Does Detail Matter?

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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

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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!

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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!

Short Story vs Novel

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Jan Carlson has an article on the RTE website dated 26 March 2026 which is about short story writing, but she generalises her advice so that it applies equally to novel writing.

Jan Carlson

Jan Carson is a Belfast-based writer who has published four novels, three short story collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland, 2019. The Raptures was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her writing has aired on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and RTE and has been translated into twenty languages worldwide. Jan was the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast in 2025 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest novel, Few and Far Between is published in April 2026.

Jan said, “As a writer of both novels and short stories, I’m frequently asked, “how do you know whether an idea wants to be a short story or a novel?” It’s never a question I need to ask myself. With each new project I’ll instinctively know what particular form the story wants to take.

A novel’s its own peculiar beast; wide-ranging, occasionally meandering, a sum of many parts, like a long walk through a densely populated city where there’s much to observe and much to distract. A short story’s more like sitting on a bench, or pulling up a seat outside a café to take a snapshot of all that’s available in this moment, through a very limited lens. As I write this, I’m well aware that some of my favourite short stories wilfully and gloriously defy this definition. They’re wide-ranging, meandering, distracting delights. The first rule of writing is you should never trust the writer who tries to tell you there are rules. (Amen!)

The best short stories often feel like they’re subverting the rules or pushing the boundaries of what the writer can get away with. I often find my crazier, more outlandish concepts are explored in the short story form simply because it’s easier to maintain the suspension of disbelief for a handful of pages, rather than the enormous word count a novel requires. Because of this, I’m always enamoured with a short story which is willing to take risks both thematically and stylistically. I enjoy a story with notions. I don’t mind being knocked for six.

I’m also a fan of carefully drawn characters. I have no time for tropes or cliches, but a character who is intriguing, unique and, above all things, believably rendered on the page, is often the one aspect of a short story which lingers with me after I’ve finished reading. Believability’s a deal maker or breaker for me as a reader. I don’t mind if your plot’s outlandish and your characters are a little unhinged, but if I can see -and it’s usually painfully obvious- that you don’t believe in the essential realness of the story you’re bringing to life, then it doesn’t matter how eloquent your writing is, or how many hooks you’ve woven into your narrative, I’m afraid you’ve probably left me cold. (fair point!)

Which brings me, finally, to voice. The key to unlocking a brilliant short story is capturing an authentic, and ideally intriguing, voice. In a radio context, I particularly love it when a story’s voice feels as if it’s conspiring with me, telling me something candid and confessional, only intended for my ears. I spend a lot of time reading my own stories in progress out loud to myself, just to ensure the voice is spot on.

Now, I’d love to say, if you follow these rules, you’ll create the perfect short story – but writing’s a contrary pursuit. So, instead I’ll say, ignore the rules. Write from the guts. Take all the risks. Scare yourself, if you can. Once you’ve finished, you’ve only just started. Edit like you’re excavating for treasure buried beneath the muck. Take comfort in the knowledge that there’s at least one story you alone are equipped to tell.” (Brava!)

Paperback vs Hardcover: Which Is Best?

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Maris Kreizman digs into which is best for Reader and Writer on Literary Hub dated 20 March 2026.

Maris Kreizman hosted the literary podcast, The Maris Review, for four years. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Republic, and more. Her essay collection, I Want to Burn This Place Down, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins.

Maris Kreizman

Maris says, “If you conducted a survey, I am fairly certain you’d find that the majority of readers prefer paperbacks to hardcover books. I have no stats to back this up, but I know what I’ve heard anecdotally for years. Paperbacks are lighter and smaller and more lithe, easier to put in a pocket or a backpack and carry around. They’re also significantly cheaper. Now that the kind of mass market paperback you could find in any local grocery or drugstore have officially been retired, you’d think that the mighty trade paperback would rule the world (of books, at least).

But it’s not that simple. When my publisher originally planned for my debut essay collection to be a trade paperback original, I begged and begged them to change their minds. I had written a humorous collection, which is the genre of book that is ground zero for the TPO format, but I also wanted the essays to be seen as literary. But I know from having covered books for decades that a hardcover release signals, at least to me, that the publisher is more invested in the title.

