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Dan Brown’s Latest

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Back is September, I reported on an interview with Dan Brown about his new novel, The Secret of Secrets, reported by Hillel Italie of the Associated Press.

For those of who are fans of Brown, I have to confess that Brown went to the same high school I did: Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, although Brown was class of ’82 and I was ’56.

Dan Brown

The reason I mention this is that Brown is interviewed by Matt Miller, in the Fall 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin, the alumni magazine. Matt W. Miller is an award-winning poet, essayist and educator. He taught English and coached football at the Academy for 18 years and is currently an associate lecturer in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

MM: The last installment of your Robert Langdon series came out eight years ago. What does it feel like to return to that character?

It’s like I never left. He and I share a lot of the same passions: history, art, codes, treasure hunts. I live vicariously through him. I sit alone in the dark with a computer, and he runs around the world. It’s a lot of fun.

MM: The book explores the noetic sciences, a multidisciplinary field that studies subjective experience and consciousness using scientific methods. What drew you to that subject?

I wrote a book called The Lost Symbol about 12 years ago in which there was a character, Katherine Solomon, and she was a noetic scientist. As I was writing that character and learning a little bit about noetics, I thought, oh my god, human consciousness is a book in itself. I thought it would be the book I wrote after The Lost Symbol, but it was too hard. I didn’t know enough about consciousness. I never imagined it would take eight years, but it’s an ethereal topic. I always felt like I was trying to get my arms around smoke, just trying to figure out how to write this.

MM: It’s a deeply researched book. Was there some “aha!” point when you knew this subject had to be the subject?

I read about an experiment in precognition where different parts of the brain light up when you see different kinds of images. In the study, the brain was lighting up before an image was seen. So, what does that mean? Perhaps the brain is creating what image to see. Or there was precognitive knowledge of what was about to be seen. Or perhaps time flows in two directions. Any of those answers, and you’re like, what? None of that makes sense. This experiment made me really think that, from a personal level, I had to understand consciousness. And as a writer, I had to figure out how to share it in a fun package.

MM: How do you balance getting all that researched information about politics, history, science, physics and metaphysics into the novel while also moving forward narrative action and character development?

You make sure that the data dump that you are performing is directly relevant to whatever character you’re writing about. Langdon could be walking down the street and think, oh, Petřín Tower, and I give a two-minute dissertation on Petřín Tower, which feels like an aside, and that’s boring. The information has to be part of solving a puzzle. It must be linear to the plot, not ancillary. And don’t fall in love with your research. If it doesn’t serve the plot, it goes.

MM: That’s the toughest thing for writers, knowing what to cut.

The delete key has to be your best friend. Any artist or musician understands the importance of blank space or silence. The rests and silences give the melody to that place. It’s the same way in writing. You need to let your writing breathe.

MM: You thank your editor Jason Kaufman in your acknowledgments. Does an editor, like a writing teacher, help you see where you need to pull back or where you need more?

That’s exactly what Jason does. He’ll read something and say: “Hey, this is great, but we don’t need four paragraphs about Prague Castle. We need two.” Then he’ll also say: “Oh, you just glossed over this thing. I want to know more about that.” He not only shares my taste, he has perspective, which is what you lose as a writer. It’s nice to have somebody come in and read it as a first-time reader, which is really the only way to know how it’s reading at all.

MM: The Secret of Secrets is set in Prague. What drew you to that city?

Setting is critical. Location is a character. Prague has a personality, as does Paris, as does the Arctic Circle. Wherever you’re setting a book, it needs to be integral to the plot. When I decided to write about consciousness, I knew it had to be Prague. Prague has been the mystical center of Europe since the 1500s, when Emperor Rudolf recruited mystics to come to Prague to talk to the Great Beyond. As far as character goes, Prague is perfect for a Langdon book. There are passageways and a door with seven locks and crypts and cathedrals and all sorts of secrets.

MM: As Langdon learns more about the nature of nonlocalized consciousness, I kept thinking about artificial intelligence. If AI could develop consciousness, where would that consciousness come from? Is it created? Is it tapped into?

Can we create artificial consciousness? When you have enough synapses, does it just happen? It seems unlikely that it just happens. And this whole new model of the brain as a receiver of consciousness changes everything because if we’re trying to build an AI to receive consciousness, it’s a much easier proposition. It’s not like you have to build something that can create all the hopes and dreams and creativity and memories and all that. You just have to receive it. I actually think that this model of consciousness is pretty exciting and makes the quest for artificial consciousness more attainable, as well as consciousness after bodily death.

