

Posted by

0

There is an article in the Telegraph on 14 May 2026 in which Claire Allfree interviews Francis Spufford about his latest book.

Claire Allfree is an arts journalist. She writes regular book reviews for The Times and for The Telegraph.

Claire says, “Francis Spufford is in danger of choking on his ginger beer. We’re sitting on the outdoor terrace at Soho House, and I’ve asked him about the vast quantities of sex that feature in his latest novel Nonesuch. A lavishly imagined speculative history, it depicts a Blitz-eviscerated London under threat from an occult Nazi plot to assassinate Winston Churchill, and is told from the point of view of Iris, a 23-year-old female clerk with a weakness for “handsome idiots”. An older male novelist, writing enthusiastic sex scenes from the perspective of a younger woman? Quelle horreur.

“I’m very aware of the possibilities of falling into umpteen varieties of creepiness or tawdriness,” Spufford agrees. “I’m a balding 62-year-old man.” It’s a warm day, but beneath his trademark kente cap, he’s starting to blush. “I read John Updike’s [famously lusty] Couples while I was writing Nonesuch, to see if I could learn anything from it. Instead I realised why David Foster Wallace described Updike as ‘a penis with a thesaurus’. It’s not because men are inevitably doomed writing sex. It’s because of the way Updike wrote about it.”

UK author Francis Spufford
Author Francis Spufford’s latest novel Nonesuch is told from the point of view of Iris, a 23-year-old female clerk with a weakness for ‘handsome idiots’ Credit: Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

Francis Spufford is in danger of choking on his ginger beer. We’re sitting on the outdoor terrace at Soho House, and I’ve asked him about the vast quantities of sex that feature in his latest novel Nonesuch. A lavishly imagined speculative history, it depicts a Blitz-eviscerated London under threat from an occult Nazi plot to assassinate Winston Churchill, and is told from the point of view of Iris, a 23-year-old female clerk with a weakness for “handsome idiots”. An older male novelist, writing enthusiastic sex scenes from the perspective of a younger woman? Quelle horreur.

“I’m very aware of the possibilities of falling into umpteen varieties of creepiness or tawdriness,” Spufford agrees. “I’m a balding 62-year-old man.” It’s a warm day, but beneath his trademark kente cap, he’s starting to blush. “I read John Updike’s [famously lusty] Couples while I was writing Nonesuch, to see if I could learn anything from it. Instead I realised why David Foster Wallace described Updike as ‘a penis with a thesaurus’. It’s not because men are inevitably doomed writing sex. It’s because of the way Updike wrote about it.”

“I had rules,” Spufford continues gamely. “I only wrote through Iris’s gaze. I still don’t know what Iris looks like – I do have a good idea of what her boyfriend Greg’s naked body looks like.”

Where does he stand on the argument that male writers ought not to write from the perspective of a woman at all? “I think that literature is f—ed if we can’t do a point of view that is remote from that of the author. It may go wrong, but the risk of it going horribly wrong is one of the risks that literature needs to take. We should simply work very hard when we do it.”

Spufford is known as one of Britain’s most idiosyncratic and delightfully daring writers. Where other contemporary novelists are constrained by the rigours of social realism, Spufford riffs on genre and subject with dazzling ease. He reinvigorated period fiction with his Costa-winning debut, the delectable caper Golden Hill (2016), while in his Booker-nominated Light Perpetual (2021), he played with metaphysics to restore life to five London children killed in 1944 by a V2 bomb

Nonesuch, published earlier this year, is Spufford’s first venture into fantasy. I normally struggle to accept angels in fiction, but Spufford’s phantasmagoric descriptions of a war-shattered London that’s haunted by, among others, the spirit Raphael, are intoxicating. It also features fascistic demonic orders, elusive shape-shifting monsters and time-travel mechanisms.

“I wanted to write about the Blitz,” he says, “without resorting to stereotypes. The unearthliness of fantasy brought out the unearthliness of the Blitz in ways that [complemented] the sense that an absolutely literal clash of good and evil was taking place at that historical moment.”

