Processing is Counter Craft’s semi-regular interview series where I talk to authors about the craft and writing processes behind their work. You can find previous entries here.

This week I’m chatting with author and editor about his cool new zine project Thirty Cabins. Riedel asked a bunch of writers (including me) to write flash fiction stories based on a 1918 cabin planning catalogue and then created a beautifully designed zine from the results. It has a great line-up of writers, including many here on Substack such as , , , and . If this kind of project sounds up your alley, check out the Thirty Cabins Substack. You can preorder the zine here.

I talked to Riedel over email about making zines, literary cabins, and planning volume two.

Thirty Cabins is a collection of flash stories inspired by a century-old cabin planning catalog, Sunset’s Cabin Plan Book (1918). How did you come across the catalog? And when did you come up with the idea to invite contemporary authors to write stories inspired by the cabin plans?

I came across the Cabin Plan Book while writing my second novel. If I remember correctly, I needed to know some very specific detail about the construction of a cabin. Maybe what a certain type of shingle is called? Luckily, Project Gutenberg had cataloged the Cabin Plan Book and I was able to find an answer. As I worked on my manuscript, I continued to reference the book, until one day I just started reading for pleasure. I was captivated by the voice, its very American can-do spirit. It made building a cabin in the woods sound so easy!

I came up with the idea for the zine after spending a few weeks at MacDowell, an artist residency known for the cabins sprinkled across its campus. There, I was working on a revision of my cabin novel and talking to a lot of artists about cabins. Poet and illustrator told me about Richard McGuire’s Here, which is a stunning graphic novel that captures a single home through time (a very long stretch of time). So, I guess all these ideas about cabins were swirling around in my head, but also this sense, because I was so deep into this novel revision and not really talking to many of my writer-friends, that I wanted to do something collaborative and community-focused. I pitched the idea to Lena one night at dinner in New York, and she was into it. When I got back home, I wrote up an invitation to potential contributors and started asking people to join.

There is sometimes this notion that literature must be dreary in order to be serious, but Thirty Cabins reminds me of a lot of the playful novels and magazines that got me interested in literature. It’s a little Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and a little McSweeney’s. (Side note: I saw you have a story forthcoming in the next McSweeney’s, so congrats!) Was this part of your thinking? To do a project that would be fun and playful and perhaps interest people who think “literary fiction” is “boring”?

I love the description of Thirty Cabins as Invisible Cities meets McSweeney’s! I guess I have been into playful novels and magazines for a while, too. I was obsessed with Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, and I’ve sought out McSweeney’s for years. I’m very inspired by how the McSweeney’s crew, helmed by the inimitable Rita Bullwinkel, excel at both form and content. I moved to Portland for college in Tin House’s heyday, and I remember distinctly a double-sided issue they published: one side was “Hope” and the other “Dread.” Ander Monson’s projects with DIAGRAM are an inspiration as well. So, I do have these influences, but I honestly didn’t start the project to pique the interest of people who think “literary fiction” is “boring,” though I do hope those people pick up a copy! I was more interested in bringing together a group of writers I admired and asking them to do something a little different than what they might otherwise work on. I was interested in seeing what the result of that would look like.

The cabin is a classic literary setting. It’s the getaway spot where characters can flee to escape their troubles or journey to in order to find new ones. “The cabin in the woods” is basically an entire subgenre of horror fiction, but it’s also common in literary fiction and other genres. (I just taught Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars” in a class, which is a cabin story.)

I guess I have a few questions here. First, do you have any favorite cabin-centric stories in literature?

There are so many! Lauren Groff’s story “The Midnight Zone” was the first that came to mind for me. Then the cabin in Train Dreams, and the one in Peter Rock’s The Night Swimmers, though I’m not sure either of those novels is cabin-centric. I guess I tend to think of cabins like Thoreau’s or Frost’s when I think of cabins – but the Cabin Plan Book is liberal in its interpretation of what constitutes a cabin: there’re lake houses and mountain huts and modern beach houses and ski lodges. That diversity of structures is something that appealed to me about the book and reflects my more recent interest in summer houses and vacation homes in literature. Joy Williams’s “Summer” and Kelly Link’s “The Summer People” both come to mind, as does Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. I was entertained by Alexandra Tanner’s “Bitter North,” published a couple years ago in Granta. I know I haven’t even mentioned horror stories. Anyway, I’m sure I’m forgetting so many here…I keep meaning to design a cabin syllabus.

Second, how did the thirty writers approach cabins? Were their commonalities that surprised you in terms of genre, style, or anything else?

Each writer brought their own style and voice to the story. That sounds obvious, I know, but as the stories arrived in my inbox, I was so delighted by how singular each story was. How a cabin story could only be written by Rachel Khong, etc.

Once all the stories had been submitted, I read them in the order in which they would appear in the zine (our table of contents matches the original book’s). It was so fun to read the stories in order because themes became evident. Kate Folk and Ander Monson’s stories share a phrase, which I think is so cool (like those two writers were writing their stories together in the same imaginary cabin). A Jeff and a Jacob make appearances across multiple stories (Jeff in 3, Jacob in 2). I love Claire Stanford’s clever formal approach to her story, the only one that required the writer to write about not one but three cabins, and Claire did it in just over 500 words, an impressive feat! (All writers were encouraged to stick to around 500 words, though some go longer.) A few of the stories detail the journey to the cabin, which is just as important in my experience as the time in the cabin itself. I was so fascinated with your story, Lincoln, in part because you had the unique challenge of writing the only story that isn’t titled after a cabin. I could go on and on about these stories. I can’t wait for more people to read them (so I have more people to talk about them with!).

Last cabin question: Do you have any particular relationship to cabins yourself? Like a cabin your family visited growing up or an allegedly haunted rotting cabin in the woods near your home?

After grad school, I lived in West Marin, California, on the coast about an hour north of San Francisco, in a redwood cabin. I was so taken by the history of the homes in that town—many of which had been summer vacation cabins for wealthy(ish) people in Berkeley (mostly) and San Francisco in the early 1900s—and that was really when my fascination with cabins began.

Thirty Cabins is a (very lovely) physical book or zine, but you are also promoting it on Substack and perhaps even found some of the authors through Substack. Do you think of Thirty Cabins as something of a hybrid online/offline project?

Most of the authors in the zine I had met in person before inviting them to contribute, and I was familiar with the work of the few I hadn’t met before. So, I didn’t discover any authors through Substack, though I wouldn’t rule that out for future issues. We have published a few stories from the zine in our newsletter, but I’ll admit that when I started the project, I imagined us being even more online. As the project came together, I began to value the tactile aspects of the zine. These days, I read a lot of books on my Kobo (it’s easier to turn pages when you have an infant in your arms), but I think Thirty Cabins is best experienced in its physical form.

I do plan to use our newsletter as a place to have a larger conversation about how people across different fields—visual artists, architects, etc.—conceive of space in their work, and what kind of stories the spaces we inhabit hold. I have an interview with the owner of a home demolition company in the works, for instance. Of course, we’ll continue to publish original fiction and author interviews, alongside news about the zine and related projects.

I imagine some people reading this might have their own idea for a project but no experience producing a physical object like a zine. Can you talk about the steps between concept and final object?

and I are publishing a deep dive on this in the newsletter! I will say we were after a more polished look for our publication, but I think there’s a lot to be said for visiting print shops like Outlet PDX or following online tutorials to learn how to make zines on the cheap. What I loved most about this project, even more than the final product, was getting a bunch of people together and giving them an excuse to create something they might not have otherwise. There was real collaborative energy around the project, and still is. It was fun to just make something with friends. (Dare I say a lot more fun than reading every single hot take about the publishing industry on Substack, as I am prone to do!)

Lastly, you recently emailed Thirty Cabins contributors to say you’re planning a volume 2 with an entirely new set of writers. Can you talk a bit about that and how you see the project continuing?

The next volume will feature the same thirty cabins with the same cabin titles but with a completely new set of writers. I don’t want to give away too much here, but one change is that the next volume’s writers will not be chosen by me. (Stay tuned to the newsletter for more details.) I’m really looking forward to seeing how the second volume builds on each cabin’s story. I think a lot about Richard McGuire’s Here or Daniel Mason’s North Woods. I like the idea of these thirty cabins each accumulating its own literary history over time.

I’ll also say that we’re working on another project adjacent to Thirty Cabins that we’ll release toward the end of the year. It’s inspired, in part, by small town newspapers.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

Hi all,

You may have noticed my Counter Craft posts have slowed a little the last couple of months. That is because I’ve been furiously revising my forthcoming horror novel Haunted Hills. I’m going to write a little about revision today since, well, it is occupying much of my mind.

First though, I was recently asked by to join and to chat about LLMs, the $2 million book deal cancelled over alleged AI use, and the general state of publishing. The conversation was hosted by and I think it turned out well! If you aren’t totally burned out on AI discourse,1 then give it a read here:

The Substack Post

An author’s $2 million book deal was pulled over suspected AI use. Where does publishing go from here?

Last week, news broke that Jerry Falade’s debut crime novel, which had reportedly sold for $2 million after a 14-way bidding auction, had been pulled from publication by the author’s own agents over suspected AI use…

Read more

a month ago · 1672 likes · 572 comments · John Paul Brammer, Kathleen Schmidt, Lincoln Michel, and Danya Issawi

Coincidentally, I just saw someone share my AI-dread-inspired short story “Algorithm America.” I wrote it soon after ChatGPT was released and decided to self-publish it on Counter Craft in 2023 partly as an experiment in publishing fiction here but mostly because I didn’t want to wait for the (often very long) lit mag submission process given the story’s timely subject matter. I feel the story has held up pretty well, if I do say so myself. Section III, about writers fighting over LLM use, feels appropriate after the aforementioned Substack Post roundtable. Maybe I’ll publish some more short stories on Counter Craft in the future. Either way, if you’re interested in reading “Algorithm America,” here it is:

And while I’m sharing links, my first novel, The Body Scout, got a very nice review here on Substack from :

The Body Scout easily earns its slot on the cyberpunk shelf. It’s a biting, incredibly intelligent neo noir digging into questions of corporatism, scientific progress, entertainment, business, and the self. All told via the seedy world behind America’s favorite pastime. And through it all there’s a real heart amid the despair, an upbeat and optimistic belief in humans and their ability to be better.

One thing I love about literary Substack is that people here actually review older books. Newsletter writers don’t have to worry about the news cycles and publication dates quite as much. We’re writing for subscribers, not social media clicks. And the cliché is true. Every old book is new to someone. And, given how few books most people read, probably new to functionally everyone.

THE HORRORS OF REVISION

This brings me back to revising Haunted Hills, my sort of Invisible Cities meets The Haunting of Hill House novel. (Now is probably the time for me to hone an elevator pitch…)

The revision of this novel has been quite different from revising my last ones. Partly, this is because I sold the novel on partial (about 50% complete), which changed my approach to writing the final half. By “approach” I mean writing in a blind panic slash furious creative fugue state as the deadline loomed. Do I recommend this tactic? Well, maybe not. But it did force me to come up with ideas I might not have thought up without the pressure cooker of time. I wrote some weird (derogatory) chapters but also a lot of weird (complimentary) ones that help make the book. My editor seemed to think so. He said it was my best novel, which is always what you want to hear. But he also said it needed a lot of structural work and reordering. I expected as much.

The second reason revising this novel has been a different experience is, well, I apparently like to punish myself. A professor once told me that with each novel you have to learn how to write a novel all over again. Some lessons carry over, sure, but mostly you create a whole new set of problems that require new solutions.2 Perhaps I took this as a challenge instead of advice. So far, I’ve changed up the style, structure, and genre of every novel I’ve written (including a couple abandoned ones).

My first novel, The Body Scout, was a science-fiction noir novel set in a near-future sports league. My second, Metallic Realms, was a comic novel set in contemporary NYC with embedded far-future space adventure stories. Both required different approaches to revision, but both were at least first-person novels with a small cast of characters. Haunted Hills is different. It’s written in a roving third-person POV with a large cast of characters. The setting is real estate development filled with haunted houses, and so there are three layers of characters: the living, the dead, and the houses themselves.3 Compared to my first two novels, the revising of Haunted Hills4 has involved far more chapter reordering as well as character rewriting. An important character introduced in act I might now only first appear in act III. Two other characters are merged or one is split into two roles. Etc. It has been like solving a jigsaw puzzle with a laser cutter where I’m moving pieces into new arrangements while also cutting new knobs and holes to make them fit.

Maybe that metaphor doesn’t make the most sense. Oh well. It’s late at night as I write this.

I’m making much larger changes (in terms of structure, plot, and characters) and also many radical reorderings and rearrangings. This isn’t necessarily a harder way to revise. My first novel had a noir / mystery plot with a linear structure. This is a more straightforward way to tell a story, but it also means that it is trickier to change plot beats or character roles. There’s a clear starting point and destination. Elements are fixed in place, like cars on a train, and removing one in the middle could cause derailment before reaching the end of the tracks. A novel like Haunted Hills has a more expansive canvas, more like a model train layout,5 I suppose, and there are many ways the track can be rerouted. Maybe it could go under a bridge or over a little river. Why not add some more shrubbery here? Maybe add a post office or a carousel there? Or even a whole new track or two that converge with the first?

Let me switch metaphors again. Since I’m writing a horror novel, I’ll say the revision has been like Frankensteining6 a creature together. I gathered a whole bloody heap of macabre parts. I splayed them on my metal slab of a draft at times haphazardly. A few were maggot-ridden and needed to be tossed, but most were in fine rigor mortis shape. They just needed to be stitched together properly. Each bone coated with the right muscles. The heart and lungs and gut hooked into proper arteries and veins. So, I’ve moved limbs and rearranged organs. Realized some bones were extraneous and certain appendages missing. The creature is largely made of the same parts, but swapped into new spots. The hope is that when the creature is done and everything from the awful arteries to festering fingernails is in place, the story will come alive.

If I have one bit of revision advice to offer—once you have a full first draft, aka the most important step—it is to work from macro to micro. Get the full skeleton of structure in place first. The right number of narrative limbs and story appendages all set in their proper spots. Then proceed to worry about the chapter organs and scene viscera. Once those are all connected, only then should you focus on stitching up small wounds and bandaging blemishes on the skin of sentences. That is to say, don’t spend your time polishing paragraphs and reworking scenes if those parts are going to be hacked off and replaced. That can make the whole process more dispiriting. It also makes it harder to do the necessary hacking and restitching. Easier to kill a darling when it’s half-dead already.

At least, that’s what works for me.

I suppose I have one other bit of advice, which is that the only way I know how to revise is to get your hands in the guts! Get messy. Palpate and squeeze. Slosh around, elbows deep, in the story itself. This is when the inspirations strike like lightning. This is when the creature begins to thrum with life.

To drop the metaphor, I mean that the way to revise is to read and reread the work. Print it out and mark it up. Make multiple draft files and test out different POVs or switch up the order of scenes. It is by reading and reworking that you get inspired. You see new connections that can be made. Different ways to explore the themes. The obvious plot point to tweak or the ending that makes the chapter sing. Changes to character or scene or story that don’t just complete the novel, but that do so in a way that feels organic to you because they indeed come from your brain as it turns everything over again and again.

To tie this back to the opening, this is one reason why I’m skeptical of outsourcing your creativity to LLMs. I am sure some artists who have a very different process will find good uses for LLM collaboration.7 And others who say they would never let an LLM write their prose will still turn to it for structural edits and revision direction. Whatever works. For me, though, I would not want an LLM to edit my story or write (or rewrite) my prose because it cannot string veins and capillaries or stitch limbs and organs the way my brain will. There is just no way that it would feel the texture of the text and the shape of the structure in the same way. I don’t feel the need to argue humans are better than machines at art. The LLM might create some other creature. Perhaps even one just as alive. Who knows? But it would not be my creature. And that’s the only kind of monster I want to release into the world.8

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

7

Substack has introduced a new “AI detector” to posts. I don’t plan to use it, but out of curiosity I had it scan this article:

Processing is Counter Craft’s semi-regular interview series where I talk to authors about the craft and writing process behind their work. You can find previous entries here.

This week, I’m excited to be talking with about his weird and wild new science-fiction horror novel Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep. Tremblay is the award-winning author of novels like The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts, among many other inventive and excellent horror works. Tremblay’s newest, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, turns a dark eye to AI and the tech companies trying to monetize our onrushing dystopia. The novel follows Julia Flang, a Gen Z slacker and video gamer, who gets recruited by her big tech exec mother for a secret job: piloting an AI-controlled braindead body across state lines. But the man—nicknamed Bernie as in Weekend at Bernie’s—is not as braindead as the corporation claims. Between Flang’s chapters, the narrative falls into the nightmarish rabbit hole of Bernie’s mind as he fights to retain a sense of self against the AI controls. The result is satirical, surreal, and terrifying. (You can read more about it here.)

I talked to Tremblay over email about unusual narrative approaches, pouring AI anxieties into fiction, and how writing “as hard and as pride-swallowing and teeth-gnashing as it often is, it’s also a fucking beautiful way to spend your time.”

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep has a braided narrative structure with two main storylines. The first follows Julia Flang, a slacker slash video gamer who gets hired to pilot a braindead body across state lines for a corporation that is testing experimental AI tech. The second is a surreal and horrifying journey occurring in the allegedly braindead character’s mind. The first is more straightforwardly narrated while the second is not only surreal but increasingly plays around with form including text boxes, multiple columns, and other interesting design choices.

How did you come up with this structure? Were there always two storylines or did the novel’s form click together during drafting?

Very early in the process (How early? Well before I wrote page one.) I knew the story would need two narrators and two points of view. I wanted Julia’s chapters to be a grounded-in-reality narrative, describing her experience controlling “Bernie” (let’s call the dude with the tech in his brain Bernie for now) in an almost quotidian way but with (hopefully) humor directed at the tech corporation. I wanted all that juxtaposed with Bernie’s surrealistic nightmare experience. I knew the Bernie chapters would be hard to read (and that’s okay, yeah?) given the attention it would demand from the reader and given, well, the body horror ickiness. My 77-year-old father just confirmed this telling me he didn’t like the book because being in Bernie’s head was too awful. Thanks, Dad? Though, if I wanted a goodreads review to call me on the phone…wait, I would never want a goodreads review to call me on the phone, and why am I anthropomorphizing a goodreads review? Anyway, I wanted the humor in the Julia chapters to help balance things. Like a playground seesaw!

Formal playfulness is something I always love when done well, as it is here. I was also interested in how “analog” the Bernie chapters were in the sense that the formal elements are like art pieces on the canvas of the page. They feel fit for print rather than the internet or social media apps. They also called to mind physical arts like cut-and-paste collage (or else early computer hobbyist art) in a way that felt like a formal complement to the novel’s anti-AI / global tech corp themes. Can you talk about the formal elements of those chapters including how you created them?

Thank you, Lincoln! I’m a sucker for formal playfulness as long as it isn’t a gimmick. If I’m going to employ an unusual approach (let’s call it that) within the narrative, I have to be able to convince myself that using it not only serves the story, but it is the best way for me to tell it. With Bernie’s hacked/colonized mind, I wanted to do all I could to replicate his disorienting experience for the reader. After an initially clunky close third person POV, I adopted second-person instead. Bernie’s direct thoughts appear as fractured and separate from the main text within rectangular text boxes, which is a visual shorthand for the pieces of himself bubbling up through the muck of his id. Later, the text boxes become even more necessary to help the reader identify who or what is thinking/speaking. That it all looks like cut-and-paste physical art is a bonus, and also, frankly, a result of my limitations as a designer and what I could do in Word. But I’m more than okay with limitations. Believe me, I’ve worked with limitations my whole life!

There’s a great tradition of horror playing with form (e.g., House of Leaves or your own The Pallbearer’s Club). Why do you think horror and unusual forms work together so well?

That’s a great question. I don’t think I’ve ever considered that before. I’m usually too busy justifying the usage of unusual forms. I certainly can’t speak for other horror fans, but my favorite works of horror inform and make me fear (or even more afraid) of the present. When I’m writing a horror story, even if it’s not set in present day, I’m aiming to engage with and disturb the readers of our current data-glutted-disinformation age. To presume anyone is going to be reading your (a general you; of course everyone will be reading Lincoln Michel’s work in the future!) stories five or ten or fifty years from now is folly. I mean, fuck, it’s hard enough writing a story that works *now*, I can’t imagine trying to write something to appeal to the AI/human/lobster hybrids that will be around in one hundred years. Joking (somewhat) aside, the inclusion of formal playfulness feels like a logical outgrowth of trying to emotionally move the now-readers by making my weird stories feel as real as possible.

A family dealing with a maybe possession? A reality TV crew would totally show up and a blogger would be detailing what happened on the show. A found memoir? Who found it? Of course the person who found it wouldn’t be able to resist commenting and giving her rebuttal. An infamous cursed film? Having the characters sitting around telling the reader about the movie sounds boring, so why not include the screenplay? In all those cases, the stories felt more real to me with the inclusion of the extra-textual stuff. And if it feels more real, then I’ll be even more afraid. Maybe horror’s transgression and the visceral response it elicits lends to the employment of unusual forms, particularly of the meta-fictional type, where the story threatens to infect reality. I don’t know. I have threatened my publisher that someday I will demand pop-up pages....

Dead But Dreaming has a pointed critique of AI, especially the type of “Artificial Intelligence” that became mainstream when ChatGPT was released in late 2022. This made me curious about the novel’s timeline. Was AI always centered in the novel or did you have an idea for the novel before the ChatGPT age?

In the early spring of 2023, I read Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and I flashed on an image of a dead guy sitting on an airplane, his body being controlled by a remote user. Even though it was, at the time, a seemingly silly scenario, I try not to be in the business of telling my subconscious what’s silly or not for fear that it will stop bringing me ideas. So, I wrote it down in a notebook, thinking I likely wouldn’t go back to it. At that point things like Midjourney and LLMs were just beginning to be on my radar. A few months later, in late May, friend and writer Christopher Golden asked if I wanted to be a part of a class action lawsuit suing OpenAI on behalf of writers. I said, “Fuck yeah,” without really thinking about what that might entail. In July we filed suit (https://llmlitigation.com/). After spending the second half of 2023 learning about OpenAI and other corporations like them (how they operate, what they had done and were continuing to do), I didn’t think that the AI-controlled body idea was all that silly anymore. I started other research for the novel (mainly reading about consciousness and how it might be defined; I recommend Christopher Koch’s The Feeling of Life Itself) in early 2024, and from there I poured all my AI anxieties into the novel, as well as celebrating my love for messy, beautiful, imperfect pop art. Hopefully the novel doesn’t read as too didactic, except where it is supposed to be didactic.

The novel really balances comedy—some of the Bernie scenes could appear in, well, a slapstick comedy like Weekend at Bernie’s—and spine-tingling horror. How do you approach this balance when writing?

I like horror comedies as much as the next tattooed and black-t-shirt wearing fan, but I much prefer horror comedies that are scary/disturbing when it’s supposed to be scary/disturbing and funny when it’s supposed to be funny. I was most nervous about the (attempted) humor, but I had the most fun writing those bits. To ignore the pathos and slapstick at a reanimated mostly dead person’s behalf would’ve been neglecting my writerly duties. To help with the humorist tone in Julia’s chapters, I reread two of my favorite Patrick deWitt novels (The Librarianist and The Sister Brothers). I only allowed myself to read three pages per sitting. The sitting was, um, literal, with me in front of my laptop, ready to work on my novel after reading the three pages. It was like a pre-reward before writing! I would be genuinely excited to sit at the laptop (instead of the usual procrastination and dread) because I got to reread a few pages of my favorite books.

