Reading

Trump vs Librarians

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There is an article written by Rainesford Stauffer in the 7 April 2025 edition of the Guardian.

 Rainesford Stauffer is a freelance writer, reporter, and Kentuckian. She’s the author of An Ordinary Age and All the Gold Stars. Her work has appeared in TIME, The Guardian, Esquire, Teen Vogue, The Cut, and other publications, and she writes the Work in Progress column at Teen Vogue. She was a 2022-2023 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism.

 Rainesford Stauffer

She said, “For many librarians, the stakes of the job are high – they’re facing burnout, book bans, legislation pushed by rightwing groups, and providing essential resources in an effort to fill gaps in the US’s social safety net.

Now, as Donald Trump’s administration rolls out their agenda, many librarians are describing his policies as “catastrophic” to accessing information and the libraries themselves – institutions considered fundamental to democracy.

Rebecca Hass, the programming and outreach manager at the Anne Arundel county public library in Maryland, has seen the effects of Trump’s second term ripple in.

“The impact [is] on many different community partners and customers that are represented in some of the executive orders,” said Hass. “We get everyone at the library. When people lose their jobs, they come to the library. When they’re not sure what’s going on, they come to the library.”

Hass said the library received some pushback about LGBTQ+ programming, including protesters showing up to its trans Pride event. But the library is undeterred in efforts to meet community needs and supply resources, creating new resource pages on immigration and LGBTQ+ communities, and updating others. They have expanded partnerships, including with social workers in the library. Usage of the community pantry has increased.

Much of this is work the library has always done, Hass said, adding: “But now it’s taken on urgency and additional responsibilities.”

Emily Drabinski, an associate professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the City University of New York, said that what is happening to librarians now mirrors what is happening to other workers.

“You don’t get paid enough to meet your basic needs. Your autonomy at work is consistently under threat. People who think that they know better how to do your job are trying to get the power to push you out of your position,” she said.

Some librarians described the impact of institutions capitulating to censorship on their work. A librarian in the deep south, who asked to remain anonymous in order to protect their safety, described tensions rising on their library board, and how the library is taking pre-emptive measures to make it challenging to find titles considered “controversial”.

“I see all that being as a measure of: ‘If we fly under the radar, we’ll be safe,’” they said. “But it’s sad because who gets left behind – for staff members of color, [or] who are visibly queer, who are disabled, we don’t get to turn off that part of ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Imani, an academic librarian in Texas who declined to give their full name for privacy concerns, is an active public library user, said “DEI removal” happened in her workplace in 2023. Now, they’re seeing increased scrutiny on how funds are spent, especially in regard to large databases.

“It’s really important that people know that this isn’t new at all,” she said, adding that she knew a school librarian who retired several years ago due to fears of criminalization. “At this point, many librarians have done every single thing they can to save things.”

Also, Imani noted, librarians are doing their work with “very little money, very little support [and] higher, higher demand”.

Elon Musk’s unofficial (sic)“department of government efficiency” recently gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which the American Library Association noted greatly affects the important services they offer, including high-speed internet access, summer reading programs, veterans’ telehealth spaces and more, with the most intense losses in rural communities.

While the majority of public library funding comes from city and county taxes, according to EveryLibrary, the IMLS provides grants that support these critical services in every state.

Marisa Kabas, the independent journalist who writes the The Handbasket obtained a copy of a letter sent by IMLS’s acting director, Keith Sonderling, announcing that state library grantee funding would be terminated immediately. (Sonderling previously declared his intention to “restore focus on patriotism” to the IMLS, which many groups noted as an attack of freedom of expression.)

The IMLS submitted a budget request of $280m for 2025.

“That’s nothing in terms of the federal budget, yet it’s going to affect every single library in the country,” said Jessamyn West, who works in a rural, public library in Vermont in addition to working with the Flickr Foundation. “It’s going to make them scramble, it’s going to make them worry, and it’s going to make them have to make really difficult choices for the services that they give to their patrons.”

In many cases, the money is already spent because of contracts libraries had with governments, West added.