MM: Not to give too much away, but there’s a fascinating section in the novel about halos and how they are rendered in art. Langdon saw the beams of light as emanating out of halos. But then he realizes he may have misread the images, that the beams are radiating back into the halos, and that is consciousness coming in.

Right. And if you read Scripture, really any religion, one receives the word of God. You don’t conjure God; God flows in. And we kind of miss that. That could be consciousness flowing in because it is not housed within the brain, as materialists presume, but outside the brain.

MM: You have a golem character. In the Jewish tradition, the Golem is a created being, an artificial intelligence with consciousness.

Yes, one of the reasons I chose the Golem is that it’s this inanimate object that can be infused with consciousness just by writing a magic symbol, or a code, on its forehead.

MM: Do you think that this novel and its topic of a nonlocalized consciousness may have a particular prescience in these times?

I hope so. There’s no bigger topic than human consciousness. It’s the lens through which we experience reality, experience ourselves and other people. The fear of death is the universal fear. Religious or atheist, we all are curious and unsettled by the fact that our lives are finite. This notion of what happens when we die is the big question. If we can adopt a mindset where we realize that human consciousness survives death, maybe some of that fear starts to dissolve. And the thing about the fear is that it’s really the catalyst for a lot of bad behavior.

MM: Do you believe in this idea you bring up in the novel that if consciousness transcends our physical self, then we can move beyond the borders of mortality and by doing so move beyond the borders between each other?

Yes, I do. If we can start to understand that this life is just one stop on a much bigger journey, bigger than things like nationalism, country, race and all those things that separate us, then it’s quite possible that humanity could move forward in a benevolent fashion.

Non-AI Novels Will Be a ‘Luxury’

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There is an article in today’s Telegraph written by Tom Mc Ardle which reports on a study done by Dr Clementine Collett at Cambridge University on AI’s effects on literary trends.

Dr Clementine Collett is a DPhil student on the ‘Information, Communication and the Social Sciences’ course at the Oxford Internet Institute. Clementine’s doctoral research explores gender bias in artificial intelligence (AI) recruitment technology.

Clementine has worked as lead author on reports such as IA and Gender: Four Proposals for Future Research (2019) with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and The Effects of AI on the Working Lives 0f Women (2022) with the IDB, OECD and UNESCO.

Dr Clementine Collett

Novels written without artificial intelligence will become an “expensive luxury”, according the report.

Dr Clementine Collett has claimed that the creative market could become “tiered”, with only those who could afford human-written work being able to read it.

“[There] is a real concern from literary creatives that we will have a two-tier market, more so than we have already,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“Where human-written work will be more expensive – a luxury item.Those who can afford it will read human-written novels and AI generated content will be cheap or free and that will potentially have big societal implications as well.”

Dr Collett, who conducted the study at the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy (MCTD), interviewed to nearly 400 literary creatives across the UK about the threat of generative AI.

“There is widespread concern from novelists that generative AI trained on vast amounts of fiction will undermine the value of writing and compete with human novelists,” she said.

Dr Collett called on the Government to weigh up the economic growth it has so far prioritised by developing AI, against the potential impact on the creative industries, including readers and the novel itself.

The study found that almost two thirds (59 per cent) of novelists reported that their work had already been used to train large language models, which power AI tools, without permission or payment.

Such practices have already impacted the livelihoods of those surveyed, with more than a third (39 per cent) reporting their income being negatively affected by AI.

The report found genre fiction, especially romance, thrillers and crime, is more at risk from displacement than more highbrow literary fiction. Dr Collett said this was because of their more “formulaic” make up.

“We don’t know what generative AI is going to be able to do in the future in terms of producing more original content,” she added.

“It’s really important because novels are such a bedrock of our thriving British creative industry and they’re the core part of our humanity.” She called on Government intervention to help protect the industry.

Prof Gina Neff, executive director of the MCTD, said: “Our creative industries are not expendable collateral damage in the race to develop AI. They are national treasures worth defending.”

A spokesman for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: “We’ve always been clear on the need to work with both the creative industries and the AI sector to drive AI innovation and ensure robust protections for creators.”

