Novel types

Soulless Fiction Factories?

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There is an article in the February 6 issue of the Telegraph by Jake Kerridge which exposes a publishing process which is not well known and could mean ‘the end of original thought’.

Jake Kerridge is a UK-based journalist who specializes in writing about books and literature. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for storytelling, he has established himself as one of the leading books journalists in the country. As a regular contributor to The Telegraph, Kerridge’s work reaches a wide audience of book enthusiasts and industry professionals alike, making him a go-to source for the latest news, reviews, and insights into the world of literature.

Jake Kerridge

Jake says, “Reader demand for the world-conquering genre of “romantasy” (romance/fantasy) has grown so voracious that publishers are struggling to keep up the supply. That’s the conclusion I drew recently when I stumbled on an advert asking for “unpublished Young-Adult fantasy romance authors to audition for the chance to write a YA novel”.

One burden the successful applicant would be relieved of was thinking of a plot: this was already outlined in the advert. “Trapped on an enchanted cross-kingdom train to her wedding, a fiery princess works alongside her infuriatingly attractive new bodyguard to expose a killer onboard.”

Working Partners, the company that placed the advert, describes itself not as a publisher but as a “book packager”. The phrase might conjure up visions of people wielding bubble wrap in a warehouse, but for some decades now these organisations have played a vital role in the publishing ecosystem – though they tend to stay out of the limelight.

Book packaging companies vary in scale from conglomerate to cottage industry, but they usually comprise a permanent editorial staff and various freelance writers. The majority of them deal in fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, and they are collaborative affairs, with the writers fleshing out ideas given to them.

There are generally two ways for a packaging company to become successful at placing books with publishers: produce, through the alchemy of collaboration, brilliant ideas; or get your staff to churn out books far more quickly than the publishers could do themselves in-house. If it sounds like literature on the factory farm model, packagers seem reluctant to dispel such ideas by shedding light on themselves.

“I think part of the reason book packagers get a bad rap is that there is a secrecy around the process, so it feels all a bit smoke and mirrors,” says Jasmine Richards, who founded the packager Storymix in 2019. “For example, celebrity fiction titles are often produced by packagers and traditionally that’s not been publicly acknowledged, although publishers are now getting better at crediting ghostwriters.

The Carnegie-nominated Fablehouse by EL Norry is one of Storymix’s big successes

“Personally I’m really proud to be a packager and to say out loud that we find talent and support it. So many writers get their first break with a book packager: you come and get paid to work on a project, build up your writing muscle and learn about the industry. Then maybe go on to sell your own project.”

Nevertheless, publishers remain wary of being publicly associated with the packaging model. In the US the romantasy community has been rocked this month by a lawsuit alleging plagiarism against Tracy Wolff, author of top-selling girl-meets-vampire yarns such as Crave.

In mounting her defence, Wolff’s lawyer revealed that her publisher, Liz Pelletier, was heavily involved in the writing of Crave, “a collaborative project with Pelletier providing to Wolff … the main plot, location, characters, and scenes, and actively participating in the editing and writing process.”

Pelletier, who runs the publishing company Entangled, has told The New Yorker that she commissioned Wolff to write Crave – “the fastest writer I’ve ever worked with” – to fill a gap in her publishing schedule when another author failed to deliver a book. Wolff produced the first draft in two months.

Commentators have dubbed Entangled a book packager in all but name, something Pelletier has denied almost as strenuously as the plagiarism accusations. If a conventional publisher gets a reputation for following the packager model in-house, they may struggle ever to woo big-name authors to their stable.

However, the romantasy genre does perhaps seem more suited to the packager model than to authors who want to express themselves artistically or come up with original ideas. Romantasy novels repeat tropes ad infinitum – love across class (or species) divides, love triangles, enemies becoming lovers – and the sales figures suggest that the more formulaic the book, the better romantasy readers like it.

With publishers able to see what tropes are trending on BookTok – #morallygreymen and #daggertothethroat are popular hashtags for romantasy readers – they are reportedly shaping books accordingly. (The New Yorker reports that Pelletier told another author: “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be”. Pelletier has said that she does not recall this conversation.)

As one fantasy novelist (who asked not to be named) put it to me, publishers do seem to be following the packager model more. “It is expensive to build up an author’s career over time, especially if you invest in them and then they turn out to be, say, Neil Gaiman. There’s a sense among publishers that the TikTok generation responds more to individual books than authors.

“It’s cheaper for publishers to hire packagers, or work like packagers, and tailor a book to its potential readership. One outcome of that is books become not just formulaic – they’re indistinguishable.” (I asked the big five UK publishers whether they were increasingly using packaging companies when it came to fiction; none responded to my request for comment).

If it’s easy to see why publishers commission work from packagers, what’s in it for the writers who toil away for them? Certainly not the money, says Honor Head, a veteran writer of children’s non-fiction for numerous book packagers. “It’s really badly paid. Usually if you work in packaging you don’t get a royalty, you get a flat fee. And if the publisher comes back and says ‘I don’t like what you’ve written’, you don’t get any more money for doing it again. But I love writing for children, and I’ve got to a stage of my life now where I don’t need to make as much money.”

There is a suggestion of the salt mines about working for book packagers. In 2010 the packager Full Fathom Five, founded by the author James Frey, was denounced by the New York Times as a “fiction factory”, with creative writing students or graduates writing up Frey’s story concepts for the unprincely sum of $250 per novel.

In China, the phenomenal popularity of wuxianwen, a type of serial fiction published straight to smartphones and tablets, is maintained by the equivalent of packagers: editors map out story arcs and farm various portions of the story out to different writers, each of whom is expected to produce 10,000 words daily.