I knew that having a hardcover release would mean more reviewers would take my book more seriously. I wasn’t planning on being a megabestseller, but I did want to make sure I got as much review coverage as possible. And, of course, the price of hardcovers is higher, which means there’s more profit, especially because the royalty split for authors is 10-15 percent for hardcover and only 7.5-10 percent for paperback.

Recently Barnes & Noble has tried to convince more publishers to publish paperback originals, particularly for YA and middle grade books. But choosing a format to please one vendor, no matter the size of that vendor, is limiting, especially when smaller indie bookstores run on such tight margins in the first place.

This is not to say that all trade paperbacks are unserious or undeserving of coverage. Paperback imprints like Vintage and Picador, as well as a great number of indie press imprints, are putting out new and impressive originals regularly. In fact in the 1980’s some of the greatest works in literature were put out as TPOs. This, of course, was before Amazon devalued the price of hardcovers so that readers expected to get brand new hardcovers at trade paper prices. I would love to read a good piece about what has happened to the viability of trade paperbacks between then and now.

I love when I see a trade paperback reprint find another life in its new format. Maybe the publisher changes the jacket design to emphasize themes that resonated with readers, or maybe there are new review blurbs that make the book design pop. At best, the trade paper reprint gives both the author and publisher a second chance at success.

My essay collection was published last July, so this coming July will see the paperback edition. I know just how lucky I am to get to be published in both formats: often, if a book isn’t a big seller in hardcover, the publisher won’t bother with a paperback at all. I hope that readers who don’t buy new hardcovers (who I don’t blame one bit) might find their way to it now. I hope the slimmer, cheaper version of my book will take a whole different journey in its new format even if we’re sticking with the old cover design, which was already totally perfect. But I also worry.

For about a year in the pre-Covid times, I reviewed five or six new-in-paperback books a month for Vulture/New York Magazine. Again, I don’t have any stats, but I’m fairly certain that approximately four or five people read those columns in total, and they were all publicists. I didn’t realize how good I had it then.

The idea of books slipping through the cracks and remaining undiscovered keeps me up at night. Currently there is not nearly enough coverage even for new hardcovers, let alone trade paper reprints. I currently don’t cover reprints because I already feel weirdly responsible for covering as many new books as I possibly can (alas, I am only one person so I am constantly feeling inadequate). I am constantly trying to stay up to date with new releases and publishers keep on putting out more. This would be a very good problem if there were more people covering books overall.

And yet, my favorite table at a bookstore will always be the new paperback table. It’s the ultimate place of discovery. In an ideal world, the trade paperback is the format for longevity, the kind of book that is perennially in stock and available at your favorite local indie so that new readers can find it again and again.”

Writing: How a Passion Can Drive Inspiration

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There is an interview in Writer’s Digest of author Rae Meadows about how her love of gymnastics shaped one of her novels.

Rae Meadows is the author of four previous novels, including I Will Send Rain. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, the Hackney Literary Award for the novel, and the Utah Book Award. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, as well as Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology, Contexts, and online.

She grew up admiring the Soviet gymnasts of the 1970s, and in her 40s decided to go back to the thing she loved as a child. She now trains regularly in adult gymnastics. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. 

Rae Meadows

Elevator pitch for the book: In 1970, in an Arctic town on the far edge of the Soviet Union, a young mother disappears leaving a mystery that haunts her husband and daughter, Anya, a gymnast in the grueling state system. From the wild tundra of Norilsk to the golden age of Soviet gymnastics to gritty late-90s Brooklyn, Winterland is the story of a woman—and an era—shaped by glory and loss.

What prompted you to write this book?

If I could point to one thing that set the novel in motion for me, it was reading about Elena Mukhina, the Soviet gymnast who won all-around gold at the 1978 World Championships. She broke her neck two years later, just before the Olympics, performing a skill on the floor she was not prepared for, which left her a quadriplegic.

Her injury was then covered up by the Soviets. There is a character in the book based on Mukhina, and she plays a pivotal role in Anya’s life.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

It took about four years from idea to publication, with COVID mucking up the process. When I first began the novel, there was going to be a peripheral character who was a former gymnast. But I loved researching so much—my life orbits around gymnastics as a mom, a fan, and a passionate adult gymnast—gymnastics soon took over.