“We’re all pretty furious,” West said.

Librarians are speaking out about what communities could lose, including internet access and workforce development in Kentucky, the Talking Book and Braille Center in New Jersey, digital hotspots in North Carolina, and much more outlined in reporting from Book Riot. As librarians grappled with losses that would directly affect their work, the IMLS Instagram account issued posts appearing to mock grantees.

“It’s catastrophic,” Drabinski said, adding that IMLS funds significant library infrastructure, including ebook platforms and interlibrary loan systems. “Without those funds, many of those systems will grind to a halt. All of our work is about to become harder at the same time that the need for our resources and services will explode.”

Drabinski continued: “What we want is for people to be able to read, and for people to have enough. The problems that we face as American workers are similar to yours, and we share a fight.”

Having Fun with Tropes

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On the Writers Digest website there is an article by Catriona Silvey dated March 12, 2025 about the use of tropes in fiction.

Catriona Silvey

Catriona Silvey is the author of the international bestseller Meet Me in Another Life. She was born in Glasgow and grew up in Scotland and England. After collecting an unreasonable number of degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Chicago, and Edinburgh, she settled in Edinburgh where she lives with her husband and children.

Catriona says, “Time travel is the science fiction trope with the most mainstream appeal: see, for example, the huge success of The Time Traveler’s Wife, or the more recent hit The Ministry of Time. The attraction is obvious—who wouldn’t want to visit a seemingly unrecoverable past, or get a sneak preview of the future? Different kinds of time travel stories also allow the author to examine different themes. If the past can’t be changed, what does that mean for our ideas of free will? If it can, what happens to our sense of self when our history gets rewritten?

“In Love and Other Paradoxes, the question of what kind of time travel story they’re in becomes a subject of debate between Joe and Esi, and a driving force of the plot. Joe thinks they’re in a stable time loop, where the future will happen no matter what. Esi thinks they’re in a rewritable timeline, where she can make a change in the past and return to a different future. The stakes of who is right ratchet up over the course of the book, combining real implications for the characters with metatextual fun for the time-travel-savvy reader.

“Joe finds out he’s going to become a famous poet when Esi accidentally drops a published book of his future poetry. The book then becomes the catalyst for several key moments in the plot: When Esi tries to get it back, fearing that if Joe reads it, he’ll send the future chaotically off course; when Joe submits a poem from the book to a competition, borrowing from his future to enrich his present.

“From The Neverending Story to House of Leaves, the plot-triggering book has a time-honored history across genres. It’s a trope calculated to appeal to readers: A protagonist who’s glued to a book is automatically relatable. In Love and Other Paradoxes, Joe’s attitude to the book throughout the novel—whether he carries it around in his pocket, or shoves it in the bottom of a drawer—also serves the additional function of mirroring his changing attitude to his future self.

“Since long before Romeo and Juliet, we’ve been telling stories of people who fall in love but can’t be together. The twist on the trope in Love and Other Paradoxes is that for Joe and Esi, the reasons are more metaphysical than social: They both think he’s destined for Diana, the muse who will inspire his famous poetry. If Joe and Esi got together instead, it would put both of their long-dreamed-of futures in jeopardy.

“The joy of the forbidden love trope is that you can write two people who are perfect for each other, with all the flirting, banter, and warmth that entails, but maintain a bittersweet tension, since they know they can’t act on their feelings. And when those feelings become too strong to resist, the stakes of the characters giving in are deliciously high. It’s a built-in way to add intensity to a romance—no wonder it’s been one of the most perennially popular tropes in the genre.

“After his knowledge of the future derails his relationship with Diana, Joe enlists Esi as his dating coach to help him win back his future love. What follows is a classic case of the Matchmaker Crush trope, where two people who are ostensibly working to fix one of them up with a third party instead start to fall for each other.

“The scope for fun with this trope is huge. Makeovers, and the attending none-too-subtle hints at attraction; poking fun at the protagonist’s lack of romantic game; the ratcheting tension, as two people who are starting to become aware of their feelings for each other continue to maintain the charade that one of them is destined for someone else. As with many tropes, the key appeal of this one is that the reader knows where it’s going long before the characters do, leading to the potential for delicious dramatic irony.