Head recalls that when she started her own packager some years ago, she and her partner “were working dawn to dusk seven days a week”. Life is more relaxed now she freelances writing children’s non-fiction for other packagers, although her rate is impressive: “I would say the longest I’ve spent on a single book – researching, writing, and then doing any checks – would be a week. It depends on the age group, but I can get a book done in half a day.” She enjoys the discipline of writing to guidelines, although it can be frustrating working on, say, a book on dinosaurs for the US market and being obliged not to write anything that contradicts creationist theory.

Storymix founder Jasmine Richards favours an organic approach to packaging, devising ideas for YA and children’s fiction with her writers and then approaching publishers rather than being commissioned. Her aim is “to put kids and teens of colour at the heart of the action”.

“When my son was about five we were in the bookshop and I couldn’t find a single book on the shelf that featured a character that looked like him. As an editor and author I thought: what’s the best way to change the look of that shelf as quickly as possible? As an author I can write one book a year, but if I start my own book packager I could get several books on that shelf.”

Among Storymix’s big successes is the Carnegie-nominated Fablehouse by EL Norry, which was sold by Richards to Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury.

“My job is often to matchmake the right idea with the right writer,” says Richards. “I had thought about a fantasy novel with a setting based on Holnicote House, which in the 1940s and ’50s took care of the children who came from relationships between African-American GIs and white British women. I knew exactly the writer I’d love to work on this project: Emma Norry, because I knew she had grown up in care and was of mixed-race heritage. I gave her a storyline, and I remember when she sent me the first chapter, I let the dinner burn in the oven while I read it. That’s a good example of how this method can unlock something amazing.”

Factories undermining the traditional autonomy of the author, or crucibles of collaborative magic? Whichever way you look at them, it’s clear that, despite most of us being unaware of their existence, without packagers the publishing landscape would look very different.”

This is a segment of the publishing market in which most of us would have no interest, either as writers or readers, but it clearly exists to serve the interests of some (perhaps a large group) of readers.

The Unreliable Narrator

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There is an intriguing article by Carter Wilson on the Writer’s Digest website on how and why to use an unreliable narrator in fiction – dated 29 January 2025.

Carter Wilson is the USA Today bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thrillers. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a five-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his works have been optioned for television and film. Carter lives outside of Boulder, Colorado. 

Carter Wilson

Carter says, “Crafting a convincing unreliable narrator might be one of the most difficult things a thriller writer does. Of course, a narrator doesn’t have to be unreliable. A perfectly dependable narrator is often just what the thriller reader needs. A voice of reason and stability thrust in the midst of chaos. Sometimes we want that level-headed hero to guide us through those dangerous waters.

But sometimes…

Sometimes we, as readers, don’t want stability. Sometimes, in the middle of that chaos, we don’t want to believe anyone, including the voice that’s at the helm. Occasionally the fun is figuring out who to trust, if there’s anyone to trust at all. The best thrillers are often the ones in which the protagonist is not only fooling the reader, but themselves as well.

I specialize in writing unreliable narrators, and when I try to dissect why exactly that is, I can think of a few reasons. There are likely many more, but that may take thousands of dollars of therapy to tease out. But top-of-mind, these reasons stand out.

1) I don’t know what I’m doing. 

I mean that with 82% sincerity. I don’t outline, and usually I only have the vaguest notion of a plot idea, or sometimes I only know the first chapter. My stories unfold to me one day at a time, which means my narrator is just as lost as I am. I’m writing from my subconscious, which lends itself to a labyrinth of twists and turns, many of which the narrator has created for themselves. Simply put, my narrator is unreliable because the author is unreliable.

2) Life is unreliable. 

If one really considers what makes a narrator unreliable, a few choice adjectives pop up. Deceitful, delusional. In denial. Okay, do those words not describe all of us, at least in some part of our lives? Unreliable is honest. What’s not honest is a hero who can do no wrong, always has the answers, and is always willing to save others before themselves. Is this an admirable protagonist? Yes, of course. But it makes for a helluva boring thriller.

3) The intimacy of the POV. 

I typically write from a first-person, present-tense point of view. That means I’m seeing the world through my narrator’s eyes, moment by moment. This makes writing an unreliable narrator most effective, because the reader experiences the thoughts and actions as the protagonist does, and offers a fractured, almost stream-of-consciousness narration. What’s more unreliable in our daily lives than our swirling thoughts, our sudden fears, our whimsical and wholly unattainable daydreaming?

Striking a perfect balance

Writing an unreliable narrator brings me great joy, because I know readers will be lured into thinking one way until suddenly they’re forced to face an altogether different reality. But it’s also a tricky way to write, and the writer has to strike the perfect balance between believability and deus ex machina. An unreliable narrator shouldn’t be approached as a literary device; rather, a narrator’s unreliability should be an organic result of who they are and the decisions they make. 

No author should set out and think to themselves, “I’m going to write an unreliable narrator.” That leads to clumsy and shoehorned writing. Rather, the author should pen the novel as it occurs to them from the subconscious, and only after reading the first draft should they themselves realize their protagonist is not to be trusted. The best writing comes from ephemeral, naturally occurring thoughts rooted in decades of life experience and keen observation. The worst writing comes from market-conscious intentions.

In my newest release, Tell Me What You Did, my protagonist Poe Webb’s unreliability is less a device than a simple fact of life. She lies to the audience because she lies to herself. Poe committed a horrible crime in her past, and though that experience has largely informed who she is in the story, she’s suppressed the memory enough that she struggles to even admit to herself what she did until events force her to reckon with her past actions. Her unreliability is, at its core, human.