Spufford is a practising Christian, and is married to the Dean of Chelmsford, Jessica Martin. Having grown up an atheist, he came to the faith during his 30s, following what he had previously termed “a classic male f—-up” (the nature of which he has always refused to discuss). “My belief can’t help but be in my novels,” he says, “because something as fundamental as [faith] colours your basic understanding of what human beings are. But I feel very strongly that my books need to work for [everyone].”

On one level, Nonesuch is a critical response to CS Lewis’s allegorical Chronicles of Narnia. Iris, for instance, is a sexually confident, modern incarnation of poor Susan Pevensie, whom Lewis notoriously bars from Narnia in the final book because of her interest in “nylons and lipstick”. Spufford adores Lewis, but on this point, he demurs. “It’s hard not to think that the way Lewis denies Susan the happy ending stems from a certain bachelor misogyny. People have worked so hard to find another excuse for Lewis, but that’s kind of what it is. So I wanted to speak up for Susan.”

A few years ago, he even wrote a sequel to The Magician’s Nephew. It was, he said, “for the pleasure of my 10-year-old self, who longed for there to be one more Chronicle”. Alas, the Lewis estate has taken umbrage and the book remains unpublished, mired in legal difficulties. “I have hopes that – especially if the [2027] Greta Gerwig film adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew does well – there may yet be a chance of a rethink. And if not, the books go out of copyright in the UK in 2034.”

Spufford is also chairman of judges for the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize, which will be awarded on May 20 to an imaginative book “in which story-telling, fiction and non-fiction writing combine in an original and exciting way”. Set up last year, the prize is named in honour of the late Polish theatre director and writer, whom Spufford describes as a “Tristram Shandy-loving, Stanisław Lem-reading, pulp science fiction aficionado”. The six shortlisted books resist easy classification: they rove between imagined documentary, essayistic fiction and what Spufford calls a “fascinatingly odd” memoir of Albanian history. He adds that at least two of the entries are “nothing like anything British culture has produced in the last 30 years”.

Spufford was himself a form-busting non-fiction writer, and only turned to fiction relatively late, in his 50s. Does he think modern British non-fiction – which has suffered an alarming drop in sales in recent years – lacks daring? (Only two of the shortlisted authors, Olivia Laing and Thea Lenarduzzi, are even partly British, and three of the five books are published by small independent houses.)

“I’m too old to believe that what’s happening in publishing now says anything definitive about what publishers want or where the culture is going,” he says diplomatically. “But I don’t really believe that there is a mass of fabulous stuff out there that doesn’t make it in because of [risk-averse] gatekeepers. I think that some things are fashionable sometimes and other things are fashionable at other times, but that the good stuff always makes its way out.

“I’m also sceptical about the idea that something has to be universally celebrated,” he adds. “Maybe things only need to find their right nook and cranny to thrive in.”

What does keep Spufford up at night is AI. “It’s not just our growing attention-deficit problem. There is also, coming down the line, a major prose-production problem. You can’t become a superlative writer without having first been a crap and imitative one. You only learn how to be good after however many hours of practice. The idea that AI can mechanise the production of the mediocre, and still produce people who can do the excellent and the marvellous is an illusion – a writer has to pass through the mediocre in order to get to the marvellous.

“But why would people do that if  AI can do that for them? I’m afraid I predict that literature will be destroyed by dribbling morons in about 15 years.”

I tell him that many people fear the same. He compares AI to “the writing machines in the basement of the Ministry in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which produce an unending diet of porn, romances and adventure stories. For me, there’s hope in the fact that people like Jack Reacher novels, because nobody else has offered the idea of a huge, burly, ultra-violent protector in the way Lee Child has”.”

Publishers vs AI

Posted by

0

The Guardian reported on May 6 that major publishers were suing Meta for copyright.

The article said, “Five major publishers sued Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant misused their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence models.

Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill, as well as author Scott Turow, alleged in the proposed class-action complaint that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without permission to train its Llama large language models to respond to human prompts.

“Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” Maria Pallante, the president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

Meta has denied any wrongdoing.

“AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesperson responded in a statement on Tuesday. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.“

The publishers allege that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks to scientific articles to novels including The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown for its AI training. They asked the court for permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and an unspecified amount of monetary damages.