“It’s in the nature of a Matchmaker Crush that it tends to lead to a love triangle. As Esi is falling for Joe, he is falling for her too, and he finds himself torn between her and Diana.

“A well-written love triangle is never just about being torn between two people; it’s about the protagonist being torn between two versions of themselves. A paradigm example is in The Hunger Games. While tough, militant Gale initially seems like a more natural match for Katniss, Peeta’s gentleness and persuasive powers make him a better fit for who she aspires to be. 

“In choosing between Diana and Esi, Joe is also deciding between two futures: a glorious, pre-defined future featuring a self he’s not even sure he wants to be any more, and a nebulous, open future, growing out of what he and Esi have learned about who they are in the present. Which one he chooses defines not just the romantic resolution, but also what the novel is trying to say about love, destiny, and how our ideas about the future can affect our present.”

Trump’s Book Bann?

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The Guardian’s website has an article by Ed Pilkington, dated 13 February 2025 under the title ‘Pentagon schools suspend library books for ‘compliance review’ under Trump orders’.

Ed Pilkington is Chief Reporter for The Guardian in the US

He wrote: “Tens of thousands of American children studying in Pentagon schools serving US military families have had all access to library books suspended for a week while officials conduct a “compliance review” under Donald Trump’s crackdown on DEI and gender equality.

The Department of Defense circulated a memo to parents on Monday that said that it was examining library books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”. The memo, which has been obtained by the Guardian, said that a “small number of items” had been identified and were being kept for “further review”.

Books deemed to be in possible violation of the president’s executive orders targeting transgender people and so-called “radical indoctrination” of schoolchildren have been removed from library shelves. The memo states that the titles have been relocated “to the professional collection for evaluation with access limited to professional staff”.

The censorship of library books in defense department schools provoked a furious response from Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee. He slammed the practice as “naked content and viewpoint censorship of books”, during a hearing on the “censorship-industrial complex” on Wednesday.

Raskin invited other members of Congress to join him in “denouncing the purge of books, the stripping of books from the Department of Defense libraries or any other public libraries in America”.

The purge of library books will affect up to 67,000 children being taught in Pentagon schools worldwide. The Guardian understands that all 160 schools, located in seven US states and 11 countries, are subject to the censorship.

The Guardian has obtained a list of books that have been caught up in the blanket evaluation. They include No Truth Without Ruth, a picture book for four-to-eight-year-olds about the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to sit on the US supreme court.

The book, by the award-winning writer Kathleen Krull, describes the sexist discrimination Ginsburg had to overcome in her rise to becoming a supreme court justice.

Other titles that have been caught up in the review include a book by the American Oscar-winning actor Julianne Moore. Freckleface Strawberry, also for four-to-eight year olds, features a young girl coming to terms with her freckles.

The Guardian invited the defense department to comment on the review of these and other titles, but a spokesperson did not refer to individual titles.

In a statement, the Department of Defense education activity confirmed that it was carrying out a review of library books as part of an examination of all “instructional resources”. The purpose was to ensure that Pentagon schools were aligned to Trump’s recent executive orders, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”

All book banns, except those which include books advocating violence, are to my mind a violation of the concept of Freedom of Speech. In their enthusiasm for cancelling DEI and gender self-identity, the Trump administration has gone too far.

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.”

Conveying a Character’s Emotions

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Harry Bingham, of Jericho Writers, sent out an excellent, comprehensive email a week ago last Friday about how to describe the emotions of a character without TELLING.

He said, “Today I want to give a more comprehensive, more fully ordered list of options.

Honestly, I doubt if many of you will want to pin those options to the wall and pick from them, menu-style, as you write. But having these things in your awareness is at least likely to loosen your attachment to the clench-n-quake school of writing.