World-Building with Sound

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Jaimi Ryan has an article dated 11 October 2025 in Writer’s Digest on the subject of using descriptions of sound creating the world of a novel. She says, “Audio drama isn’t just about dialogue. It’s the hiss of a radiator, the crunch of boots on dry leaves and the pause before a truth is revealed. Just as novelists use language to build immersive worlds, audio creators use sound to transport listeners into spaces that exist only in the imagination.”

Jaimi Ryan is a seasoned Podcast Producer and Sound Designer with a background in music production. After pivoting from music to podcasting in 2017, she has had a wide range of podcasting experiences including podcast creation, remote recording, audio restoration, post production, content editing and hosting.

Jaimi Ryan

Jaimi offers ten examples of how sound effectively in fiction deepen world-building and heighten storytelling. Sound provides another sensory dimension to our creation of the world in the reader’s imagination.

1. Establish Setting Through Ambient Sound

Think of ambient sound as the aural equivalent of a setting paragraph. In prose, you might write: The bustling tavern smelled of smoke and spilled ale. In a podcast, you can build the same tavern with clinking glasses, murmured conversations, a lute playing softly in the corner, and the occasional burst of laughter.

A great example of this is The Magnus Archives, which often drops listeners into a location without explanation, simply using a faint hum of fluorescent lights or the drone of a tape recorder to situate listeners in an archival office.

2. Use Sound as Characterization

Characters don’t have to be introduced only with dialogue. Their sound signatures (the objects, rhythms, or textures that follow them) can give immediate recognition.

For instance, maybe a character’s arrival is always marked by the swish of warm-up pants or heavy footsteps with an irregular gate. A fantasy warrior might be defined by the clanking of armor, and maybe a futuristic smuggler always powers down a ship with a metallic sigh. These repeated cues become auditory shorthand.

3. Control Pacing With Silence

Writers know the power of white space. A sentence fragment on its own line can punch harder than a full paragraph. In audio, silence has the same effect.

A long pause before a confession can feel like holding your breath. A sudden drop into stillness after a loud scene can jar listeners into alertness. Even half a second of silence can sharpen a joke’s timing.

Think of silence not as empty, but as intentional space. The absence of sound is still a sound choice, and you want to be sure there are no unintentional silences.

4. Layer Sound for Emotional Resonance

Prose layers tone through metaphor, diction, and rhythm. Dialogue sits in the foreground, but what happens underneath can amplify emotion.

Example: A tender scene might include a faint piano or the distant chirp of crickets, lending warmth. A horror moment could include barely audible whispers under a monologue, or a low drone slowly increasing in volume, unsettling the listener without ever being directly acknowledged.

The trick is subtlety. Too many layers muddy the track. But the right two or three can make a scene unforgettable.

5. Build Tension With Repetition

Writers often use recurring images or motifs, and sound can do the same.

Consider the steady drip of water in a dungeon scene. If it returns across episodes, it builds anticipation: Why does it matter? Or a few distant, unexplained “monster roars” early on. Each recurrence adds dread until the beast finally appears.

6. Use Perspective and Proximity

Audio production can mimic point of view. A voice whispering directly in one ear (using stereo panning) creates intimacy, an almost conspiratorial feel. A muffled argument heard through a wall distances the listener, making them an eavesdropper rather than a participant.

This is the audio equivalent of close third-person versus omniscient narration. Ask yourself: how “close” should the audience feel to this moment? Then adjust the sound perspective accordingly.

7. Contrast Soundscapes

Sometimes the most effective worldbuilding comes from playing the sound against the situation. A gruesome scene underscored by cheerful music, or a high-stakes conversation happening over chirping birds or children playing can disorient the listener in interesting ways and create dramatic tension.

8. Map Geography Through Sound Cues

Listeners can “see” a space through audio cues. Footsteps shifting from tile to gravel tell us a character is moving outdoors. A voice echoing differently in each room maps an environment in our heads. For even more immersion, consider stereo panning sound effects to the left or right, or even moving from one ear to the other to put the listener in the middle of a scene. Those footsteps can move from tile to gravel, and they can also move from the left ear to the right as though the character is walking by the listener.

9. Treat Sound Effects as Symbols

Sounds can function like symbols in prose. A tolling bell might signal both time passing and the inevitability of death. If you repeat sounds strategically, they accrue significance. They become thematic shorthand, much like recurring images and motifs in a novel.

10. Marry Soundscape and Dialogue

Finally, remember that sound is your setting, your imagery, even your punctuation. Pacing is heavily affected by the way the dialogue interacts with the sound environment.