The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement. All of the pending cases are likely to revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the matter issued diverging rulings last year. Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one of the cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of authors $1.5bn to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged piracy. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement as well.”

Story-telling bridges

Posted by

0

Elizabeth Sims has an article on the Writer’s Digest dated 18 February 2026 which deals with the use of bridge characters in writing.She is the bestselling author of seven popular novels in two series, including The Rita Farmer Mysteries and The Lillian Byrd Crime series.

Elizabeth Sims

Elizabeth said: “My grandmother had a rough life, raising six children during the Depression. She worked as a charwoman and sold radios door-to-door. I wish I could tell you she saved every nickel to feed the kids, but, well, some of it went to a different, strange, purpose. 

Now and then, she’d set off on foot to the fortune tellers in the city. They charged money, of course. My uncles considered that money wasted. My mother, however, understood, if only a little. No one knows what the fortune tellers said, but my mom sensed that they gave my grandma something of value. 

What was it? Hope? Reassurance? Perhaps only friendly company over a cup of tea, which would have been a respite from household chaos? 

People said the fortune tellers could see into the future, and thereby help you navigate it to best advantage. They were mediums, serving as a bridge between bleak real life and something better. Mind you, no fortune teller worth her salt would agree with the doctor who just told you your cancer is inoperable. No! Things will get better. Maybe even miraculously! 

When I read and write fiction, I often consider the bridge characters who populated the secret part of my grandma’s life. And I think it would be good for writers to become more aware of the idea of bridge characters. When we examine something with intention and care, we can begin to see things we hadn’t noticed before, and then we can make use of what we’ve learned. 

To connect is to imply separation as a precondition. That right there is a cool thing to contemplate while we’re chomping our morning coffee. How might we define a bridge character in fiction? Simply a character who spans two worlds, with some effect on the action and other characters.

If you want to get a character to a place they just can’t get to on their own, consider a bridge character. Example: A respected judge has gotten in deep with gambling debts. He can’t pay, and neither can he go and intimidate his creditors with a baseball bat. But one day, he adjudicates a case of a lowlife with connections to organized crime. He lets the guy off easy, then gets in touch to ask a return favor. One favor leads to another, one contact leads to another, one ethical breach leads to another.  The lowlife serves as a convenient bridge between the judge’s clean hands and the dirty world of the streets. Eventually, the judge might be forced to hit the streets to save his life or his family … and it will feel real and compelling. 

Bridge characters can be used to create tension. Here’s a world. Here’s somebody, all of a sudden, who doesn’t seem to belong in this world. Hmm, why is that? What are they doing here? Maybe we shall see. No doubt we will see; I know and trust this author to play a straight game with me. So, we will learn more about this character … but when? For now, we can only speculate.

Messenger 

A messenger essentially is a bridge character. Almost every one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories begins with a messenger (a client with a problem) who serves as a bridge between Holmes and nefarious criminals and their deeds. 

A simple envelope, sitting there on the dressing table… 

Servants 

Servants can be terrific bridge characters. Let’s say you need your main character, who happens to be a countess, to make contact in secret with a humble blacksmith miles away. It’s not going to make sense to have her just saddle up and ride cross-country to his place. She’d be seen, even if she tries to disguise herself leaving her own house. People would ask questions. She needs a bridge. 

So, the countess directs her maid to carry a parcel to the smithy. Splendid! Look what we can do! First off, is the maid to be trusted? What do we know of her? Does she know what’s in the package? What might her own secret objectives be, and why? What obstacles might get in her way? What helpers might appear? Do we need a subplot here? Do we want one? Could be good.

Linked Bridges 

As we’ve seen, in science fiction and fantasy, bridge characters can literally span worlds: useful when you have to keep two populations of characters separate. A cadet from the local space academy can drunkenly steal a small craft and then get marooned in the next galaxy over. Survival challenge! Exchange of folkways! Revelation of valuable resources, information! Forbidden love! The overlord’s daughter stows away on the return journey! Wonderful stuff. 