I could spend hours watching videos of Soviet gymnasts and call it research. I wrote much of the book in the parent area of the gym where my daughter trains.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

It’s hard for me to believe this is my fifth novel. I feel so fortunate. Each publishing experience has been different, but this one has been by far the best.

I had the absolute lottery win of having Amy Einhorn as an editor, and I felt like she “got” this book from the beginning. I am an understated writer to a fault, and she pushed me to be less subtle, which I think improved the book immensely. I was able to trust the editing process more than I ever had before.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

For one, I never thought I would use my high school Russian! I am a big believer in serendipity in the process. Winterland was initially going to be set entirely in Brooklyn, but I read an article about Norilsk, where the novel is set, and it just took root in my imagination.

I don’t outline or do much planning when I write. I generally know the beginning and the end, which makes for many surprises along the way.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope Winterland feels transportive, a book readers can immerse themselves in. It’s set in the not-too-distant past, but the Soviet Union is a vanished place, despite some eerie similarities of late. Much of the novel takes place in a city carved out of the Arctic by gulag labor, one that is still closed to anyone not granted permission to enter, so to me it has an otherworldly quality.

And, of course, I want readers to feel for the characters, especially Anya, to follow her from age eight into adulthood. I have always been drawn to the idea of extraordinary stories behind ordinary lives. She could be someone you see on the subway and she has this remarkable past.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

My very first writing teacher used to call excess setting up of a scene “furniture moving.” Streamline, take out the furniture moving, trust your reader to get from A to B without describing every last detail in between.

Review: Lord of the Flies

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As I mentioned in a previous post, with the release of the movie by this same title made it necessary for me to read this classic novel. I wouldn’t be able to see the movie, because I know my wife wouldn’t enjoy it, and I had not bought a copy because its theme struck me as gruesome. I’ve had the same problem with the Hunger Games, but with that movie out, I had to buy and read it, I’m glad I read both of them. In neither case does the author write the story as gruesomely as its theme. In both cases, the story is told without emotional embroidery, leaving the reader to consider what the author is saying about humanity.

Lord of the Flies was written by William Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) who was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies  (1954), Golding published another 12 volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, Golding was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. Golding was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature. As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on its list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.

William Golding

From 1935 to 1940, Golding taught English, Greek, drama and philosophy at English schools. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy, was assigned to a destroyer and left the Navy in 1945 as a lieutenant. He was married and had two children. He had a difficult relationship with alcohol most of his adult life. Golding published 12 novels, 2 collections and 3 non-fiction works.

The novel begins when a British aeroplane has crashed on an isolated island. The only survivors are boys in their middle childhood. A fair-haired boy named Ralph and a fat boy nicknamed Piggy find a conch shell, which Ralph uses as a horn to gather the survivors. Ralph immediately commands authority over the other surviving boys using the conch, and is elected their “chief”. A red-haired boy named Jack, and a quiet boy named Simon use Piggy’s glasses to create a signal fire. The boys become paranoid about an imaginary monster called the ‘beast’. One night, an air battle occurs near the island and the body of a fighter pilot  drifts down in a parachute. Twin boys Sam and Eric mistake the corpse for the beast.  Ralph leads some of the boys, including those who were to attend the fire on a wild pig hunt which culminates in a feast. Tensions rise over the maintenance of the fire and the reality of the beast. Jack makes a tribe of his boys, who paint their faces and engage in ritual dances. Simon, who discovers who the beast really is, rushes to tell Jack, but he is mistaken for the beast and killed by the frenzied boys. Jack and his tribe steal Piggy’s glasses, the only means of starting a fire. Ralph goes to Jack’s camp with Piggy, Sam, and Eric to confront Jack and retrieve the glasses. In the rebellious spirit against Ralph’s authority, the tribe drops a boulder that kills Piggy and shatters the conch. Ralph learns that Jack plans to hunt him. The next morning, Jack’s tribe sets fire to the forest. Ralph narrowly escapes the boys and the fire, and while fleeing, falls down in front of a uniformed adult – a British naval officer who has landed on the island to investigate the fire. 