Let’s say that we have our character – Talia, 33, single. She’s the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at a major London museum, and the antiquities keep going missing. She’s also rather fond of Daniel, 35, a shaggy-haired archaeologist. Our scene? Hmm. Talia and a colleague (Asha, 44) are working late. They hear strange noises from the vault. They go to investigate and find some recent finds, Egyptian statuary, have been unaccountably moved. In the course of the scene, Asha tells Talia that she fancies Daniel … and thinks he fancies her back.

In the course of the scene, Talia feels curious about the noises in the vault, feels surprise and fear when she finds the statues have been moved. And feels jealousy and uncertainty when Asha speaks of her feelings for Daniel.

We need to find ways to express Talia’s feelings in the story.

Here’s one way:

Direct statements of emotion

Talia felt a surge of jealousy, that almost amounted to anger.

Bingo. Why not? That’s what she feels, so why not say it? No reason at all. Some writers will panic that they’re telling not showing, and they’ve read somewhere that they shouldn’t do that (at all, ever), so they’ll avoid these direct statements. But why? They work. They’re useful. They help the reader.

More complicated but still direct statements

Somewhere, she felt a shadow-self detach from her real one, a shadow self that wanted to claw Asha’s face, pull her hair, draw blood, cause pain.

That’s still saying “Talia felt X”, we’ve just inserted a more complicated statement into the hole marked X, but it still works. And that dab of exotic imagery gives the whole thing a novelly feel, so we’re good, right? Even though technically, we’re still telling not showing.

Physical statements: inner report

Talia felt her belly drop away, the seaside roller-coaster experience, except that here she was no child. There was no sand, no squinting sunshine, no erupting laughter.

Now as you know, I don’t love text that overuses physical statements as a way to describe emotion, but that’s because overuse of anything is bad, and because the statements tend to be very thin (mouth contorting, chest shuddering, etc). If you don’t overuse the statements and enrich the ones you do make, there’s not an issue.

Notice that here, we have Talia noticing something about her physical state – it’s not an external observation. But both things are fine.

Physical statements: external observation

Colour rushed into Talia’s face. She turned her head abruptly to prevent the other woman seeing but Asha was, in any case, more interested in the case of funerary amulets.

Here, we’re only talking about physical changes that are apparent on the outside, and that snippet is fine too. It doesn’t go very deep and, for my money, it feels like a snippet that would best go after a more direct statement. “Talia felt a surge of jealousy, anger almost. Colour rushed into her face, and she turned her head …”

Dialogue

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …”

Dialogue conveys emotion. It can also provide text and subtext in one. So here, the overt meaning is Talia’s doubt that a mid-thirties Daniel could fancy a mid-forties Asha… but the clear sub-text is a catty jealousy on Talia’s part. And readers love decoding those subtexts, so the more you offer them, the better.

Direct statement of inner thought

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …”

Doubt what? That he’d fancy the glamorous, shaggy-haired Asha, with her white shirts and big breasts and pealing laughter?

The second bit here is a direct statement of Talia’s actual thought. We could also have written:

Doubt what, she wondered. That he’d fancy …

That inserts a “she wondered” into things, but as you see, we can have a direct statement of her thoughts with or without that “she wondered”. Either way, it works.

Memory

Talia remembered seeing the two of them, at conference in Egypt. Holding little white coffee cups on a sunny balcony and bawling with laughter at something, she didn’t know what. Asha’s unfettered, unapologetic booming laughter and all the sunlit roofs of Cairo.

That doesn’t quite go directly to emotions, but it half-does and we could take it nearer with a little nudging. And, for sure, if you want a rounded set of tools to build out your emotional language, then memory will play a part.

Action

When Asha spoke, Talia had been holding a small pot in elaborately worked clay. It would once have held a sacred oil with which to anoint a new bride. Talia felt Asha looking sharply at her, at her hands, and when she looked, she saw the pot was split in two, that she’d broken it, now, after two thousand three hundred years.

OK, is that a bit on the nose? Breaking a marriage pot. Well, maybe, but it’s better than quaking, clenching and contorting all the time.