Bridge characters don’t have to go solo; you can link them together. Say you need to get your space cadet from Galaxy A to Galaxy D, but in his world, his ship can’t make it that far. So yeah, here comes a possible ally. This new character lives in Galaxy B, where they’ve figured out how to use better technology to get over to Galaxy D. Trouble is, Galaxy B has been at war with Galaxy D for many time units, and a trip there in a ship associated with Galaxy B would be terribly risky. 

Linked bridges can also function in non-physical ways. See the next point. 

Philosophical Bridges 

Bridge characters are great at connecting ideas and emotions. Philosophical, moral, political, metaphorical. I like to call a certain set of people “peacemakers:” therapists, clergy, spiritualists. The peacemaker can bridge any number of characters. Think of a family therapist, who works to help everybody understand one another, bridging gaps by guiding clients to communicate honestly and with some care. A trusted counselor or clergyperson can be the repository of countless secrets, as well: rich fodder for plot turns. 

You can easily adjust an existing character to be a philosophical bridge. One good deep conversation while dressing for combat or branding the cattle or shutting down the reactor, can connect a character with new ideas, a better (or worse) conscience, renewed zeal for an old cause. 

Unexpected Bridges 

Want to push boundaries, get wild? A family can be a bridge character. An organization. A SWAT team. A shared needle. Think of sex workers and their johns, think of the fortune tellers, the town sleazeballs, stray dogs. Can a place be a bridge character? Sure, in a way. How about a spot where strangers regularly brush shoulders: a concert hall, the park where guys cruise specifically on Wednesdays at lunchtime, the farm market.

Adapting Old Bridges 

Be sure to study old models and rip them off. Remember the Valkyries? Think what you could do with a modern one! Turn it into a prison escape! “Ronaldo’s in the state pen for life [a living death], but he didn’t do it. OK, maybe he did, but I love him! I’ve got bus tickets to Florida [paradise]. I’m getting him out. Tonight! You gonna help me, or what?” 

A Note of Caution 

Take care, and be aware, of the stereotypical “charmed minority” or disabled person. In 2001 the film director Spike Lee coined the term “the magical Negro” to describe a stock character imbued with special gifts or moral authority, who by means of their insight or even mystical powers rescues the white folks or solves problems for them. (Employed by white authors and directors to, presumably, signal their open-mindedness in a cheap way.) 

Even if you haven’t encountered the term before, you can instantly understand it and bring to mind examples such as John Coffey in Stephen King’s The Green Mile and Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Consider also the fairly numerous blind prophets in ancient mythology (they can’t see, but they foresee) as well as the “noble savage” trope. 

Then there’s the mentally different, the character disabled in one way but specially enhanced in another, such as the guy who can’t button his coat properly but can compose a symphony in an hour. 

I’ve heard it argued that Harper Lee’s Boo Radley (To Kill a Mockingbird) fits this category, but I disagree. He’s just a shy guy who prefers to live behind closed doors and do the right thing. The children—imaginative, naïve, and careless—build Boo into a demon. 

Boo is a bridge from dark to light. He emerges to do good in the dark, then emerges to the bright light of the children’s world to save them and to powerfully facilitate their maturing. That done, he returns to his world, guided, childlike, by the child who is now just about as much of a grownup as she’ll ever need to be. 

A non-minority, able-bodied, neurotypical author must be cautious about these things, but not to the detriment of the work. As a white, able-bodied, neurotypical author, I’ve written heroic minority and disabled characters as well as non-heroic ones. As long as you can reasonably defend your choices, I say you’re good. But you won’t please everybody. 

Bridges—whether wood, stone, or steel—are functional and beautiful. We’re drawn to them. There’s usually a pretty good view from a bridge! Consider all that as well, when you work with your characters and their wonderful complexities! 

Further guidance  

Questions to prompt bridge characters:

  • Is something lacking your story, but you don’t know what? Honest thought here. Write down what’s worrying you. 
  • Is there a relationship between two characters that somehow isn’t right? 
  • Do you have a character who’s alienated, out of touch, trying to reach something? 
  • Action lagging? Maybe a bridge character can foment a subplot. 
  • Drama feeling tepid? Let your mind wander around that problem before trying to get specific. Make notes.
  • Identify two elements that need bridging. Two people? A person and a place? 
  • Consider the current power dynamics between them. Who’s superior, who’s inferior? Can you invert that? Might that be cool?  
  • If you’re really stuck, start with the most basic bridge character: a stranger who comes to town. Blank canvas! 
  • You got this.”

