Writers

Building Tension in a Fictional Marriage

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On the Writer’s Digest website, May 5,2025, author Paul Vidich examines the way three novels portray deception in fictional marriages to build tension and compelling stories.

Paul Vidich is the acclaimed author of The Mercenary, The Coldest Warrior, An Honorable Man, and The Good Assassin, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, LitHub, CrimeReads, Fugue, The Nation, Narrative Magazine, Wordriot, and others. He lives in New York City.

Paul Vidich

Paul says: “What is more intimate than trust in a marriage? My new novel,The Poet’s Game, explores the marriage between a widower who left behind a long career in the CIA and his new, younger wife who works as a Russian translator in the agency. I wanted to examine a loving relationship that is full of joy and laughter, but where one spouse has a toxic secret that calls into question the loving relationship.

“Can two people love each other and still betray each other?  In The Poet’s Game, Alex Matthews and his wife, Anna Kuschenko, are trained to use lies and deceit in the course of their intelligence work, and they ultimately contend with a dark secret that will forever keep them from being entirely truthful with each other. How does a couple that uses deception in the normal course of their professional duties, approach intimacy in marriage?

“The marriages portrayed in The Odyssey, Rebecca, and Berlin Game artfully depict the tension between love and deception, and I studied the texts to see how the authors succeeded.

“Odysseus’s wife Penelope, often described by the epithet, long-suffering, is surrounded by suitors seeking her hand in marriage during her husband’s 20-year absence. He is gone and presumed dead. Penelope defends against the suitors’ entreaties, but it becomes increasingly difficult for her to remain steadfastly faithful. When Odysseus returns, he appears in disguise as a beggar, recognized only by his household’s elderly swineherd. He hides his identity from Penelope. Is he suspicious that she betrayed him and he doesn’t want to reveal himself while he investigates? His deception is one of the epic’s curiosities, but Odysseus’s withholding makes their ultimate reunion more satisfying and Odysseus’s deceit adds dimension to his character.

“Odysseus’s behavior is a good example of what John Le Carré said of complex characters: “The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”

“Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 romantic thriller, uses suspense and deceit in a marriage differently. The unnamed first-person narrator, a naïve young woman in her 20s who is a companion to an older woman in Monte Carlo, happens to meet a vacationing wealthy Englishman, Maxim de Winter, a 42-year-old widower. They fall in love, marry, and he brings his new wife back to his estate in Cornwall – Manderley. Maxim’s household servants, and particularly his spinster housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, take an immediate dislike to the young wife—comparing her disparagingly to the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca, who died a year earlier in a sailing accident. 

“At Mrs. Danvers’s suggestion, the new wife dresses in Rebecca’s clothes to please her husband, who mourns the dead Rebecca. But rather than please Maxim, he is angered. The new wife suspects something is not right in their marriage, but she is helpless to discover what is wrong. Only a freak storm one night that sinks a ship off the coast results in the discovery of the missing sunken sailboat, and Rebecca’s body. The discovery causes Maxim to confess to his new wife that his marriage to Rebecca was a sham. Rebecca was cruel and selfish, took many lovers, and on the night that he murdered her, Rebecca confessed she was with child from a beau.

“Layers of deceit are drawn back in the final scenes and all that was hidden from the narrator about Rebecca’s death comes to light, drawing Maxim and the narrator closer together. Jeopardy of the shared secret deepen their bond.

“Len Deighton’s 1983 novel, Berlin Game, features the loving couple of Bernard Samson, a middle-aged British intelligence officer working for MI6, and his wife, Fiona, also an MI6 intelligence officer. They have two children, live a respectable middle-class London life that is filled with the demands of parenting, family and friend obligations, and office scandals of adulterous colleagues. Samson is charged with exfiltrating an important East German asset and in the process confronts uncomfortable evidence that there may be a KGB traitor among his MI6 colleagues. Samson’s suspicions of treachery are confirmed when he is arrested in East Germany as he helps his asset escape, and is confronted by his wife, Fiona, dressed in a KGB uniform. She joined the enemy as a young college student drawn to communist ideology.