As far as the balance went, I figured the horror/disturbing stuff would be there, and I wouldn’t have any trouble dredging that up. I actively looked for places to insert the humor. I hope it works. It worked for me? (Yes, I’m obnoxiously admitting I made myself laugh. My mom always tells me I’m so funny, though.)

You’re an author who often blurs genres, with a novel like this including elements of body horror, science fiction, and surreal fantasy. I’m always curious how writers approach genre. Is genre or “genre bending” something on your mind when writing or is it something you don’t think about and feel is a question for marketers and not authors?

Until this June, I’ve been a full-time high school mathematics teacher. I enjoyed teaching but I also viewed the job as my artistic safety net. I didn’t need my writing to help support my family and give us shitty health insurance. This empowered me to say no and to publish in the independent presses when the other empowered people said no. I was going to write my weird horror-tinged shit and then let other people figure out what to do with it. Now, I’m beyond fortunate to work with my friend and agent Stephen Barbara, and since 2014 my editor Jennifer Brehl. Both allow me a wide definition of what horror or dark fiction is and can be. So, in general, I do not think about genre or marketing concerns until after the book is done. However, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I worried a little about Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep. Would folks who read me before be willing to follow me there? Would new folks give it a try? Would my dad like it? (We have the answer to that one.) Valid questions with (some) still unknown answers. I can proudly say that I didn’t change one thing in the book because of those questions. I think writing to the imagined proclivities of imagined readers is madness (and again speaking only for me) and doing so would kill my desire to write. I love writing the messed-up stuff that occurs to my brain at a particular point in time, and more times than not I think, “Hey, this turned out kinda cool. I hope other people like it too.”

POV has been on my mind recently, and I was very taken by your use of POV in Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep and how the novel combines third-person, second-person, and later first-person-plural. How did you approach point of view in this novel? And how do you approach it generally as a writer?

I don’t have an MFA and I don’t have an English degree and what little I think I know is this: POV has to be included in any writer’s interrogation of their story. POV is not a default setting. It’s a choice, one that has to be chosen with the purpose of serving the story. As much as I feel more comfortable writing first-person, it can’t and I won’t let it be my default. The story’s needs dictate the POV. Bernie’s chapters, as previously mentioned, is a great example. His early chapters just weren’t working in third. With it, there was an arm’s length between the character and the reader. It had to be second because I needed the reader as close to being in Bernie’s head as I could make them.

I wanted to ask about your intertextual allusions in the novel (sorry to sound like a stuffy English professor there). The title is a play on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Julia regularly references movies like The Big Lebowski and Weekend at Bernie’s. The rabbit tattoo conjures both Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix. Etc. What role did these allusions serve for you?

While some of the references started as me fumbling around to build Julia’s character, basically me thinking something like “Huh, it’d be weird to have a Gen Zer walking around quoting the Dude. Why would she do that? Why would she need to do that?” As Julia fleshed out, she became a celebration of art, of the human (so fucked that we even have to qualify the following as such now) joy in communicating and connecting through art. That is art’s purpose; to make us feel less alone. It doesn’t matter if you or the other characters don’t get her references, you still understand she is attempting to communicate while sharing a bit of herself. Later in my book, when the AI attempts similar references, it might be funny, but you’re probably laughing nervously.

Lastly, since AI is central to the novel and everyone and their uncle is freaking out about the future of literature in the age of LLMs, what advice would you give a writer who is trying to write their own unique work without having their mind colonized by tech programs?

The advice would be, simply, write your own unique work and do not go near algorithms that have stolen our books/stories. There is no gray space here. You are not a writer otherwise. You’re not even a hack! (I’m a hack!). You’re a scab; the use of American union language is purposeful. If I sound like a scold, I don’t care.

But maybe I should approach this more positively. The novel, the story, the song, the painting, the art isn’t the final piece (note, I didn’t use the word ‘product’). The art is the effort in tandem with the lived-in and on-going experience of the person who created it. The work is the art. The work is what makes doing it worthwhile. As hard and as pride-swallowing and teeth-gnashing as it often is, it’s also a fucking beautiful way to spend your time.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

The Principle of Principles

Hello readers,

I’m pushing through to finish this Principles of Plotting series, so this Part IV post immediately follows “The Principles of Plotting Part III: Variation.” If you missed the other posts, I would read them in order as I explain the idea behind the series and also describe the principles in roughly descending order of importance. Here are the links to Part I, Part II, and Part III. I’ll repurpose my recap from the last post:

I find myself annoyed at both the vague literary world aphoristic advice1 and the absurdly prescriptive rules found in many genre and Hollywood screenwriting guides.2 So, this series is my attempt to offer flexible plot principles that can apply to (almost) any type of story. Or, at least any type of story that wants to have a plot. What is a plot principle that applies as much to a Kafkaesque novel as a Marvel romp? That applies to an experimental short story as much as a Hollywood romcom? In my first two installments, I went over how I’m defining plot3 and why I think authors—perhaps even especially literary/experimental/subversive ones—should pay attention to plot.

Part IV will be a two-for-one special with both Intersection and Redirection. As with the previous principles, these are meant as loose guidelines that are meant to generate ideas without stifling creativity. They don’t tell you what to do. They tell you what to think about before you decide what to do.

I’ll also note that these principles are not meant to be applied equally per se. Everything depends on the work in question. Maybe one story is driven by Escalation while another is structured around Oscillation. Perhaps a novel that you think will be powered by Variation needs to be revised toward Redirection. Stories are not static. I dislike anthropomorphizing art and acting like stories are living beings that “tell” the writer what they want. But, well, there is some metaphorical truth to that. Stories are neither planned constructions like houses nor organic things with their own wills. They fall somewhere in between with the writer needing to both impose planning and react to the developments that sprout during drafting. A good writer needs to be nimble and apply the principles that work for the particular scene and particular story.

Principle of Plotting #4: Intersection

Intersection means that your various storylines come together in a satisfying way. By come together, I mean the storylines don’t merely get completed. They collide. They interact. They get entangled. Anyone can finish plot arcs and character arcs. The trick is having the various arcs work together to produce an even greater effect. As a clunky visual metaphor, see the image at the top where a fisherman pulls together different lines to drag up the fresh catch.

One of the worst sins a plot-forward story can commit is to drop plot lines. It is far easier to generate interesting story ideas or mysterious elements than it is to finish them. So, there is often a temptation to pull a Lost and cut the plot lines you can’t finish and then walk away whistling, hoping the reader doesn’t notice. This is a mistake both for ongoing storylines and for elements that are signaled as significant to the reader. (This is the real meaning of “Chekhov’s Gun,” aka that a gun shown in the first act must go off in the third. That’s not because a play needs a murder—although it rarely hurts—but because a gun placed prominently on a stage is something a viewer will notice and expect to see have a payoff.4)

Still, completing storylines is only step one. The more powerful and difficult thing to achieve is to bring the storylines together in a way that feels both surprising and inevitable. This normally means that the storyline trajectories intersect—thus Intersection—and affect each other. The arcs and plots weave together to form a complete pattern or picture. The ideal is that each part feels necessary. If you removed one, it would untangle the whole thing.

This principle is most important at the climax of the story. This is usually when the major storylines and characters come together to settle the “questions” of the work. But the principle is useful throughout a narrative. Some braided narratives, with two or three main POVs, might have the storylines intersecting at different angles from start to finish. A multigenerational epic divided into five parts might have a large point of Intersection at the end of each. Etc.

As always, the specifics of how Intersection should be deployed are dependent on style, genre, and the specific story you are telling. A detective mystery is expected to tie up all the loose ends5 and much of the pleasure of the story is retroactively seeing the skill with which the author constructed the puzzle. On the other hand, many forms of horror and weird fiction create eerie effects through a lack of clarity and finality. Still, most stories will have intersections of various kinds and if they don’t the reader will feel the author has been lazy or cheap.

(To preempt the angry comments: Yes, you can write great plotless fiction in which the various parts never touch. In such works, there is something else, like theme, creating cohesion. But this is a series on plotting and not on not plotting.)

Crossing Plot and Character Arcs

The cleanest and most classic form of Intersection is when the character arc crosses the plot arc around the climax. The protagonist completes their interior journey in a way that allows them to defeat their external obstacle (or vice versa). This is what Hollywood films, with their stricter structures, tend to aim for. The romcom lead learns to love themselves in a way that allows them to marry their crush and live happily ever after. The superhero embraces their responsibility in a way that allows them to blast the big baddie back to kingdom come. Think of the original Star Wars in which Luke Skywalker embraces his destiny as a hero through accepting the power of the Force, which literally gives him the ability to hit the tiny target and destroy the Death Star and save the universe. Celebration. The end (until the sequel). A similar dynamic plays out in The Matrix and most other Chosen One narratives (again, until the sequels).

As always, these principles apply to all sorts of works, not just blockbuster films. Intersection doesn’t have to happen in a heroic, save-the-world way. You simply have the plot arc and character arc—or if you prefer external struggle and internal struggle—wrap around each other. In a story like William Carlos Williams’s “The Use of Force,” the external conflict (the doctor is trying to examine a young child’s mouth) and the internal conflict (the doctor is losing his professionalism and becoming animalistic in the physical struggle to open the girl’s mouth) collide in the titular use of force. In Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” the protagonist’s plot question (will the young boy be impregnated with centipede monster larvae?6) and character arc (moving from naive passive child to someone with agency) are resolved together. Etc. Obviously, these are reductive readings of stories which are doing many more things. Arcs are only the spines of the stories, but there are plenty of other bones plus the meat, skin, and organs.7

The Star Wars example is one in which the character arc changes the trajectory of the plot arc. It can work in reverse too.

In my post on Variation, I brought up Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a fabulist story about a world in which babies are made from inanimate material like mud, yarn, and porcelain. (Spoilers ahead.) The protagonist, Ogechi, is poor and made from mud and twigs by her own mother. Her desire is to have the kind of delicate child a rich person has, which is to say the opposite of someone like herself. This causes her lots of grief and pain because these delicate babies are easy to kill and also her horrible boss literally leeches her joy in exchange for the magic necessary to bring life to the babies. Ogechi ends up making a demonic baby out of hair clippings—a fable within the fable warns us of the dangers of hair babies—which becomes the central plot line. The hair baby causes more and more problems, including killing her coworkers, until Ogechi finally kills the demonic baby. The story ends with Ogechi making a new baby out of mud aka the type of baby her mother made and what she has always run from: “Let this child live in sorrow. Let this child not grow into a foolish, hopeful girl with joy to barter. Ogechi formed the head, the arms, the legs. She gave it her mother’s face. In the morning, she would fetch leaves to protect it from the rain.”

The Storyline Tie-Up

The above describes stories with one protagonist and one main plot line. Many stories have far more plot lines and POV characters to weave together. In truth, even aforementioned action films like Star Wars and The Matrix have several strands to wrap up. Luke is only in the position to save the day because Han Solo completes his arc from selfish smuggler to freedom fighter and Neo is only revived because Trinity embraces her feelings for Neo.

There is a unique challenge presented to stories with several main storylines and different POVs. In such works, you might still want to have the character and plot arc of each character cross but you also need to have the various storylines collide. Potentially, this could be merely thematic but normally it is going to be more literal: your POV characters will appear in the same place and/or act in ways that affect the other storylines causing some level of chaos, closure, comedy, or tragedy.

The more storylines and POV characters you have, the trickier this becomes. If you don’t believe me, ask George R. R. Martin.8

Earlier this year, I published an article about what I called “TV brain prose,” aka writers who seem to be thinking in TV/film scenes instead of leaning into the unique possibilities of prose fiction. Some readers misinterpreted this as me saying TV and film suck and/or shouldn’t be an inspiration for fiction. I didn’t mean that at all. Like just about everyone, I love movies and (good) TV. Anyway, the storyline tie-up is something that TV does very well. Think of more or less any sitcom like Seinfeld. Any given episode will have several storylines that might be separate for much of the episode. Maybe Jerry and George are caught up in relationship troubles while Elaine is plotting something at work and Kramer is hatching some wacky plan. Whatever the storylines are, they come together. Kramer’s goofiness ruins George and Jerry’s plans which makes them unable to assist Elaine, leaving everyone in a mess. The storylines don’t merely end. They intersect.

In a different mode, examine Shakespeare’s tragedies in which the various storylines come together for tragic purposes (e.g., Romeo and Juliet parallel schemes to be together ironically lead to both committing suicide). Or how an epic fantasy series like The Lord of the Rings separates the main characters in various combinations for long stretches yet brings them together at the climax to collectively save the realm.

Since Intersection is expected, it helps create tension and interest for the reader. I mentioned before that many braided narratives intersect throughout but others will present seemingly unrelated storylines that prompt the reader to wonder just how on earth they will merge. An example would be Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which takes place half in a surreal fantasy world and half in a cyberpunkish future. How are these two seemingly different stories related? That question is part of what keeps you turning the page.

Principle of Plotting #5: Redirection

I’m grouping Redirection with Intersection because they are often entwined, as some of my examples above show. Luke Skywalker’s character arc intersects with the plot arc, changing the direction from All Is Lost to The Day Is Saved. Ogechi’s exterior world struggle causes her to reverse her character, embracing the very thing she’s run from the entire story. Romeo and Juliet’s opposing plans smack into each other, sending them both from romance to tragedy.

But Redirection isn’t only about storylines intersecting. Redirection is about artfully shifting the story into new terrain. A few times I’ve pulled out the phrase “surprising yet inevitable,” a principle usually applied to endings yet I think applies throughout a story. We want the parts of a story to feel like they follow from what comes before. That they are logical not in the sense of mathematical logic but storytelling logic—the math of characters, aesthetics, and themes. The story grows from the seed of the beginning into the sapling of the middle and the blooming tree of the ending. Yet at the same time readers want to be surprised. If we can predict everything that is going to happen, why bother continuing to read?

Redirection is one way to think of adding satisfying surprise to a story. It is similar to what I called Oscillation, but Oscillation is a more frequent back-and-forth movement that powers the story along. Redirection is a larger change in trajectory. Oscillation is pedaling right and left to move the bike forward. Redirection is making a sharp turn to ride into new terrain. That turn might even be a doubling back and the new terrain the old terrain, but changed. The triangle of Freytag’s Pyramid is only one plot structure shape. Another is the circle seen in everything from Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” to Dan Harmon’s “Story Circle.” We return where we start, but with the hero and/or the world changed.

Plot Hinges

On the larger structural level of a story, Redirection is pivotal to the beginning, middle, and ending in different ways. Here we might even return to the old Freytag’s Pyramid that I’ve both critiqued and defended before.

This traditional story structure has three main plot hinges, in which the story and character’s directions shift course.

A classic beginning is to start in the “normal world”9 that gets sent in a new direction by the inciting incident. This might be your old “a stranger comes to town” (e.g., cousin Charles’s appearance disrupting the equilibrium of the Blackwoods in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle) or equally old “a character goes on a journey” (e.g., the man and child have to flee in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of The Road).

The middle, in Freytag’s model, is when the hero’s fate switches from rising to falling (e.g., the banquet scene in Macbeth is the pivot from Macbeth seeming to rise in power to his unraveling). Note that “climax” is used differently in Freytag’s model than we use it today. He means the pivot point and not the final fireworks. Many stories will feature a major setback at the hinge in which the protagonist not only has another obstacle to pass but one that defeats them. Other stories may have the character treading water happily in the middle until something redirects them toward success or failure. The middle is where the character is sent hurtling toward the end.

And the very ending is the dénouement, which is often a Redirection of the story that ends on a slightly different tone or leads the characters to a different place. The triumphant climax of Sauron’s destruction in The Lord of the Rings leads to the bittersweet actual ending of the Scouring of the Shire.

Of course, you may choose a different model the three-act beginning/middle/end. Perhaps you prefer a four-act kishotenketsu or the five-act screenwriting structure. Maybe you think of “acts” as “parts” or “books” or something else. No matter how you are dividing the units of your plot, what will make them feel like distinct and necessary units is if they redirect the story. If they can be removed without affecting the overall story shape, why are they there at all?

Character Pivots

The above are plot-oriented means of Redirection. But Redirection in character and interiority can be just as powerful and important. One elegant form of the character pivot is when the character doubles back to the beginning. The example I gave above of Arimah’s short story achieves this. Ogechi ends by embracing what she ran from at the story’s opening. She is rerouted into reverse. Part of the reason to circle back to the start is that it helps the turn feel—yes, again—surprising yet inevitable. A reader is less likely to feel a Redirection is cheap if the shift was foreshadowed.

Another satisfying character Redirection can be described this way: “the character gets what they want only to realize it wasn’t what they needed.” Many stories of ambition work this way from The Great Gatsby to The Devil Wears Prada. The character wants the big job, only to realize it takes over their life. Or they want success and wealth, only to realize that power corrupts and they were happier before. Or they achieve what they hungered for only to realize the hunger doesn’t go away and they want more and more.

Other Trajectory Shifts

These are just a few methods of Redirection. There are endless variations. In a work like Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, it may be the reader who wants the character to escape their situation even though the character seems happy to stay. When—spoilerish comment—the protagonist is left in an ambivalent state at the end, perhaps it is the reader that is redirected.

I’ve stressed that these principles are meant to be loose enough to apply to everything from formulaic bestsellers to experimental work. One example of a more surreal artist whose work often features extreme Redirection would be David Lynch in films like Lost Highway (the complete switcheroo in the middle) and Mulholland Drive (closer to the two-thirds mark).

Redirection might take the shape of shifting the story to a new plane that reorients everything that comes before. The blunt version of this is the twist ending. But there are subtle ways of twisting, such as how John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” and other means of redirecting to a new plane. You might shift focus, zooming in to highlight the most important element or else telescoping out to place the story in a wider view. Or you might do both at the same time, such as when Donald Barthelme’s “The School” shifts from a catalog of things that have died at the school over the course of a year to a philosophical debate about the meaning of death during one class.

Applying these Principles

Okay, those are my core Principles of Plotting: Escalation, Oscillation, Variation, Intersection, Redirection.

As I mentioned above, the idea is not that you should apply these principles in some equal way. Some might not apply well or perhaps even not at all to a given story. And you may have other things you focus on that make your stories work for you. Whatever works is what works. These principles are ones to keep in mind when things are not working. When you are looking at a scene or a segment or a story and thinking it’s flat, inert, treading water, or just ambling about. Maybe that flat opening chapter needs Escalation. Perhaps when the directionless middle of your story needs more Oscillation. It could be that the ending your beta readers dislike needs a radical Redirection. Possibly Intersection is the key to fixing the muddled mess of your final chapter.

I’ll repeat what I said up top: These principles aren’t meant to prescribe what to do. They suggest what to think about before you decide what to do.

At least, that’s how I use them. I hope it is useful for some of you too.

Next time, I’ll talk about other ideas of plotting (from other authors) that I’ve found useful. Some of these might contradict or clash with mine. That will be intentional. There are no rules in fiction.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

Hello readers,

Every couple of weeks, I get a nice note or restack about my Principles of Plotting series. So, I figure it is finally time to get off my ass—or I suppose sit back down on my ass—and finish the series.

To quickly recap, I find myself annoyed at both the vague literary world aphoristic advice1 and the absurdly prescriptive rules found in many genre and Hollywood screenwriting guides2. So, this series is my attempt to offer flexible plot principles that can apply to (almost) any type of story. Or, at least any type of story that wants to have a plot. What is a plot principle that applies as much to a Kafkaesque novel as a Marvel romp? That applies to an experimental short story as much as a Hollywood romcom? In my first two installments, I went over how I’m defining plot3 and why I think authors—perhaps even especially literary/experimental/subversive ones—should pay attention to plot. I also explored what I consider to be the two most fundamental plot principles: Escalation and Oscillation.

I won’t repeat everything here. If this subject interests you, I obviously encourage you to read the first two entries before this one.

Rebutting Some Rebuttals

For the most part, the feedback on these small series has been lovely. Of course, I expected and received some pushback. I welcome it. But this is my newsletter so I get to rebut some of the rebuttals I’ve seen.

First, a certain type of writer will say that the general idea of plotting—and the specific advice of e.g. escalating stakes or providing up and down movement on the story’s main axis of meaning—are inauthentic. That stories are supposed to come out naturally, organically, without preservatives or pasteurization. I’m not saying such folks have a MAHA raw milk view of storytelling… but I’m not not saying that.

I kid, I kid. Look, my feeling is always that whatever works is what works. If you are a writer who feels your characters “tell their own stories”4 and your job as a writer is akin to a nature photographer who just camps out in a camouflaged tent pissing in a bottle while you wait for something dramatic to occur without interference in front of your view—that’s great! If it works, that is all that matters. Tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to produce the work you enjoy.

However, if this “natural” way of writing fiction isn’t working for you then I would suggest reframing the question. Stories are not raw milk or nature photography. They are always constructed by the author. Even in purely non-fiction genres, like highly researched biography, the author chooses what facts to emphasize, what way to organize the facts, and what events will start or end the story. You can frame nearly any life as heroic or pathetic, successful or failed, inspiring or a warning. If this is true of real lives, it is obviously true of invented ones. Plot is artificial, sure, but so are fictional characters, imagined settings, paragraph breaks, chapter titles, and everything else.

A second objection I’ve seen might be summed up as “Who cares if the plot is interesting? Maybe what matters is other elements of the story, like the voice or the character’s memories or the setting.” In both entries, I went out of my way to stress that I admire the infinite forms of fiction and that includes many “plotless” novels.5 Still, I think the question to ask yourself is why are you including a plot if you don’t find it interesting and/or don’t care to make it interesting on the page? If your story revolves around a mystery plot where a detective figure finds clues to try to solve a case, but you don’t care to make the mystery or its solving compelling… well, why is it there?

There might be a good reason! I’ve enjoyed some novels that deconstruct and subvert detective fiction. I love Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map, where the detective seems ever further from solving the case as the confusing clues mass. Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company was my favorite TV show last year and it revolves around a character obsessing over solving a ridiculous “crime” and finding ever more ridiculous clues and conspiracies. Several Thomas Pynchon books could be added here. I would suggest that these authors still make their plots interesting, even if in absurd ways, and also that they undermine traditional detective stories for specific thematic, comedic, or narrative reasons. If your plot is thoughtlessly tacked on for no real reason except you think you need to cram one into your manuscript to sell it to publishers, well, readers will probably be as unenthused as you are about the plot.

Moving on:

Principles of Plotting #3: Variation

Much of the pleasure of any text is seeing how the writer can tweak the ideas in new and interesting ways. Some screenwriting guides will talk about how films need to include “the promise of the premise,” which is to say some part of the film—typically the middle—must, well, make good on the promise of the film’s premise. In a movie like Groundhog Day, how will the character act out the repeated day in different ways? In any movie where a character gains a superpower (or the power of God or Santa Claus or whatever), what are all the possible ways they will use that power? In any “odd couple” story, what are the varied ways the two personalities will clash?

Again, this principle is true for any type of literature. Solvej Balle’s ongoing and acclaimed novel series On the Calculation of Volume has an essentially Groundhog Day premise—a woman lives the same day over and over—but explores the premise through a very different sensibility and style. It still rests on variation. No one would read or watch a movie about someone reliving the same day if they just do the same thing each iteration. We want to see how the writer can twist the concept in ways that meet and subvert our expectations. In Balle’s series, that might be the different aspects of mundane reality the narrator fixates on. In a superhero movie, it might be how different supervillain powers will test the hero’s fighting abilities. In either case, variation is key.