The final key in writing an unreliable narrator is to avoid coyness. Too many times an author hints over and over that their protagonist is not to be trusted, building up an anticipation that’s so great the payoff never quite satisfies. Rather, the best unreliable narrators are those who never wink at the camera, and when they look into the mirror they’re just as convinced as we are that the person in front of them is telling the truth.

Like I coach all my students, write from the heart, from the soul, from instinct, from the subconscious. From that perspective, an unreliable narrator is not a trick but rather a fully formed individual who is convinced they are doing the right thing, despite all evidence to the contrary. This results in a hero—or anti-hero—who is, above all else, uniquely flawed and morally gray. Just like all of us.”

A Last Minute Win

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Beth Kander has an article on Writers Digest website dated 12 December 2024, about how she entered a writing contest at the last minute an won more than the contest!

Beth Kander

Beth Kander is a novelist and playwright with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. The granddaughter of immigrants, her writing explores how worlds old and new intertwine—or collide. Her work has been described as “riveting,” “emotional,” “expertly crafted,” and “habit-forming.” Expect twists, turns, and secrets, with surprising heart and humor. Beth has too many degrees and drinks too much coffee. Her favorite characters are her dashing husband and their two lovely kids.

She says, “This book definitely has a non-traditional origin. I was knee deep in another project when a friend texted to let me know that the pop culture site Hey Alma was having a Hanukkah movie pitch competition. Eager to procrastinate on my existing project, I checked the pitch competition deadline—and found out it was the very next day. Long story short (literally), I threw together a pitch for I Made It Out Of Clay, a quirky romcom-with-a-golem concept, submitted it at the 11th hour, and ultimately won the competition.

Industry folks started reaching out to me to inquire about film rights. My literary agent, Alli, passed along some great advice from a film agent colleague: “Write the book first, not the movie.” So, I set aside my other book projects and prioritized writing this novel. The story immediately provided myriad unconventional opportunities to explore big topics: grief and family dynamics and identity and adult friendships and turning 40 … I got to write about these heavy things while laughing and making monsters. What a gift.

I won the pitch competition in December 2022. I was so inspired, I drafted the novel in two blurry months. My agent took it out on sub in February 2023. It sold at auction in March 2023, and publication was set for December 2024. So all told, a two-year-process from idea to publication. That’s fast—often, the writing alone can take longer than that! I’m grateful that although the acquisition happened fast, I had a great editor and plenty of time to revise the book, several times over. I loved spending the time really developing the story and connecting with each character.

I’ve learned so much in the process of publishing this book that it’s honestly hard to even know where to begin, and there have been plenty of surprises along the way. But if I had to pull out the biggest lesson, it’s this: You just never know.

You can spend years working on a story you really believe in, only to have it languish and eventually fade away. You can have an overnight idea that becomes the story everyone’s eager to read. You can’t trust trends or tricks. You just have to keep trying. I think a lot about this two-panel meme, where the first panel is labeled “what people think success looks like” and shows an arrow moving steadily forward and up, and the second panel is labeled “what success actually looks like” and it shows a tangled mess that a forward-facing arrow finally re-emerges from… which feels relevant to the publishing process. But I’ve been over-the-top lucky to work with my agent, Alli, to navigate every detour along the way. And working on I Made It Out Of Clay with my editor, April, and the team at Mira/HarperCollins, has been a delight. Sometimes, gracefully and gratefully, the puzzle pieces slide into place.

You just never know.

This was the fastest writing process I’ve ever undertaken. To go from a paragraph-long idea to a 90,000-word novel in two months is… well, not something I’d necessarily recommend, honestly. Thank God for coffee.

But what I realized is that I didn’t speed-write this book in a vacuum; it wasn’t an anomaly, or a fluke. It was a culmination. All those years, all those other stories; that was my training for this manuscript-marathon. I doubt I’ll keep that pace up with many subsequent projects, but I’m definitely holding fast to the lesson that even the projects that don’t pan out help shape the ones that will fly.

There’s so much I hope that readers will get out of this book—catharsis, cackling-laughter, genuine enjoyment, a sense of release. There’s some strange stuff in the story (an actual monster!) but it’s really rooted in characters that I hope are relatable in all their imperfections and deep desires for something better. Most of all, I hope this book gives readers permission to laugh in the midst of sorrow or acknowledge sadness even as they dance for joy; to let complicated, conflicting emotions exist alongside each other on the page and in our lives. The publication of this book intersected with a profound loss in my own life, and I’ve become so grateful for anyone and anything that acknowledges that we can feel many things at once. If readers come away with that affirmation, I’ll be thrilled.

Write the book you want to rewrite—because most of writing is revising! Don’t agonize over every word in a first draft; that will only slow you down. Just write the story. Get it onto the page. Drafting is the stage where you capture the idea. Revising is where you figure out how to really tell the story well.”

Plot Design: Three Questions

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On the Writer’s Digest website, this article by Steven James appeared in Aril 24, 2018.

The writer claims that the answers to these questions will fix any problem you might be having with your plot.

Steven James is the critically acclaimed author of thirteen novels. He serves as a contributing editor to Writer’s Digest magazine, hosts the biweekly podcast The Story Blender, and has a master’s degree in storytelling. Publishers Weekly calls him “[a] master storyteller at the peak of his game.” Steven’s groundbreaking book Story Trumps Structure: How to Write Unforgettable Fiction by Breaking the Rules won a Storytelling World award as one of the best resources for storytellers in 2015. When he’s not working on his next novel, Steven teaches Novel Writing Intensive retreats across the country with New York Times Bestselling author Robert Dugoni.

Steven James

Steven says: “Initially, most authors land somewhere on the continuum between outlining and organic writing. If you try to fit your story into a predetermined number of acts or a novel template, you’re more of an outliner.