Use of the setting

They were in the vault now, marital relics stored in the shelves behind them, funerary relics and coinage on the shelves in front. Leaking through the walls from the offices next door, there was the wail of Sawhali music, the mourning of a simsimiyya.

At one level, that snippet is only talking about hard physical facts: what’s stored on the shelves, what music they can hear. But look at the language: we have marital and funerary in the same sentence. The next sentence brings us wail and mourning. This is a pretty clear way of saying that Talia’s not exactly joyful about things. Every reader will certainly interpret it that way.

And there are probably more alternatives too, and certainly you can smush these ones up together and get a thousand interesting hybrids as a result.”

How to Talk About Your Book

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Maris Kreizman has put some advice (for herself) on the Literary Hub website dated two days ago.

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.

She says, “Today I have my very first press event for my new book, which is out in July. I, along with three other wonderful Ecco authors, will take part in a lunchtime Zoom meeting with various members of the media and booksellers, during which we’ll be interviewed by Ecco’s associate publisher. I’ve been thinking a lot about what to say, and how to talk about my book in general.

I will not use this space to workshop anything, I promise. I’m not here to sell this book to you. But I do think my many years as a books journalist has primed me to understand what makes for a good talk, and I want to tell you about what I think works, while also reminding myself. Stage fright is real, after all.

I won’t have a script, just a few notes. I know how important it is to actually have a conversation, and that means being present and listening to what other people are saying, too.

The goal is to talk about the book in more detail than the marketing copy that my editor so carefully crafted for me, but to still be pithy and precise. The book has gone through so many iterations, and I have to have a handle on what it is now, after many rounds of edits and much feedback from my agent and editor and a few trusted friends.

In my career covering books, in podcasts and in print, I’ve conducted hundreds of author interviews, and the very best ones featured writers who were able to make a tight, cohesive narrative out of, well, the narrative they’d already written. As an author, getting the story right is the most important part of writing a book, but getting the story of the story right is the most important part of promoting it, of getting readers to want to buy it.

Often the authors who have the best grasp on the concept of storytelling to sell their own work are also teachers, the ones who are used to speaking to an audience in classes and keeping their attention until the end of the session. The biggest pros I’ve encountered have four or five stories that they can trot out for any occasion when they’re talking about the book. Does this mean that every article or interview they do is entirely original? Absolutely not. Do average readers read every single piece of press that’s written about a particular book, even the ones they’re interested in? Absolutely not.

It has just about always been the job of the author to help sell the book long after they’ve finished the job of writing it. I think we like to pretend that in the past authors could simply write a book and then keep their heads down, letting their publishers take care of getting the word out. To be fair, before the technological changes of the 21st century (namely social media) authors could be more passive in the promotion of their books—Philip Roth never had to connect with readers on Twitter or do a bunch of podcasts, after all. But he did have to, in interviews and at bookstore talks and signings, make readers want to buy what he was selling.

Now, in a landscape where books don’t get tons of traditional media coverage and social media overall gets less and less reliable, it’s more important than ever for authors to take an active role in talking about their books (reminder: we love our in-house publicists and marketing gurus, but there’s only so much they can do on a tight schedule with a punishing work load). As icky as it may feel to have to be the chief salesperson of one’s own book as well as the writer, who else has more of a vested interest in making sure the book finds readers?

My hope is that after I’ve discussed my book today, more people in the industry will actually get a chance to read it, and they’ll be able to tell me what they think my book is about. They have more distance from the work than I do, and I welcome their interpretations. In fact I welcome any good faith takes on my book, although because I am also the chief protector of my own sensitive feelings, I may not have the emotional bandwidth to consider them all.”

I agree with what Maris says, and I’d like to add some points:

  • Her listeners will want to know what the book is about – no more than three sentences: time, place and key events.
  • They don’t want to hear a summary of the plot.
  • They will be interested in anything particularly unusual about a key character or event.
  • You can talk briefly about the development arc of a key character – particularly if it’s positive.
  • If you had to do some special research (interviewing people/going places), that’s worth mentioning.
  • They would like to hear from you about what makes you feel good about the book.
  • How about touching on what motivated you to write the book, and how you got the idea for it.