How can pre-adolescent boys lose their humanity, forsaking all values of friendship, kindness and justice, and become savage, murderous animals? Golding’s novel answers the question with convincing credibility. The author makes use of the wild environment, the perilous situation, the lack of any supervision, and the uncertain outlook to nudge the boys down the wrong path, but he also paints vulnerable characters, communicating inadequately, misperceiving reality to make such a horrible result entirely believable. A truly masterful piece of writing!

Review: Cherished Belonging

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One of my sons-in law sent me this book. Since he is a widely-read, intelligent and very likeable guy, I have read it and enjoyed it.

Cherished Belonging was written by Gregory Joseph Boyle (born May 19, 1954), who is an American Jesuit priest and the founder and director of Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program. He is the former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles.

Gregory Boyle

At the conclusion of his theology studies, Boyle spent a year living and working with Christian communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Upon his return in 1986, he was appointed pastor of Dolores Mission Church, a Jesuit parish in the Boyle Heights  neighborhood of East Los Angeles that was then the poorest Catholic church in the city. At the time, the church sat between two large public housing projects and amid the territories of eight gangs.  Referred to as the “decade of death” in Los Angeles between 1988-1998, there were close to a thousand people per year killed in Los Angeles from gang related crime.

By 1988, in an effort to address the escalating problems and unmet needs of gang-involved youth, Boyle, alongside parish and community members, began to develop positive opportunities for them, including establishing an alternative school and a day-care program, and seeking out legitimate employment, calling this initial effort Jobs for a Future. 

In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Jobs for a Future and Proyecto Pastoral, a community organising project begun at the parish, launched their first social enterprise business, Homeboy Bakery. Initial funding for the bakery was donated by the late film producer Ray Stark. In the ensuing years, the success of the bakery created the groundwork for additional social enterprise businesses, leading Jobs for a Future to become an independent nonprofit organization, Homeboy Industries.

This book doesn’t really have a plot, but that doesn’t make it any less readable. The nine chapters each have a title which may serve as a summary of the content. But for me, the chapters are unimportant, apart from dividing the book (212 pages) into nine convenient parts. The content, alone, is what makes this book a thought-provoking, fascinating collection of stories and reflections on the stories.

Here’s an example of a story. “Adrian stands in front of an almost entirely white group of criminal justice majors and graduate counselors at Lorcas College in Dubuque. He’s a stocky guy, with the expected tattoos etched on his neck and face and shaved-smooth head. After fifteen years in prison and only a brief three months with us at Homeboy, his trip here was his first on a plane and the only time he’s stood in front of a group to tell his story. Actually, he had been out of state before. During his tenure locked up, they had transferred Adrian to Oklahoma from Calipatria State Prison. It took them thirty-nine hours on a bus. He was shackled at the ankles, the waist, and the wrists. The inmates never got off the bus the entire time. ‘To me,’ he tells me. ‘it was torture’. The most noticeable feature of Adrian’s presentation is his sweet-natured voice. It’s not just younger than his thirty-four years it has a quality that is so pure and gentle. It is soulful and true. You just want to listen to him. His authenticity keeps folks spellbound: ‘I know that most people would take one look at me . . . i mean you would see me walking down the street, and you would cross to the other side. But what you don’t know about me is that if I had only one dollar left and you needed it, it would be yours. If you were shirtless, I would give you mine. If your car conked out, I’d help you push it.’ Everyone in the room believed him,”

There are about two hundred stories like that in the book. What’s more each of the characters in those stories stands out as unique: each with his/her own peculiarities. So, the theme of the book is that God loves each of in spite of our faults, and that each of us should show love to the other regardless of the circumstances. It is clear that the culture of Homeboy is primarily one of love. What isn’t covered by the book is how Homeboy gets new members to shed their aggression and defensive nastiness. Apparently the culture of love is so strong that it is both a magnet and a force for change. There are also coaches who are assigned to the new ‘homies’.

Why don’t we have Homeboys in every major city?

Is Gen Z Stupid?