If you don’t care how many acts your story has as long as you let your characters struggle through the escalating tension of your story in a believable way, you’re more organic.

Both organic writing and outlining have their inherent strengths and weaknesses. (Yes, even organic writing can, in some cases, lead you astray if you don’t let all three questions listed below guide your writing.) Outliners often have great high-concept climax ideas. Their stories might escalate exponentially and build to unforgettable endings. However, characters will sometimes act in inexplicable ways on their journey toward the climax. You’ll find gaps in logic. People will do things that don’t really make sense but that are necessary to reach the climax the writer has decided to build toward.

Organic writers are usually pretty good at crafting stories that flow well. The events are believable and make sense. However, sometimes the narratives can wander, and although the stories are believable, they might also end up being anticlimactic as they just fizzle out and don’t really go anywhere.

So outlining often results in problems with continuity and causality, while organic writers often stumble in the areas of focus and escalation.

Outliners tend to have cause-effect problems because they know where they need to go but don’t know how to get there. Organic writers tend to have directionality problems because they don’t necessarily know where they’re going, but things follow logically even if they lead into a dead end.

Whichever approach you’ve been using, you can build on its strengths and solve its weaknesses by asking the following three questions and letting the answers influence the direction of your story.

1. “What would this character naturally do in this situation?”

This focuses on the story’s believability and causality—everything that happens in a novel needs to be believable even if it’s impossible, and because of the contingent nature of fiction, everything needs to follow causally from what precedes it.

2. “How can I make things worse?”

This dials us in to the story’s escalation. Readers always want the tension to tighten. If the
story doesn’t build, it’ll become boring and they’ll put it aside.

3. “How can I end this in a way that’s unexpected and inevitable?”

Here we’re shaping the scenes, and the story as a whole, around satisfaction and surprise. So the story has to move logically, one step at a time, in a direction readers can track—but then angle away from it as they realize that this new direction is the one the story was heading in all along. However, readers don’t want that ending to come out of nowhere. It needs to be natural and inherent to the story.

The first question will improve your story’s believability. The second will keep it escalating toward an unforgettable climax. The third will help you build your story, scene by twisting, turning scene.

Organic writers are good at asking that first question; outliners are good at asking the second one. As far as the third, organic writers will tend to have believable endings and outliners will tend to have unpredictable ones.

The way you approach writing will determine which of those questions you most naturally ask and which ones you need to learn to ask in order to shape effective stories. …

DIVE INTO THE QUESTIONS

I should mention that, in regard to the first of the three key questions listed above, some writing instructors teach that we should ask ourselves “If I were this character in this situation, what would I do?” rather than “What would this character naturally do in this situation?”

There’s a subtle but significant difference. One of these questions puts you in the scene, and the other emphasizes the character’s response.

It’s important that you move yourself out of the story and let the characters you’ve created take over. I don’t want to imagine myself as the character. I want to observe the character responding as she would, not as I would if I were her. Step further away from yourself, and remove your own views as much as possible from the situation.

Incidentally, the first two questions also help authors who strive to write books that are either character-centered or plot-centered (remember, however, that no story is character-driven or plot-driven because all stories are tension-driven).

The first question helps plot-centered authors develop deeper characterizations. The second question helps character-centered authors develop plots that are more gripping.

The central struggles of the main character (internal, external, and interpersonal) will only be ultimately satisfied at the story’s climax. As we write the scene-by-scene lead-up, we are constantly deepening and tightening the tension in those three areas.

Some climaxes implode because they lack believability, others because they don’t make sense or they’re too predictable, others because they don’t contain escalation of everything else in the story and end up being disappointing.

Let me reiterate: The solution to most of these problems is keeping the promises you’ve made to your readers by maintaining believability, creating endings that are inevitable and yet unexpected, tightening the tension, ratcheting up the action, relentlessly building up the suspense, heightening the stakes, and escalating to a finish that reaches its pinnacle at just the right moment for the protagonist and for your readers.

Let those three questions filter through every scene you write.

  1. “What would this character naturally do in this situation?”
  2. “How can I make things worse?”
  3. “How can I end this in a way that’s unexpected and inevitable?”

If you’re attentive to them, they’ll crack open the nut of the tale for you.”

Book Banning in Britain

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There is an article in today’s Daily Telegraph by Ben Lawrence which startled me. We’re all familiar with book banning in the US, the EU and elsewhere, but in the UK? (Ben is Commissioning Editor of the Telegraph.)

He said, “We are banning books again, and this time it appears to be a consequence of ill-informed hysteria. The Index on Censorship discovered that 28 of the 53 British school librarians they polled had been asked to remove books – many of which were LGBTQ+ titles – from their shelves. It appears that pressure had come from parents and, on some occasions, teachers too. For a society that’s meant to be modern and tolerant, these findings are depressing: the culture wars are failing to subside, and we seem to think nothing of using our children’s education as an ideological battleground.

That battle has been raging in America for several years. In March, the American Library Association reported that 2023 was an all-time peak for such censorship. I imagine that much of the opprobrium launched at titles such as All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson – the memoir of a young, queer, black activist – was led by Republican-Christian zealots. In Britain, however, the root causes are harder to deduce. Certainly, our national disease of knee-jerk reaction is partly to blame. According to the Index on Censorship, one worker was asked to remove all gay-related content from the school library due to a single complaint about a single book.

Yet the depressing thing is that we have long been intent on cutting off children from literature and its “dangers”, ignorant of the fact that books are crucial to young people’s development. The current situation in the UK smacks of the dark days of the 1980s, when Section 28 legislated that no local authority could “promote homosexuality”. In the line of fire was a ridiculously innocuous picture book from Denmark called Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, which featured a small girl with two dads, and now looks about as morally corrupting as a Cliff Richard fan convention.