Unsolved Mysteries

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Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers made in interesting point about unsolved mysteries in his Friday email of 6 December 2024. He calls it the easiest technique in fiction.

Harry said, “Lots of things in writing are hard. One thing in particular is very, very easy… but it’s astonishingly neglected by a lot of writers.

Here’s an example of getting something wrong, using an extract I’ve invented for the purpose. In my mind, this extract might stand at the start of a novel, but it could be anywhere really.

So:

Dawn woke her – dawn, and the rattle of trade that started to swell with it. Barrels being rolled over cobbles, a cart arriving from the victuallers’ yard, men starting to bray.

It had been a cold night and promised to be a cold morning, too. Her feet found the rag mat next to the bed. She washed hands and face briefly, and without emotion, then lifted her nightgown and began to bind her breasts, with the white winding strip she always used. Round and round, flattening her form.

She continued to get dressed. Blue slops. Bell-bottomed trousers, a shirt, a waistcoat, a blue jacket, loose enough for her shoulders to work. Just for a moment, she looked at her hands. They’d been soft once, and were coarse now, hardened off by the scrambles up rigging, the hard toil on ropes.

Caroline – Charles as she was known to her fellow ratings – had been forced to take work as a man when her father died two years ago, right at the start of this new war against Napoleon. She had tried taking work as a seamstress, but the pay had been poor, and she had a younger sister always sickly to look after. In the end, she had found herself forced to dress as a man and work as a man, here at the great bustling port of Portsmouth…

I hope you can see that this passage is kinda fine… and kinda fine… and then disastrous.

The first paragraph here is fine: it starts to establish the scene.

The second paragraph is intriguing: why the flipping heck is this woman (clearly not a modern one) so keen to flatten her chest?

The third paragraph inks in a bit more of the mystery: OK, so this woman works on ships of some sort in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So why is she disguising herself as a man?

And then –

The disaster –

The writer makes the horrendous mistake of answering that question. The story was just beginning to make fine headway. We wanted to grip our reader and thrust them forwards into the story. Our first three paragraphs set up a fine story motor, which was already starting to chug away. Then by completely solving the mystery, we destroyed almost every shred of momentum we had.

By the end of that extract, we still have an interest in seeing what happens to this woman, but we don’t yet know her very well as a character. We can’t at this stage care very much about her. But we did care about that mystery. And the author just ruined it.

The lesson here – and the easiest technique in fiction is – take it slow. If the reader wants to know X, then don’t tell them X.

That’s it! That’s the whole technique.

A much better approach here would have been to simply follow Caroline/Charles’s morning. I’d probably have given her some kind of problem to solve. Perhaps, she owes an innkeeper money that she doesn’t have and needs to slip away unseen. Or she has to collect some belongings from one part of town but has to get back to her ship in order not to miss the tide.

That way, one part of the reader is asking, Will she get back to her ship in time? But that’s just a top layer to the more interesting underlying question of Why is she disguised as a man?

Indeed, we’ll study the whole rushing-about-town episode with extra interest, because while we’re not that fussed about whether she misses the tide or not, we are interested in that second question – and we read about these ordinary story incidents as a way to uncover clues about the bigger issue.

The key fact here is that readers love solving mysteries. They like reading a text to find clues and hints and suggestions that lead them to an answer. I think for most readers that process has an extra impetus if the mystery is embedded in something very personal to a key character.

So the technique you need to adopt is:

  1. Create a mystery. Then,
  2. Don’t solve it.

The easiest technique in fiction.

Homer Is a Distressing Poet?

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The Daily Telegraph has an article in its 29 December 2024 issue which I find distressing. (I could not find an author attribution.)

Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey classics

The article says, “Homer’s epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey have been hit with trigger warnings by a university for “distressing” content.

The University of Exeter has come under fire after telling undergraduates they may “encounter views and content that they may find uncomfortable” in their Greek mythology studies.

In what has been branded as a “parody” and “bonkers”, students enroled on the Women in Homer module are told material could be “challenging”.