How will Jane Austen’s heroines find different partners given their different temperaments and situations? How will the ghosts haunting the hotel produce unique scares in Stephen King’s The Shining? What new bizarre obstacle will prevent K. from reaching the castle in Kafka’s The Castle? What new magical hurdle will Frodo face in The Lord of the Rings? For that matter, what new rants and insults will a Thomas Bernhard narrator come up with next? Regardless of genre or style, nearly all fiction works through a balancing act of repetition and difference. When we enjoy something, we want to see it again and again… but also in new and surprising forms.

There’s an old writing saw that goes “an ending should feel both inevitable and surprising.” You can apply this to every plot beat. A clever plot consistently feels both inevitable (or at least logical) and surprising (or at least fresh). We want to see the ideas tweaked and concepts twisted—but not so much that it feels disjointed and not so little that it feels repetitive. The reader wants to be both surprised and not so surprised. Yes, this is hard to do. Who said plotting was easy?

Various Forms of Variation

How artful variation is deployed in fiction is—like everything—dependent on style, genre, and other factors. Like I said, these are loose principles. In more action-oriented stories, the variation is often in the tests of the hero’s abilities. You don’t want your superhero to beat the first villain with a laser vision blast, the second villain with a bigger laser vision blast, and the third villain with an even bigger laser vision blast. That’s going to be boring (unless the whole premise is that it is boring6). The reader wants you to mix it up. Maybe the second villain can only be beaten with frost breath and the last villain requires extreme cunning to defeat. Similarly, you don’t want a Sherlock Holmesian detective to gather every clue in the same way. You want to see him prove his mettle in different spheres of detective skills—first he shows his knowledge of herbs while inspecting the poisoned tea, next he uses cryptography skills to decode a message written on the notepad—both because it makes the hero’s powers more impressive and because it simply is more interesting.7

Speculative fiction often rests on creative variation of the speculative premise. The writer introduces a speculative idea—e.g. the devices that allow you to communicate with an alternate timeline in Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”—and the reader reads in part to see how this will impact society in contrasting ways. Some people collaborate with alternative versions to work more effectively at their jobs, other people become depressed upon realizing their alternative versions are more successful than them, still others make money finding devices connected to universes where a popular celebrity didn’t die in a car crash. Etc.

One story I frequently teach is Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “Who Will Greet You at Home,” which I think is an excellent story in general and more specifically a perfect example of how even a surreal or fabulist story can have a classic plot structure. It has great Escalation and Oscillation as well as Variation. The story takes place in a world in which babies are made from inanimate material. It opens: “The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it unravelled.” Our protagonist, poor and made by her mother from “mud and twigs,” is driven to have a baby who is “a thing of whimsy, soft and pretty and tender and worthy of love.” We see the variations of the premise—Ogechi is taunted by a baby made of porcelain and in desperation makes a baby out of stray hair clippings—all applied to the central themes and character drive. Anyway, I don’t want to spoil the story and I will return to it when I talk about my fourth plotting principle of Intersection (specifically the intersection of character and plot arcs). But it and Chiang’s stories are good examples of how plot Variation is strongest when it powers the themes and characters, and vice versa.

Part of why Variation is so important in any genre is that it provides the reader with another reason to turn the page. They aren’t just reading to find out what happens next. They are also reading to see how you can delight them with the unexpected.8

Variation Accumulation

Although perhaps a little outside the scope of an article on plot, plotless fiction often functions through a sort of escalation through accumulation. It provides a sense of plot without plot. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a good example of that. It would be a stretch to say there is anything resembling a plot or even traditional characters in that book. The novel is 55 descriptions of imagined cities with no throughline of character9 or story. Still, the accumulation of various cities adds up to something compelling. The reader turns the page, in part, to learn how Italo Calvino can describe dozens of different imaginary cities in ways that are fresh instead of repetitive.

Another story that comes to mind is Robert Coover’s postmodern classic “The Babysitter.” The story is composed of a hundred non-linear fragments that alternate between the banal and brutal, mundane and insane. The variation is done through juxtaposition. (The structure thematically mimics flipping through TV channels in which you surf through local news, violent crime drama, goofy sitcom, and more back to back.) There is no traditional plot because there is no clarity on what is “real” and what is fiction. The reader must construct their own story from the dozens of various possibilities.

But variation through accumulation can occur in a more traditional and/or realist story as well. I recently reread one of my favorite Cheever stories, “Reunion,” which is a good example of escalation through accumulation in a short space.10 It’s very short so you might as well go read it now. But to summarize, it opens with a young narrator who is excited to see his estranged father. The father takes him around to a series of restaurants where he (the father) is extremely rude to waiters. This is a simple pattern story in one way and much of the pleasure is in the tweaks on the father’s rudeness—he snaps his fingers at one place, he insults in Italian at another, and at a third he’s so drunk he says “Bibson Geefeaters” instead of “Beefeater Gibsons” and is pissed when corrected, and so on—but the story achieves an escalation of the father’s assholeishness through the accumulation of shitty comments. You might describe the story as one in which a young boy realizes his father is a piece of shit, but that is something that occurs offscreen. What we see onscreen is the various ways his dad is a dick.

Variation of Variation

There’s a more complex form of variation that I’ll attribute to George Saunders’s essay “Rise Baby Rise” that discusses Donald Barthelme’s classic story “The School.” Barthelme’s story is all about variation as it is a pattern story made up of ever-bigger things dying in the titular school. The herb garden dies and the pet gerbils die and a puppy they find in the parking lot dies and then grandparents and then some of the children. You get it. Saunders makes the point that being too straightforward in your escalation is off-putting. “Why? Because I’m condescending. I’m assuming that this simple, linear pattern is enough to interest you. I’m treating you like a dumb beast, endlessly fascinated by a swinging weight on a cord.” At the end of the essay, Saunders suggests one way to solve this problem: “escalating escalation.” In Barthelme’s story, the catalogue of things dying in the school shifts into a philosophical discussion about life and death between the narrator and his students. This is another way to think about variation. Take the themes and interests of your story and shift them into new terrain. If you can pull it off, it’s a very useful trick.

That’s enough various comments on variation. Next up, I’ll talk about Intersection aka how the various plot lines (and character arcs) get tied together.

10

Many of Cheever’s stories could fit this topic. Certainly his most famous story, “The Swimmer,” is propelled by the variation in the swimming man’s encounters.

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My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

Hello readers,

You may have noticed I didn’t post a Counter Craft article last week, which is because I spent the last couple weeks in a furious creative haze to finish up a draft of my forthcoming haunted house novel Haunted Hills. The process of writing that novel has been completely different from the processes behind my last two novels, Metallic Realms and The Body Scout. Partly, that’s just the way it seems to go with books. Each time, you have to teach yourself how to write a book all over again.1 It’s quite annoying. But another reason is that I challenged myself to write a novel in a rotating third-person point of view instead of the first-person POVs of my first two novels.

This is my segue into a low-stakes (and probably overly pedantic) craft topic: why I dislike the traditional POV taxonomy.

When I teach intro to literature classes to undergraduates, I open the first class going over the five types of POV. (This may seem overly basic, but most of my students are not humanities majors and are unfamiliar with such things.) Each time I teach the traditional POV taxonomy, I feel it isn’t the most useful one from a fiction writing, uh, point of view.

Here’s a quick refresher. The alleged five forms of POV are as follows: First-person (“I do this”), second-person (“you do that”), and third-person (“he/she/they/it do the other thing”). However, third-person POV is broken down into three types: third-person objective (no interiority), third-person limited (one character’s interiority and perspective), third-person omniscient (unlimited interiority and perspective). Those are your five.

There is more we could say, of course. First-person POV implies a character who exists within the fictional story world while the various third-person forms are narrated by a voice that usually exists outside of the story world. But, that’s the gist. Most intro to literature guides will also say that second-person POV and third-person objective POV are rare in literature,2 meaning you’re left with only three common POV forms.

I disagree.

It’s not that the categories are wrong exactly. But they are rooted more in grammar than narrative. Grammatically, “I” and “we” are both first-person pronouns. Narratively, there is a dramatic difference between an “I” narrator and a collective “we” narrative voice. An I is a single character and the story is limited to one perspective. A we is a group, which can provide a plethora of perspectives or else a sort of consensus chorus perspective. That opens up entirely different storytelling opportunities and restrictions.

The grammar focus of POV taxonomy also seems to confuse many. More than once I’ve seen people, even professional critics, mistake a first-person POV with direct address (“I wanted to tell you about the time I woke up as a big ol’ bug”) for true second-person POV (“You wake up and realize you have turned into a gigantic bug.”)

Look, I said this was going to be a pedantic and low-stakes post. But for fun I’m going to offer a different taxonomy of POV based more on storytelling than grammar. From a narrative perspective, I think there are three main questions as far as POV goes. 1) Information, aka what can the narrator know and convey to the reader. 2) Filtration, aka whose consciousness(es) is information filtered through. 3) Modulation, aka how is the narrator shaping information for the assumed listener.

The Storyteller (first-person singular — classic style)

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. — “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin

This is your classic first-person POV. These days it is likely the most common POV of any type. A character inside the story world is telling a tale to an undefined listener/reader. In this mode, the implied listener is not a part of the fictional reality. They are in essence whoever is reading the tale. Historically, there was often explicit artifice to this effect. “To whoever finds these letters, please believe my strange tale!” In our modern narrative-savvy times, the convention is to avoid overt signaling. The reader gets it. Either way, the story is told from one person’s perspective and we understand the story is being crafted for us. This is where the possibility of “unreliable narrators” creeps in, although many would argue all uses of first-person imply some level of unreliability just as in real life we know anyone speaking to us is omitting, exaggerating, minimizing, distorting, and otherwise shaping a narrative both intentionally and unintentionally. That’s just what people do.

The Chorus (first-person plural)

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years - “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner.

For my money, the difference between a “we” and “I” is as enormous as anything in the traditional taxonomy. An I narrator is filtering the story through an individual character and can only relate information that individual would know. A collective speaks as a consensus and can know many things. In some ways, this POV is similar to third-person omniscient. The narrator might just know everything and be able to get in countless people’s heads. But the Chorus can also allow the author to represent a group consensus—the judgmental town in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” or the boys in The Virgin Suicides—that is quite unique.

The “we” has an expansive range. It might represent the entire human species (“We’d really like it if you Martians stopped invading”) or a group as small as two, plus anything in between. One of my favorite uses of a Chorus narrator is Alice Sola Kim’s “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying,” which speaks on behalf of three girls,3 all Korean adoptees, in a way that constantly shifts to represent both the group’s collective identity and the way each pair of girls judges the third.

The Appeal (first-person with direct address)

Your mother wouldn’t let me bring the ice chest into the house, so I left it in the garage. — Caiman by Bret Anthony Johnson.

Sometimes a narrator is not addressing a vague reader outside of the story world but a specific person within the fictional world. The character is modulating the story to appeal to that specific person in a specific way. A guy who is telling a story to try to win back his ex (“You see, baby, I’m a changed man now that I’ve completed my character arc!”) is going to spin a story differently than one trying to explain a divorce to their child (“Our lives will never be the same after this inciting incident, son.”) Either way, the existence of the addressee within the story world allows for different types of stories than ones addressing an undefined reader outside of the fictional world.

I don’t think every time a narrator speaks to a “you” fits into this category. Often a you is used generally in the same way as one (“to skin a cat, first you have to lure it with milk”) and other times they are metafictionally addressing someone other than a character in the story. For example, the famous ending of Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” that suddenly addresses the reader4 directly: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” Could the latter constitute another type of POV? Sure, why not. I gotta cap the number here somewhat.

The Diarist (first-person singular — incognito mode)

A list of all the people who have ever lived and what is known of them

Entry for the Tenth Day of the Fifth Month in the Year the Albatross came to the South-Western Halls

Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people. Possibly there have been more; but I am a scientist and must proceed according to the evidence.

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Some first-person narrators are not telling a story to an undefined audience or to a specific character(s) in the story world. Sometimes they’re telling a story to themselves. This might be literally in diary entries or in some other way imply the story was written for the narrator’s eyes only. There is still unreliability—don’t we often lie to ourselves?—but it is of a different sort.

In a strange way, many first-person singular present tense stories read as a form of this because the narrator relates their impressions in the moment rather than modulated by time and telling. Perhaps I’m stretching the number of first-person forms. Let me move on to second-person ones.

The You-I (second-person singular — classic style)

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. — Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerny

The You-I is in many ways a pronoun swapped first-person or third-person limited. In this POV, the “you” is a character who exists in the story world and normally the narrative is filtered through that character’s voice. In McInerny’s opening above, you know that the “you” is not you—the reader holding the book—nor is it an avatar of the reader in some Choose Your Own Adventure way. It’s a specific male character in this specific fictional setting talking to a specific female character. Narratively it functions like the Storyteller POV. Information is restricted to what one character knows. That character is the sole filter for the story.

Why use this form?5 Theoretically, this POV makes the reader feel closer to the character. “I was burning with anger” is apparently distancing while “You were burning with anger” brings you closer. I guess. OTOH, the most common complaint about You-I POV is that readers dislike it because it distances them from the story by making them constantly “No, I did not do that! Stop saying I did!”

This is the most common form of second-person because it is the easiest to write and to read. The writer’s brain simply mentally swaps pronouns, and the reader’s brain does the same thing. It causes minimal friction. This also makes it the least interesting use of second-person for me. Sometimes, the POV represents the main character’s estrangement from themselves or the like. But much of the time, this POV seems to be picked because the writer thinks it sounds cool or thinks is more literary without the POV really impacting the story. I want there to be a reason to use second-person.

The Instruction Manual (second-person imperative)

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; — “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid

This is the voice of an instruction manual, WikiHow article, or recipe book. “First you beat the eggs, then you add a teaspoon of sugar.” It’s pretty hard to find pure examples of this in fiction outside of experimental work, since it is difficult to weave a narrative without clear characters. But you can see versions of it that blur the line between Instruction Manual and the You-I.

A classic example is Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” which is a story in the form of a mother giving a laundry list of gendered instructions in one semicolon-laden paragraph. There’s also Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?”: “First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/ missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age — say, 14.” And the metafictional narration of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler that opens “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every thought.”

These stories ultimately still imply specific characters in specific fictional worlds but they deploy an instruction manual approach that changes the sentences, style, and stories.

The Reporter (third-person objective)

He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.

I’m glad you’re leaving! I’m glad you’re leaving! she said. Do you hear?

He kept on putting his things into the suitcase.

Son of a bitch! I’m so glad you’re leaving! She began to cry. You can’t even look me in the face, can you?

— Popular Mechanics by Raymond Carver

The Reporter is what I’m calling third-person objective because this is the POV used in journalism and it adds a journalistic flavor to fiction. Third-person objective is when there is no interiority at all—no dipping into any character’s mind to show their thoughts, memories, or feelings—and relates only description, actions, and dialogue. Only what a camera on the wall might see.

It’s a cold mode. Most readers recoil at it. Characters are our windows into a story, and third-person objective narrators are opaque windows. It’s well-suited to minimalism and most digestible in short shorts. In Carver’s very short story “Popular Mechanics,” a couple fights over a baby and yet we never even learn what precipitates the fight or for that matter even their names. While every other POV is filtered through a singular or collective consciousness, the Reporter presents only the facts without filtration.6

The Motorcycle Sidecar (third-person limited — single player mode)

She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

— “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin

This is the most popular form of third-person narration, when the narrator is a sort of sidecar attached to the main character’s motorcycle. The narrator goes where the main character goes, sees what they see, and thinks what they think. This is called either “close third” or “third-person limited.” In many ways, this mode is similar to the Storyteller. One character provides the information and filtration. However, there can be a gap between the narrator’s voice and the main character’s subjectivity. The gap is bridged by means of “free indirect discourse.”7 That’s creative writing jargon for when a third-person narration slips into the character’s voice without direct signaling. Bob stubbed his toe on a plastic truck. Damn it! Lucy’s little brat was always leaving his toys all over their crappy apartment. The reader understands “little brat” and “crappy” are Bob’s thoughts. This gap also means the story is modulated by the narrative voice rather than who the character is addressing (as in the Appeal or the Diarist).

The Floating Camera (third-person limited — multiplayer mode)

She was struck dumb with frustration. She had obviously disappointed him in some fundamental way, which she felt was completely due to misunderstanding. If only she could think of the correct thing to say, she was sure she could clear it up. […]

She hadn’t yet noticed how much he had disappointed her.

He couldn’t tell if he was disappointing her or not. She completely mystified him, especially after her abrupt speech on cerebralism. It was now impossible to even have a clear picture of what he wanted to do to this unglamorous creature, who looked as though she bit her nails and read books at night.

— “A Romantic Weekend” by Mary Gaitskill

This is a simple concept—third-person limited, but not limited to one person—that radically changes a story. A Floating Camera floats between the perspectives of different characters. This is not the same as true third-person omniscient (see below). A Floating Camera doesn’t know everything, nor does it have a distinct narrative-god voice separate from the character. But it moves between the perspectives of different characters, allowing scenes and interactions to be filtered through multiple perspectives.

Many novels—to pick one, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series—will alternate POV characters each chapter. But a skilled writer can hop between multiple characters’ minds within a chapter or even a paragraph. A favorite example is Mary Gaitskill’s irony-drenched “A Romantic Weekend,” which constantly flips back and forth between a man and woman on a disappointing romantic getaway showing us how each person keeps misinterpreting the other.

The God-Narrator (Third-Person Omniscient aka God Mode)

Oh, Dylan. Oh Melanie. You fakers both. You cannot hide every flaw. You cannot hide flaws that are not flaws but are mere signs that you are part of this world, a place where terrible and wonderful beauties are coming to pieces at every moment and others are constructing themselves out of the remains […] Some, such as a certain set of extraterrestrials (who do not appear in this story), see all mass as flowing together like uninterrupted light. They would say the flaw is that humans conceived of themselves as separate in the first place, that we imagined ourselves as privately taking up space.

— Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth

The God-Narrator is omniscient aka all-knowing. It is the one POV that has access to unlimited information. A God-Narrator can freely dip into multiple characters’ subjectivities, as in the Floating Camera, but can also tell us things no characters in the story could know. The far future. The distant past. The thoughts of inanimate objects. Whatever they want.

The God-Narrator becomes a distinct voice that comments on the action itself. It provides opinions and judgments. See my example above, taken from Deb Olin Unferth’s novel Earth 7 (which I just reviewed for the New York Times so is on my mind). Although the God-Narrator might imply a sort of passive authority, that doesn’t have to be the case. Indeed the God-Narrator can even become an I, such as in “The Moon in its Flight” by Gilbert Sorrentino, where the author-narrator begins to metafictionally comment on the story of two lovers: “I’ll put her virgin flesh into a black linen suit, a single strand of pearls around her throat. Did I say that she had honey-colored hair? Believe me when I say he wanted to kiss her shoes.”

The God-Narrator is a very common POV in classic novels from before the mid-20th century. It has fallen out of favor for various reasons—readers’ preference for psychological intimacy and/or self-insert fantasy, a postmodern turn away from singular authority and objective truth, and writers who simply can’t pull it off—but when done well few POVs are as satisfying.

There are endless variations on these POV categories. And these categories themselves have endless variations. Tense and point of telling8 alone complicate each of the above. The beauty of fiction is that the possibilities of storytelling are endless. Still, Substack posts have to end. So, dear readers, I’ll stop this one here.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

This is going to be a more scattered post than usual as I’ve spent recent weeks in the novel mines finishing up my forthcoming haunted houses (yes plural) novel Haunted Hills. I plan to write more about that soon. For now, some other things:

Two Anthologies To Look Out For

Despite being deep in the novel mines for the last few months, I did manage to emerge and finish two short stories that are coming out in two very different yet equally cool anthologies.

The first anthology is Thirty Cabins edited by , which is organized around an old 1918 cabin catalog called Sunset’s Cabin Plan Book. Each author was asked to write a flash fiction piece based on one of the cabin plans and other chapters (my story is based on the “cabin miscellany” decoration section). I love a playful Oulipian constraint like this, and the anthology has a great line-up of writers, many of whom are here on Substack such as , , and . The zine should be out later this summer. There is also a Substack newsletter for the curious.

The second anthology is the aptly named The Speculative Detective Agency edited by Matthew David Goodwin and Richie Narvaez. As the name implies, the anthology collects detective stories with science-fiction, fantasy, or horror elements. The anthology has a shared universe with characters recurring between stories. I had a lot of fun writing my entry. (If you’ve read my first novel, The Body Scout, then you know I enjoy both Raymond Chandleresque hardboiled narrators and weird speculative concepts.) My entry deals with LLMs and black magic. I suppose I shouldn’t say anything more.

This anthology also has a great line-up (Monique Laban, Amber Sparks, Karlo Yeager Rodriguez, Alex Grecian, Megan Chee, and more) and will be published by Diversion Books in October. Pre-orders are open if you’re interested.

A New LLM Author Psychosis?

It’s hard to keep up with the multiplying publishing AI scandals, but I’ve become a little fascinated with one. Not the literally nonsensical “The Serpent in the Grove” story that won a Commonwealth Short Story prize, nor the Shy Girl self-pub-to-trade-pub horror novel, nor the freelance book reviewer who admitted to AI plagiarism, nor the temper tantrums some (mostly STEM) professors have thrown over arXiv imposing temporary bans on academics who submit papers with AI errors. No, what I’ve been following is the flailing of Steven Rosenbaum after his (ironically titled) The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality was found to contain fabricated or misattributed quotations.

Rosenbaum admits he composed the book with extensive collaboration with LLMs, which he blames for the errors. While it would seem pretty easy for an author to simply say “my bad,” Rosenbaum has chosen a different route: a media complaint tour. Talking to WIRED, New York, The Atlantic, and more, Rosenbaum has begun insisting that it’s unfair he is criticized for making basic errors and not checking his work. Indeed, he claims, his book has fewer errors than most: “it’s five, and of the five, one is a citation error. So it’s four, which my guess in nonfiction is below the average.” He also insists that everyone else, including presumably anyone critiquing him, is secretly using AI to write their work anyway. He told WIRED “82 percent of journalists are using AI every day” and New York that “[a]nyone who is a working writer today […] you’re using AI.” Indeed, even asking him about his LLM use is “like saying, do you beat your wife? It’s one of those accusations that there’s no response to.”

Rosenbaum’s defenses are as sloppy as his quote checking. His claim that 82% of journalists use AI “every day” is hallucinated from a study that found 82% of journalists surveyed have used some form of AI at least once “in the past 12 months.” That study included any use from spellcheck to interview transcription (which responsible journalists check against the audio files) and in no way implies most journalists are using LLMs in the way Rosenbaum does. I also doubt it is true most non-fiction books have more than four hallucinated quotations. While it might be true that there are four errors of some kind in many books, we certainly have no reason to believe the fake quotes are the only errors in Rosenbaum’s book. They were just the easiest to catch.

The strangest part of Rosenbaum’s various interviews was when he told Kate Knibbs at WIRED that he would literally never write again if he had to write without LLMs:

He doubled down on his personal commitment to AI, noting that he still uses it every day. “If the only way for me to not end up with a mistake ever again is to literally stop using AI, that’s just not realistic. If the answer is to stop writing, that’s not out of the realm of possibility.”

I asked him whether he would rather stop writing than stop using AI in his writing process. “Yeah,” he answered.