“The villain in Berlin Game is the wife. But, in spite of Fiona’s treachery, her relationship to Samson has all the appearances of an affectionate marriage with young children, an active social life, and the little intimacies of a hard-working couple. 

“In each of these marriages, one character’s lies and deceptions deepens the complexity of the relationship, and provide the surprises that make for a compelling story. One partner hides an important detail of their life, and the revelation of that detail operates to bring the couple closer together, or thrust them irreversibly apart. The reveal provides an insight into what a character wants from the spouse—Odysseus wants to test Penelope’s fidelity, Maxim wants to protect his new marriage, Fiona wants to hide her treason. Deception and a surprise reversal in the relationships propels the plots of these stories.

“Exposition is helpful to establish scenes and context, but dialogue provides the beating heart of the relationship and deployed effectively reveals the dynamic between husband and wife. Dialogue is used to imply, suggest, and hide and always for the purpose of adding to the unstable relationship between spouses. When characters come in contact with each other, sparks fly and the reader is riveted by the uncomfortable arguments and unexpected intimacies. The appearance of trust masks the inconsistencies and lies that point to betrayal. The best scenes are laden with uncertainty.

“A character’s hidden motives make use of complex maneuvers to maintain the dark secret, all the while under cover of a gauzy film of intimacy and love. The layering of intimacy and artifice creates three-dimensional characters who come alive on the page.” 

AI-gatha Christie Is a Crime

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In response to the article mentioned in my last post about the AI-powered service available from the BBC consisting of digital tutorials by famous writers like Agatha Christie, there is the article below which thoroughly trashes the idea. This article was published on the 3rd of May in the Telegraph and was written by Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Ruth Dudley Edwards (born 24 May 1944) is an Irish Unionist historian and writer, with published work in the fields of history, biography and crime fiction, and a number of awards won. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she has lived in England since 1965, and describes herself as British-Irish. Her revisionist approach to Irish history and her views have sometimes generated controversy or ridicule. She has been a columnist with the Irish Sunday Independent, the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and The News Letter.

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ms Edwards said, “I try to be positive, so in my frequent Luddite moments I call upon my inner Pollyanna and remind myself of the many blessings of technology. Yet the news that the BBC has added to Maestro, its educational streaming platform, a course of 11 short online videos in which a recreated Agatha Christie tells you how to write crime fiction made me feel appropriately murderous.

Indeed, it’s given me inspiration for another short story deriding and killing publishers. But I won’t be asking AI for help. It’s likely to be the nuclear weapon employed by Big Brother to destroy original thought.

Yes, James Pritchard – who through Agatha Christie Ltd is the custodian of her legacy – has insisted that all writing advice given in 11 videos by his great-grandmother’s recreated voice and face be drawn wholly from her own words.

But after a lifetime of reading crime novels and more than four decades writing them, I think the whole idea of a disembodied voice mouthing the words selected by a team of academics is a horrid and dangerous way to go.

Agatha – which as a fellow member of the Detection Club I feel entitled to call her even though she died 20 years before I was elected – was a genius. She became the world’s best selling author because of her innate gifts when it came to plotting and her rare, unsentimental understanding of human nature and good and evil.

I read all her books in my youth, sneered at her writing in my pretentious years at university and during a bad bout of flu in my early 30s reread her and repented. I imbibed from her and others of her contemporaries like G K Chesterton and Edmund Crispin a love of the genre, especially when humour was added to the pot.

And then, unexpectedly, I was invited to write a crime novel, joined the Crime Writers’ Association and discovered a world of fun and friendship and very varied lives, for our members included cops and ex-convicts, doctors and nurses, musicians, bureaucrats and publicans. We would swap stories of how an episode in our lives had inspired us to have a go at telling a story from an improbable viewpoint. No subject was off-limits.

I’ve had several occupations, including in academia, public service and journalism, and have never come across such a congenial and sociable bunch as crime writers and readers. There’s a humility about them that I love and found rarely among academics and the literati. You couldn’t get from an algorithm or from lectures what I’ve learnt from my lovely, irreverent, self-deprecating and sometimes mad companions in that world.