With references to sexual violence, rape and infant mortality, undergraduates are also advised they should “feel free to deal with it in ways that help (eg to leave the classroom, contact Wellbeing, and of course talk to the lecturer)” if content is “causing distress”.

However, the advice, which was obtained by the Mail on Sunday via Freedom of Information laws, has been ridiculed by both classics-loving Boris Johnson and experts alike.

The Iliad depicts the final weeks of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by Greek city-states, while The Odyssey describes Odysseus’s successful journey back to Ithaca, set over multiple locations, timelines and alternative homelands.

Mr Johnson, who read classics at the University of Oxford and is a fan of Homer, said the ancient works provided the “foundation of Western literature”.

Reacting to news of the university’s warning, the former prime minister described the policy as “bonkers”, telling the paper: “Exeter University should withdraw its absurd warnings. Are they really saying that their students are so wet, so feeble-minded and so generally namby-pamby that they can’t enjoy Homer?

“Is the faculty of Exeter University really saying that its students are the most quivering and pathetic in the entire 28 centuries of Homeric studies?”

Historian Lord Andrew Roberts said students shouldn’t be “wrapped in cotton wool and essentially warned against ancient but central texts of the Western canon”.

Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, added: “A university that decides to put a trigger warning on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey has become morally disoriented to the point that it has lost the plot.”

Jeremy Black, the author of A Short History Of War, said the measure “can surely only be a parody”.

A spokesman from the University of Exeter told The Telegraph: “The University strongly supports both academic freedom and freedom of speech, and accepts that this means students may encounter views and content that they may find uncomfortable during their studies.

“Academics may choose to include a content warning on specific modules if they feel some students may find some of the material challenging or distressing.

“Any decision made to include a content warning is made by the academics involved in delivering the modules, and these help ensure students who may be affected by specific issues are not subjected to any potential unnecessary distress.”

The warnings on Homer’s work come amid an increasing number of works being slapped with trigger warnings.

Last week, it emerged that John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was removed from the Welsh GCSE curriculum for the “psychological and emotional” harm caused by its racial slurs.

In October, the University of Nottingham received similar criticism for warning students of The Canterbury Tales’ “expressions of Christian faith”.

Earlier this year, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were amongst a collection of children’s stories that were handed trigger warnings for “white supremacy” at York St John University.

In 2023, a disclaimer was added to the republishing of Nobel Prize-winning Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Whilst deciding not to censor the book, publisher Penguin Random House’s note made clear the reissue did not constitute an “endorsement” of Hemingway’s original text.”

I remember that as a child my mother reading both the Iliad and the Odyssey to me and that I particularly enjoyed them, knowing that they had been written 2,800 years ago.. Are today’s young adults really so vulnerable to distress? If so, trigger warnings are necessary for 90% of the current news!

English Literature Is Making a Comeback

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There is an article in today’s Telegraph by Ben Wright, which argues that AI is making a degree in humanities more valuable than ever.

Ben Wright

Ben Wright is a columnist and associate editor for The Telegraph. He was previously business editor and before joining the Telegraph was City correspondent at the Wall Street Journal and editor of Financial News.

Ben said, “Some might call it a tragedy. The number of students taking English literature at A-level dropped from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 last year. The number applying to study the subject at university dropped by a third over a similar period. Some pessimists believe the English literature degree could die out within a decade if the subject doesn’t make a better case for itself.

It’s not hard to understand why. For years now, we’ve been telling students to focus on Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects in the belief that a strong knowledge in these areas was the key to gaining entry to a whole range of industries. When you work in the money markets (or law courts, or Silicon Valley), what use are the novels of Wordsworth gonna be, eh?

That’s not complete nonsense but now the pendulum is in danger of swinging too far. And I’m not just saying that as one of the dwindling tribe of English literature graduates huddled together for warmth under the shrinking shelter and capricious protection of the media and publishing industries. Many employers, including those at the very cutting edge of tech, are coming to the same conclusion.