John Clarke, head of Haringey’s Community Information with a copy of Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin in September 1986

I sometimes doubt that those who are quick to show their outrage are even concerned about the morals of Britain’s children; it’s more about their own fear of the unfamiliar. Some books represent a world that exists outside their own limited boundaries, which they therefore can’t control. This was the case in the 1980s: Section 28 felt, in part, like the natural product of a society that had failed to come to terms with the Aids epidemic.

But what those who try to ban books consistently fail to realise is that any attempt to arrest social change will ultimately, in a functioning democracy, be doomed. Perhaps in China, where there are edicts against books that fight against communist values – Alice in Wonderland, for example, is banned for its anthropomorphisation of animals – a suppressed book really can stay buried. But in most places, the allure of a title in samizdat will always ensure its longevity.

For censors have always proved to be on the wrong side of history. Those who fettered the genius of James Joyce and banned Ulysses on the grounds of “obscenity now” look like narrow-minded killjoys. As for Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence? For what it’s worth, I’m still not convinced that it’s great literature, but its depiction of sex was a necessary step forward for British society, and the end of its ban a crucial catalyst for making England a more tolerant place.

It’s telling that one of the few authors who refused to defend Lady Chatterley during the 1960 trial at the Old Bailey was Enid Blyton, an author whose work now often looks mean-spirited and bigoted. In fact, Blyton’s books were banned from my own school library in the 1980s – along with Judy Blume’s progressive adolescent novel Forever – which just goes to show how times change.

And yet, although this news from the Index of Censorship is worrying, I still feel hopeful. Curious minds will always seek out good writing, however long it takes them to find it. Book banning may be a global industry – but the freedom to read will always prevail.”

Book Banners are Banned

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The Guardian has an article by Maya Yang dated 9 June 2024 on its website which suggests that the tide is turning against book banners in the US. The federal cavalry has arrived in Texas.

“After a case spurred by complaints on books containing the words “butt” and “fart” as well as touching on the topics of racism and LGBTQ+ identity, an appellate court has ruled that Texas cannot ban books from libraries simply because officials “dislike the idea contained in those books”.

The fifth US circuit court of appeals issued its decision on Thursday in a 76-page majority opinion, which was written by Judge Jacques Wiener Jr and opened with a quote from American poet Walt Whitman: “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”

In its decision, the appellate court declared that “government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree”.

It added: “This court has declared that officials may not ‘remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the idea contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion’.”

The appellate court’s latest decision follows a federal lawsuit filed in 2022 by seven Llano county residents against county and library officials for restricting and removing books from its public circulation.

The residents argued that the defendants violated their constitutional right to “access information and ideas” by removing 17 books based on their content and messages.

Those books include seven “butt and fart” books with titles including I Broke My Butt! and Larry the Farting Leprechaun, four young adult books on sexuality, gender identity and dysphoria – including Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen – and two books on the history of racism in the US, among them Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.

Other books targeted by the ban were In the Night Kitchen, which contains cartoons of a naked child, as well as It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, according to court documents.

The books were removed after parents complained, with library officials referring to the books as “pornographic filth”.

In its majority decision, the overwhelmingly conservative appellate court ordered eight of the 17 books to be returned, including Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen, Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.

Wiener wrote how a dissenting opinion from the Donald Trump appointee Kyle Duncan “accuses us of becoming the ‘Library Police’, citing a story by author Stephen King”.

“But King, a well-known free speech activist, would surely be horrified to see how his words are being twisted in service of censorship,” wrote Wiener, who was appointed during George HW Bush’s presidency.

“Per King: ‘As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.’ Defendants and their highlighters are the true library police.”

Wiener also said that “libraries must continuously review their collection to ensure that it is up to date” and engage in “removing outdated or duplicated materials … according to objective, neutral criteria”.

In a report released last October, the American Library Association found that Texas made the most attempts in the US to ban or restrict books in 2022. In total, the state made 93 attempts to restrict access to more than 2,300 books.

A wave of book banning has also emerged in Florida as part of the culture wars of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, on “wokeism”, a term meant to insult liberal values.

In January, a Florida school district removed dictionaries, encyclopedias and other books because the texts included descriptions of “sexual conduct”.

Meanwhile, in 2022, a Mississippi school district upheld the firing of an assistant principal after he read a humorous children’s book, I Need a New Butt, to his students.”

I don’t doubt that the litigation will continue but the 5th Circuit Court (one step below the Supreme Court) and a conservative court, has set a precedent which will be forced on other recalcitrant states.

Collaboration: Novelists & AI?

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Debbie Urbanski has an article on the Lit Hub website dated December 8, 2023 in which she argues that novelists should embrace artificial intelligence.

Debbie Urbanski is a writer, nature lover, and human whose stories and essays have been published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, she can often be found hiking with her family in the hills south of Syracuse, New York.

Debbie Urbanski

Debbie says: “Let’s imagine, for the purpose of this essay, that the following statement is true: An AI writes a novel.

Actually, forget about the imagining. This is already happening. Today’s AIs—large language models (LLMs) specifically, like GPT-4—can write. If you’ve glanced at the headlines this year, you probably know this. They can write papers for high school students, they can write bad poetry, they can write sentences, they can write paragraphs, and they can write novels.

The problem is, for now, the creative writing that LLMs produce isn’t that great.