You learn how to write primarily through reading. I don’t believe it can be taught, though I admit some people benefit from good editing, and there’s nothing wrong with handy hints. Indeed, I was a contributor to the highly entertaining Howdunit – published in honour of the 90th anniversary of the Detection Club – in which 90 of the living and some dead members muse on our trade. We collaborate on books occasionally, our planning meetings are hilarious and we donate the proceeds toward subsidising the next communal dinner.

My passion is free speech, and my blood freezes at the thought of how AI will be used by Big Brother. I bet all the casual racism and other kinds of wrongthink expressed in throwaway lines in the work of Agatha and her generation will not survive the first algorithmic sanitising.

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell taught us.

AI can see off originality, courage, and truth in no time.”

Agatha Christie a Writing Teacher?

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This article by Benji Wilson was in the April 30th issue of the Telegraph.

Benji Wilson

Benji Wilson is a journalist based in London. He is a feature writer and interviewer for The Sunday Times, TV critic for The Telegraph and a columnist and critic for Private Eye. He is also the London correspondent for Emmy magazine as well as writing for USA Today and the Sydney Morning Herald. is the world’s best-selling author, so if you wanted to learn how to write a crime novel she’s the first person you’d ask.

Benji says, “Agatha Christie is the world’s best-selling author, so if you wanted to learn how to write a crime novel she’s the first person you’d ask. Unfortunately, she died in 1976. But in the age of AI, with a plot twist that would assuredly have had Christie herself itching to incorporate it in a book, death need not be the end. A new BBC Maestro course of online video lessons, made in conjunction with Christie’s estate, brings the queen of crime back to life.

“First and foremost, for me, this project is about looking at her process as a writer and paying homage to that,” says James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson and the Chairman and CEO of Agatha Christie Limited. “One of the things I am proudest of that has happened over the last however many years is how seriously Agatha Christie is taken, which I don’t think was always the case. She is now held in the regard and esteem that she should be as a writer.”

It’s that esteem that will encourage wannabe Christies – in this case, myself – to pay their £120 for a Maestro subscription (which gets you a year’s access to all manner of courses from Stephen Bartlett to JoJo Moyes to Jo Malone). The new Agatha series is a short lecture course given by a recreation of the writer herself, with Christie’s face and voice somehow grafted on to a (brilliant) performance from the actor Vivien Keene. Delivered across 11 videos, all of less than 20 minutes, you sit and are spoken to – nothing interactive here – as Agatha takes you through plotting, structure, detectives and satisfying resolutions.

The difference to all the other BBC Maestro courses is that Christie’s writing advice is only sort-of delivered by Christie. But the message does come from the horse’s mouth, so to speak – it was one of the stipulations of the Christie estate that every one of the words that Keene speaks should have come from Christie’s pen.

“It had to be her lessons; it couldn’t be some made up thing,” says Prichard. “So we had a team of academics under Dr Mark Aldridge [an acknowledged Christie expert] to see to that.”

In order to fit with the BBC Maestro credo – ‘Let the greatest be your teacher’ – “It had to look and sound like her,” says Prichard. “And what they have done is extraordinary. The final thing was that it had to be of value to both aspiring writers and fans. And I think it does that. All I can say is I was speaking to my father on Friday and both of us agreed that we’d learned a hell of a lot from her that we didn’t know.”

If AI-gatha’s Maestro course could teach her own relatives a thing or two – Prichard said that he learned from the course that Christie’s books work because “they’re actually about people, and people never really change” — then surely it could help me? I was lucky enough to get an early view of the Christie course and can report that watching Agatha, or ‘Agatha,’ dole out aperçus on story structure, cast creation, plot twists, red herrings, and the art of suspense, was most of all… unnerving. A half-smiling Christie-bot stares barrel-straight down the camera with schoolmarm-ish supremacy. She seemed to sense my self-doubt, my daft plot ideas, my general unease.

There is also some mild unease at having AI involved at all. To authors, AI is perceived as a threat more than a boon.

“I’d be lying if I said there weren’t worries [about using AI],” says James Prichard. “But I believe and I hope that this is using AI in both a helpful and ethical way. The AI model of Agatha doesn’t work without the performance of Vivien Keene. This was not written by AI. It is a leading academic unearthing everything that she said about writing. And I believe that what we are delivering here in terms of her message is better presented and will reach more people as a result of being presented, if I can use inverted commas, ‘by her.’”