This is an odd new form of AI psychosis. Rosenbaum is in his mid-60s, and was presumably capable of writing without LLMs for many decades. Using them has damaged the basic credibility of his work. Yet he is already so dependent on LLMs that he cannot even conceive of writing without them…

This is an example of why it’s hard to classify LLMs as merely another “tool” for artists. They can be, certainly, but imagine a professional athlete saying “if I can’t wear the new Nike sneakers, I’d rather never play again,” an established painter saying they’d give up art if they couldn’t use the latest paintbrush, or for that matter an author saying “if I can’t use Google Docs to write, there is no point in writing.”

On the other hand, I could imagine an author who cannot write their own work admitting they would never write again if they couldn’t employ ghostwriters…

The Ghostwriter in the Machine

There’s another aspect of Rosenbaum’s scandal that fascinates me. He seems incapable of understanding that by letting LLMs ghostwrite parts of his work—he’s extremely cagey about the degree—he has in fact not written the work entirely himself. This is something I’ve noticed in many instances of AI use. Authors want to believe that the work is entirely theirs even when they did not write the entire work.

(Or at least the work is theirs when things go well. When things go bad, they have no relationship to the work published under their name. See, for example, Mia Ballard blaming the Shy Girl AI scandal on a friend she hired to edit who “changed a lot of the wordings” and now “my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do.”)

Rosenbaum claims that LLMs “hallucinated” his reporting, changing the words and meaning. Yet he also insists “the ideas, reporting, arguments, and final authorship are mine.” In Ars Technica, he says something similar: the “actual reporting, narrative structure, interviews, arguments, and conclusions… [are] entirely mine… There was never a time when AI was writing the book.” These statements are obviously false. If AI generated quotes that were published in the book, then LLMs did write parts of the book. If LLMs changed your reporting, then your book is (at least in part) not your reporting. 2 + 2 still equals 4, even if Claude hallucinates 5.

It reminds me of the first time I caught an undergraduate student using LLMs. This was back when LLM cheating was rare instead of routine. The student had submitted an essay comparing themes in two different poems, but the poems were entirely hallucinated. The poets named were real poets, but the titles and every single line had been invented by an LLM. (Ironically, I caught the paper because TurnItIn—which traditionally caught plagiarism by flagging when text has been copied from elsewhere—had not flagged anything in the paper, including the quotes.)

How do you grade the uncanny valley? I was reading imaginary “analysis” of poems that did not exist. Hallucinated claims about non-existent poems.

The student, like Rosenbaum, admitted to using ChatGPT yet thought they should get credit for the arguments and the work. They had only let an LLM rewrite the text to fix grammar and spelling errors. The paper was still theirs. Except the paper, in a very literal sense, no longer represented their thoughts on the poems because they had not read these poems. The poems didn’t exist before the LLM hallucinated the lines. Plus, the LLM had changed the meaning of their sentences just as it changed the lines of the poem.

There are legitimate uses for LLMs in art and journalism. Good work can be made with the help of programs. But writers who use LLMs to generate some or all of their work should be honest about what they are doing. They are at a minimum collaborating with another “author” and in many cases handing their work over to a digital ghostwriter. The ghostwriter isn’t exorcised merely because it’s a machine instead of a man. Writers who want to collaborate with LLMs should make peace with this fact. There’s nothing wrong with collaborative writing. In fact, I’d say the most interesting LLM-assisted works published so far have all been open collaborations and leaned into the merging of program and human. The problem comes in hiding your use. In refusing to be honest—even to yourself—about what it is that you are doing.

When does an LLM cross the line from tool to ghostwriter? That’s a fair question. It may take some time to sort out. But I think there’s an easy rule of thumb:

Saturday Reading Links

I’m going to end with a little link round-up here, including several interesting essays on AI.

In the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang wrote about a test he developed to have readers guess if paragraphs were human-authored or LLM-authored. Despite people missing about half the time, Kang talks about why human authorship still matters. He also noted a stylistic tic that I’ve also seen in LLM works: the characters don’t do anything:

A.I. also had a weird habit of making its characters fidget constantly, always running a finger along the edge of a table or adjusting a collar. The most reliable marker, though, was something more abstract, and, I suppose, upon reflection, even a little spooky. The scenes generated by A.I. had characters, but, apart from fidgeting, they mostly did nothing.

In The Atlantic, Ted Chiang wrote about Anthropic’s Claude constitution and why “No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious”:

What would it take to convince me that a computer program is actually conscious and using language the way that people use language? Let me offer an analogy. If tomorrow someone showed me a video of an astronaut in a spaceship orbiting Alpha Centauri, a star that’s 4.3 light-years from Earth, what would I have to see in that video to convince me that it was real? My answer to that is, there is nothing in the video itself that would convince me. No matter how high the video resolution is or how realistic the scenery is, I would feel confident in saying that the video is fake. I won’t pay attention to any video of an astronaut orbiting Alpha Centauri unless I have previously seen good evidence that astronauts have landed on Mars, that astronauts have reached the moons of Jupiter, that astronauts have reached the moons of Saturn, and that astronauts have crossed the orbit of Pluto. Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.

had a great piece / rant on AI here on Substack that pointed out that a world of LLM text is bad regardless of the quality of LLM text:

AI is a bad writer, but that’s not even close to being the whole problem. Let’s say it wasn’t. Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.

In the past couple of weeks, two authors I interviewed last year for my “Processing” author interview series won awards. Helen Phillips won the Climate Fiction Prize for Hum and Julia Elliott won the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her story collection Hellions. Many congrats to Phillips and Elliott! While these awards have nothing to do with my interviews, it seems a fine excuse to repost them:

Lastly, I reviewed Deb Olin Unferth’s lovely and wild science-fiction novel Earth 7 for the New York Times.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

Processing is Counter Craft’s semi-regular interview series where I talk to authors about the craft and writing process behind their work. You can find previous entries here.

This week, I’m excited to be talking to Hannah Lillith Assadi about her moving, resonant, and all-around excellent new novel Paradiso 17. The book was inspired by the life of her late father, a Palestinian refugee from the Nakba. Like her father, the character Sufien moves around the world still longing for home, eventually coming to America, marrying a Jewish woman, having a daughter, and settling in Arizona. The novel spans a life, from young childhood to old age. It’s a book that is haunted by grief and exile, but also one that is suffused with the fullness of life. There is sadness and love and humor and dreams and everything in between. You can read more about it here.

I spoke with Assadi over email—she graciously took time to answer these questions as she is (as she notes below) in the 39th week of a pregnancy—about writing late at night, Google Maps stalking, the importance of structure, and adding a layer of dream to reality.

Paradiso 17 is organized around place, both thematically, as a novel about a Palestinian man exiled after the Nakba who moves around the world in search of home, and structurally in that the novel is organized by setting. “Part I: The Holy Land,” “Part II: Italy,” “Part III: New York, NY,” etc.

Did you decide on this structural organization before writing the novel, or is it something that emerged while drafting? And how did this focus on setting change how you wrote the novel?

Setting in this novel was a really interesting challenge coming out of my first two novels which were devoted to really particular geographies, the desert in the case of Sonora, and the Atlantic South in The Stars Are Not Yet Bells. I’ve always thought of myself as sort of a landscape painter. And those novels emerged, in some ways, as love letters to place. Here, I knew I wanted the shape of my late father’s life to graph onto this book which meant it had to really move across space (and time). It was tricky to let go of my instincts as a writer, and think more about momentum because there was just so much story to cover. So, in some ways, setting was secondary. But then I held fast to place as a structural device, as you say, so it’s there. And of course, this is a novel about loss of place, so that exilic sense is what actually haunts every page of the book. So, it’s sort of a ghost of setting novel versus a love letter to setting novel like my others.

The book really does a beautiful job evoking these different settings in various historical moments. Every setting felt very real, and there are many settings. I know the novel is somewhat inspired by the life of your own father, and I imagine some details come from his memories. I also noticed that you thank many of the settings in your acknowledgments. Could you talk about the role of research in writing this novel? Either in regard to setting or in general.

I’m really happy to hear that because many of the places in this novel, Palestine in particular, but Kuwait and Italy also, were places I haven’t visited or seen for decades. Much of what’s here in terms of those settings was from what I remember of my father’s outlandish (likely semi-fabricated) stories, but because I didn’t know I was writing this novel until after he passed, I had to fill in the gaps with research. And by research I’m talking pretty low-level. For instance, I consulted some of my paternal uncles and cousins who had old photographs of the various family residences as well as my father’s very good friend whom he met in Italy in the 60s. That friend gave me the address of my father’s old apartment in Florence and I literally stalked Google Maps looking at the entry door to the building for inspiration, and zoomed in on the block and the general environs to give texture to that part of the Italy section.

In addition to place, I was interested in the use of time in this novel. The novel is structured chronologically, but time moves somewhat fluidly with a third-person POV that references future events and the narrative frame that this is Sufien’s memories on his deathbed. I know this is an abstract question, but I’d love to know how you approached time when writing the novel.

Thank you for this observation. I think the sense of time in the novel is as essential as its sense of place, or its sense of loss of place, as it were. I wanted the temporality to feel cyclical, and recursive, and also sort of vertiginous the way it does in trauma and for the traumatized. In order to accomplish this, the novel needed the narrative frame so that the reader knew the inevitable end of Sufien’s trajectory. This protagonist will die. There’s no avoiding it (as it is for us all). And then only from the conclusion can time become fluid, and can the narrator move back and forth through it like another dimension. But also, each chapter title is the chapter’s final sentence, so there is this sense of return and returning in each episode of the character’s life, a characteristic which also marks the end of his story—that supernatural return to Palestine at the end of the novel. So, it’s an end but a beginning, too. That sounds a little cheesy, but hopefully only in trying to explicate it versus the experience of reading it.

Although the novel is largely realist, there is a thread of the supernatural. What inspired you to include that in the novel?

Like you, maybe, I am not satisfied with the real. I live here (most of the time) and this world weighs on my soul, all this very real constant barrage of horror. It seems to me, that if there is any hope for humans, it’s in the supernatural and in our capacity to dream. But more specifically, for this story, I wanted there to be a sense of reckoning and justice. My father died defeated (in his words). I did not want Sufien to die defeated. I wanted the reader to glimpse the return of what was stolen from this character. Only the supernatural could make space for that.

Paradiso 17 is your third novel after Sonora and The Stars Are Not Yet Bells. It’s sometimes said that each novel forces you to learn how to write a novel all over again. (Something I’ve found frustratingly true.) When writing Paradiso 17, what lessons were you able to carry over from your previous novels and what did you have to learn all over again?

I think this is so, so true. It’s as if each novel has its own rules of conception and gestation! But what carried over for me was my commitment to a particular vision, call it the supernatural, as we just spoke about. In all three, I took the raw material of life, and added a dream layer to lift it up. And in all three, I was interested in the blurry line between madness and the prophetic. Craft-wise though, I think structure is paramount and though the structure varies across the three, I consistently rely on a frame story from which I depart and return.

I read that you mostly wrote the novel at night, while your children slept. Can you talk about your writing process in general? Do you have any habits or preferences to get into the right headspace to write?

I think for me, night is the only option, because it’s the only time I’m not distracted by, yes my kids, but also more aggressively, the daily demands of email and text and the constant electronic input of our world. I’m not sure if it’s repeatable for me to write another novel entirely at night. But this one was a product of my grief in the year after my father passed and at night, after everyone slept, was the only time I could be fully with my own grief.

As for habits to get into the writing, I just need to be alone. While writing Paradiso, I won’t lie, I was a bit indulgent. Grief is an altered state unto itself but by the time I settled into writing, I’d definitely had a glass or two of wine, plus a few cigarettes. Since I am, at the time of writing this, 39 weeks pregnant, I’ve been approaching the page completely sober. I have to say, I’ve been less productive.

The novel contains many brief chapters covering many decades of time. Did you outline the novel and plan out the chapters ahead of time? Or was it a case where you wrote many chapters and scenes, some of which were cut during editing?

I didn’t outline it, no. In the year after my father passed, every night (or nearly every night) I wrote for an hour or two, almost furiously everything I could remember about my father’s life in semi-chronological order. I had no idea what I had at the end of it. I thought maybe just a document of grief or madness. Gradually, it took shape. But as you can imagine, a lot had to go. When this went out to editors, it was nearly 100,000 words. In its final form, it’s about 77,000 words, I think. John Freeman, my editor at Knopf, had me cut an entire thread involving a detour to Florida and a really destructive girlfriend. In fact, I think a few girlfriends were cut. It was hard to kill some of these literal darlings of mine, but in retrospect absolutely essential to the movement of the story.

The novel takes its title—and epigraph—from Dante’s Paradiso, in canto 17: “You shall leave behind all you most dearly love, / and that shall be the arrow / first loosed from exile’s bow.” Can you talk about the inspiration from Dante? And what other works, literary or otherwise, influenced you while writing Paradiso 17?

Yes, of course. Though I should say the working title of this novel was Frank Leone, my father’s pen name. I have John to thank again for warning me that this working title made the book sound like a mafioso story, which is funny, but obviously not the right feeling. The epigraph had been there from a very early stage, as I was re-reading The Divine Comedy, while writing the book, and on a whim, I thought, what about a title inspired by the exile canto? And there it was. Later, in the editing process, I grafted it such that the number 17 comes to play a role of huge significance as well. It’s the age Sufien is when he leaves home, but more importantly it’s a motif of his loss. 17 is the number on the door of the stolen house in Palestine, and it haunts him, in various iterations across the course of his exile.

In terms of other texts, I was greatly influenced by some afterlife literature I was reading at the time of writing. I’ve reread Toni Morrison’s Beloved a handful of times and it’s a masterpiece, as we all know, but particularly in its sense of structure.

Lastly, what are you working on next?

I am trying to write a love story that is also a ghost story about a relationship which transpired in my turbulent 20s!

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

For all of the truckloads of money and advanced technology behind LLMs, their primary achievement so far may be in revealing how low the bar is in seemingly every field. The various LLM/AI scandals this week are good evidence of that. Let me do a little recap.

[NOTE 05/20: Please see update at the bottom!]

A (Likely) AI Slop Story Wins a Literary Award

If you subscribe to this newsletter, then you likely already know the big literary one: Granta magazine published a story that is seemingly AI-generated from an author with a seemingly AI-generated author photo whose social media profiles are full of AI hype. The story “The Serpent in the Grove,” attributed to Jamir Nazir, was on of the regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize selected by the Commonwealth Foundation. (Granta has responded by saying they asked the LLM Claude whether the story was written by AI—Claude said “almost certainly” involved AI—and that they were keeping the story online until Commonwealth Foundation finished its investigation.)

I’m inclined to believe the story is AI-generated because it is filled with the sort of literally nonsensical metaphors that LLMs often produce. It reads quite similarly to the viral OpenAI metafiction story. But it’s also true that humans also write nonsense prose full of incoherent metaphors.

The real question is perhaps not how an AI story could slip past judges but how a story this poorly written could win an award for its “lyrical precision.”

It’s easy to make fun of the word salad sentences in this story and, well, I’m going to. We might as well have a few laughs while the slop flood drowns us. The story has many other issues, from incoherent narrative to language that’s inaccurate for the setting, but I’ll focus on the alleged “lyrical precision” that impressed the judges:

If you ask him, he shrugs the way men shrug when feeling places a hand on the neck and says be still.

Classic kind of shrug. I’m always shrugging when feeling grabs my neck and says “be still!” Which feeling? Who knows? Any of them, I guess.

In the hot hush, the grove held its breath and released it – small and entire, like a last stitch drawn through a wound that had finally decided to close.

This is seemingly the emotional climax of the story (to the degree it even is a “story”), and honestly one of the most confused sentences I’ve ever read. How many metaphors are mixed here? The grove of trees releases breath like a last stitch through a wound that is still being stitched even though it “decided” to close itself. Got it.

The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.

I did enjoy the surreal image I got of an enormous sink that covered the horizon.

They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.

Ladies, you may be sexy, but are you sexy enough to give benches boners? And is your name rain in a shape?

You can read the whole thing if you enjoy this kind of prose. Sadly, I must admit many do. When I wrote about the OpenAI story’s sentences not carrying any meaning, I experienced some pushback from readers who said, basically, “who cares if sentences mean anything?” They admitted the metaphors were mixed, the images made no sense, and the sentences were unintelligible. They just didn’t care. Obviously, the judges of this prize didn’t care either.

If a story this poorly written can win an award, the issue isn’t AI. Again, humans write word goop too. The issue is a lack of standards. Not just in literary publishing, as I’ve seen some try to claim. Remember the recent Shy Girl scandal was about a self-published book that was repackaged by a big publisher as commercial genre fiction.

One aspect of Shy Girls that has stuck with me is the defense from author Mia Ballard. Ballard claimed she hired an acquaintance to edit her book who likely used AI. She noticed the editor “changed a lot of the wording” but said she didn’t have time to read through the book and see what edits were made before publishing it. (Apparently, she didn’t have any time to read her own book in the many months between self-publishing it and republishing it with Hachette either). Put aside the question of AI, as well as whether this mysterious acquaintance exists: Ballard’s defense is she blindly accepted extensive edits without even reading them! And plenty of people find this defense acceptable.

How low are the standards that “I couldn’t be bothered to read the novel I put my name on” is a defense at all? That should be a scandal in itself.

Here’s another publishing AI scandal in the same “Hey now, am I really supposed to read my own work?” vein:

This New York Times headline says it all. An author of a non-fiction book called The Future of Truth couldn’t be bothered to check the truth of his own book. The book was published with “misattributed and invented quotes […] throughout.” He’s launching an “investigation” into how he was so lazy.

The same low standards are being revealed all over the place. Over in academia, a lot of academics—mostly, it seems, economists—have been furious that people expect them to actually read the works they cite.

ArXiv, an open-access archive of scholarly articles, announced it would ban users for one year if they submitted work with obvious LLM errors such as fake citations. The policy didn’t say that scholars had to avoid using LLMs entirely, only that they were responsible for the accuracy of the work that they put their name on.

The stuff that we were long told was the bare minimum—read your sources, check your work, know you are responsible for anything you put your name on—is now framed as an impossible standard that few could meet.

So, I have a hard time not admitting the slop defenders might be right. It probably is true that many academic papers have fake citations. I would not be shocked if non-fiction books often contain quotation errors. Many works are published, sometimes to sales or acclaim, that are full of meaningless sentences. These AI scandals may indeed be revealing low standards that exist in various fields.

This doesn’t, however, mean that standards aren’t lowering even more thanks to AI. LLMs simply make it easier to cut corners and introduce these types of errors. Citation errors may have always existed, but how common was it to “hallucinate” entire articles and journals? Yes, some students have always cheated or cut corners. That doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous when many, perhaps most, students are cutting every possible corner.

I don’t know how this all sorts itself out. Perhaps a silver lining will be that some institutions and individuals will rediscover the concept of standards, even if just as a change of pace.

05/20 UDATE: On X, author Kevin Jared Hosein, who previously won the Commonwealth Foundation prize, has shared exchanges with Nazir. It seems likely that at a minimum the author used LLMs to rewrite his story. The LLMs may have rendered the work into grammatical but nonsensical sentences.

As a professor, I have seen this happen. Sometimes a student will show me their rough draft and what an LLM revised. The programs correct the grammar of sentences, but often completely change their meaning.

While this might explain why the story has so many bizarre and confusing sentences, it does not explain the bizarre decision to award the story…

Hosein also said the following, which I will leave without comment:

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

For this week’s Counter Craft, I’m trying something a little different and co-publishing a conversation with about Substack, the state of literary venues, and trying to make a living as a writer in the modern media wasteland. Warner is publishing the conversation simultaneously on his excellent Substack The Biblioracle Recommends, which is well worth subscribing to for anyone interested in writing, education, and literature.

Before I get to the conversation, I saw two depressing writing landscape tidbits I thought I’d share to depress you too. But also because both seem relevant to my conversation with Warner about surviving as a writer in the current landscape.

First, a chart from a National Bureau of Economic Research study showing that the number of ebooks published each month has tripled since ChatGPT was released:

I think the chart is self-explanatory. The slop book tsunami is here:

The second depressing tidbit is also LLM related:

News Corp’s CEO recently described the company as “an AI inputs company.” News Corp is Murdoch’s non-Fox corporation and owns (among other things) the Wall Street Journal and Big Five publisher HarperCollins. I imagine most of my readers will find this depressing. I can’t imagine many journalists, editors, or authors would like to think of their job as providing “AI inputs.”

However, I also wanted to highlight this because I think it is of a piece with something I allude to below about the way media companies have shot themselves in the foot in the internet age. I’m not a businessman and don’t pretend to be. Still, it seems like a mistake to make your business working to help another business replace you. Remember when media companies built their businesses around social media traffic and tech partnerships only to be screwed over and over again by e.g. Facebook demanding “pivots to video”? Social media companies were always going to siphon as much revenue as possible away from media companies. AI corporations will, of course, do the same.

Anyway, on to the conversation with John Warner. The conversation was conducted over a shared Google Doc and was inspired by some Substack Notes discourse about some BlueSky tweets about Substack. Yes, it’s a bit inside baseball. However, we spun it into a larger conversation about trying to make a career in the modern publishing/magazine/media landscape as two writers who started careers at different times. I think you’ll find it interesting if that is something you are navigating yourself.

John Warner is the author of ten books, most recently More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. His other books range across humor, fiction, and higher education and honestly don’t make all that much sense as a collection of work to anyone but him. He writes a weekly column about books and reading at the Chicago Tribune and The Biblioracle Recommends newsletter. He’s also been one of the longtime color commentators for the Tournament of Books (which featured a novel called Metallic Realms this past year), and from 2003 to 2010 was editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

John Warner: So, we both took note of a particular BlueSky comment from writer/bookstore owner Lauren Groff:

I don’t think either of us have any beef with Lauren Groff. I recommend her books all the time and she put her money where her mouth is by opening a bookstore in her Florida hometown, but there’s something off about this right? Like is Substack to blame for this state of things?

Lincoln Michel: I’ll start off by saying I admire Lauren Groff as a writer and as a person. I think she’s a real “literary citizen” who cares about the state of literature and is probably speaking from that place. That said, her comments strike me as exactly backwards.

I do agree with Stratis that it’s quite bad we’ve lost great magazines with strong editorial guidance and real pay rates. But writers under, say, 45 (this includes me) missed out on a world where you could make real income freelancing for great magazines that would help you shape a career. That didn’t exist for any but a very small handful of us.

John Warner: I’m 56 and I would say that while the world still existed to some degree when I was coming up, it was well past its peak even then.

Lincoln Michel: Yeah, as my age cutoff implies, this has been true for at least a couple decades. From my vantage point, the growth of Substack is a response/symptom/whatever you want to call it to the constriction and, in many cases, decimation of career paths in writing. Mostly in journalism, but also in literary writing. All of the damage wrought by cheap online ad rates, “pivoting to video,” self-inflicted missteps, and above all the big tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X sucking up revenue—that all happened long before Substack even existed as a company. Certainly well before it took off in the last 3 years or so.

John Warner: It’s not entirely clear what Substack is being blamed for. As you say, all this stuff predates Substack by quite a lot. To the extent that Substack appears ascendent right now is mostly a matter of a kind of luck and timing. It’s not hugely different from the vision for Medium which failed to thrive in the same way MySpace tanked while Facebook became its own nation state.

Contra the language of the platform’s founders (who I honestly think are kind of dopey and routinely say shit that makes me cringe) Substack is not a revolution. It’s just next.