Does Detail Matter?

Posted by

0

Jennifer Shoop has an article dared April 17, 2026on Writer’s Digest about why detail is important in writing. Jennifer Shoop is the creator of Magpie, the literary lifestyle publication and platform that inspires women to live thoughtful, well-curated lives, inviting self-discovery. Magpie features a daily blog with an engaged readership covering a wide range of lifestyle topics, including motherhood, friendship, love, literature, and beyond. Jennifer holds an advanced degree in literature from Georgetown University and resides in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and two children. Her debut book SMALL WONDERS: A Field Guide to Life’s Joys is available wherever books are sold.

Jennifer Shoop

Jennifer says, “I am disciplined as a writer. I treat my writing like a 9-to-5 job, and I show up daily, determined to shake hands with the empty page no matter how hungry for sleep or depleted of inspiration I am. I do this because the only way to shrink the maddening gap between my aesthetic ambition and my current ability is to try over and over again.

Writing is, after all, a practice. No one is born a good writer; we work at this by listening, observing the techniques of others, laminating, red-lining, going back to square one, drafting badly and then well and then badly again, finding the right word, shedding the wrong one, understanding that all of it is a thinly-veiled search for self-knowledge. The blinking cursor is, then, like a call to the start line: a chance to limber up, strengthen muscle, fine-tune the hook shot.

However, even though I treat writing like a vigorous exercise, I find it difficult to the point of debilitating to focus on broad-trunk elements like structure and format and theme. These almost always emerge for me in the process of writing, and are the result of editing after I know what I’m writing about. I find it much clearer to approach the page wearing an aptitude for detail. I might not yet know the shape of the essay or the arc of the story, but I can dial in on the fulcra of word choice and imagery and manipulate those with care, and then watch as tiny ecosystems of thought and feeling expand, moss-like, around them, and almost without effort. A well-chosen phrase is like a seed watered and left to bloom on its own.

And I think this is for a few reasons, some technical and some abstract. The first is that when I am straining for a specific detail, I find that I sieve out the inessential, and leave readers with just what they need. Strangely, perhaps, the more exacting the example, the more accessible the writing becomes. Perhaps this is because we leave less room for doubt or improvisation on the part of the reader. We tell them about the blue room with the salt-stained paint and the patchwork quilt and the gardenia and grief in the air, and they follow us to that room with those credentials. They sit with us there and cry or watch the weather in the window or finger the quilted coverlet.

I also believe that readers implicitly trust a detail. Mary Oliver may never have seen a starling or a hummingbird or a flicker, but the way she writes about those birds, with eggshell-delicate anthropomorphosis, it is nearly impossible to doubt her. (Of the flicker, in her fantastic poem “Spring,” Oliver writes: “My, in his / black-freckled vest, bay body with / red trim and sudden chrome / underwings, he is / dapper.” Can there be any question as to her creative authority on this bird? I feel I am watching it with her, charmed equally by its dashing figure and Oliver’s silhouette of it.) There is a sense, then, that the more specific the prose, the more trustworthy the writing becomes. There is a proximity to truth or at least to the lived experience of something that feels like it, and this is important, because we can paddle a long way out on a good rapport with our readers.

From a more technical standpoint, good, round writing is attentive to the rhythm and mouthfeel of each sentence, which are only malleable if we are hyper-specific with diction. Do the words jangle like the cut of keys, or do they chime gently against one another, wind-blown and wandering? Do they trickle-trackle like creekwater, or do they stand still in the cold earth? The singular way I’ve learned to play in that soil is by studying each word carefully and asking for or rejecting alternates. The process is like sifting through paint swatches: that one reads a little too blue; this one is too on-the-nose.