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There is an article on the Telegraph by Liam Kelly dated 12 February 2026 which I had to read. Its title was “Why Gen Z are too stupid to read Wuthering Heights”. My interest was simple: I have a few relatives who are Gen Z, and I always thought they are quite bright.

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.

“The hotly anticipated film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has led to a surge in sales of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Bookshops shifted more than five times as many copies last month (10,670) as in January last year (1,875), according to publisher Penguin.

Many of the books have been bought by young people eager to understand the story of Cathy and Heathcliff before Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version hits cinemas on Friday. But if stories circulating online are to be believed, many of these newly bought novels are being left largely unread.

Social media is awash with Gen Z readers who claim to love literature but lament that they find Wuthering Heights – a book regularly taught at GCSE and A-level – too difficult.

Why Gen Z are too dumb to read Wuthering Heights

“Guys, this is testing me for real. I feel so stupid,” says Grace Deutsch, whose profile goes by the name Grace’s Mini Library, in a typical TikTok post about Wuthering Heights. “And I have a theory that anyone who says that they absolutely loved this book only says that to sound smart. I’m so serious, because, like, what do you mean?!”

Another TikTok user, who goes by the alias Wagesylie, has put together a popular five-part plan to help readers tackle Brontë “if you’re overwhelmed and don’t know what’s going on”. It includes alternating between chapters and study guides – a “gut check” to see if you are “understanding the plot” – and listening to the audiobook while reading a hard copy.

These struggles are not confined to social media. A colleague reports that at a press screening for the film earlier this week, two women discussed their thoughts on the book. One, who was reading it for the first time, said her “brain rot” – a Gen Z term for chronic short attention span – had left her unable to grasp much of the plot or language.

What is going on? There appears to be a growing consensus that the prevalence of smartphones has systematically eroded attention spans, particularly among the generation that has grown up knowing nothing else.

Is it really so surprising that, as we enter what critics have described as a “post-literate” age, young people who have spent much of their lives scrolling through mindless videos might find a masterpiece of Victorian literature a struggle? After all, university professors in the UK and the US have reported that literature undergraduates are increasingly unable to get through a whole novel. That it may not be surprising, of course, does not make it any less depressing.

Gone are the days when literature students could move from discussing Pride and Prejudice one week to Crime and Punishment the next. A viral piece in American online magazine The Atlantic in October 2024 featured professors who said students were struggling to read full novels, or even poetry. One reported that only extracts from Homer’s Odyssey are now set, supplemented with “music, articles and Ted Talks”, because even elite students are unable to grasp the full text or its themes.

We all know that people read less than they used to. A survey conducted for World Book Day last year found that 40 per cent of Britons had not read a single book in the past 12 months, a worrying trend that is even more pronounced among children. According to the National Literacy Trust, only a third of those aged eight to 18 now read books in their free time. It is not hard to conclude that comprehension skills are being diminished as a result.

The commentator James Marriott has described the collapse of reading as “one of the most profound social and cultural developments of modern times”, given that the spread of mass literacy was one of the foundations on which stable, prosperous democracies were built. If people do not – or cannot – read, but instead take their cultural sustenance from short videos or podcasts, there is a risk that society could drift back towards oral storytelling, which largely faded centuries ago. Surely nobody wants to return to the Dark Ages?

That so many people appear to be struggling with Wuthering Heights is no surprise to experts. Claire O’Callaghan, a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University who has written extensively on the Brontës, tells me the novel is a “difficult text” with a “convoluted structure, multiple narrators and overlapping names. You have several generations and movement across time – you go backwards and forwards”.

O’Callaghan, whose biography of Emily Bronte has been expanded and updated ahead of its republication in June, adds: “It’s a book that, in my experience, often takes quite a few reads to really get a sense of all those things clearly.”

The corner of TikTok that has helped encourage young people to read – inevitably called “BookTok” – has largely been a boon for publishers of schlocky, unchallenging “romantasy” titles and thrillers rather than classics. Perhaps the marketing of the new film has led would-be readers to assume the source text was a romcom, rather than an at-times-harrowing account of unrequited love and generational trauma. That may be what a Valentine’s Day weekend release does to potential cinemagoers.