What kind of tutor is AI-gatha? The course shows that Christie plainly studied her craft and while she opens up saying, “I don’t feel I have any particular method when it comes to writing,” which is disappointing, she does in fact adhere to a broad methodology founded in meticulous planning.

“And I take it seriously,” she says, looking serious.

The importance of saying something – not preaching but there being some form of moral backbone to your story — is emphasised throughout. Readers like to see justice served, she says.

“I write to entertain but there is a dash of the old morality play in my work – hunting down the guilty to protect the innocent.”

But where to even start? That’s my problem. Agatha recommends – glory be! – idleness (but not sloth) as a fallow field where ideas can take seed. She encourages eavesdropping on conversations on buses as a source of characters and dialogue, and so I head to that virtual bus that is the Internet.”

Benji finds that Telegraph readers are keen on air fryers and he concocts a short, very silly story about people being murdered by exploding air fryers.

Are You an Imposter?

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Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers sent an email today about how writers are vulnerable to Imposter Syndrome.

Imposter Syndrome

He says: “Writers are hopelessly vulnerable to Impostor Syndrome.

That might be part of our psychological make-up (dreamy, introverted, bookish) – but I don’t think it’s mostly that. Perhaps it isn’t that at all.

If I were a stone-walling guy, I’d drop my tools in the late afternoon and look at my day’s work and think, ‘Yes, I just built that.’

If I were a drainage-contractor or a chimney-sweep, I could count my accomplishment in yards of drain unblocked, or so many vertical feet of chimney cleared. (I once cleaned my own chimneys, then set the house on fire, but it was only a little fire, and the fire brigade came, not once but three times, and the kids were all at home with friends, and got to watch everything, and the firemen let the kids try on their helmets and climb around the fire engine, and everyone had a very nice time.)

And, OK, lots of white-collar jobs can’t be measured by the yard, but there’s still a rhythm of feedback: client meetings, reports, ad campaigns, emails. What’s unusual about the job of novelist is that you have essentially two ways to measure accomplishment, the first of which is phoney and stupid and you know it to be those things. So, novelists can measure accomplishment, via:

  1. Word Counts. Which gives you a sort of feedback, the way a dry stone wall gives you feedback as you build it, but if the words are sh*te, then the feedback is meaningless. And because you know that, you don’t trust the feedback. And because first drafts are first drafty, the words probably are sh*te, so you are right to be suspicious.
  2. Book deals. And yes, a book deal comes with an actual contract, signed by a serious and moneyed counterpart. And there’s money. And there’s the whole hoop-la of publication. So this is serious, meaningful feedback. Same thing with self-pub: you don’t achieve meaningful sales unless your work has been good, so sales is also a metric that matters. But book deals come along once in a blue moon. I mean, if you produce a book a year and work with a standard two-book deal, then you only get confirmation that you’re not an idiot once every two years. That’s a very long time.

So authors get regular meaningless feedback (word counts) and very, very infrequent feedback that matters (book deal, or successful book launch.)

And a lot of what we do involves creating a bad first draft so we can then turn it slowly into a good final draft.

The result? Impostor Syndrome is endemic among writers. It’s endemic among proper published authors too. I know plenty of top 10 bestselling novelists who are pretty much guaranteed to feel like their work is hopeless before they (once again) do what they do and produce an excellent book.

The solution? There ain’t no solution, except to recognise the problem. You will feel that your work is inadequate, because – right now – it is inadequate. And that’s fine. That’s a stage we clamber through to get to adequate and then excellent.

The ladder from rubbish to excellent is editing. It’s self-editing to start with and – even if you’re wise enough to get a professional manuscript assessment – it’s still self-editing after that, because it’s still you that has to choose how to react to your editor’s comments. So. Write, Edit, Publish, Repeat. You may only get meaningful feedback on your output about once a year. That’s just the way it is. Other indicators may not be accurate. You are not an impostor. You’re a writer.”