A rapid-fire exchange over pounding rain creates urgency. Slow, deliberate dialogue against a hushed forest soundscape encourages reflection. Moments of soundscape without dialogue can create immersion, tension, reflection, or whatever mood you’re trying to build while also giving the listener a moment to digest what is happening in the story.

As you experiment, listen to how other audio dramas and films use sound. Notice when a silence unnerves you, when a sound effect feels over-the-top, when background noise deepens immersion. Don’t forget to have some fun with it, audio is an exciting medium for creative storytelling.

Getting Accents and Dialects Right

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Harry Bingham’s email of last week deals with the tricky subject of how to write in accents or dialogue convincing but not condescending.

Harry is the founder and CEO of Jericho Writers.

Harry said, “So here is an example of transcribing a character’s voice in a patronising way:

“Eet eez ’orrible to ’ear ze proud Frensh race beleettled in zis stooped manner.”

But what the character involved has actually said here is:

“It is horrible to hear the proud French race belittled in this stupid manner.”

The first sentence, by transcribing its pronunciations in a very literal way, makes the speaker come across as ludicrous – cartoony, a circus clown with a striped jumper, a string of onions and a comical moustache. But what’s actually comical? The sentence itself displays perfect command of English, and what’s being apparently laughed at here is an accent, over which the speaker has very little control.

And, golly gosh, that’s a slippery slope.

Most people writing a non-English character in this way will (if English) speak roughly RP, or Received Pronunciation – in effect, roughly what a BBC newsreader used to sound like. In the US, it’s much the same thing, except that the reference dialect is Standard American English.

(And, please note, in RP English, we say “She placed the glahss on the grahss next to her great big – handbag.” But we wouldn’t even conceive of inserting the letter H into the two italicised words to mark the weird pronunciation. Nor do we adjust the spelling to take care of the flat “a” sound in American and North-British versions of those words. So when it comes to our weird pronunciations, we don’t even think of trying to reflect them in spelling.)

And of course, as soon as you start to accord any kind of typographic privilege to a particular accent – whether RP or SAE – you get into all sorts of bother.

It’s one thing to have a comical Frenchman – France is a nuclear power and can look after itself – but do you really want to apply the same diminishing treatment to, say, a black resident of Harlem? Or a Scouser? Or a northern woman of Pakistani heritage? Or a Mexican immigrant?

The answer, if you haven’t already figured it out is, No, certainly not. Don’t go there. Step away from the quirky spellings.

That’s partly because of a perfectly legitimate anxiety about racism.

But it’s also just a recognition of modern linguistics. The RP / SAE dialects are simply two dialects amongst many, many others. They don’t come with a halo over them that says, “the king/President speaks this way, so this version is right and everything else is wrong.” The fact is that we all speak the dialect of our culture and each dialect has no more or less validity than the next.

That’s not just true of pronunciation. It’s true of grammar too. Any significant dialect has its own grammar, which may differ from SAE / RP grammar (which, by the way, each differ from each other.) So African-American Vernacular English has its own strict rules of grammar, that are just different from SAE – and not just different, but with subtleties that SAE struggles to cope with. SAE has four basic past tenses: I did buy it, I have bought it, I bought it, I had bought it. AAVE has five, but differently structured: I been bought it, I bought it, I done bought it, I did buy it, I do buy it.

What does all this tell us?

It tells us (duh!) that other people may speak differently from us.

It tells us (duh!) that it’s not respectful or, in fact, linguistically accurate, to privilege one set of accents or grammars over another.

And that means that the solution for a novelist is quite easy:

  1. Don’t try to capture nuances of accent in the way you transcribe speech. We don’t write “grahss” if we try to capture how the king of England speaks. We don’t write “eet eez ’orrible” if we try to capture how President Macron expresses himself.
  2. Do use the actual words that your character uses. President Macron is probably more likely than the rest of us to use the word voila even when speaking English. And if he says it, that’s what you write. Likewise, if a Black American character says finna (a contraction of fixing to or going to) then that’s the word you write down. It IS a word; it just isn’t an SAE / RP word. Don’t patronise your characters by editing their speech.
  3. Do use the grammar that your character adopts. So if your character is African-American, she might say ‘I done bought it’, in which case you write, ‘I done bought it.’
  4. For that matter, most of us are perfectly adept at code-shifting, so that same character might speak using AAVE when at home with her mother, but might use SAE when (say) running for President of the United States. And if your character code-shifts, you code-shift right along with her.
  5. The same goes for English spoken as a second language. Let’s say your novel features a top French footballer, who possibly now plays for Real Madrid. Perhaps that footballer says, “I do not chase after the records.” No native English speaker would naturally put the word “the” into that sentence, and nearly all English footballers would say “don’t” rather than “do not.” So you don’t need to do anything as condescending as write “Eet ees ’orrible” in order to hear the Frenchness in the speaker. You just have a careful ear for those non-native uses and let the reader intuit the rest. They definitely will.