The marketing machine behind the film has been in overdrive. Press tours have featured Robbie – practising “method dressing”in elaborate corseted gowns – and Elordi walking the red carpet together, embracing embracing and swooning. Official merchandise tie-ins range from snacks to lingerie, bedclothes and massage oil. All are a far cry from the desolation of the Yorkshire moors.

There is some self-awareness among those who now find themselves unable to get through Wuthering Heights about what has hindered their comprehension skills. “It has not taken me long to realise that there is some brain rot happening,” Mary Skinner, another bookish TikTokker, says in a recent video. “It’s actually been a wake-up call for me. I don’t think I’ve read anything other than books that were extremely easily digestible in… it’s got to be over six months. I’m finding this much more challenging than I would have a couple of years ago.”

 Declining literacy skills have also fuelled an explosion in AI reading apps, including Clippit, Reedy and Amazon Kindle’s “Ask” feature, which promise to simplify language (often by modernising it), signpost plots and explain characters’ intentions before they are fully fleshed out by the author. Don’t have time to pore over hundreds of pages before bed? Simply scan the text and get the gist of the story, without exercising your brain or stretching your intellectual capacities. How very dystopian.

But how hard is it to get through Wuthering Heights, really? My recent re-read was largely trouble-free – and not because I am some sort of singular genius. There was the odd word to look up, such as when Heathcliff is described as “an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone”, or when the narrator says, “I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium” – but Brontë’s language is, for the most part, fairly accessible (though the same cannot be said for her eccentric use of commas). This is hardly late Joyce.

While the new film has been criticised in some quarters for straying too far from the source text, it includes plenty of verbatim quotations (think “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” and “I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine”). “There’s just no better dialogue than Brontë’s,” Fennell said at a British Film Institute talk last week. “She’s got these extraordinary, extraordinary words.”

One reason readers may find Wuthering Heights challenging comes down to expectations. Is the novel a love story? A tale of revenge? Some combination of the two? Or something else entirely? “We tend not to make people comfortable with ambiguity, and that requires deeper reading, more critical reading, and reflection on the multiple perspectives within a novel,” says O’Callaghan.

That is all well and good – laudable, even. But if we really are entering a post-literate age, are people who struggle with a book such as Wuthering Heights capable of deeper, more critical reading? Or are we drifting towards a bleak future in which novels must guide readers by the hand?

Why Read Classics Now?

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There is an article Why you should revisit the classics, even if you were turned off them at school on The Conversation website, dated March 3, 2025 by Johanna Harris.

This caught my attention because with all the current publicity about Lord of the Flies, I have decided to buy and read a copy. I’ve had plenty of chances to do that, but I thought, ‘It’s such a grim story!’ We won’t go to the movie; my wife would hate it, so it’s now or never.

The author of the article, Johanna Harris, is Associate Professor, Literature, Western Civilisation Program, Australian Catholic University.

Johanna Harris

Ms Harris writes: “Throughout my school years I had an exuberant, elderly piano teacher, Miss Hazel. She was one of five daughters (like me) and, like many young women of her generation, had never married her sweetheart because he did not return from the war.

Her unabashed gusto for life and infectious, positive outlook left an indelible impression upon me. So too did the memorable fact that Miss Hazel read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from beginning to end once every year.

As a younger girl I wondered about the ways Pride and Prejudice could be so important to a woman in her eighties that she would want to read it annually. Was it to do with Austen’s depiction of a family with five daughters, or to relive an endearing love story?

Since those years I have seen, more through lived experience than through academic study, just how deeply meaningful the reading of classic books, like Pride and Prejudice, can be.

I no longer simply read this book for Elizabeth Bennett’s love story, but for the finely crafted replication Austen gives us of human character, with all its flaws. Hers are imaginary yet imaginably real situations, all depicted with humour and a sensitively calibrated dose of sympathy for even the most unlikeable literary figures.

The clergyman Mr Collins, Elizabeth’s distant cousin and her rejected suitor, was always repellent for his obsequiousness but I see more readily now his self-serving nature cloaked in altruism. The haughty snobbery of Darcy’s aristocratic aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, hints at a deeper layer of sadness and fragility only rereading can illuminate.