Lincoln Michel: I agree. Substack is a blogging platform with a functioning payment system. It’s basically Blogger meets Patreon. Smartly executed and designed with a good discovery system, but it is not something radically new. I don’t think it’s the “literary revolution!” that some on here like to say. But I don’t see how you could rank it high among threats to literature in 2026. I think there are a lot of problems with the state of media in general and the literary world more specifically. Plenty of problems with Substack too. But Substack seems like a little lifeboat in a tsunami. Not sufficient, but certainly not the problem.

For example, I can’t imagine blaming Substack for the death of newspaper book review sections, like when Bezos decided to gut the Washington Post’s book section recently. But Substack has been the home to a lot of book reviewers, including now former WP critic Ron Charles. It’s provided a source of new book review coverage as other sources dry up. That’s a good thing, even if Substack can’t fully replace what was destroyed by others.

John Warner: I actually started my Substack in 2021 because the Chicago Tribune was purchased by a private equity firm and I thought it was only a matter of time before my column got 86’d. That hasn’t happened because I’m just that good!

No, more likely because my freelance rate hasn’t changed in a decade, I deliver my copy on time and the page where I appear every Sunday is already laid out. I’m grateful to still be there, but the audience has steadily eroded as the circulation drops. If I was 15 to 20 years older I could’ve had that sucker syndicated in 100s of newspapers for a decade and I’d be corresponding with you from my yacht.

In this reality, I’ll keep doing it until they tell me to stop, but there’s no future in it, and if I were to hang it up on my own initiative, they wouldn’t replace me with books coverage.

Lincoln Michel: I also started mine in 2021, and it was for similar reasons. There just didn’t seem to be a future in freelance writing for me. A newsletter was more a fallback plan than a strategy. The economy of freelance writing—especially for anything literary—has been broken for a long time. There’s a million things we could blame here from smart phones to America’s anti-intellectualism to whatever, but it kind of doesn’t matter. We have to make a career somehow and pay rent somehow. What do you expect writers to do? Crank out 2,000 book reviews a year at 25 bucks a pop to be part of literary venues?

That’s barely hyperbole. Lit sites paid (and still pay!) like 25-75 bucks for a piece. Sometimes more if you’re lucky or the piece is long. I’m not saying they’re exploiting writers per se. Most sites and mags just don’t have the funds to pay well. The online arms of established journals—GQ, Rolling Stone, big newspapers, etc.—pay several hundred but that is still hard to live on because it’s hard to get that many pitches accepted, much less find the time to write them all. The tradeoff was supposed to be that these institutions would, if not pay you much, at least get you readers, confer legitimacy, and help jump start a career by leading to book contracts or a staff job. That deal evaporated sometime in the 2010s. Publishing in those magazines and venues just doesn’t lead to as many other opportunities as they used to.

So the question is, again, what do you expect writers to do?

John Warner: Again, this is no shade against Lauren Groff, her success is deserved on every level—talent, work, hustle—but she has reached a level where she has a readership in what remains of the critical apparatus, among the regular book buying audience, and also—and this is underappreciated—among the independent bookstore crowd which generates things like the Indie Next list. If there is a larger erosion of reading/book buying it will affect her like it will every else, but she has a solid readership. Most of us don’t achieve that.

I’ve published 10 books over 26 years, but if you look at the list, it’s bizarre. The first one (My First Presidentiary co-authored with Kevin Guilfoile) was done in colored pencil. I now opine on how we should still teach young people to write. I sometimes think of myself as one of those land mammals who have to keep moving toward the remaining source of sustenance. The time when the abundance of the wild could nourish everyone is long gone. That’s why you might find me in your garbage cans, my grubby little paws latched onto the carcass of your rotisserie chicken.

Deep down, my personality and interests are ill-suited to a networked platform like Substack—I mostly want to be left alone with my thoughts as I write them down for later consumption—but if I want to write as a profession, it makes sense to be here.

Lincoln Michel: To pull back a second to the original tweets, I’m also not actually sure “small literary venues” specifically are dying. Has the number of lit mags on Submittable or Duotrope notably declined? The damage and missteps I’ve alluded to mostly seem to have destroyed for-profit businesses. Glossy magazines. Regional newspapers. Etc. Places that need ad revenue and subscriptions to survive. Most literary magazines are some combination of nonprofits, hobbies/labors-of-love, or funded by universities and staffed by undergrad or grad students. Have small lit venues disappeared? Lit mags are always dying and being replaced by new ones, of course. But has the churn changed? And here we need to note Substack itself has helped create some interesting new magazines such as Strange Pilgrims, Zona Motel, and The Metropolitan Review.

What do you think? Are small literary venues dying out? And more importantly, where do you think Substack benefits or damages writers?

John Warner: Some literary venues have disappeared. Glimmertrain wrapped things up in 2019. The Gettysburg Review was casually erased by an indifferent college administration a few years back. Both these places were a tier below the elite, but they were significant credits.

Here’s what I know, essentially that for the entirety of my life studying writing and then working as a writer the ways writers made their livings have been disappearing. When I was in college (1988-92) the conventional wisdom was that you write a lot, publish stories in little magazines, and then see if you can’t break through to a bigger spot (New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Esquire, Playboy, Story Magazine, maybe) after which an agent would be in touch and you would get a two book deal (stories then novel) with a reputable press. Those early stories were enough for the tenure track job and then the books would be for tenure.

Badabing! Badaboom! The life of a writer. Some folks coasted, others continued to produce. Either way, not a bad gig. Did anyone, including publishers, make any money on these books? Sometimes, not always, but that wasn’t really the point.

But by the time I finished my MFA (1997) while this path still existed, it was rare and narrow. The academic industry of creative writing had expanded to unsustainable levels, and it’s only greater now. I think there were about 50 MFA programs when I applied. What are there now, 300?

You could still hope to be discovered, and I had a couple of nibbles in the late 90’s, early oughts when I was a finalist for an Esquire fiction award and published my first story in McSweeney’s and agents came looking for fresh prospects, but for a combination of reasons (I was good, but not like undeniably good) and increasingly scarce opportunities, that compact was not on offer. There were exceptions. I remember eating my heart out over Gabe Hudson and Arthur Bradford getting deals for story collections, (Then I read them and recognized they were better than I was.), but they were the exceptions.

A bunch of those heavy hitter publications I named don’t publish fiction anymore. The New Yorker essentially doesn’t publish unagented fiction. I wrote this (now embarrassing) cri de coeur against the new New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, who casually dissed the slush pile inhabitants as “unsavvy” near the start of tenure, in 2003! This would be the latest possible date for that old path, but as the piece shows, by then, that path was closed.

Lincoln Michel: Yeah, I graduated college in 2005 (and an MFA in 2009) so I heard a lot of the same advice you did from professors or visiting agents/editors. People who still remembered the old models. I was told how agents read lit mags—not just The Paris Review but second, third, and fourth tier magazines—to find new clients. How it was common to start your career with a two book deal from a big publisher with the short story collection first. How a good debut could land you a tenure track job. Etc.

None of that really happened to me or my peers. We didn’t find agents through mid-tier lit mag publications. We did not get two book deals or when we did it was a novel first and a story collection begrudgingly later (and even that feels like ancient history as big publishers almost never do story collections anymore). I do have some friends who landed teaching tenure-track jobs early on, although widespread adjunctification has made the number shrivel too.

John Warner: We’ve both spent our time in the non-tenure track teaching world and in a lot of ways higher ed parallels publishing in that some folks made it over the line to something sustainable while lots of other, equally qualified people doing the same labor found themselves in jobs that were not viable long term. I relied on writing/editing and a well-employed spouse always during my teaching career. I was more fortunate than many, but in a “just” world, those tenure track jobs would’ve still existed.

Lincoln Michel: I think this gets at something central to the conversation, which is that it feels like all the typical career paths for writers imploded at once. Staff magazine jobs evaporated at the same time newspapers were collapsing and adjunctification took over universities. In publishing, the midlist and thus advances have been shrinking (unless you’re writing to whatever the latest commercial fiction trend is). Plenty has been written about how even film and TV jobs pay less and are harder to find.

That said, I don’t want to sound like I’m spinning a big sob story. Most of my dedicated writer friends did find agents and did/do publish. But, we didn’t get there through the old model. I’ve published in tons of literary magazines, including big ones like Granta and The Paris Review. Yet, I’m pretty confident my other activities—like having a lot of Twitter followers, blogging at Electric Literature while I was an editor there, and yes having a popular Substack—that has helped me the most. To pick a specific example, I got my first adjunct MFA class because the program director had been following my tweets about genre fiction and asked if I wanted to teach a speculative fiction class.

The old model didn’t work for most to begin with. It just doesn’t seem to work for anyone now. The younger writers who are making it work are following other paths.

John Warner: The early days of the internet had some promise. I was getting $600 a pop from Modern Humorist for bits like writing a Britney Spears fan letter in the voice of Camille Paglia, but that was never going to last either. Any time a path has been identified, it’s probably already disappearing from in front of you.

More importantly, I think you’re illustrating one of the principles that has been constant essentially during the digital age, which is that opportunities require you to be, to some degree “present” online. My early breaks were publishing at the McSweeney’s website, and getting noticed there by the guys at Modern Humorist, which turned into the first book followed by just playing out the string until all that went away. My second book came from a parody of writing advice at McSweeney’s that my editor (Jane Friedman) saw and asked if I could do a book along those lines for Writer’s Digest Books. That project turned into a short-lived humor imprint with F+W Publications where we put out a handful of titles, including one by Wendy Molyneux who has gone on to big stuff in TV and film (Bob’s Burgers, The Great North) and Chris Monks who took over from me as editor of the McSweeney’s website.

Oh yeah, somewhere in there I started editing the McSweeney’s website because I knew Dave Eggers and he was looking for help. The Tournament of Books was started by my buddies at The Morning News and Kevin Guilfoile had this idea that it would be funny if he and I did color commentary on the judgements. That was almost 20 years ago. One day when we’d run out of stuff to say, on a lark I declared that I would give everyone who told me the last five books they’d read a personalized reading recommendation. I called myself “The Biblioracle” and doled out like 200 recommendations over a few hours. A year later I got a chance to do a sample column for the rebranded Chicago Tribune books section (Printers Row) and haven’t missed a week in over 15 years. If I hadn’t been doing all this different stuff, primarily online, I never would have come to anyone’s attention who had the power to put me proximate to an opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard and delivered as best I could on these projects and I “deserved” whatever success and opportunities came my way, but there’s also undeniable chance involved and tons of stuff failed! That humor imprint doesn’t exist anymore. By the end, I couldn’t give the books away for free, even though the books were great. My novel is out of print. A threatened lawsuit nixed another book. Printers Row is long gone. Etc…etc….

Lincoln Michel: Your point about needing to be online to get opportunities makes me think of another reason Substack is thriving. It’s not just the decline of magazines. It’s also the decline of other social media networks. This is most obvious with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Twitter used to be the ideal place to share work and get readers for your journalism, criticism, whatever. Now it’s all spammers and scammers paying for bluechecks and outgoing links are suppressed in the algorithm. It doesn’t help writers anymore. Facebook is a wall of ads and AI slop. BlueSky and others all lack the reach of old Twitter. Instagram and TikTok are image and video based. Substack is what’s left for writers. The opportunities I used to get from my tweets, I now get from my Substack articles.

John Warner: Totally agree. Twitter was a real help in terms of drawing attention to my work, particularly writing about higher education and now it’s been well over a year since I looked at it. It has no utility whatsoever in terms of writing and career-building.

Substack strikes me as the place people have gone when there’s nowhere else to go. For writers, it’s going to work great for some, okay for others, and not at all for most until it stops working entirely at some point in the indefinite future.

For readers, I think it’s clearly a worse proposition than a world of robust publications that collect different voices under an umbrella. I know there’s a lot of frustration with the gatekeepers of the world—check out my twenty-three-year-old rant about Deborah Triesman above—but they serve a purpose.

Lincoln Michel: Right, I would prefer to be edited by serious editors in high-quality magazines that paid decent rates and had a significant readership! That sounds great. Sign me up!

I feel like some people act as if writers here were debating A) a hard but rewarding career in magazine writing or B) self-publishing on Substack for more money. Like we gave up valuable literary community (or whatever) to be mere individual mercenaries. That’s maybe the case for a few big names in journalism and politics writing. For most of us though, especially in the literary space, A) was never an option. It’s like blaming authors who self-publish for not sticking it out and getting that six-figure Big 5 deal. That huge Big 5 deal was never coming, at least for 99.99%.

Not only was there no steady career for us to leave at all but even an unsteady one didn’t necessarily exist. Most of what I write at Counter Craft I could not have sold to magazines at all. I actually pitched a craft column with the name “Counter Craft,” to some lit sites that liked working with me. I was told columns didn’t work in the social media SEO age. They could only consider individual, occasional articles.

I don’t even think the success of Counter Craft proves they were wrong. Probably a craft column would not have driven a lot of traffic on a magazine’s website. Certain things do work on Substack (or individual newsletters on other platforms) that simply do not work in traditional magazines, online or off.

Do you feel that way? As a Substack writer and reader, are there things that Substack enables that simply don’t work elsewhere?

John Warner: I think there’s a lot of different approaches/genres that are kind of native to or suited to Substack like what Naomi Kanakia calls an “effort post,” but I think the commonality among most of this stuff is that it feels like you’re having a sustained conversation with a specific readership and that pieces don’t need to be wholly figured out and polished, the thinking can be fresh and contingent.

At least that’s how I think of it because I almost always write my newsletter between 7:30 and 11am on Saturday morning. I spend the week gathering material in my head and browser tabs and then let loose. Because we both go back some, I think it’s really just blogging and tend to think the blogger’s mentality is still what works best. Counter Craft is pretty focused, but it seems to me that you’re often reacting to what’s in the writing world ether, right?

Lincoln Michel: It definitely feels like a return to blogging to me, with the same jumble of stuff that made blogging interesting. Longer essays mixed with very short reaction posts to news or digressions to unusual topics (I remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates blogged for The Atlantic, he’d have a long history post about say the reconstruction era followed by a post on superhero comics). I love that mix, as well as the response / counterresponse discussion that can happen between bloggers.

I don’t systematize my posts really, but it’s a mix for me. A long craft essay I work on for weeks followed by quick commentary on some lit world topic, plus interviews and other things. But yeah, it is the sort of thing you can only do in a blogging format. It wouldn’t work as a proper column in a print magazine. You’d want that to be more standardized. Which is just to say that again part of the appeal of Substack is that it allows you to do things you can’t really do elsewhere.

To switch gears, since we’ve critiqued Groff’s tweets, it’s probably fair to say what we think is correct. You’ve talked about how readers are better served by good magazines collecting a variety of voices. I agree. And I think Groff’s comments in context with Stratis’s do get at a big problem, which is that it is really hard for new voices to get a foothold anywhere including Substack. Good magazines, good mentors, and yes even good “gatekeepers”—a term I don’t think makes all that much sense in the internet age, but…—can really help emerging writers. (Bad ones, of course, can destroy them. Much has been written about how 2010s websites encouraged writers to write messy personal essays that got rageclick traffic for the magazine but left writers, often young women, out to dry.)

Substack leans pretty heavily to already famous voices. Perhaps it’s no worse than anywhere else online in that regard, but it doesn’t seem like a great venue for new voices.

John Warner: I think there was a first-mover advantage to some of the earlier arrivals that no longer holds for new, non-prominent writers. There will always be exceptions of unique and incandescent voices that gather attention, but my newsletter wouldn’t have been viable if not for arriving with a couple thousand subscribers who followed me from the Tribune. Ron Charles, formerly of the Washington Post, has been here a couple of months and well-eclipsed me already because he’s probably the biggest name in book reviewing for regular readers. An independent writer who does reviews could not achieve that here no matter how talented and prolific.

Lincoln Michel: The old magazine model was better at this, in part because new magazines could rise to the top and bring new voices and formats with them. You brought up McSweeney’s, and that is the perfect model of how I used to think these worlds worked. My understanding is McSweeney’s largely started to publish the kind of work that the older institutions turned their nose at. By the time I was in college, McSweeney’s was the cool and popular magazine. It had become the new institution. Other magazines cropped up to publish different styles in response. That’s the good and healthy way culture used to work. Old institutions got staid and either evolved or were replaced by new ones. Rinse and repeat. I’m not sure the current internet ecosystem, Substack included, can foster that healthy cultural churn in the same way. The algorithms flatten everything and encourage repetition over divergence.

John Warner: You noted some of the Substack publications that are an effort to establish a “scene” under editorial mastheads, and even as some of this writing is not for me I’m very encouraging of these efforts because I think experimentation is necessary and healthy. In More Than Words I have a chapter titled “On the Future of Writing for Money” that sorts through Substack, crowdsourcing, traditional venues, and other models in terms of how sustainable they are for individual writers and a larger reading culture, and my conclusion is that writer collectives like Defector and Flaming Hydra are the most promising way forward, so bringing people together under different umbrellas is a necessary thing.

I do wonder if the incentives of Substack being a social media platform are going to be distorting. There’s already a kind of rivalrousness/chumminess aspect to it, which is good for attention and short term drama, but ultimately you have to produce stuff that readers want to read. Spectacle only goes so far.

But honestly, it’s not all that different. In the early oughts a bunch of people who wrote for McSweeney’s used to hang out in the Salon Table Talk message boards and that shit could get weird and petty too.

None of it was probably healthy, but things keep on keepin’ on.

Lincoln Michel: I also admire the Defector model. Although I do think the most accurate criticism of Substack as a model applies to it as well. There’s just not enough subscriber money to go around and pay as many people as the magazine and newspapers did before the internet. The blunt economic reality is that the old model rested on high-paying print ad rates (or things like classifieds), which the internet has undermined, and subscriptions, which will always be harder to get in a world of ever proliferating entertainment options. (Media organizations that survived often have other revenue streams—e.g., the New York Times games department apparently is a huge driver of subscriptions—that can’t simply be recreated by everyone else.) Both factors seem like they can only get worse. LLMs/AI corporations are overtly working to decrease even the meager ad revenue websites get—e.g., Google showing AI summaries at the top of searches so users don’t click off of Google—and using Chatbots to generate things or date an AI bot or whatever is just another thing dividing people’s time.

John Warner: Indeed, the remaining sources of revenue for writing are always being cannibalized and it’s harder and harder for that money to make it to the writer. I don’t see a scenario where this improves at a systemic level. Yes, a Brandon Sanderson can make a bunch of bank through crowdsourcing, more than just working through traditional publishing, but he was a success in traditional publishing first and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get in the order fulfillment business. I want to write stuff.

You’re someone I would point to as a person who is figuring out how to build a “career” as a writer of books—I mostly make my money on non-book or book-related work like speaking—with each new project moving you forward on a trajectory. Do you think along these lines or is it just one foot in front of the other?

Lincoln Michel: While I’m glad it seems that way, I’m afraid I’m definitely not in the “can live on fiction writing” camp. The majority of my income comes from teaching. I teach composition fulltime and do various other teaching gigs too.

As far as a book career, I’ve always wanted to write the kind of weird books I loved to read growing up (and still love to read). The kind of stuff that few ever lived on. I don’t have interest in order fulfillment or made-to-order fiction chasing whatever trends and tropes editors are buzzing about at a given moment. Of course, I hope—like we all do—to be the rare exception who writes startlingly original work that is also somehow bestselling and award-winning at the same time. And why not, let’s throw in an acclaimed adaptation that leads to a sprawling multimedia franchise universe too while we’re dreaming. But back in reality, I’ve always planned to support myself on other things to allow me the freedom to write what I want to write. A career that lets you write books, rather than a career of book writing.

John Warner: I’m a subscriber to the How I Make Money Writing newsletter (on which you recently appeared) and it’s clear that it’s very hard to make money only through writing. Lightning could strike, I suppose. If Reese or Jenna pick your book, you’re going to get a nice payday at the least and you have (by my rough estimate) a one-in-four shot at making a million bucks if your sales go nuclear, but even that kind of promotion isn’t a guarantee of a life-changing breakthrough. And maybe that breakthrough is also not a great thing if what you’re after is a life as a writer.

Maybe you saw the New York Times story about Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, who got dumped by her publisher when she couldn’t deliver the next book after being battered by late-arriving backlash to that first book. She clearly made a massive pile of dough from The Help, so cry me a river, but if writing is the thing you want to do, she wasn’t doing all that much of it over the last seventeen years.

At some point I started looking at my career through the lens of whether or not I was looking forward to what I had to do that day when I got up in the morning. I count myself lucky that, for the most part, I’ve achieved that.

But it still feels pretty precarious. I’m working on my next nonfiction book proposal now, and I think it’s a strong idea that will both appeal to the audience for my recent books and maybe expand the circle a bit, but despite recent successes, there’s zero guarantee it’ll be traditionally published.

Putting on your crystal ball, where do you think we’re going to be in say, five or ten years? When it comes to Substack, I worry about the people who are going all in on the platform as their vehicle for supporting themselves. I think the owners could unilaterally change the ecosystem in a way that makes the situations of writers much worse at any time and the more locked-in you are, the tougher it will be.

Lincoln Michel: It’s very precarious and the sands are always shifting. “Don’t quit your day job” remains, sadly, probably the best advice. I’m with you that writers should not put their chips all in on any given platform. Look at Twitter again. But I think if we broaden out from Substack and think of newsletters and blogging (like you I still think of this as a form of blogging), I bet they will remain very useful for writers. I think their importance will increase.

The “enshitification” of the internet will continue apace. It will probably accelerate with LLMs. Facebook and Google search and whatever else have no incentives to drive traffic and revenue to writers. They can replace us, for most of their users, with LLM slop. But, they aren’t the entirety of existence. Lots of people still care about art. Lots of people read. And I expect a lot of the population—maybe the majority, maybe not—will actively seek out human authors and individual voices with idiosyncratic interests as a counter to a beige slop world. Part of that will be people seeking out more real world experiences. Perhaps a new flourishing of reading series and salons or something. But online, as far as literary culture goes, I’d place my bets on newsletters and blogs. Though the form they take will probably change and mutate. (Back in the blogging heyday, many glossy mags and newspapers hosted blogs. Maybe that comes back and revives some literary ventures?)

John Warner: This is a source of some hope for me too. The digital revolution when I was coming up was exciting because it allowed us to connect with all these like-minded people we didn’t really know existed online. I think the next phase is more likely to be, cripes, let’s get off our fucking computers!

Lincoln Michel: Sorry to be a little corny at the end here, but I feel like we’ve talked about many true problems and maybe it is nice to include what’s good or interesting or hopeful about the present state of literature. Author income is in a dire state. OTOH, I think this is a very exciting time for authors who want to experiment in new forms, try out new models, and do whatever we want. (Maybe that’s the freedom of not expecting money?) One thing that sucked about the old models is authors got slotted into roles. If you started as a horror writer, you were a horror writer. If you started a small press author, you were probably staying on small presses. Etc. Now? There’s way more freedom to bounce around between imprints, genres, and forms. You can be self-publishing science fiction on Monday, putting out a big press literary novel on Tuesday, and doing a weird experimental work on a small press on Wednesday.

Correspondingly, this is a great time to be a reader. Really. Yes, discoverability is a problem, but there are so many interesting works being put out in so many different genres and such a greater access to world literature in translation than perhaps ever before.