To demonstrate this point, I recently gave GPT-4 a few lines from my novel that describe a post-human world. Then I asked it to complete the paragraph. Here’s what it wrote:

The woods seemed to inhale, drawing in its myriad of lifeforms, coalescing into a pulsing organism. The gurgling creek was its veins, the trees its lungs, the moss and ferns, its skin. This realm thrived on its own rhythm, deaf to the clockwork of man-made time. Creatures great and small, predators and prey, living in an intricate ballet—well, you get the idea. If I were being kind, I would call these sentences overwrought and unpleasant.

So here’s what I really want us to imagine for the purpose of this essay: An AI writes a novel and the novel is good.

This is what a lot of people, and certainly a lot of writers, are angry and scared about right now. That AI, having been trained on a massive amount of data, including copyrighted books written by uncompensated authors, will begin writing as well or better than us, and then we’ll be out of a job. These concerns over intellectual property and remuneration are important but right now, it feels they’re dominating the discussion, especially when there are other worthwhile topics that I’d like to see added to the conversation around AI and writing.

Such as: how can humans and AI collaborate creatively?

Which brings me to a third possibility to consider: An AI and a human write a novel together.

In my first novel After World, I imagine humanity has gone extinct and an AI, trained on thousands of 21st century novels, has been tasked to write their own novel about the last human on Earth. When I began writing in the voice of my AI narrator in 2019, I had no idea that within a few years, artificial intelligence would explode into public view, offering me unexpected opportunities for experimentation with what, up until that point, I had been only imagining.

Some of the interactions I’ve had with LLMs like GPT-3, GPT-4, and ChatGPT have been comical. GPT-3 recommended some truly awful book titles, such as Your Heart Was A Dying Light In An Abyss Of Black, But I Lit It Up Until You Burned Bright And Beautiful, or Eve: A Love Story. (Eve is not in this novel, I explained. This didn’t seem to matter. It is just a cute play on words, replied GPT-3.) But many of my conversations with LLMs have been fascinating.

I’ve discussed with them about what AI would dream if they dreamed. We talked about the questions an AI might have about how it feels to be a human. We discussed what the boundary between AI and humans would look like if this boundary was a physical one. (An “ever-evolving, shimmering and translucent wall,” if you’re wondering.) We talked about why poetry comforts people, and we tried writing poetry and song lyrics together. We created so much bad poetry and so many bad songs.

But after days and days of so much bad writing, GPT-4 presented me with this pleading prayer which now appears at a turning point of my novel. To the embodiment of growth and expansion, / To the embodiment of purpose and fulfillment. / To all these entities and more, I humbly offer my plea, / Grant me the strength to manifest my desires…

One can certainly reduce these sorts of exchanges to my typing in prompts and the LLMs responding to those prompts, but what I’ve experienced feels like a much more collaborative process, more of an active conversation that builds on previous interactions. In a way, when we talk with GPT-4, we’re talking to ourselves. At the same time, we’re talking to our past, to words we’ve already written or typed or said. At the same time, we’re talking with our future, portions of which are unimaginable. As a writer, I find that the most exciting of all.

Here are a few other examples of human-AI collaboration that leave me optimistic:

1. “Sunspring”“ (2016)
A short film directed and acted with grave seriousness by professional humans but written by Benjamin, a LSTM recurrent neural network. The writing is surprising, surreal, and beautiful. I’ve watched this film more times than I’ve watched any other. I find it both weird and moving. It features one of the prettiest songs I know, “Home on the Land,” written by Benjamin but sung and scored by the human duo Tiger and Man. From the lyrics: I was a long long time / I was so close to you / I was a long time ago. (Interesting to note that “Zone Out,” Benjamin’s much less collaborative 2018 film that he wrote, acted in, directed, and scored, doesn’t have nearly the same emotional impact as his more collaborative work, despite the fact that the technology had advanced in the two intervening years.

2. Bennet Miller’s exhibition at Gagosian (2023)
Miller, a Hollywood director, generated more than 100,000 images through Dall·E for this project. The gallery show displayed 20 of them. When I first saw these photographs in March 2023, I couldn’t stop looking at them. I still can’t look away. I find them haunting, existing on the edges of documentary and fiction and humanness, suggesting a past and memories that didn’t happen but nonetheless was recorded.

3. Other Dall-E’s collaboration with artists (ongoing)
In particular, check out Maria Mavropoulou’s work on “A self-portrait of an algorithm”  and “Imagined Images”; everything August Kamp is doing, including documenting the worlds of her actual dreams with ChatGPT and Dall·E; and Charlotte Triebus’ Precious Camouflage, which examines the relationship between dance and artificial intelligence.

I worry that we’re forgetting how amazing this all is. Rather than feeling cursed or worried, I feel lucky to get to be here and witness such a change to how we think, live, read, understand, and create. Yes, we have some things to figure out, issues of training, rights, and contracts—and, on a larger level, safety—but I think it’s equally important to look up from such concerns from time to time with interest and even optimism, and wonder how this new advance in technology might widen our perspectives, our sense of self, our creativity, and our definition of what is human.”

Gender Specific Dialogue

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Here is an article from the Writers Digest website by Rachel Scheller dated 11 February 2023 in which she discusses gender differences in dialogue. She begins by saying, “Writing dialogue to suit the gender of your characters is important in any genre, but it becomes even more essential in romance writing. In a romance novel, characters of opposite sexes are often paired up or pitted against each other in relationships with varying degrees of complication. Achieving differentiation in the tones and spoken words of your male and female characters requires a careful touch, especially if you’re a woman writing a male’s dialogue, and vice versa. 

“GENDER-SPECIFIC DIALOGUE
It’s difficult for a writer to create completely convincing dialogue for a character of the opposite gender. But you can make your dialogue more realistic by checking your dialogue against a list of the ways in which most writers go wrong.