I think the only time this is liable to get complicated is in relation to languages that are highly related to English, but aren’t actually English.

A lot of you will have encountered the broad Yorkshire speech of Wuthering Heights. This for example:

‘What are ye for?’ he shouted. ‘T’ maister’s down i’ t’ fowld. Go round by th’ end o’ t’ laith, if ye went to spake to him.’

Would that be better with “the master’s down in the fold”? And well – I don’t know. You can call it both ways. The modern tendency would be to eliminate some of the non-standard spelling, but in Bronte’s day, the fact was that broad Yorkshire dialect (“Tyke”) was pretty much a language to itself, related to English in much the same way as Robert Burns’ Scots is. In which case – honour the language. Give it leg room. That’s what I chose to do with my Orcadian sailor, Caff, and deliberately wrote a version of Orcadian that was damn close to impenetrable to an ordinary reader.

And if you want to do that then, (a) have fun! It’s really entertaining. And (b) get it right. I don’t speak Orcadian, I’m not Scottish, and I’ve never been to the Orkneys. So I did the best that I could with books and online resources … then wrote to the editor of an Orkney newspaper and asked for her help. She was very happy to give that to me, and I was very happy to receive it, and my readers have the joy of having a little bit more Orcadian in their lives: something we all need.”

Writing the Book You Want to Rewrite

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Beth Kander is interviewed by Robert Lee Brewer Writer’s Digest (published 12 December 2024) on how she entered a competition at the last minute.

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

Beth Kander

What prompted you to write this book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You just never know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Setting the Mood

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Jo Schulte has an article on the Writer’s Digest website dated May 28, 2025 about how a writer can establish the mood in a story.

Jo Schulte

Jo Schulte grew up chasing fireflies in Michigan, spent many years navigating London’s publishing industry, and now calls Atlanta home, y’all. When she’s not writing, Jo can be found walking her dog, getting distracted by renovation projects, or enjoying a well-earned brunch (the housecleaning can wait).

Jo says, “Before characters speak or plot threads intertwine, before a reader knows the rules of a world or the stakes at hand, what greets them first—quietly, viscerally—is mood. Mood shapes tone, reinforces theme, and interacts with protagonists as deliberately as any villain or ally. It’s the foggy breath in the late autumn woods, the hum of neon lights in a dystopian alley, the salt tang in the air as a ship crests a storm-spined wave.

Mood isn’t just the flavor of a story—it’s the foundation of setting. Before readers know where they are, they need to know how to feel. That emotional tone becomes the lens through which they understand place. Setting isn’t a neutral canvas; it’s an invitation into a living, breathing world. A map might show where the towns are, but mood shows you how those towns feel. It’s where setting really begins.

If you sit down and start describing trees, you’re going to end up with—guess what?—trees. But if you sit down and ask, “What do I want the reader to feel here?”, your descriptions will carry emotional weight. A clearing in the woods can be peaceful, ominous, ancient, or desolate—it all depends on the tone you choose.

In The Whisperwood Legacy, I wanted a setting that felt like nostalgia gone sour. The story unfolds in an abandoned amusement park in the Appalachian Mountains—a place meant to feel like memory: familiar, even comforting, but wrong in the way a dream curdles when you try to hold onto it. The rides aren’t beautifully decaying; they’re stubbornly refusing to collapse, clinging to the past like a bruise that won’t fade. That feeling—of something rotting just beneath the surface—is the emotional tone that shaped every detail.

Tip: Before writing a scene, ask yourself what emotional undercurrent should hum beneath the surface. Is this a place that soothes, unsettles, tempts, or traps? Jot down two or three feelings the setting should carry—not just what it looks like. Let that guide every detail.

A strong setting doesn’t just look good—it works hard. It should reveal something about the characters, plot, or world. If it’s not doing at least one of those things, it’s just set dressing.