Can I toss these questions back to you? If you were starting your career today, with an eye for the next 5-10 years, what would you do? And what about the state of literature excites you, despite whatever problems it has?

John Warner: I agree that there is an opportunity and atmosphere available for people who are willing to just try stuff. I keep referencing McSweeney’s because I was around for its origins, but it was born out of Dave Eggers being frustrated that the glossy magazines weren’t publishing stuff that seemed genuinely interesting and worth reading. There was no intention beyond doing one issue of a journal and then another and another. They’re up to 82 issues.

The website existed simply because the internet was new and you were supposed to have a website. Prior to me taking the reins as editor it wasn’t even primarily a humor website. I looked at what had been published and thought that this weird funny stuff seemed like it would play best online so we should focus on that. Thanks to the superior efforts of my successor, Chris Monks, It’s now a quasi-institution and because the whole enterprise is now non-profit, sustainable.

The key, that you hit on, is for people to do the work that compels them. Don’t try to chase someone else’s path because that looks like the way to have a hit. Success in this realm is always idiosyncratic. After the fact, we go looking for the next Gone Girl or whatever, but I’ve always viewed that as a dead end.

I also think and hope we’re going to see another era of successful small/independent publishers. The math of the business is punishing (as this piece from the Dalkey Archive’s Chad W. Post shows), but there is a desire for people to both write and read stuff that falls outside the main paths of publishing. I’ve been reading a bunch of books from a Canadian publisher, Biblioasis, lately (most recently Silver Lake by Alex Pugsley), that are fantastic. (They also published this year’s Tournament of Books runner-up, Passenger Seat.) Reese and Jenna are probably not going to latch on to these books, but there must be at least some audience for these things because they’re great.

I hope there’s a way for the work to make sense for everyone involved.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

Two tangentially related topics this Friday:

Making and Not Making Money Writing

I was interviewed by for the How I Make Money Writing Substack. Authors probably don’t talk about money enough, even if many of the reasons are understandable. (Anyone remember when the #publishingpaidme hashtag went around and a few writers who were honest about their high advances got raked over the social media coals?) Anyway, I try to talk practically and honestly about money-related matters on Counter Craft and I’m glad there is a Substack devoted to authors explaining how they juggle jobs and balance bill paying and art making.

Nguyen’s Substack has a paywall, but he gave me a 30-day guest pass link to share with Counter Craft subscribers if you want to read the interview. I talk about my years cobbling together freelance and adjunct income as well as my “business model” on Substack of publishing everything for free initially and then paywalling select older articles for paid subscribers:

Philosophically, I like readers being able to read what I post for free. And from a career perspective, it seemed more useful to build up subscribers and have a “platform” that might help me sell books. It was all free at first. At some point, I realized I’d been writing several books worth of articles and thought it was fair to put older articles behind a paywall and keep posting everything new for free. I really am indebted to the readers who subscribe. It helps me keep it going.

At this point, I probably make more from Substack subscribers than I would placing the pieces in literary-minded websites and magazines. But I’m fortunate to not depend on either Substack or freelance income anymore. I would have to completely change how I do the newsletter if I was trying to live on subscriptions. As for other outlets, I almost never pitch anymore. If an editor at a journal I enjoy solicits me, I typically say yes. But I don’t really pitch non-fiction anymore. I need to save what non-work, non-Substack time I have for fiction writing.

More Thoughts on Book Reviews

There’s been a lot of discussion on the decline of book reviews and what it means for authors, most recently from Dwight Garner in the New York Times. Garner’s article “Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone?” was good although I did think it was an oversight to ask that question and not mention Substack. This is where many of the book reviews have gone, including for people alluded to in the article (e.g., Ron Charles was one of the critics let go by the Washington Post and is now on Substack.) I normally find the Substack cheerleading quite silly. This is a social media slash blogging platform. It has plenty of problems, and recreates many of the usual problems of both online platforms (AI slop, rage bait, etc.) and humans in general (group think, cliques, etc.). But, I do think Substack is where a lot of book reviews are migrating. BookTok remains huge, but the types of books that go viral there tend to be very different from the ones that get coverage here.

This isn’t anything magical about a tech platform. It’s just that this is a platform built around longform text and so will attract readers and writers of longform text in the same way that Instagram has become a popular platform for photography and illustrations. Lena Dunham’s new bestselling memoir was apparently promoted through a sort of Substack tour and has credited the platform for helping the book sell. As I’ve said before, I received as many or more reviews of Metallic Realms on this site than in professional magazines. Anyway, that’s all I’ll say about that.

But speaking of Substack and book reviews more generally, I wrote about my mixed feelings on traditional book reviews earlier this month. Other recent Substack essays worth reading on the subject are with a more critical take on the traditional 800-word book review, on publishing a book in a world without reviews, and on the problems with overly positive book reviews.

The last piece in particular got me thinking a little more about book reviews and why I think some of the issues with them are tricky to solve. I agree that book reviews are on the whole too positive—and Lefray also correctly points out this is a longstanding problem, quoting Elizabeth Hardwick complaining about them in the 1950s. In more recent history, I remember when the review aggregation site Metacritic began including books. If you’re not familiar, Metacritic aggregates reviews by converting them into a 1-100 score and then averaging them. High averages are colored green, middle scores are yellow, and low are red. For movies and TV, this works well. For books, it did not. Nearly every book got good reviews on average. A wall of green scores with a few yellows and the occasional rare red flop. Metacritic soon dropped books from the site.

(Lit Hub’s BookMarks has a similar aggregation model, and does a better job of providing a range of scores. Though this is largely by adding a second positive category—it goes Rave, Positive, Mixed, Pan—that Metacritic lacked.)

That was over 20 years ago, before the social media age and the complete gutting of book review sections we’ve seen in the last decade. Book reviews seem to have always skewed positive. There are many reasons for this, but I think the most popular ones are both true and incomplete. Yes, there is a sort of desperate and corny rallying around books: “Any reading is good reading! Especially today in our mindless TV binging and cellphone doomscrolling age!” The near extinction of full-time book critics does mean that most book reviewers are fellow novelists who may be too willing to go easy on a fellow practitioner—“It’s an accomplishment for anyone to finish a whole book and manage to get it published!”—or, more cynically, afraid of pissing off an author (or their agent or editor or friends) who you might need a favor from or hope to work with down the road.

All those factors are in play, but again the problem is an old one. Critics have always been mostly fellow authors. Acclaimed novelists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf wrote reviews and acclaimed critics like James Wood or Susan Sontag are or were novelists. Even the critics who haven’t published novels tend to publish books of criticism, meaning they too potentially have incentives not to piss off agents, editors, and publishers. (There’s no real solution here except maintaining your own integrity as a critic and reading critics who believe have integrity.) The decline of reading and the general cultural fragmentation plays a role, but then Elizabeth Hardwick’s Harper’s essay is from the 1950s, back when literature still held a central role in American culture. So, what else is at play?

I tend to think so many of the issues people have with publishing—many of which I agree with—ultimately stem from one big blunt fact: there are a shit ton of books. There are tons of manuscripts written and tons of books published. And, yes, there aren’t all that many readers for them. But even when there were lots of readers, people complained that reviews were too positive.

Publishers Weekly recently reported that over 4 million books were published in 2025. Granted, most of those were likely some form of spam, scam, slop, or else super niche book that would never get general review coverage. When I interviewed the Bookseller (a buyer for an independent bookstore) they said they look at about 50,000 titles a year across the various publisher catalogs. Those are 50k books that might be stocked in a bookstore, which is a fair proxy for what might get book reviews. Let’s make the math easy and say 1,000 books a week.

Compare 1,000 new books a week to how there are only about 3 new wide-release movies in theaters each week. Even adding in streaming platform originals, we’re talking a tiny fraction of the number of new books. A lot of things spill out from these numbers. One is that wide-release films are always targeted to a wide audience. Books, OTOH, do not have to earn nearly as much to be profitable and are often aimed at very specific niches. If you’re a culture editor at a major newspaper or magazine, you could reasonably conclude that every new film is of potential interest to your readers. The New Yorker (or whatever) can justify reviewing any new MCU film or kid’s movie or anything at all because a lot of their readers might care to read about it. The same doesn’t hold for books.

What percentage of the New Yorker’s audience cares about a random romantasy or thriller title by an obscure author? Hell, what percentage of romantasy or thriller or [insert any genre including literary fiction] readers care about any given random title? The percentage is always functionally zero. 99.999% of books do not attract inherent interest from book review readers, who themselves are a small number anyway.

This is part of the reason why positive reviews are more common than pans. “You Need to Read This Great Book” is a better selling point than “You Need to Avoid this Bad Book, Which Is One of Roughly 1,000 New Meh Books You Should Avoid This Week.” Sure, I believe you that yet another book is boring. But why would I spend my time reading about yet another bad book by yet another author I’ve never heard of and may never hear from again. If it’s a famous name—a Stephen King or a Sally Rooney—sure, many people may be excited to read a pan. A book review editor can always justify assigning reviews of famous names. Outside of such rare authors though, who cares? Probably not your readers.

I’m not trying to pawn this issue off on editors. This is how I feel as a reader too. Why would I spend my time reading about a random mediocre book by a random author that I’ll never hear about again? I have better things to do with my time. (Or at least pretend I have better things to do. Probably I’ll just waste time on my phone. Still. Hope for productivity springs eternal.)

There are two exceptions here. The first is when you admire an individual critic. I will happily read Parul Sehgal or Christian Lorentzen, to pick a couple examples, talking about a book I have no intention of reading. Here is where the disappearance of full-time book critics hurts. And also where Substack helps. If someone subscribes to your newsletter, they presumably value your voice and thoughts and so are more likely to find value in reading a critic of an unknown book.

The second exception is, of course, famous or newsworthy authors. While few people may actively want to read pans of books they don’t care about, plenty of people will delight in pans of Ocean Vuong and Ben Lerner, or else Rebecca Yarros and J.K. Rowling. (First time those four have been in the same sentence together?) Or a takedown of a book like Shy Girl or American Dirt that are at the center of a buzzy controversy. You can almost feel the relief that book reviewers have when there’s a worthy target to shred. Finally! A reason to bring out that fancy Japanese chef’s knife you got as a wedding gift. Something worth cutting apart.

The same logic holds true in niches. Here on Substack, there are Substack famous authors who might sell few books compared to a NYT bestseller yet who are known enough here that there is interest in reading critical coverage—positive and negative—about them.

The flipside of the gigantic quantity of books published is the paltry remuneration for book reviews. This is a problem that has gotten worse and worse. Writing a book review really does take a lot of time, even just reading the book. I’m a book critic, at least at times. I feel I’m very honest in my reviews. I would never rave about a book I disliked nor pan one out of artistic jealousy or the like. Yet I’m sure if you read all my reviews you would find that they skew positive. Money is a big part of that. If I’m assigned a review at a major newspaper that pays real money, I’ll review whatever I’m assigned and pan or rave as need be. Otherwise, though, I’m probably only going to bother writing a review for something I like. I won’t even pitch writing one unless I’ve read the book and am excited enough about it that I want to write about it. If the book sucks—or to be more charitable, if it simply doesn’t connect with me—I won’t finish it. Again, I have, or like to pretend I have, better things to do with my time.

Even assigned book reviews will likely skew positive without factoring in any of the cronyism, “positive literary citizenship” corniness, and any other such things. Book review assignments aren’t random. Editors mostly assign reviewers books in the genres and styles that they care about. I’m typically asked to review weird story collections or dystopian SFF novels and never inspirational celebrity memoirs or lighthearted commercial romances. If I was, I’m sure I’d write more negative book reviews.

Then again, it might be fair to say as someone who doesn’t read many inspirational memoirs (or whatever) I’m not really in a place to judge them. They aren’t a genre I’m familiar enough with to really comment. And again, this is downstream from the volume of books. It’s pretty rare to have a professional movie reviewer who will only review one genre of film. It’s common to have reviewers who only review romance, science fiction, etc.

Anyway, those are just some scattered thoughts. As I wrote recently, I’m hoping to review more books here on Counter Craft. But they probably will mostly be books that I enjoy not because I don’t think negative reviews are useful but just because, well, I’ve only got so much time. Here’s my latest one, if you missed it:

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

I’m deep in the novel revision mines—Haunted Hills coming to you next year!—so this article will be on the shorter side. I wanted to relate a little publishing industry gossip and then explain why book sales can be so confusing.

Some Market Trend Gossip

The word on the street, as the kids no longer say, is that Romance and Romantasy sales are starting to tank. The market is so oversaturated, and so much of what publishers are putting out is bad, that readers are being put off. I’ve heard about bookstores overrun by a flood of books with the same tropes, Big 5 editors overwhelmed with barely distinguishable submissions, and foreign publishers uninterested in buying rights. Adult non-fiction is also doing poorly, which has apparently been true for a few years.

My thought: The Romantasy issue was predictable since publishers rushed to throw huge advances at anything called Romantasy and much of it was written by authors “pivoting” from their established genres to jump on the trend as quickly as possible. Some publishers were also pressuring authors to rewrite their books in adjacent genres (YA and various SFF subgenres) so they could be marketed as Romantasy. The bubble was bound to pop.

What’s doing well? Mysteries, “anything speculative,” and fiction aimed at Baby Boomers, especially featuring heartwarming late-in-life transformations. The last bit is driven by the huge sales of Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent and Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden,. This is also perhaps a predictable trend. Older generations read more, have more free time, and more disposable income in this economy than younger generations.

Anyway, brb. I need to quickly rewrite my proposal for my three-volume The Dragon Smoochers series into the standalone novel called Mr. Mystery’s Magical Late-Life Lessons before the publishing winds change again…

Why Book Sales Are Confusing

There’s been some lit world discourse about book sales, spinning off of New York Mag’s Book Gossip column reporting that Lindy West’s much-hyped memoir isn’t selling very well: “According to BookScan — the leading industry tracker that captures mostly print sales and with a week or so delay — total Adult Braces sales stand, as of this writing, at just over 3,000 copies.” The article goes on to note the memoir sold “only” 1,800 copies in the first week compared to 7,000 copies of Strangers, another buzzy memoir.

I put “only” in scare quotes because 1,800 copies in a week is a lot of books in most circumstances. Very few books sell that many in a week, and the majority never sell that many at all. But is it a lot for a memoir from a famous author who got infinite media coverage (and probably a very high advance)? Not really. One truth here is that there has probably never been a bigger gap between “the discourse” in traditional media and actual sales. Magazine and newspaper coverage just doesn’t move books like it used to, for better or worse.

Anyway, I haven’t read West’s work and have no opinion about it. But I saw a lot of people pointing out there can be a huge gap between BookScan sales and actual sales. And I saw others ask, why is that? So, here’s a quick primer on why BookScan data is different from an author’s royalty statement.

What BookScan Tracks

Circana’s BookScan is an industry tool that tracks “point of sale” purchases—that is, a customer buys a book from a retailer like an indie bookstore or Amazon—and claims to cover about 85% of print sales. [Note: Nick Mamatas in the comments points out they only claim 85% of “trade print sales,” which could exclude sales at e.g. toy stores and gift shops.] BookScan tracks this by having retailers directly report their sales based on ISBNs. This is the number journalists report because it is the only number they have access too.

I saw a few people claim BookScan misses online retailers like Amazon. That’s not accurate. BookScan tracks all the major retailers from Amazon to Target as well as several hundred independent bookstores. But they don’t capture everything…

What Sales BookScan Leaves Out

Ebook and Audio: While Circana has an ebook tracking tool, most of the time when a magazine reports BookScan sales they are only talking about print sales. Ebook sales and audio are a huge part of the market, and in some genres they can constitute the majority of sales.

It’s also worth pointing out that sales get confusing when ebooks and audio come into the mix. Hardcover and paperback books both have standard cover price ranges. Even if a retailer offers a discount, the publisher earns the same amount of money. Ebooks, on the other hand, fluctuate in price with publishers frequently running huge discounts for limited periods. Audio income often comes from subscription services rather than straightforward sales. (Think about how a Netflix stream differs from buying a ticket at a movie theater.)

Is a $2.99 ebook sale, a $25.99 hardcover sale, and an audiobook subscription stream all the same thing? Anyway, that’s another article.

Print Sales Outside of Traditional Retailers: BookScan can only track what is reported to them. Many book sales—especially from small or independent publishers—are not reported. Think of a press selling copies from a folding table at a book fair, an author hand-selling books after a bar reading, or a small publisher selling directly from their website. All of those are likely missed. For a bestselling novel, such sales might be only a tiny % of the overall sales. Missing them doesn’t matter. But for a small press book, they could constitute a majority of sales.

Library Sales: Publishers also sell to libraries, and there are a lot of libraries in the country. explains it well:

Unsold Bookstore Sales: It’s good to remember that publishers do not—by and large—sell books to readers. They sell books to “accounts,” which is to say things like bookstores and Amazon. Retailers can and do return unsold book stock, which is a quirk of publishing. (A convenience store doesn’t get to return unsold nail clippers and candy bars.) But bookstores also keep a certain number of books on their shelves. If you have 500 bookstores with 1 copy of your book on their shelves—and hopefully a copy they replace when it sells—then that’s another 500 sales from the publisher’s POV.

Subscription Boxes / Special Editions: Books can also be sold in other editions outside of traditional publishers. My novel Metallic Realms received a stunning OwlCrate edition that was sent to their subscribers. Such sales are unlikely to be reported to BookScan, and if they were, they would be under a different ISBN since it is a different edition and from a different publisher. (The ISBN is the code that each edition gets. Paperback, hardcover, audiobook, and ebook all have different ISBNs.)

What Else Differs from BookScan and a Royalty Statement?

The above covers most of the differences between a publisher’s internal sales data and what BookScan reports. But a royalty statement, and the publisher’s overall profit or loss on a book, includes other things. When a publisher buys your book, they usually acquire rights for a certain territory, and publishers can make a lot of money selling across territories (as well as other subsidiary rights). For example, if you sell “World English” rights to a US publisher, they will hopefully try to sell the rights to another English language publisher, e.g. a UK publisher. If you sell “World” rights, then the publisher will try to sell the right to translate to publishers in Italy, Germany, Japan, China, etc. The money from such sales is split—according to percentages spelled out in your contract—between the publisher and the author. This is also how it works for something like a deluxe edition from a subscription box. OwlCrate did not purchase a specific number of books from my publisher, Atria Books. They purchased the rights to publish the special edition for a lump sum. Publishers can also sell the rights to an audiobook edition to an audiobook publisher (more common in small presses as the Big 5 all sell their own audiobooks). Etc.

An author’s “advance” is an advance against royalties, which includes sales of rights. Hypothetically, an author can “earn out” their entire advance and begin receiving royalties before selling a single copy of their book to a single reader—before the published edition even appears on shelves for that matter—just through the sale of rights.

I think that about sums it up. If you’ve been wondering why BookScan sales, actual sales, and royalty statements all differ, I hope the above explains why.

Okay, back to the novel revision mines for me…

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

What Are the Principles of Plotting?

In January, I started a series on what I’m calling “the principles of plotting” and then got a little sidetracked. Sorry for the delay, but I’m back with Part Two today. I’d encourage you to read Part One first. But I’ll summarize Part One briefly. There is a tendency in some corners of the literary world to mock the idea of plot or even to call it “fascist.” And even when plot isn’t looked down upon, it is often simply overlooked. Lessons in plot are rare in an undergraduate creative writing class or an MFA workshop. I ended up having to teach myself plot before I could publish my first novel, The Body Scout, which was a somewhat surreal science fiction novel with a noirish plot at the core.

I think plotting is a narrative element like any other. It isn’t necessary to have a good plot in a story. Some great works resist plot and even would be ruined by plot. I think the same is true of any other element. Invisible Cities would not be improved by round characters with defined arcs. Fairy tales would fall apart with detailed worldbuilding. The Mezzanine does not need more present action scenes. Etc. At the same time, great plotting is as difficult to pull off as memorable characters, unique worldbuilding, strong voice, or anything else. It is a skill worth learning.

When I taught myself plot, I read more than a few essays and craft books with extremely prescriptive advice. The screenwriting craft books are especially prescriptive, often mapping plot beats down to the specific page numbers. I’m always allergic to that. I’m excited by the infinite possibilities of fiction and far more interested in different ways to think about structure, character, style, or any other element than I am in learning what one person claims is the “right way” to do them. Thus, my series here is an attempt to come up with principles not rules. Or as I said in Part One:

I try to synthesize all of the above. To balance the extreme prescriptivism of Hollywood guides or Hero’s Journey-type maps with the freeing yet vague advice of the literary world. For me, this takes the shape of what I’ll call story principles. Principles are not rules. They are not saying X must happen between beats Y and Z. And principles are flexible, applying to a wide variety of stories across styles and genres (though never, of course, covering everything). But principles also give you something more tangible to think about than “find your voice,” which may leave most writers shrugging their shoulders instead.

My “Principles of Plotting” don’t apply 100% to all texts, nor would I want them to. I said the possibilities of fiction were infinite, didn’t I? But I think they apply to most kinds of stories regardless of genre or style.

Part One focused on Escalation, and the idea that plots are powered by escalation. Stakes get bigger, things get worse or better, and we hurtle upwards towards some conclusion. The escalation can take many forms. A superhero may fight ever stronger enemies while a Kafkaesque character may sink ever more into hopelessness. In a haunted house novel the poltergeist might become ever more threatening while a domestic realist story may show the marriage increasingly fracturing until it falls apart. The point is the principle can apply to many types of fiction from experimental to highly formulaic works. Anyway, go read Part One if you want to read more about Escalation.

Part Two is going to focus on a complicating principle that I’m calling Oscillation. Briefly, this is that while you typically want a sense of overall escalation you simultaneously need a sense of up and down or back and forth movement. These two seemingly contradictory principles are the most essential parts of plot from my point of view. The trick is combining them.

However, I realize there is something I should explain before I get to Oscillation….

What Even Is Plot?

In my first entry, I took a jab at writers who mock plot while celebrating similar concepts like “story” without defining the difference. Embarrassingly, I didn’t really define plot myself. I edited the article to add a definition, but I’ll repeat it here now.

For the purposes of this series, I’m defining plot in more or less the usual way. Plot is “what happens?” or more specifically the cause-and-effect sequence of events that explain what happened as well as how and why.1 Story, in the sources I read, is defined in two opposing ways. Either people say story is the simpler version of plot (essentially the gist of the story as summarized in a sentence or two) or else as the entirety of the work factoring in all elements like style and themes. I’ll use story to mean the latter.

I will take a somewhat more expansive view of plot than others in that I’d include the character’s interiority as it relates to the cause-and-effect events. Plot arcs and character arcs are typically entwined. This is true of a formulaic action film (the hero learns to believe in herself before she can defeat the big supervillain2) as well as a canonical literary work (Captain Ahab gets increasingly monomaniacal before leading the Pequod to [spoiler redacted]). If the plot involves the how and why, then I think we can group internal character events with the external world events when describing the plot.

To take a classic example, Kate Chopin’s short short “The Story of an Hour” has basically three external events. A woman with a heart condition hears her husband has died in a train wreck. She locks herself in a room. Then her husband returns—he hadn’t in fact been on the crashed train—and she dies of a heart attack upon seeing him. Much of the story, and I would say the plot, occurs internally when she goes through an entire character arc from sadness to joy realizing that as a widow she will be finally free in a patriarchal society where married women are controlled by their husbands. This internal world arc is connected to the external world arc. She dies not because she’s happy, as Chopin ironically states is the doctor’s diagnosis, but because her new freedom has been snuffed out.