“If You’re a Woman
Here’s how to make your hero’s dialogue more true to gender if you’re a female writer:

  • Check for questions. Men tend to request specific information, rather than ask rhetorical questions. If your hero’s questions can’t be answered with a brief response, can you rephrase them? Instead of asking questions at all, can he make statements?
  • Check for explanations. Men tend to resist explaining; they generally don’t volunteer justification for what they do. If you need him to explain, can you give a reason why he must?
  • Check for feelings. Men tend to share feelings only if stressed or forced; they’re more likely to show anger than any other emotion. They generally don’t volunteer feelings. If you need your hero to spill how he’s feeling, can you make it more painful for him to not talk than to share his emotions?
  • Check for details. Men tend not to pay close attention to details; they don’t usually notice expressions or body language; they stick to basics when describing colors and styles. Can you scale back the level of detail?
  • Check for abstractions. Men tend to avoid euphemisms, understatements, comparisons, and metaphors. Can you rephrase your hero’s dialogue in concrete terms?
  • Check for approval-seeking behavior. Men tend to be direct rather than ask for validation or approval. Can you make your hero’s comments less dependent on what the other person’s reaction might be?

“If You’re a Man
Here’s how to make your heroine’s dialogue more realistic if you’re a male writer:

  • Check for advice. Women tend to sympathize and share experiences rather than give advice. Can you add empathy to your character’s reactions and have her talk about similar things that happened to her, rather than tell someone what he should do?
  • Check for bragging. Women tend to talk about their accomplishments and themselves in a self-deprecating fashion rather than a boastful one. Can you rephrase her comments in order to make her laugh at herself?
  • Check for aggressiveness. Women tend to be indirect and manipulative; even an assertive woman usually considers the effect her statement is likely to have before she makes it. Can you add questions to her dialogue, or add approval-seeking comments and suggestions that masquerade as questions?
  • Check for details. Women notice styles; they know what colors go together (and which don’t); and they know the right words to describe fashions, colors, and designs. Can you ramp up the level of specific detail?
  • Check for emotions. Women tend to bubble over with emotion, with the exception that they’re generally hesitant to express anger and tend to do so in a passive or euphemistic manner. If you need your heroine to be angry, can you give her a really good reason for yelling?
  • Check for obliviousness. Women notice and interpret facial expressions and body language, and they maintain eye contact. If you need your female character to not notice how others are acting, can you give her a good reason for being detached?

“Writing Realistic Dialogue: Exercises

  1. Eavesdrop (politely) as real people talk. How do two women speak to each other? How do two men speak to each other? How do a man and a woman speak to each other?
  2. Can you guess the nature of each relationship? For instance, do you think the couple you’ve listened to is newly dating or long-married? On what evidence did you base your opinion?
  3. Read your dialogue aloud. Unnatural lines may hide on the page, but they tend to leap out when spoken.
  4. Listen to someone else read your dialogue aloud. Better yet, get a man and a woman to read the appropriate parts. How do the lines sound? How do they feel to the speakers?”

Rachel Scheller

I haven’t been able to find a bio of Rachel. Where the bio is usually inserted at the end of the article, it is always a member of Writers Digest staff with a different name. All I can say is that Rachel has written about a dozen articles for Writers Digest and some books.

Review: Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire

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I ordered this book when it received some publicity in my alumni newsletter. I knew nothing about Assyria. My ancient history studies were confined to Greece, Rome and a bit about Egypt. it is written by Eckhart Frahm, who is professor of Assyriology in the Department of Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale. One of the world’s foremost experts on the Assyrian Empire, he is the author or coauthor of six books on Mesopotamian history and culture. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Professor Eckhart Frahm

When this book arrived, I found that it was 420 pages long with 8 pages of colour photographs and 5 pages of maps. In addition, there are 55 pages of footnotes and a 20 page index. I thought, how am I going to get through this. I haven’t read a history book in about 70 years. But I soon found that Professor Frahm’s enthusiasm for his subject is quite infections. The book is written in the tone of a mystery which has been solved.

Professor Frahm divides the history of Assyria into three periods. The Old Assyrian period beginning is about 2000 BCE after the town of Ashur (in what is now Iraq) and its god of the same name became politically independent. At that time it was ruled by a popular assembly and a dynasty of hereditary leaders. In about 1700 BCE, Ashur went into a period of decline which lasted until the 14th century when Ashur got back on its feet and became a territorial state eager to expand by military means. This marked the beginning of the Middle Assyrian period. Assyria was now a full-fledged monarchy and began to see itself as equal to Babylonia and Egypt. In about 1100 BCE, Assyria suffered a number of set-backs including climate change, migration and internal tensions. The Neo-Assyrian period began in 934 BCE when a series of ruthless and competent kings took over the Assyrian throne. In 671 BCE, King Esarhaddon and his army conquered Egypt. This made Assyria a fully fledged empire including northeast Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, stretching east into western Iran, north to Anatolia and south to the Persian Gulf. But only half a century after Esarhaddon’s rule, Assyria collapsed and Ninevah, its capital, was destroyed by Babylonia.

This story is, of course, very much dependent on archaeological finds, and in particular, on thousands of clay cuneiform tablets which tell the details of what took place. These can be compared to what is contained in the Hebrew Bible. The cuneiform tablets deal with everything from the economic details to who was appointed the king’s cup bearer. There are records of nearly every Assyrian king over a period of nearly two thousand years. The culture, politics, economics and trade, agriculture, the military capabilities, the vassal states, the languages, literature and arts, as well as the daily life of ordinary people are covered. The Assyrian political model became a guide for the Babylonian and Persian Empires which followed. There is also a discussion about the damage done to monuments and artifacts by ISIS.

For me, the only short coming about the book is the maps, which do not relate the ancient cities to modern geography.