In The Whisperwood Legacy, the park is owned by the protagonist’s family. Every broken ride, every dusty booth, every desilvered mirror ties into the central mystery she’s unravelling. The setting isn’t just eerie; it’s personal. It matters to her, which means it matters to the reader.

Tip: Ask yourself, “Why this place? Why not somewhere else?” If the answer is “because it’s spooky,” dig deeper. Why this spooky place? What emotional or narrative connection does your protagonist have to it? Bonus points if it’s complicated.

A well-developed setting doesn’t just exist—it affects. To build one that resonates, you need more than a visual snapshot. The best settings reach into the body: They hum in your ears, cling to your skin, sit heavy in your lungs. They make readers feel something. That’s where sensory details come in—not as decoration, but as emotional cues.

We often talk about five senses, but there are more: temperature, balance, pressure, the sense of being watched. The goal isn’t to check off every sense—it’s to choose the ones that amplify the mood. A sticky floor can make a room feel oppressive. The sharp scent of antiseptic can make a hallway feel sterile and cruel. These choices turn static space into living atmosphere.

Tip: When developing a setting, ask which sensory detail best serves the emotional tone. Instead of listing what’s there, consider what your character notices and feels. A creaking stair might do more than a paragraph of visual description, particularly if it’s the only sound in a house that should be empty.

Setting isn’t static. As your character changes, their relationship to the world around them should shift too. This emotional arc is one of the most powerful tools in storytelling.

At the beginning of The Whisperwood Legacy, the park is a decaying monument stuffed with history. Then it becomes a puzzle. By the end, it’s something else entirely. That change in how the protagonist sees her surroundings reflects her internal transformation.

Tip: Identify two or three key locations in your story. How does your protagonist feel about each one at the start? How does that evolve? Let the setting mirror or contradict their emotional arc.

The most memorable settings aren’t pristine or sweeping—they’re specific. They’re strange. They have a sense of lived-in oddity that makes them feel multidimensional. The best details are the ones that make a reader pause and think, wait, what?

In Whisperwood, I could have just created a park with aesthetic attractions, but instead every facet of the park is connected not just to fairy tales, but deeply personal histories. For example,  the house on the park grounds isn’t just a home with vibes, it’s a clapboard mansion where the basement is off limits, the bedrooms are decorated and referred to by colors, and all the landlines have been ripped off the walls. These aren’t generic moody images—they’re eerie because they’re specific, and because that specificity matters to someone. Everything has history. Everything has a story.

Tip: Add one weird, memorable detail to every major setting. Make your world feel like it has secrets and history.

Ultimately, setting isn’t just where the story happens—it’s why the story feels the way it does. It anchors emotion, drives atmosphere, and creates the lens through which everything else is experienced. When you start with mood, you’re not just sketching a backdrop; you’re inviting the reader into a world with its own weather, weight, and wonder.

So set the scene like you mean it. Choose a mood that distorts the light into the temperature of your choosing. Build a place that does more than exist—make it ache, thrill, hum, lure, swoon, or unsettle. Turn a setting into its own story.”

35 Years Teaching Writing at Columbia

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There is an article on the New York Times website by Emma Goldberg, dated 25 May 2025, which is interesting in that it reports on the methods of a high level, successful professor at a prestige university.

Sam Freedman has taught for thirty-five years at Columbia. His students have obtained 113 deals for 95 books.

Emma Goldberg is a business features writer for The New York Times. She reports on cultural, societal and economic change.

Sam Freedman leading the course on book writing that he taught for the last time this spring. “This is a big part of my life’s work,” he said.

Ms Goldberg says: “The night before the start of his final semester teaching, after 35 years, Sam Freedman had a dream that he was going to miss class. He woke up with a strange jolt of relief. What comfort, he thought, to know that after three decades he still couldn’t shake his pre-semester agita.

The most difficult work, he has always believed, ought to evoke fear.

“All these years later I’m still anxious the night before, still concerned about getting here at 7:15 in the morning to be ready for all of you,” he said, facing his students on a Monday morning in January, wearing the same dark suit that he purchased in 1989 at Rothmans when he was first starting to teach and realized he needed formal professional attire.

The seminar that Freedman teaches at Columbia Journalism School began in 1991 as something of an experiment, testing whether students could, in the course of a semester, produce a book proposal to sell and hopefully publish. The results have proved his hunch: The class has led to 113 book contracts and 95 published books, out of some 675 people who have taken it.