What Even Is “Plotless Fiction”?

So, what is “plotless fiction” then? I think most people call a work plotless if it either has very little events (“nothing happens!”) or else the events are not connected in a cause-and-effect way to create a single story. The cliché of a boring literary fiction novel about a young man/woman wandering around Brooklyn having sad thoughts is plotless not because no events happen. The character probably enters a few bars, maybe has some depressing sex, etc. But the events don’t connect in a cause-and-effect way to create an overall story arc.

Again, though, from my perspective plotless is not a bad thing. Many of my favorite books have minimal to no plots. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I mentioned above, is composed mostly of descriptions of imagined settings with no real characters or events.3 Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine takes place in the mind of a character riding an escalator from the ground floor to the mezzanine, and the vast majority of the text describes his musings, memories, and digressions about topics like shoelaces and hotdogs. Thomas Bernhard’s novels typically feature a character doing very little in “real time”—perhaps merely sitting in a wing chair at a party—while internally ranting about things they hate. Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a series of conversations that a largely undefined narrator has while attending a writing conference. In all of these works, there is “not much happening” and also minimal to no cause-and-effect relationship built between what does happen. You could reorder the descriptions of cities, the musings about everyday objects, the rants, or the conversations without most readers even noticing much less dramatically altering the books. The same could not be said of, say, a tightly plotted murder mystery.

Plot is at minimum a spectrum. There are books with strong plots and minimal ones. And there are other complications we could throw in. For example, the “episodic plot,” which is often a series of mostly disconnected stories with minimal cause-and-effect relationship between them. Are these plotless? Well, it depends. Episodic plots are a sort of series of mini-plots strung loosely together that may have an overarching plot (e.g., Odysseus returning home to reclaim his throne) or not (e.g., most network TV shows in the pre-prestige TV era) or else be a bit of both (e.g., The X Files mythology storyline interspersed between monster of the week episodes).

Lastly, and obviously—or at least I hope it is obvious—the various elements of any story are entwined. Plot cannot be wholly separated from character, voice, worldbuilding, structure, or anything else. Still, I think we can separate it enough to talk about.

Since I love different models and complicating ideas, I’ll plan to include a series of links to other models and concepts as the series goes on. (For example, is also currently writing an interesting series on plot here on Substack that I recommend reading.)

Principles of Plotting #2: Oscillation

Just as you walk stepping left to right and a bird flies flapping their wings up and down, stories need back and forth movement. You want an overall shape of escalation, yes, but a straight line of escalation is simply boring. We do not want to see the superhero punch a series of stronger bad guys without ever struggling nor do we want to read a detective find all the clues in order without any setbacks. Even if the ultimate ending of a story is inevitable, the trick of fiction is surprising and delighting the reader with the route to get there. Yes, that stoner you knew in college was correct. The journey is the destination, maaan.

One of the simplest versions of a story is this: a character wants something but obstacles get in the way that they have to overcome. In such a story, the protagonist progresses to the climax in a sort of two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back fashion. (In another type of story, it may be a one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back motion into failure.) What these obstacles are varies story by story and they may be internal or external. But this back and forth movement propels the story on its overall escalating course. This is what I’m calling oscillation.

This principle can apply to both formulaic stories and experimental ones. In any superhero movie (or rom-com), the hero is going to face setbacks and struggles on the way to saving the world (or uniting with their true love). But even in a work like Kafka’s The Castle, the protagonist’s futile quest to reach the castle is filled with moments that at least seem to progress him on his goal.

Kurt Vonnegut has a famous “shapes of stories” theory that showcases a version of this up and down movement by using a Y axis of a character’s fortune and an X axis of story time:

(The Kafka joke is funny, but as I argued above his stories do include movement or at least the appearance of movement that shapes the emotional arc of the work.)

Vonnegut’s idea was later mapped out by the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, which tried to quantify the movement of stories on a happiness to unhappiness scale by counting the ratio of “happy words” (e.g., joy, peace, and love) to “unhappy words” (e.g., terror, death, misery). I have to admit I normally find this kind of data-driven art analysis silly. Indeed this specific study helped produce a lot of silly headlines like “Every Story in the World Has One of These Six Basic Plots” and “There Are Only Six Basic Book Plots, According to Computers.” These claims were both silly and uninteresting. The researchers use this analysis to say stories are composed of “rising” or “falling” and then map stories up to three steps… which only leaves six possible combinations.4 But since this is obvious nonsense—many stories have more movement than that—they declare all other stories are “combinations of these six.” Rather than proving anything, this could be summarized as “if we think of stories as having rising and/or falling, then all stories will have some combination of rising and/or falling.” Wow. Brilliant insight, computers.

Okay, rant aside, I did find the analysis a useful visualization of story movement.

Here’s a few famous epics charted together via Lapham’s Quarterly from the same data:

Those graphs are a good demonstration of the up and down movements that propel a story. But they probably aren’t helpful for generating your own plots. A story can be mapped like a stock price. It fluctuates up and down. Okay. How do you achieve that on the page in a productive way?

How Do You Achieve Oscillation on the Page?

First, you may simply want to think about the general shape of your main character’s journey. What is the shape you want? Perhaps thinking of the general shapes Vonnegut drew will give you a sense of overall structure. Maybe you want the character to rise in the first act, then fall low in the second. Is that happening on the page? Read your draft and ask yourself if reordering events and chapters would improve the shape? Are there too many “rising” (or “falling”) events in a row, lending to an undynamic segment of the novel? Or even worse, too many flat chapters where nothing is changing for the character internally or externally?

For more concrete advice, there is an idea in Robert McKee’s famous screenwriting guide Story that I frequently reference in class. If you aren’t familiar with McKee, his book Story is often called things like “the Hollywood screenwriting Bible.” His lectures and advice are famous enough that he was parodied by Brian Cox in Adaptation:

Much of McKee’s advice is a bit too prescriptive for my taste, but there’s one idea related to oscillation I have found very useful and that is his conception of a “story value.” He says all stories should have a story value on which the story moves up and down. McKee says, “story values are the universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive, from one moment to the next.” These values are expressed as binaries such as Freedom vs. Oppression, Love vs Loneliness (or Hate), Courage vs. Cowardice, and so on. McKee’s advice is that every scene in a movie (and perhaps every chapter in a novel) should move the character somewhat up or somewhat down this binary.

Take your average rom-com plot. You have a lonely character who wants to find love, so they start low on the axis of “Love vs. Loneliness.” Then they have a meet cute (up the axis), but oh no the cute person is in a relationship (down the axis), yet that other relationship is on the rocks (up the axis)—so on and so forth—until finally the two lovers unite and live happily ever after (way up!). This is the general gist.

As a principle, this can apply to anything you want. A character-driven story may function on an interior value axis (like “courage vs cowardice”) while a superhero action flick might have an external world value axis (“freedom vs oppression”). I think you can easily have multiple values at work. Perhaps most works need both an internal value axis and an external one—the superhero must oscillate up to finally embrace courage in order to win freedom by defeating the invading alien hordes. And you can make your values as strange or experimental as needed. The point, for me if not McKee, isn’t the values but the structure that movement imposes.

From a practical drafting and revision perspective, it is useful to think about your story value(s) and then going scene by scene and asking yourself “is the story value changing?” Map it out. The change could be small or big, but there should be some change. If there isn’t, then your story is stagnant and likely boring. Consider the story of a couple’s marriage disintegrating. If a couple starts a scene in love with no problems and they end in love with no problems, that’s not as interesting as if they start in love and then an issue arises that moves them down the axis. Worst of all is you have several scenes in a row that keep the characters in the same dynamic. It’s flat. Why have five scenes in a row where nothing is changing?5 If you need to have many events in a row where little changes—or they are on a steady upwards slope or steady downwards slope—you probably want to introduce some movement. Or else you need to summarize these flat scenes (e.g., with a montage in a film) to get us back to the movement.

This is the gist of oscillation. A plot is propelled by up and down movement. At the same time, my first post argued for an overall trajectory of escalation. These principles are combinable. If you want a metaphor, think of a bird flapping its wings up and down to rise up to the treetop. Or a mountain climber zigzagging up the mountain.

In my first entry, I quibbled with the old Freytag Pyramid model6 and suggested that at least for most modern stories an upside down checkmark is a better model than a triangle. This diagram from Janet Burrow that I included illustrates the dual principles of escalation and oscillation.

I’ll end with that and be back—in the not too distant future—with some other plot principles.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

This post has two parts. First, me rambling about my conflicting thoughts on book reviews. Second, a recommendation of the best book I read recently: Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora. Feel free to scroll past the rambling if you just want to read the review.

Also, a reminder that I’m running a subscription incentive where I’ll send you a signed book if you sign up for an annual subscription. Details near the top of my last post.

A Bit on the Bad State of Book Reviews

Although I try to maintain a somewhat positive, or at least not despairing, outlook on literature, I admit to feeling not great about the state of book reviews. Things are bad. Everything I hear and read—from conversations with fellow authors and publishing professionals to news stories like the Washington Post cutting its books coverage earlier this year—is about how it is harder and harder to get coverage at all.

I’m sure many will think, “So what? Book reviews are formulaic and boring anyway. Good riddance.” I enjoy a traditional book review, but even if you don’t, there are reasons to mourn their disappearance. Most books do not sell all that well, as everybody knows. As an author, receiving serious critical engagement of your work is one of the best parts of publishing a book. Book reviews are also vital for the sales of many types of books. Not all types. Certain works thrive in a world where sales are dominated by marketing dollars, trope lists, and social media algorithms. But for my tastes, those are rarely the most interesting books. What I love typically falls into some category (small press books, translated literature, books that defy easy genre pigeon-holing) that have a much harder time catching on without reviews. Though, to be sure, such books faced an uphill battle even when critical reviews determined sales more than viral TikToks.

I’ve written before about how Substack (and newsletters in general) are one of the few bright spots in books coverage. But I’ve been thinking recently about how I don’t review that often. I recommend books, implicitly through my Processing author interview series and explicitly in the survey articles I categorize under “Syllabi.” But why don’t I write more straightforward book reviews?

Despite feeling serious book reviews are important and the traditional book review a worthy form to master, I find them tricky and somewhat confused. The problem, for me, stems from the dual audiences of a book review: those who haven’t read the book (and who are deciding if they want to) and those who have read the book (and are reading to see what critics say about it). There are other audiences sometimes, such as those who are looking to hateread a pan of a famous author’s book that they have no intention of reading. (I have, at times, been a member of this group too.) But the first two audiences are something a professional reviewer has to balance despite their conflicting knowledge base and opposing interests in reading the review. How can you offer interesting commentary or interpretations to already-read-it-ers without “spoiling” the story for haven’t-read-it-yet-ers? How do you usefully summarize the book for the latter without boring the former? Etc.

The trickiness of the balancing act is compounded by the brevity. 500-800 words or so. That really isn’t much space to get across the author, the context, the story, and the style while also including a few quotations and some critical evaluation (often smushed into the end). Learning to impart all that efficiently is a real skill, and probably a good exercise for students to try and master. It’s worthy to learn. But, I digress.

All of this is a long prelude to saying that I’m going to try to be the change I want to see—in the small and limited way I can with this Substack—and offer some more reviews of books. Especially books that I think could use highlighting, such as those in translation or on small presses. At the same time, I’ll try to jettison the traditional format in favor of something a bit more conversational and loose that hopefully befits a newsletter. And I will inject some digressions on fiction craft that I could never fit into a traditional book review.

Okay, preamble aside, let me tell you about an amazing novel I just finished about someone digging up magical frozen corpses of soldiers in early 19th-century Prussia.

You Should Read this Book: Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora (translated by Rahul Bery)

Mora is apparently a known name in Spain—and this book won something called the Málaga Novel Prize Winner—but I will confess I knew nothing about him or the novel other than the translation was published by Bellevue Literary Press. Centroeuropa was simply a book I picked up off my to-maybe-read pile of galleys, review copies, and purchases. Actually, this is not one pile. It is currently five piles—split between my wife and me—that are stacked from floor to windowsill along one wall. Really, six piles since there’s another stack on my entryway table…

(So if I haven’t read a book you sent me, sorry, I will try!)

Anyway, when I grab books from the pile(s), often I’ll read a couple pages to see if I’m hooked or not. Exceptions exist, but I almost always know if I’ll love a book from the first few pages. You can tell if an author has the juice or not from the first squeeze so to speak. Or at least if the juice is the juice you want to drink. Here is the opening of Centroeuropa (as translated by Rahul Bery):

Male, Prussian, hussar soldier, frozen.

That was the first body I found while digging in the frozen earth to bury my wife; I say my wife because I never knew her real name, although I will return to that later.

This opening sinks several hooks into me. I admire the style, the shock, the teased mysteries, and also the storyteller voice of a narrator reflecting on the past. “I will return to that later.” The craft jargon here is “the point of telling,” but this specific point of telling encourages interesting elisions and contradictions from the inherent unreliability of memory and self-mythologization. This becomes a major part of the novel, with “translator’s notes” appearing now and then to remind you the narrator, Redo, has contradicted or omitted something.

The next paragraphs:

When one finds a buried body under one’s own earth, in one’s own soil, one suspects it is not alone; in some way, anyone who finds a corpse fears or suspects that other corpses are out there, waiting their turn. The fields of a given place cannot be looked at in the same way once the first body has been found, for now they no longer resemble flower meadows but burial grounds.

The story began with this discovery of that first soldier, but what I wish to write cannot be properly understood unless I go back a few hours to my anguished interview with Mayor Altmayer. Or perhaps I should go further and recall those sad days in Mainz? I ask the potential reader to forgive me for faltering as I expound, for these memories constitute the first long text I have ever put to paper, and the past is so wide, long, and deep, that choosing any single part as a starting point constitutes, in some way, an imposture. Nothing starts at an exact point. Our lives do not start entirely with our births.

Probably this first page will let you know if you are onboard or not. I took my seat.

When I was younger, I took a (non-academic) class with the brilliant writer Diane Williams. Williams wrote a list of what mattered most in fiction, from her POV, on the whiteboard. #3, the least important, was “the news.” Or, basically, everything that happens in a story from plot to characters. #2 was “voice” or style, which is probably self-explanatory to anyone reading a craft newsletter. But #1 was “authority.” This is hard, impossible really, to define. It is the masterfulness with which a writer’s work demands your attention and makes you trust that you are listening to someone who you want to listen to.

Mora wields great authority from page one. At least for this reader’s tastes.

What is the story this perhaps untrustworthy narrator tells? Redo Hauptshammer has lucked his way into the deed to a parcel of land in Prussia and fled his mysterious past with his wife, who is killed by a stray bullet before they arrive. Redo arrives in Szonden with the coffin and, after navigating the local bureaucracy, tries to bury his wife. He finds not just one soldier but an ever-multiplying number of soldiers—one then a pair then four then eight—all buried under his plot of land and all from different wars and magically preserved.

Plotwise, the book centers on the foot-dragging government and ecclesiastical bureaucrats who cannot decide what to do with these impossible corpses, preventing him from fulfilling his plan to plant sugar beets and start a new life. It would really have been best if they’d just stayed underground and no one had to make any decisions. History, with its shifting empires and forgotten mounds of dead, is always ready to rupture through this novel both literally and thematically. “[I]n these history-scarred lands, no sooner do you open up the ground than you find deep rivers of blood.”

Don’t mistake this for a horror novel. It’s quite funny and often moving. Despite this surreal central premise, the rest of the book proceeds more like historical fiction than magical realism. There is a period-appropriate (and memorable) witch character, but otherwise the story isn’t about magic but about a man trying to mourn his lost love and rebuild a life from scratch.

Mora populates the novel with memorable side characters, which I know is a bit of a stock phrase, yet is here quite true. Some of these characters have only passing mentions, such as a giant named Udo whom bees refuse to sting, and others play more of a role, like the local historian Jakob Moltke who befriends Redo or the witch Ilse who warns him about more bodies hidden inside the dirt.

Those will be my plot summary paragraphs, because there are twists and reveals—especially one at the end—I would not want to spoil.

One thing I greatly admire in fiction, especially of a surreal bent, is tonal variety. Mora is adept at moving between surreal slapstick, melancholy rumination, Kafkaesque strangeness, and lyrical description. Mora also has a Nabokovian predilection for playful language games—Redo moves near the river Oder—but they are never distracting. It’s a novel you cannot predict. Meditative digressions, strange memories, comedic set-pieces, or bursts of beauty could appear at any moment. One lovely line I copied into a notebook while reading: “These past conversations come back to me all mixed up, like birdsong in a forest.”

The novel’s free movement through time, little mysteries, and well-rendered cast makes the novel feel expansive despite its <200 page length. The novel takes place on one tiny plot near one tiny town, but contains vastness.

Overall, Centroeuropa was a novel of buried secrets, elliptical storytelling, and lovely surprises. I never knew where it would go, but I was always happy to follow wherever it decided to land.

*

After I finished the novel, I read an article by the translator Rahul Bery at Lit Hub. I like to read books blindly, and then read up on them after. So if you are the same way, skip this section until you have read the book. Though the “spoilers” here aren’t about plot but structure and composition.

Bery talks about the process of translating the novel and especially about Mora’s blog post, “How I wrote Centroeuropa,” explaining his process in writing this “archaeological novel.” I was not surprised to find that Mora’s novel was designed with the kind of Oulipian constraints that I always love, such as how the novel chapters double in length. The first is three pages. The last nearly half of the novel.

Bery talks about other games and “‘Easter eggs’ (my words, not his)” seeded throughout the novel. I also read Mora’s blog—as translated by Google Translate, I fear—where he talks about the last chapter being “divided into 64 parts of 375 words each, semantically represents the checkmate move in a chess game.” I hope Mora won’t mind me screenshotting the accompanying chart of the novel’s six chapters:

I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. Indeed, one of the first articles I wrote for Counter Craft—in the month I launched in February of 2021—was “Invisible Architecture” about essentially Oulipian-type constraints that authors use to generate and structure their book that might not be visible to the reader.

If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, perhaps you’ll love Centroeuropa too?

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

Housekeeping

Hello all,

I’m excited to be joining the contributors of ’s very cool Thirty Cabins project, a collection of flash stories inspired by the 1918 book Sunset’s Cabin Plan Book. The project seems like a lot of fun and features a lot of great writers including several here on Substack like , , and . More info here.

Subscription Incentive… Extended!

For March, I’ve been running an annual subscription incentive where I’ll mail a signed copy of one of my novels or co-edited anthologies to any reader who signs up for an annual subscription (or extends their existing one) to Counter Craft. This worked really well, and I got many nice notes from readers. I also have some copies left. So, I’m going to extend it through April while supplies last. Just shoot me a message when you sign up with your address and which book you’d like. (And if you signed up in March and didn’t message me at the time, just shoot me a message now!) This is limited to readers in the US though, given postage costs.

Lastly, I’ve been neglecting my “Principles of Plotting” series. A few readers have nicely written me about how they enjoyed the first entry and hoped it continued. I’ve drafted most of the next few posts so I’m going to hold myself accountable here and promise to put the next entry up in April.

Scandals, Scams, and More Scandals

In my timelines, most of the literary discourse has been occupied with debates about the Shy Girl AI scandal in which Hachette cancelled the republication of an initially self-pubbed book by Mia Ballard over alleged AI use. The author’s defense seems to be that she paid an acquaintance to edit her book and that person rewrote the book with AI, thus she shouldn’t be penalized.

(AI questions aside, I find it hard to sympathize with an author noticing someone else had “changed a lot of the wordings” throughout a manuscript and then… publishing it anyway without even doing a final pass to see if you agree with the edits. If the author isn’t responsible for the writing in their book, well, what are we even doing here?)

As I drafted this post, another literary AI story broke. The Wrap reported that the New York Times cut ties with a freelance book reviewer for submitting a review that included language taken from a review by The Guardian. The reviewer, Alex Preston, admitted to using LLMs to write the review. “I took responsibility immediately and apologized to The New York Times,” Preston said. The similarities between the reviews read exactly like the copy-and-paste-then-tweak-a-few-words plagiarism that high school teachers and college professors have dealt with for generations. (Hat tip to .)

Some passages are so similar that I wonder if they were LLM-generated or copy and pasted by the author into an LLM for revision. It could be either. Prompting ChatGPT to generate a review of the book also seems to take language from existing reviews, so the reviewer could have copy and pasted from an LLM to introduce the plagiarized text.

UPDATE 04/01: interviewed Preston here, who is apologetic and claims the LLM inserted the plagiarized text.

The short version is that I had written a draft review of the book, but it was under length and I was rushing badly and drowning slightly. I made the stupid decision to use an AI tool to help expand and smooth it, with instructions about US spelling and house style at the NYT which I always get wrong - Mr so and so etc.

I looked at how it had tidied up the end of the review but didn’t realise that it had also dropped in language from Christobel Kent’s Guardian review. I was rushed and stupid and I’m so sorry. That is the heart of it.

Despite this, some people are willing to defend Ballard or Preston, though often in a backhanded way. “Genre books [and/or book reviews] are all formulaic and boring, so what does it matter if people automate them?” Well, one reason might be that readers and institutions still care so using LLMs without disclosure might tank your career.

Remixing the Memoir Scandal Arguments

A common defense of Mia Ballard I’ve seen—primarily on Threads, if you want to search for those takes—could be summed up this way: It’s racist to single out AI use by Mia Ballard (a black woman) because James Frey (a white man) recently published a book using AI and no one critiqued him for it. Racism in publishing is quite real, to be clear. But I’m not quite sure the comparison holds up. First, James Frey was certainly critiqued for the book that was mostly panned. The book was not published by Hachette or any of the Big Five publishing houses. In any event, Frey was open about the LLM use unlike Preston and Ballard.

But reading the various defenses of Ballard (and now Preston) did have me thinking about James Frey in a different way. There are some parallels with Frey’s original memoir scandal and the ensuing debate about what, if any, standards should exist in non-fiction writing.

A quick recap: James Frey published two memoirs in the mid-00s—A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard—that turned out to be almost comically fabricated. Frey wasn’t fudging a few details but inventing things whole cloth. For example, in reality he spent a few hours in police custody while in his memoir he pretended to have spent three months in prison. That scandal culminated in Oprah, who had chosen A Million Little Pieces for her book club, roasting him in a televised interview. (Oprah later apologized for being so harsh.) Frey’s publisher at the time offered refunds to offended readers.

(Frey actually did try to sell A Million Little Pieces as a novel first, but editors passed. The book only sold because of the claim to truth. Frey was unwilling or unable to improve the novel or else to rewrite it to be a true memoir.)

Despite the fabrications, Frey had his defenders. These included some notable academics and non-fiction writers like David Shields (“of course [Frey] made things up. Who doesn’t?”) and John D’Agata (“I never really understood why people think what nonfiction’s job is to give them information”.) These and others settled on an argument quite similar to defenses of the LLM writers. Who cares if a book is fraudulent? Didn’t you hear about “the death of the author”? That’s supposed to mean you can’t judge a text by anything except how you feel. Plus, we can never prove exactly how much [a memoir is fabricated / a text used LLMs] so everyone should just get over it.

While most people misunderstand Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” there is something to this argument. All memoirs are fictionalized to some degree. No one can perfectly recall past conversations or scenes—our memories are so faulty that even the most shocking events, like 9/11, become fabricated in our brains—and so writers invariably fictionalize them. And most of us know that memoirists may fudge timelines, combine people, or otherwise tweak the details of events for the sake of clarity or storytelling. It’s also true we can never prove exactly how much of a memoir was fictionalized and many fraudulent memoirs have likely been published without being caught.