Assyria is a fascinating and enlightening read.

Spice Not Smut

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There’s a post by Ciera Horton McElroy on the Writer’s Digest website, dated 9 February 2023, in which she argues that it makes better fiction when the writer uses spice rather than smut. She goes on to describe how to write spicy fiction.

Ciera Horton McElroy

Ciera Horton McElroy (b. 1995) was raised in Orlando, Florida. She holds a BA from Wheaton College and an MFA from the University of Central Florida. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Bridge Eight, Iron Horse Literary Review, the Crab Orchard Review, and Saw Palm, among others. She currently lives in St. Louis with her husband and son. Atomic Family is her debut novel.

Ciera says,”I was shocked when my undergraduate professor said, ‘Christians write the best sex scenes.’. Seriously? How? I wasn’t the only one surprised. The other writers in the senior class at our Christian college snickered and exchanged glances.

“No, really,” she insisted, taking in our unconvinced faces. “Because Christians understand one important thing when it comes to writing about sex. Restraint.”

She went on to explain that writing about sex is also not writing about sex. Meaning, we need to write about the ache, the desire, the struggle to control one’s impulses.

I remembered this piece of advice many years later. Because when it came time to add some scenes to my novel Atomic Family that were a little … well, spicy … restraint was the magic word.

Writing about sex can be challenging for so many reasons. How much do we need to describe? How technical do we need to be? How do we forget, while writing, that our parents and friends will likely read this?

You get the picture.

What I’ve discovered in my writing is that there’s an important distinction between spice and smut—and that spice is often more interesting and character-driven for fiction than the latter.

In fiction writing, smut means sexually explicit or even pornographic material. Think Fifty Shades of Grey. Erotic novels are their own genre with their own devoted reader—but as with anything, they’re not for everyone.

What I’ve discovered as a historical fiction author is that you can have spice in a scene that doesn’t even have physical contact. All you need is desire. If we know a character’s desire and attraction, then we can feel the longing and passion along with them—and all of that can be fully, emotionally, and even physically realized without having content that is overtly graphic and descriptive.

Think about how much was accomplished in the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy accidentally touch hands. Hot. If the setting is clear and the tension is established, the smallest moments can be imbued with burning desire.

By varying your sentence structure, you can accomplish a lot in terms of showing desire. Ian McEwan is a master of using literary devices to show sexual desire and intimacy. Take his landmark novel Atonement. We’re going to look at the library scene. (Yep, that scene.)

‘He tilted her face up, and trapping her against his ribs, kissed her eyes and parted her lips with his tongue … At last they were strangers, their pasts were forgotten. They were also strangers to themselves who had forgotten who or where they were. The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling.’

There’s such lyrical beauty in this paragraph. Notice the short phrases, the breathiness to the prose. As their passion is heating up, the sentences become both longer and choppier. The syntax itself shows not only desire but escalation. This is a great tool to have in your back pocket when it comes to writing scenes with sexual tension.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but sometimes distancing a character from his or her body has a heightening effect when writing about sex. Lauren Groff often includes innovative sex scenes in her work—innovative in that they are distinctly character-driven. Usually, the scenes are meant to show what’s happening internally in a character’s psyche, as well as what’s obviously happening with the body. Take this scene from Groff’s early novel Arcadia.

‘She pressed down again, her body against his chest, and at last her mouth found his. He imagined the quiet street outside shining in the lights, the millions of souls warm and listening to the rain in their beds. He couldn’t stop looking at the side of her face, her eyes closed, the small shell of her ear, the scar in her nostril where the stud had been, her thin pale lower lip in her teeth. He was close but held off, until at last she whispered, Go.’

Notice how the narrative starts with the physical: We’re clearly tuned in to what’s happening. Then, we pan back out. He is imagining the quiet street, the lights, the people around them in the beautiful world. And then he’s back, but his focus is on all the bodily details that seem, honestly, very un-sexual. The side of her face. The shell of her ear. A scar on her nostril. I find that this “zoom-out and zoom-in” technique heightens the intimacy in the scene, especially as he’s noticing delicate and easily overlooked physical details of his partner. But doesn’t that feel so human?

Sometimes all you need is a little more conflict to help raise the heat.

In my novel Atomic Family, Dean wrestles with whether or not to cheat on his wife with a young woman named April, who works with him at the nuclear plant. His desire comes to a fever pitch at a very inopportune time … at work. During a smoke break. When a colleague could find them at any moment. After struggling to restrain himself, Dean can’t resist kissing April. I used interjectory thoughts from Dean to escalate his desire, showing his intense and urgent need to find privacy—now.

‘With one hand, he cups her breast outside the sweater. He can feel the boned bra and the whirlpool lace through cashmere. My office, he thinks. My car. They could slip away for an hour—no one would miss them. A storage closet. The locker room. He would be fast, so fast! It’s been so long! A sampling trailer. The stairwell.‘

Notice how he’s negotiating with himself. This is the character-driven restraint as he’s battling with his own desire. Of course, the text doesn’t need to specify exactly what would happen in the office or his car. The reader knows. It’s pretty obvious what he wants.

Note, too, that desire feels more urgent when the setting is awkward or uncomfortable or there is some circumstantial reason why the lovers don’t want to be caught. Ian McEwan accomplishes something similar in Atonement with the note that the two lovers block out the sounds that might have drawn them back to reality—because, as we know, someone could find them. And does.

If you have a strong sense of your character, then writing about desire should naturally flow from the character’s internal struggles and desires. We don’t have to get technical to know what’s going on. We just have to know what it means to the person on the page … and by using things like syntax and setting and tension, you can turn up the heat in your fiction while still maintaining a sense of mystery.”