Box-ticking and speed

When we’re at school or university we may read for speed. I remember managing my reading of Ann Radcliffe’s 432-page gothic romance The Romance of the Forest to work out how many pages per hour I would need to read across a weekend in order to finish the novel before my university tutorial. (It was an ungodly ratio and I don’t recall much of the novel.)

Or we may read for the tick-box exercise of writing for assessment requirements: accumulating knowledge of a novel’s original metaphors, descriptions that best capture a prescribed theme (“belonging” or “identity”), or of poetry by which we can demonstrate a grasp of innovative metre.

But how and why do we reread classic books, when we are not constrained by class plans or prescribed exam themes. And why should we?

‘Like a graft to a tree’

Rebecca Mead’s The Road to Middlemarch offers a compelling exploration of one writer’s five-yearly revisitation of George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch.

Mead first read the novel at school, and Eliot’s subtitle to the novel, “A Study of Provincial Life”, captured precisely what Mead was trying to escape at that time: provinciality.

Eliot’s central character, Dorothea Brooke, captivated Mead as an unconventional intellectual heroine yearning for a life of meaning and significance. Mead marked out important moments with a fluorescent pen, such as when the intellectual and spiritual inadequacies of Dorothea’s husband, Casaubon, dawn upon her. Mead writes, quoting Eliot:

‘Now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness […]’ These seemed like things worth holding on to. The book was reading me, as I was reading it.

This idea of books “reading us” can sound like an odd animism. But books can prompt us to reflect on our own lives, too. Eliot makes Middlemarch almost compulsory to reread later in life: the idealism of youth captures the young reader, while the novel’s humour becomes more sympathetic as we age. To reread a novel like Middlemarch is to trace the ways we too have experienced idealism turn to illusion, or have seen the restless pursuit of change turn to a retrospective gratitude and a recognition of grace.

Our ability to acknowledge new depths of meaning in our own lives and to recognise within ourselves a subtler sympathy for the lives of others can be articulated almost as precisely as lived experience itself. As Mead says, “There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.”

Feeling for Lear

The same can be said of Shakespeare. As young readers, we won’t necessarily capture the full vision King Lear offers us of the tragicomic paradoxes sometimes presented by old age. The play depicts the loss of power and control over one’s life and decision-making, the tender fragility of family relationships when the care of aged parents is suddenly an urgent question and the madness that can prevail when an inheritance is at stake.

Some of these things might abstractly be understood when taught to us in the classroom, but they are far more powerfully seen when revisited after we have lived a little more of that imaginably real life ourselves.

As students we might have squirmed with discomfort at the literal blinding of Lear’s loyal subject the Earl of Gloucester (the horror of witnessing a visceral, grotesque injury).

But as we age it is the tragedy of moral blindness that lingers, making the final scene so extraordinarily moving: “Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. Look there, look there,” Lear pleads, as if to say that Cordelia, lifeless in his arms, still breathes.

Does he really see her lips quiver? Does he really believe she lives? Is this some consolation with which he dies or is it delusion? Lear’s heart is broken. So is mine.

Each time I revisit this final scene, the grief of Lear as a father is profoundly felt, but my heart is broken even more so by his continuing blindness; his vision (what he thinks he sees) is desperate, untrue, and ultimately meaningless.

Sites of discovery

When we read we inhabit imaginary worlds and each time the reading can be different. Philip Davis, a professor of literature and psychology has written,

Rereading is important in checking and refreshing that sense of meaning, as the reader goes back and re-enters the precise language once again.

Davis points to an idea advanced by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, of the reader’s collection of special, memorable fragments, which serve as metaphors for the reader’s self-utterances, developed over time. These are “nascent sites for thinking and re-centring”.

This is a similar idea to the novelist and journalist Italo Calvino’s description in Why Read the Classics? of the way classic books “imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable” and “hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.”

Works of imaginative literature are not manuals for life, though they might along the way gift us with some wisdom; they are sites of discovery and rediscovery.

The classic works we are introduced to at school may establish such sites for thinking about ourselves and others, but it is in rereading them as we grow older that we can better see the ways we have grown as imaginative, moral beings.”