I make a game of word acquisition for this purpose. I love to thumb through writer’s dictionaries and will reference technical literature (for farm equipment, for astrophysics) if an analogy calls for it. You would not believe the broad play spaces I have found at the rainbow’s end of these hunts for the specific, the way a highly technical term like Gamma Velorum (a quadruple star system in the constellation Vela) can draw a plain-clothed sentence into the musical and luminous. So the specific is about sound, too, about how loudly or quietly or cacophonously or melodically it can set the word echoing.

Finally, from the writer’s side, and perhaps this is laziness in fine clothing, I find it a tremendous relief to know that my task is to write earnestly from the narrow aperture of my own small straits. I am not aspiring to write about gods or the gates of horn and ivory, of which I know nothing. But I can, with care and focus, unearth the godliness in my own backyard: the Angelus of the sunup bird, the canticle of the crepe myrtles that bloom in June in my Maryland suburb.”

It’s about being a clever wordsmith!

Post publication alteration of books

Posted by

0

There was quite a long article in the April 12 edition of the Sunday Telegraph which discussed in detail the alteration of children’s E-books without readers, of even the authors being aware of the changes. I am not able to find the original, which was quite critical of publishers. Instead, there is a shorter version which I found on PressReadeer.com which includes some of the original text written by Liam Kelly. I quote from the shorter version below. The full length version has disappeared, and does not even appear in his list of Telegraph articles – perhaps because publishers objected to it.The original title was “Publishers are altering children’s books on the sly”.

Liam Kelly is a senior culture writer and covers the full sweep of arts and entertainment, from literary prizes to Eurovision. He reported live from Oasis’s reunion gigs and played The Traitors on location in Scotland with Claudia Winkleman. Liam has been shortlisted for a number of awards. He has even won a few.

Liam Kelly

“Updated edi­tions of nov­els have been around for almost as long as books have been prin­ted en masse. Many print edi­tions will include details such as when a book was first pub­lished, and when the edi­tion you are read­ing was prin­ted; some will say whether any­thing has been changed, giv­ing read­ers a heads-up. And every­body knows, thanks to a 2023 Tele­graph exposé, how Roald Dahl’s work has been severely bowd­ler­ised.

But in the era of the E-book, nov­els sud­denly seem wor­ry­ingly fun­gible. They live in a cloud com­put­ing sys­tem; they can be tweaked at any time, for any reason, without you – the reader who bought the book – being aler­ted.

“I do tend to think that once something’s been writ­ten, that’s what it is and it’s what we should accept,” says David Fick­ling, the founder of the eponym­ous chil­dren’s pub­lisher, whose authors include Philip Pull­man. He’s scorn­ful of pub­lish­ers who try and – as with the cack-handed Pretty Little Liars edits – fail to get down with the kids. “We all make the mis­take of overthink­ing that we know what chil­dren want,” he says. “We can remem­ber what we wanted when we were chil­dren. I can remem­ber what I wanted, but that’s not the same as what an eight-year-old wants now.”

Industry sources say that any updates would usu­ally be done in agree­ment with the author. But that isn’t always the case. RL Stine – who wrote the mul­ti­mil­lion­selling Goose­bumps series of hor­ror nov­els – reacted with, well, hor­ror when it was revealed in 2023 that his work had been “san­it­ised” without his input. In Dahl style, one fat char­ac­ter went from being “plump” to “cheer­ful”; “crazy” became “silly”; a char­ac­ter who was described as hav­ing “at least six chins” turned into one who was “at least six feet six”. And the text was also silently made con­tem­por­ary: a Walk­man was replaced by an iPod, lest read­ers be flum­moxed by the idea of a cas­sette.

Lois Duncan, the author of the 1973 best­seller I Know What You Did Last Sum­mer, had in the years before her death in 2016 made some such revi­sions her­self. “I loved going through the nov­els,” she said in 2010, “and giv­ing the char­ac­ters cell phones and com­puters, and chan­ging their clothes so they were no longer wear­ing poly­es­ter pant­suits. And of course I changed the dia­logue slightly so that it soun­ded more con­tem­por­ary.”

Jonny Geller, the chief exec­ut­ive of the lead­ing lit­er­ary agency Curtis Brown, tells me that he doesn’t like this habit of ret­ro­spect­ive book fid­dling. “Even a novel set in the 1990s should be accur­ate,” he says. “How are we ever going to look back and know what it really was like to live in that time, if we keep try­ing to go after the atten­tion span of a very young per­son who doesn’t know much?”