This spring Freedman taught the course for the last time. He didn’t want to become one of those fading professors he remembers from college, the types who used laminated notes and made students wish they’d been around to take the class in its glory years. The journalism school does not have plans to continue the class in the same form after his departure.

“The course is an institution in itself and you could almost say that about Sam — his retirement is certainly the end of an era,” said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, who regularly meets with Freedman at an Upper West Side diner to trade ideas about books and teaching.

Freedman began his career as a reporter at the Courier-News in Bridgewater, N.J., and later worked on the culture and metro desks at The New York Times. He went on to write 10 books, including one following a New York City public-school teacher for a year. But he realized, at a certain point, that teaching the book-writing seminar for young journalists was one way of creating something that would outlive him.

“This is a big part of my life’s work,” he told the class on their first day of the semester. “Teaching this class, it feels like it’s OK for me to keel over.”

The day had echoes of a religious induction, as Freedman told his students to be “worthy of the ancestors,” his term for class alumni. He projected onto the whiteboard at the front of the room a photo of his office “shelf of honor,” crammed with most of the 95 books that came out of the class. Midway through that first day, four ancestors came to speak.

“If he believes you have a book in you,” said Grace Williams, the author of a 2024 history of a women-owned bank, glancing around the classroom, “you definitely have a book in you.”

The relationship between books and authors is obvious and glorified, but the relationship between books and teachers is less clear. The teachers behind books are often invisible, not the hand stirring the ladle to make the stew but the hand that once wrote the recipe down on some well-worn index card.

When I wrote a book in 2020, about young doctors graduating from medical school early in the pandemic, I reached out for guidance to Freedman, the father of a childhood friend, because I’d heard about his Columbia course. He shared audio clips and met with me, over Zoom, to explain his approach to narrative writing.

What struck me then was the exactitude with which he approached the craft, the lessons he pulled from his own career and then passed around the room: that the reader should never know more than the character, that authors should master methods before trying to subvert them, that narrative is an equation comprised of character, event, place and theme (N = C + E + P + T).

“Nothing in the class is contingent on having a gift, or having the muse speak to you,” said Leah Hager Cohen, who studied with Freedman in 1991, which led her to write Train Go Sorry, about a school for the deaf.

Freedman focuses particularly on demystifying the book proposal, a piece of writing that he likens to the albino alligators which, according to urban legend, once lived in the New York City subways — surviving without exposure to the public world, and therefore evolving to be mysterious and often misunderstood creatures. During the semester, his students draft such proposals. Afterward, he sometimes connects them to agents who he feels might be interested in their reporting topics, though he emphasizes that this won’t always lead to representation.

“He’s been the godfather to an awful lot of publishing over the years,” said George Gibson, the executive editor at Grove Atlantic.

Over the decades that Freedman has taught, the publishing industry has gotten far more corporate. And other mentors who work with aspiring authors noted a recent increase in programs that support young book writers outside of journalism school, which can be costly to attend.

What has stayed consistent, Freedman insists, is the need for an obsessive work ethic, and many of his lectures are paeans to just that.

He emphasizes that there is no such thing as writer’s block, only a failure to have done enough reporting, or an ego that’s getting in the way of putting words on the page. He closes the classroom door at 9 a.m. and those who are late have to wait outside until the first break, at least an hour later. (“Latecomers will be seated at intermission,” read the sign he used to post on the door.) He tracks every grammatical error a student makes, with the expectation it will never be repeated.

Kelly McMasters, who took the class in 2003 and went on to co-teach with Freedman, recalled that when she was his student, he got so fed up with her use of parentheses that he drew her a picture of parentheses, curling up like an old pet near a rug and a bowl of food, and showed it to the whole class. “Your parentheses are fine,” she recalled him saying. “Here’s the rug they can lie down on, here’s their food bowl. You may never use parentheses again.”

“I was so mad and hurt,” McMasters said. “But you know what? He was one hundred percent right.”

If Freedman enters his classroom a bundle of nerves, his students do far more so. One current student, Ally Markovich, 29, was so intent on getting into the class that she flew to Ukraine last summer to begin reporting her book proposal even before she had applied. Another, Carl David Goette-Luciak, 33, made a ritual of meeting his girlfriend for cheap pizza every Monday night so he could share with her the notes he took during Freedman’s lectures. “You can’t go to the bookstore to tell the reader what you meant,” one of them read.

What a great experience to have had a professor like Freedman!

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.” 

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.

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.