Strangely, a chronic problem has become acute with the advent of artificial intelligence. Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, caused a bit of flutter earlier this year when he tweeted: “The hottest new programming language is English.” What he meant is that increasingly you don’t need to be able to code to code.

A friend of mine who works in the tech industry points out that the deep learning algorithms and transformer models created by the likes of Google, Meta, and OpenAI among others in the past few years didn’t create Large Number Models; they created Large Language Models (LLMs).

Anyone can therefore write prompts for ChatGPT and their ilk. “Natural” language is therefore becoming the “user interface” for artificial intelligence. (That sentence alone illustrates why Silicon Valley might need some help with the transition.)

As my friend put it: the invention of the iPhone put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket, but LLMs give all of us the ability to program it. In many ways this is great news. It means that technology is becoming more democratised and accessible. It opens up a host of opportunities for those who are skilled in the use of language. The problem is, that’s not many recent graduates.

Anjney Midha, who is on the board of several AI companies, says he often sees very bright Gen Z kids struggling to write clear prompts because they mostly communicate through broken or pidgin English: “Translating thought to language is insanely hard for them.”

Ethan Mollick, a professor studying AI at Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, says this means that – in an inversion of the old order of things – experienced managers are becoming better coders than bright young things fresh out of university.

Nor is the problem confined to the world of tech. Universities are finding that many students arrive having never read a whole book from cover to cover. This is leading to a massive deficit in old-fashioned skills that turn out not to be so old-fashioned after all.

For the past few years, Kingston University has been asking businesses what skills they need but currently aren’t finding in potential employees. Top of the list are the ability to communicate, analyse, adapt, problem-solve and think creatively.

What’s more, it turns out that computers can learn to code far quicker than humans can. They can easily be taught how to ace exams in maths and science. But even the most sophisticated generative AI struggles with English literature papers. There’s a clue here.

In a recent interview about AI, the mathematician Terence Tao said: “I think at the frontier, we will always need humans and AI. They have complementary strengths.” So, contrary to the prevailing doom-mongering about the relentless rise of AI being about to damn the humanities to perpetual irrelevance, might the very opposite be true?

With such a large supply and demand mismatch, you’d assume the market will eventually correct itself, but perhaps things can be helped on their way. Colin Hughes, the head of the country’s largest exam board AQA, argued the GCSE English language needed to be rethought because it was “not very inspiring” and “a bit too mechanistic”.

One obvious way to update the syllabus would be to teach the writing of clear, succinct and unambiguous prompts for artificial intelligence chatbots. English literature could also be made more relevant.

That is not – repeat, not – about bemoaning the canon for being too “male, pale and stale”, as Sharon Hague, the managing director of Pearson, recently did. Nor should we point the finger at “wokeness” for killing off the English degree.

Such tensions have always existed in the discipline. So academics can continue with their squabbles about which voices are most marginalised, but only after pointing out that studying literature is a crash course in empathy, that almost all careers require an element of storytelling and that the only way to learn how to write well is to read lots.

Anyone can therefore write prompts for ChatGPT and their ilk. “Natural” language is therefore becoming the “user interface” for artificial intelligence. (That sentence alone illustrates why Silicon Valley might need some help with the transition.)

Harold Bloom argued that deep reading fostered higher order thinking. An education in the humanities or the liberal arts also makes students more adept at dealing with nuance and expressing opinions based on value judgments. These are useful skills for dealing with an unpredictable future and a world composed of various shades of grey.

None of this is going to result in an immediate stampede of people signing up to study English literature at university. You don’t need to understand Chaucer to write clear AI prompts. What’s more, you shouldn’t really need any better argument for studying great art other than for its own sake.

But if reading whole books and writing essays is no longer a given, then those who can will have an edge over their peers. And if more students can be persuaded that’s a good way to become more employable, a reasonable proportion of them will go on to study English literature at A-level and a reasonable proportion of them will go on to do so at university.

It’s only common sense that if you are worried about the rise of machines and robots stealing our jobs, it’s better to lean into the stuff that AI finds trickier to do. The not-so-secret ingredient is right there on the packaging; they’re called humanities for a reason.”