Geller points to the surge in pop­ular­ity for David Nich­olls’s 2009 novel One Day, after Net­flix released a 2024 TV adapt­a­tion that remained faith­ful to the book’s ori­ginal 1990s set­ting. The novel, he says, had been “a big suc­cess among young people. I think they rev­elled in the period before phones and email. So I think it’s pos­sible to attract young read­ers… to fic­tion that’s older than 20 years and not have to update it.” To do oth­er­wise, he adds, is “pat­ron­ising, and actu­ally quite dam­aging about our per­cep­tion of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions and the world they lived in”.

For some authors, the changes are per­sonal. Stephen King released a “com­plete and uncut” edi­tion of The Stand in 1990, 12 years after the post-apo­ca­lyptic fantasy was ori­gin­ally pub­lished. Partly, this was because King’s pub­lisher had ori­gin­ally cut 400 pages from his manuscript; by now, he was an apex nov­el­ist and could rein­state large parts of the book. But he also took the oppor­tun­ity to shift the set­ting from 1980 to 1990, and made ref­er­ence to the Aids pan­demic and Madonna hits.

And in some lit­er­at­ure aimed at young adults, the changes are even use­ful. Take Are You There God? It’s Me, Mar­garet, Judy Blume’s much-loved com­ing-of-age novel. It was first pub­lished in 1970, and much of the story centres on the anxi­et­ies of a girl in early adoles­cence; she deals with her first peri­ods by using belts with san­it­ary nap­kins, which were com­mon at the time. After the advent and pop­ular­isa­tion of adhes­ive pads in the 1980s, Blume decided to update the book to reflect the change in real-world con­sumer habits, so as not to con­fuse or ali­en­ate future audi­ences.

Then again, there are times when this sort of tinker­ing badly back­fires. In 2010, Hachette made a great show of “sens­it­ively and care­fully” updat­ing Enid Blyton’s Fam­ous Five nov­els in order to make them “time­less”.

Blyton’s 1940s ref­er­ences to “house­mis­tress”, “awful swot­ter”, “mother and father” and “school tunic” became “teacher”, “book­worm”, “mum and dad” and “uni­form”, respect­ively. Even “jolly japes” was con­sidered a term too obscure for mod­ern chil­dren to grasp, while Anne’s “dolls” became “ted­dies” – lest she be seen as being too girly.

But they may have under­es­tim­ated young read­ers – or the par­ents and grand­par­ents buy­ing the books. Six years later, the pub­lish­ing house was forced to con­cede that the new ver­sions “didn’t work”. With the excep­tion of some “offens­ive” (ie racist) terms, they rein­stated Blyton’s prose as she had writ­ten it.”

While there may be a financial incentive for a publisher to alter a novel, at least they should obtain the author’s permission!

Writers, leave AI alone!

Posted by

0

There is an article in yesterday’s Telegraph by Cal Revely-Calder with a title similar to the above, which, for once, puts the shoe on the other foot. Instead of complaining about AI invading the creative space, it objects to those who admit AI to the literary space.

Cal Revely-Calder is the literary editor of the Telegraph.

He said, “Self-respect, Joan Didion once wrote, cannot be faked. It depends on “a sense of one’s intrinsic worth”. You can pretend or lie or dissemble if you want to boost your reputation, but in the end you’ll always lack “what was once called character”.

This thought occurs to me whenever – and these days it’s pretty often – I see someone in the literary world stand accused of secretly using AI. Recently, for those alleged sins, the novelist Mia Ballard has had her second book pulled from shelves; the politician Matt Goodwin has had his state-of-Britain polemic castigated; and the critic Alex Preston has had a book review near-disowned by the New York Times.

Alex Preston

All three have confessed to some degree of AI use and, to me, none of the confessions are good enough. Ballard blamed a human editor she had hired to revise her novel, though you might expect a novelist to check her own final draft. Preston blamed himself, claiming he had been struggling to meet the NYT’s demand – a modest 1,000 words – and, in desperation, had resorted to help from AI, which plagiarised a piece in the Guardian. Again, Preston seems not to have checked.