Review: The Moonstone

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T S Eliot said, “The first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” That is a fulsome recommendation of The Moonstone. Edgar Allen Poe wrote several mysteries as short stories in the early 1840’s, but in 1868, Wilkie Collins pioneered the following features of The Moonstone:

  • an English country house robbery
  • an “inside job”
  • red herrings
  • a celebrated, skilled, professional investigator
  • a bungling local constabulary
  • detective enquiries
  • a large number of false suspects
  • the “least likely suspect”
  • a reconstruction of the crime
  • a final twist in the plot

which became became classic attributes of the twentieth-century detective story in novel form. At 436 pages The Moonstone is quite long.

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English writer and the son of an English painter. He published his first story in 1843. He wrote his first novel, Tahiti as It Was, in 1844, but it was rejected in 1845 and remained unpublished during his lifetime. He was introduced to Charles Dickens in 1851 and they became fast friends. In 1852 his novel, Basil, was published. In 1853 while writing Hide and Seek, he suffered his first bout of gout, from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life. The novels Collins published in the 1860s are the best and most enduring of his career. The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone were written in less than a decade. They sold in large numbers and made him a wealthy man. The inconsistent quality of Collins’s dramatic and fictional works in the last decade of his life was accompanied by a general decline in his health, including diminished eyesight. He was often unable to leave home and had difficulty writing. During these last years, he focused on mentoring younger writers. In 1858, Collins had begun living with Caroline Graves and her daughter Harriet. Collins disliked the institution of marriage, but remained dedicated to Caroline and Harriet, considering them to be his family. In 1868, Collins met Martha Rudd in Norfolk, and the two began a liaison. She was 19 years old and from a large, poor family. A few years later, she moved to London to be closer to him. Their daughter Marian was born in 1869; their second daughter, Harriet Constance, in 1871; and their son, William Charles, in 1874. When he was with Martha, Collins assumed the name William Dawson, and she and their children used the last name of Dawson themselves. For the last 20 years of his life Collins divided his time between Caroline, who lived with him at his home in Gloucester Place, and Martha, who was nearby.

The Plot: Rachel Verinder, a young English woman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday. It is a legacy from her uncle, a corrupt British army officer who seized it in India. The diamond is of great religious significance and extremely valuable, and three Hindu jugglers/priests have dedicated their lives to recovering it. She wears the diamond at her birthday, but it has disappeared the next day. Superintendent Seegrave, an incompetent local policeman, investigates the Indians and Rosanna Spearman, a housemaid, without success. During the ensuing year there are hints that the diamond was removed from the house and may be in a London bank vault, having been pledged as surety to a moneylender. The Indian jugglers are still nearby, watching and waiting. Franklin Blake, a cousin and suitor of Rachel’s, and who attended her 18th party, returns from overseas and resolves to solve mystery left unsolved by Sergeant Cuff, the famous English detective. Franklin learns that he was given laudanum (an opiate) by Dr Candy, the family doctor, because of his anxiety about Rachel and the diamond. Rachel herself tells Franklin that she saw him take the diamond, but she has not revealed the theft because of the consequences for him. Franklin tracks down the holder of the diamond when he redeems it from the bank at an appointed time. That man turns out to be Godfrey Ablewhite, who has embezzled a large sum and wanted the diamond to repay his debt. He, too, is a suitor of Rachel, and he had convinced Franklin, in his drugged stupor to give him the diamond to place it in safe keeping. After recovering the diamond from the bank, Godfrey is murdered by the Indians, who escape to India. Rachel and Franklin marry and a noted adventurer, Mr Murthwaite, explains that he has followed the Indians and seen the diamond returned to its proper place: in the forehead of a statue of an Indian god.

The story is quite a bit more complicated than that with a dozen more characters, and considerably more involvement. There are also multiple narrators of the story. The characters are all unique, with their defects and attractions, and their motives are clear, even if not well reasoned. It is difficult to put the book aside, in spite of its length. A modern editor would have abbreviated it by at least 100 pages by cutting the passages where the characters review in detail what has happened after each event. Still, it is an enchanting story of a Victorian crime in a Victorian setting.

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.”

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.