Goodwin has been more defensive. Confronted by critics who claimed that his new book, Suicide of a Nation, was full of ersatz quotations, dubious claims and incorrect facts, he retorted that the detractors were partly wrong and partly missing the point. After all, his core thesis – that migration is destroying Britain  – was untouched; some “errors and typos” were inevitable if you self-published to avoid the “woke” publishing industry; and his opponents were “Lefties and losers” anyway. Goodwin insists that he was working from notes and did not use AI to write one word, merely (as he wrote in the Spectator) “to interrogate data”.

Matt Goodwin, academic-turned-politician, has admitted using AI ‘to interrogate data’ for his new book Suicide of a Nation Credit: Paul Cooper

But even if we believe him, and charge only Preston and Ballard with subcontracting their work to AI, something in the culture is clearly amiss. To use an AI tool may be wise if your job involves crunching data sets or summoning figures – though you would be advised to check the robot’s homework – and it is probably true that, in such empirical areas, its use will become society’s norm. To use such a tool if your job is to write, whether creatively or critically, misunderstands your brief. Writing is thinking. They are inseparable processes. Circumvent them and you may as well not have bothered. Readers are human beings, and they want human thoughts and feelings to be expressed.

This applies, to be clear, to non-fiction as well as fiction. Short of being a pure list of dates or statistics, any book of any genre requires a guiding intelligence. Writing and reading are parallel ways of touching another mind, another soul. That is what you, the reader, are doing now. People can use AI for computation or research, but if they use AI to write one per cent of their work, as Ballard and Preston certainly did – and, again, Matt Goodwin strongly denies it – they have abrogated one per cent of the essence that makes them a human being. Morality confers on us basic obligations; one of those is treating humans, ourselves and others, as creatures worthy of dignity. To filter yourself through a robot that cannot “know” anything, that just blends other people’s books into an oracular mulch – the plagiarism device on your phone – is to insult everyone involved.

You may think this sounds moralistic. Well, good. Publishing, like fast food or arms manufacturing, is an industry, and it will function amorally, by supply and demand unless someone takes the trouble to care and shape what it does. Hence we need people – editors, booksellers and, yes, writers – to preserve, for no reason greater than feeling and taste, the human element.

Without that preservation – and corners of Amazon already look this way – AI-created writing will extract and remix the real thing, then remix itself, in an ouroboros of slop. We will be drawing on data, past tense, to generate the future, and that way stagnation lies. Genres will calcify; mistakes will multiply. And the tide is rising. Talk to anyone behind the scenes, from agents to publishers, and you will hear that AI-written submissions are pouring onto their desks. The literary agency Curtis Brown complained last week that harried agents were, in turn, feeding submissions into ChatGPT to give them summaries, without the writer’s consent.

But that is the cost of convenience, the ruling lifestyle of our age. Why do anything difficult, complex or slow when you can get a machine to do it on your behalf? If this question seems genuine to you, and you are a writer, please stop. Do literally anything else. Because good writing is extremely difficult. Ask any novelist or critic worth their salt. It involves introspection and false starts and revisions, and interventions from editors, at least if you want to do it well; and the final product will comprise, however half-remembered and half-buried, every single one of those things, alchemically changed into something new – something, you hope, now worth the attention of someone else.

Preston, at least, seems repentant, though it is a mystery to me why anyone would cheat on a book review. Such pieces cannot be written en sufficient masse to earn you a living, no matter how much AI you use, and I say that as one of the few people left commissioning them. Ballard, for her part, has gone prudently silent. Goodwin has kept raging online; you can form your own judgment of him.

In the meantime, these writers’ varying fates, as with those who come next – and there will be more – should stand as a warning to the literary world. If writing is just a product to you, just the sum total of stuff you add together to form other stuff, then it might as well be done by AI, for what difference does it make? Writing becomes mere information, data, flat and lifeless, smoothly and efficiently recombined. But if it is more than that, as I hope for most people remains the case, keep it out of your books. Have some self-respect.”

I agree!