Similarly, there is something to the argument that all writing is borrowed from other sources and many texts are formulaic so why care if a text was written by LLMs? And yes we can’t prove exactly how much LLM use went into a text and many LLM-generated texts have likely been published without being caught.

At the same time, most people do think there is a line. Most people do want some standards. That the exact line or precise metric is disputed doesn’t mean that readers simply cease to care. Partly, that’s because most people do not like to be tricked. James Frey and Mia Ballard would likely have been in the clear if they openly said their work was fictionalized and LLM-assisted, respectively.

But also, some things clearly do cross even nebulous lines.

The Other Big New Literary Scandal

There’s a new fraudulent memoir scandal that I haven’t seen discussed much in my circles. Amy Griffin is being sued with allegations that her bestselling memoir The Tell was both fabricated and stolen. I wrote a bit about the book last year in a piece on the “book club industrial complex,” after the New York Times published an article casting doubt on the authenticity of the memoir, including its allegations of sexual abuse by a teacher. The new lawsuit brings up a darker possibility: the abuse was real, but experienced by someone else who Griffin ripped off. Griffin’s classmate is alleging that Griffin and/or her ghostwriter Sam Lansky not only stole the classmate’s traumatic experiences but engaged a third party to dig into her story to steal even more details:

In the lawsuit, Ms. Doe claims that she met with Ms. Griffin in 2019, at the author’s invitation, at a coffee shop in California and discussed growing up in Amarillo. The suit also says that in 2022, Ms. Doe was contacted by someone claiming to be a talent agent and producer who “expressed an interest in using her ‘life story’” for a film or television show. During several subsequent conversations, Ms. Doe revealed her middle school sexual abuse. When Ms. Doe asked for a contract, the purported agent cut off contact, according to the lawsuit.

Ms. Doe claims that the information she shared was then used in “The Tell.”

If truth doesn’t matter and the only thing to care about is the book itself, is it fine to steal someone else’s life story? I suspect the intellectual argument has limits and many would consider stealing another person’s trauma to be a step too far. Employing someone to gaslight an abused woman to steal her story for your memoir is pretty vile behavior, if true. It is certainly far worse than anything Ballard or Preston did with LLMs, and for that matter worse than what Frey did.

But the connection between all these scandals is despite academic arguments about why no one should care… readers do care. Most of us do consider factors beyond the decontextualized art itself when judging a work. This might be the genre label (it is fiction or non-fiction?) or the production methods (is this a painting or a photograph?) or the time period (is this an innovative early work or a derivative later imitation?) or any other number of factors.

One of those factors seems to be “did the author actually write the book themselves?”

The Muddy Battlefield of AI Writing Debates

Arguments about LLM use in literature (and art/entertainment more broadly) tend to fall into two polar opposite camps. AI skeptics predict that LLMs themselves will be a fad and, at least in the arts, we will look back on any use of AI with embarrassment. The AI believers predict that AI use will only increase, its ubiquity will be inevitable, and today’s fretting over it is what we will look back on in embarrassment. For the believers, LLMs are simply the future and looking askance at their use will seem as silly as looking down on authors for using computers instead of typewriters or doing research on the internet. Even many AI haters believe a version of this argument. They may not like that LLMs are here, but they think their ascendance and acceptance is inevitable.

I’m going to stake out my position in the middle. I don’t think LLM use will become entirely rejected or blindly accepted without limits. I think we’re in for a lot of confusing, muddy, fraught debates about what is acceptable use and what isn’t. For when the use is legitimate and when it is fraudulent. I expect people will stake out different positions and for the debate to remain a live one—as it remains for non-fiction—for the foreseeable future.

The rebuttal I hear to the above is that because LLM use is hard to detect (“and the models will only get better”) people will simply give up caring about questions like “did the author actually write this book?” But as the memoir scandals show, questions of authenticity do not disappear just because they’re hard to detect and what is acceptable is debated.

We could draw parallels to debates in fields outside of literature. When does performance enhancing drug use cross the line into athletic fraudulence? The same drugs athletes use to cheat are used in medical treatments. What treatments and medications are a matter of health and which are abuse? What happens when regular people use treatments banned by sports leagues? These are constantly fought over topics—and ones that inspired my science-fiction novel The Body Scout, which is set in a futuristic baseball league—and the lines and metrics are nebulous and shifting.

These debates are messy, yes, but life is messy.

I expect LLM use to end up in similar endlessly contested ground. Some uses of LLMs, like spell check or research, will likely be accepted by most of the population (though some will remain opposed to any use). Other uses of LLMs, such as calling a text you did nothing but prompt your work, I expect to never be considered legitimate by the general population (though some will stake out the extreme position there too).

Then there is the muddy middle ground, where I expect the debate to remain confusing and perhaps illuminating. For example, using fragments of LLM text within your work—especially if disclosed—seems artistically legitimate to me. But what’s the line? 10% LLM text? 25%? 50%? Or when does spitballing with an LLM about plot and character turn the work into something other than yours?

These questions aren’t just being debated among LLM skeptics or AI haters. They’re also fraught within the “AI artist community,” where there are frequent accusations of “stolen prompts” and “plagiarized” LLM outputs. Here on Substack, interviewed an author who openly writes in collaboration with LLMs. One thing in particular stood out to me. Despite the bombastic title—“I Write With AI. Deal With It.”—the LLM-assisted author, Chad Rye, felt some uses of LLMs were illegitimate: “I believe that once you start letting the AI write or come up with places, characters, story beats, etc. then its not really yours.”

The point is that what is considered acceptable LLM use is fraught even among LLM lovers. Why would we expect that to change any time soon, especially among a general public that is largely skeptical of AI?

Since I’m predicting these questions will remain unsettled for some time, I won’t pretend to settle them here. For myself, I’ve developed a simple rubric that I think holds up well. At least for now. The short version is that you should disclose any use of LLMs that you would disclose if that function were performed by something other than an LLM. E.g., you are not expected to disclose using Microsoft Word for spellchecking or Google for research. Nor are you expected to disclose batting around ideas with a friend or receiving minor copyedits from a colleague (though it is good practice to thank them in the acknowledgements). OTOH, you are expected to disclose or cite appropriated text whether it is quotations in an academic essay or the source material of an erasure poem. If you’re using any text from an LLM, I think it is good practice to disclose it. And, as the above scandals show, smart for your career.

At least as things stand now…

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

Last year, I expanded my interview series from authors to other members of the literary world like editors, translators, and bookstore buyers. I’m planning to continue that this year, and this week I’m excited to be talking to Julia Ringo and Naomi Huffman of the very cool press Hagfish. Recently, I wrote a piece about literature needing a “do it ourselves” mindset and how we need to create more innovative and flexible publishing models. Hagfish is a great example of that. They’re a hybrid independent press, editorial studio, and literary agency that focuses on reissuing underread books by women authors. They publish a small number of excellent books, design them beautifully, and market them thoughtfully. Plus, their colophon and name are taken from the strange, eel-shaped deep-sea fish.

I spoke to Huffman and Ringo about literary resurrections, running a hybrid business, and being “nimble and imaginative” as a small press.

I’ve wanted to talk to you both for a while and reached out after writing an article about how, in this time of flux and chaos in the industry, publishing needs to think up new models and have more of a “do it ourselves” mindset. Hagfish is a great example of doing things in a different way. You’re a hybrid editorial studio, literary agency, and independent literary press that puts out excellent books like Rosalyn Drexler’s To Smithereens and Iphgenia Baal’s Man Hating Psycho. How did you start Hagfish, and why did you settle on this hybrid studio/agency/press structure?

NH: We started Hagfish, in part, because we had a hunch that there was room in the industry for a project that was explicitly feminist, funny, brash, and strange. We also knew there were a lot of truly incredible books that were out of print and weren’t likely to be reissued by other presses, given what we understood to be their typical selection criteria and processes. The idea of working for ourselves was also really appealing.

We’re generally risk-averse realists, and we had worked in publishing long enough to know that we couldn’t expect book revenue to keep it running, at least not at first. We announced the studio ahead of the press, and worked for two years on a range of editorial projects with writers, agents, and publishers. In the background, we were sorting through the foundational decisions of starting a small press: acquiring our first titles, setting up distribution, the branding and design of our books. The studio remains our primary source of revenue; it allows us to pay ourselves while we’re getting the press and agency to be more financially independent.

How did you settle on the hagfish as a name and logo?

JR: We were working at FSG when we first started thinking about the project; FSG’s colophon depicts three fish, and MCD’s an electric eel, so sea creatures were on our mind. We liked the idea of an animal that is a little strange, a little resilient, and perhaps not immediately glamorous. Hagfish are deep-sea scavengers; they live on the ocean floor and feed on what others have overlooked or discarded, which felt like an apt metaphor for our work. They’re a little mysterious and a little strange, and they have a sharp bite.

As I understand it, one of the motivations for Hagfish was “literary resurrections,” especially of overlooked women writers. Drexler’s To Smithereens was first published in the 1970s, and your next book, Joan Silber’s In the City, was first published in the 1980s. As agents, you helped sell a reissue of Nettie Jones’s 1983 novel Fish Tales.

Can you talk about this focus on literary resurrections, and how and where you find these overlooked gems?

NH: I first got a taste of the work that attends reissues—working with an author’s estate, sorting through their out-of-print and unpublished work—in 2018, when I sought out the archive of the late author and journalist Katherine Dunn. I spent the better part of a year transcribing her unpublished short stories, which became the collection Near Flesh, and then learned about the existence of an unpublished novel manuscript, Toad, that Dunn had unsuccessfully submitted to publishers in the late 1970s. (FSG eventually released both, in 2025 and 2022, respectively). I fell completely for this kind of work—it was intimate and emotional, and thoroughly thrilling, and it immediately became the only thing I wanted to do in publishing.

The “discovery” process is unique to each project; we start from square one every time. We’re looking for mostly women writers from a working-class perspective who wrote in spite of the many demands on their time. Broadly, we like voice-driven work that pushes against the conventions of its era, and which inevitably resonates with the social and political struggles of our time. We find our books and writers in used bookstores, and referenced in other writers’ writing, and from bookseller suggestions, and, more recently, from readers of our books.

A lot of publishers talk about “literary community” in a vague way without perhaps putting much effort into community. Hagfish seems sincerely invested in literary community. How do you think about community at Hagfish?

NH: I don’t know that we’re invested in literary community more than any other small press; we’re just trying to advocate for books and writers we admire, and which we know our readers will appreciate. It’s tempting to think of literary community as a purely positive force, when really it’s neutral, at best, and often demands free labor or favors performed in good faith without acknowledging the tremendous value of those things.

Anyway! We do think of ourselves as especially sensitive to readers and booksellers; it’s why, before we acquired anything, we spent a good deal of time meeting with booksellers and store owners to share our ideas for Hagfish with them. We asked them about things like distribution, book design, and their favorite overlooked writers. We see ourselves as publishing within a consortium composed of those folks, for and with our readers.

Julia and I are both very allergic to social media—and we only have an Instagram account, which I am constantly threatening to delete. I don’t know, it feels gross to convince readers the best way to “stay in touch” with us is through an app owned by fascists. And because the long-term relevance (not to mention security) of Instagram and similar platforms are dubious, it seems dumb to devote significant energy to expanding our readership there. When we launched our members-only newsletter Bottom Feeder we chose not to do it on Substack (whoops) because we didn’t want to force our readers to give the Substack people any of the money they were paying to support us. I’m sure this cost us some number of subscribers, but I don’t worry about it; they’ll find us if they want to. Our membership and the newsletter are growing slowly and steadily, and the members are really engaged—our newsletter has an insane open rate.

You met while working at FSG and together have a lot of experience in different parts of traditional publishing in both Big 5 presses and independent presses. Since I opened this by talking about changing publishing models, what is something you think big presses could learn from small presses? And what could small presses stand to learn from how the big presses operate?

NH: Those working at Big 5 publishers need to think more about the actual sales performance of their books. The corporate structure insulates you from that—you get a paycheck even if the books you’re working on aren’t profitable. But this means some editors, at a certain stage in their careers, become as concerned with having the power to offer an impressive advance, or the chance to work with a legendary agent, as they are with publishing a talented author. It means some publicists and marketers orchestrate compelling campaigns that don’t actually improve sales. I’m not advocating for more retaliation for poor sales—publishing workers need jobs; it’s ideal, really, that publishers don’t expect all of their books to make money—but the industry needs to be more sensitive to sales feedback, and more willing to experiment with new strategies.

As for small presses, I’d like to see a stronger set of tenets form around independent publishing and the role it serves within the industry at large. It’s pretty common to encounter a small publisher complaining about having one of their authors “stolen” by a Big 5, to which I’m like, Can we drop the proprietary attitude? And also—yes, exactly! Independent publishers should delight in kickstarting a writer’s career and being bellwethers of emerging literary trends. That’s precisely what readers want from us.

As a small press, you publish a limited number of books and publish them well. You put out two books in 2025 and have your third forthcoming this spring. Some small presses—especially ones that are just starting—struggle to get attention, and some perhaps even eschew thinking about the marketing, publicity, and other “boring business stuff.” But even your first publication, To Smithereens, got great coverage and was named a best book of 2025 by The New York Times. How does Hagfish approach marketing and publicity as a small team?

JR: Because we publish only a few books each year, we try to treat every book as an event, thinking carefully about design, timing, press outreach, bookseller relationships. Mostly, we talk to people, especially booksellers, and work closely with them to champion our books. On the events side, we try to get creative and aim to reach beyond the normal audience of reading-goers.

We don’t have a huge budget for these things, but we can be nimble and imaginative, and people respond to genuine enthusiasm.

From the outside, it seems like Hagfish has both an ethos and a lot of flexibility. You initially didn’t plan to be a literary agency, correct? Your focus is on resurrecting older books, but you also published Man Hating Psycho (first published in 2021 in the UK) and have said you’re open to publishing other types of books too. Where do you see Hagfish going next?

JR: The agency side of the business emerged organically, as we found ourselves working with writers whose projects we cared about and felt we could support more meaningfully by different avenues. But yes, we’ve intentionally built a business with the capacity to adapt however we need it to. In speaking about the authors we want to support, we sometimes use the term “underpublished,” a broad enough concept to encompass various forms of underappreciation or lack of attention that may befall a writer. We don’t want to wind up feeling trapped by any too-narrow definitions of what we’re looking for, but instead be guided by our taste, our instincts, and our sense of possibility.

For the future, we’d like to continue to grow the agency—having always worked on the publishing side, it’s been fun for us to develop these skills and work with writers in new ways. We want to keep developing our membership program, making sure it feels as rewarding for our readers to follow us as their support is to us. As more of our books emerge, we hope readers will become ever more certain of what a Hagfish book looks like, and to know that they can count on our authors to surprise, provoke, delight.

Is there any advice you’d offer to anyone looking to start their own literary project, whether it be a press or agency or something else?

Both: Do it.

I think many literary people look at publishing-related news, like the Washington Post shuttering its book section, and feel only despair. Is there anything about the state of publishing and literature in 2026 that you find exciting or hopeful?

JR: And we haven’t even mentioned the specter of AI! In fact, what we find exciting is that we feel there’s a real longing for the analog and anti-algorithm; readers want a beautiful physical object, they want to stand in a room with other readers, they respond to a bookstore’s curated shelves or a bookseller’s in-person recommendation. Indie bookstores are thriving in many places; literary translation and reissues are more prominent than ever–see the explosive success of Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, from Transit Books. We know that many readers share both our anxieties and our love for the offbeat and surprising; we just have to meet them where they are.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

Yesterday, Alexandra Alter at The New York Times broke the news that Hachette has canceled a book, Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, because the author used LLMs to write the book:

“Hachette remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling,” a Hachette spokeswoman said. She added that Hachette requires all submissions to be original to the authors, and asks authors to disclose to the company whether they are using A.I. during the writing process.

What’s the Short Version of What Happened?

The timeline of this story seems to be that the book was originally self-published and sold decently. There were accusations of AI use—and the author admitted to stealing a painting without credit for the self-pub cover—but the book was picked up by Hachette UK and published in November of 2025. The book continued to receive LLM accusations, as well as criticisms that the book was poorly written and filled with errors, including a nearly 3-hour YouTube review of the book titled “i 'm pretty sure this book is ai slop” that has been viewed 1.2 million times (!). (Imagine how many human-authored books could have been read with all that time…) Despite these rumors, Hachette US was going to publish an American edition this spring. Now, the US edition has been canceled and the UK edition discontinued.

It is unclear exactly how AI use was determined. The NYT says Hachette did so after “conducting a thorough and lengthy review of the text.” said that “it looks like they only canceled it after the New York Times queried them about it and presented evidence of AI use.” And I will note that the author seems to have basically confessed in a YouTube comment, although she blames it on a friend who edited the book and “changed a lot of the wording” and then claims she didn’t have time to do a final pass herself to check what was changed. (Authors: Read your book before you publish it. You are responsible for edits you accept!) Others have pointed out how the author’s interviews have all the usual LLM tells. The NYT reported that Ballard reiterated the claim that “an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.” and that her “name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do.” She says she is pursuing legal action.

If you want to do a deep dive, read this Reddit thread and watch the two hour and forty minute YouTube.

Some people have asked why this book was canceled at all, even if it was LLM-written or just slop. Lots of bad books are published, right? First, let me note that more than a few books have been published partially or entirely written by LLMs. But these books have all disclosed the fact both to the reader and to the publisher. LLM use is not banned from publishing entirely. In general, the safe thing to do is to disclose any LLM use beyond basic things like spellcheck or research.

The published books that have used LLMs used them in thoughtful, artistic ways. Not to simply generate a book the author didn’t “have time” to write or even read before it was uploaded. What we’re talking about with this case is something closer to traditional copy and paste plagiarism than anything creative.

The issue here seems to be that the author lied about it and signed a contract attesting to sole authorship. The reason to cancel this book is similar to the reason you cancel a traditionally plagiarized book. There are ethical reasons, sure, but also just plain business ones. It hurts your brand and reputation to publish slop—and perhaps also potential legal headaches given recent court rulings—and those things still matter in publishing. Readers might barely notice what colophon is on a book’s spine, but authors care and publishers’ reputation affects how books are covered and sold.

Like many, I’ve been thinking and writing about AI and art a lot over the past few years. And I’ve been particularly worried about the expected flood of slop that threatens to clog up all parts of publishing. So, here are some scattered thoughts on the first book that has been publicly canceled over LLM usage.

It Was a Matter of Time…

We all knew a scandal like this would hit sooner or later. Every editor I know has been crossing their fingers the first big scandal wouldn’t be one of their books or a book on their imprint. What I’ve read of the book was, in my view, bad. But, I have to give a point to the AI boosters here. This book got criticism and suspicions of AI use from readers…but also clearly some people bought it and enjoyed it. It sold 1,800 copies in the UK. This is not like the AI romance author story I wrote about last month, where an author was seemingly spamming the Kindle store with hundreds of books that individually weren’t getting much readership but collectively could grift some income. Shy Girl sold copies and tricked at least some readers.

Does this mean LLMs can write artistically now or compete with great or even just good authors? I wouldn’t go that far. The book seems bad. Sloppy. But we must acknowledge that lots of human slop sells too. Perhaps we can say that LLM slop has achieved human slop levels.

Publishers May Need Stronger Vetting and Editing for Self-Published Acquisitions

Many may wonder how a book this poorly written and also probably AI-generated—again, there were rumors and viral videos about how bad this book was—could have gone through the vetting process and layers of gatekeepers in publishing. Well, it probably didn’t. It was self-pubbed and seemingly sold without an agent. When a US publisher acquires an already published book, it is rare to do much editing. So, the question is how much editing did Hachette UK do? I have no inside knowledge in this case. My suspicion is not much editing was done. Probably a copyedit and proofs for typos. Perhaps nothing more. Again, maybe I’m wrong. But it seems hard to believe a book with this many issues was published with a rigorous vetting process.

This is not to say there aren’t many great self-pub books. There are. But big publishing is a business and many publishers have been grabbing bad self-pub books (and fan fics) because they were selling. The incentive in such cases is to take over the sales as quickly as possible, or else you risk the book’s customers running out by the time your edition hits the marketplace. This scandal shows the risks to that approach.

In general, agents and editors may need to pay attention (if they are not already) to how LLMs are developing and what tics and tells LLM text displays.

Don’t Expect Everyone to “Just Get Over” LLMs

For four years now, people have been insisting everyone will “get used to it” or “get over it” and just all accept LLM use in any and all scenarios. Others seem confident LLMs are a bubble and will disappear. I think both camps are naive. With a technology like this, you should expect to see a lot of different reactions. I expect many readers to remain adamantly against LLMs in the art they consume (even if they use them for other things like boring work emails). I would expect another group to not care. And probably a not insubstantial number will actively seek out LLM art and primarily consume it. Although I suspect most of those will spend their money on access to better models to prompt their own works and not on purchasing books someone else prompted.

The segment of readers who want human work—which, yes, might include artistic uses of LLMs as opposed to low-quality slop—are the readers that publishers will need to keep. That’s going to be their business. The slop will always be cheaper elsewhere. The layers of vetting and editing are the advantages of traditional publishing. They provide, or are supposed to provide, a certain level of quality control. A level of trust. Publishers may need to be a lot more careful now. I mentioned in my last piece that over four million books were published last year, and most of those were self-published books. The big increase in books is almost certainly because of AI. Traditional publishing’s survival may depend on creating a safe island in the sea of slop.

Blurbs May Become Even More of a Pain

Everyone hates blurbing. It is an annoying, awkward, and time-consuming process for everyone involved. It will get worse.

The blurbers of this canceled book likely feel embarrassed and angry. The publisher’s failure can almost be understood by pure profit motives, but blurbing is doing a favor for someone. You don’t get paid to blurb. You put your name on someone else’s work, attesting to the quality. Will authors become even more selective about blurbing? Even less willing to blurb a stranger and more likely to only blurb friends or colleagues who they know enough to trust?

This would be a sad outcome. I know some assume that blurbs are all connections and cronyism, but that isn’t the case. I’ve blurbed authors I’ve never met, and similarly my books have blurbs from authors who had no reason to blurb except that I wrote them a fan letter about how much I loved their work.

Watch Out for AI in Query Letters

In general, I fear everything may get even harder for emerging authors. (Not that it won’t cause problems for established ones too.) If there is a tsunami of slop in every agent’s query inbox, every lit mag’s slush pile, and every editor’s submission stack, then those gatekeepers will have no choice but to figure out a way to drastically filter the flood. Likely, this will mean leaning even more on connections and vetting systems.

Here is a bit of practical advice. Agents are the first filtering system in traditional publishing, and probably the ones hit hardest with slop. One thing I’ve heard is agents are seeing obviously AI query letters even when the book itself doesn’t seem to be AI (at least at a glance). Those authors are being passed on. Why risk working with an author who clearly uses AI for query letters? Are they someone you can trust? I get why authors might turn to LLMs for query letters even if they avoid them in their books. Queries seem like a crass and uncreative part of publishing. Still, I’d advise not risking it.

For a more hopeful read on how we human authors can navigate a world of robot slop, read this recent piece:

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

There were a couple pieces of book world discourse over the last week that I wanted to respond to without writing entire posts about them. So, I’m going to group them here. Before I get to those…

In Personal News

I had a great time chatting with at the Ledger podcast about writing novels, interiority, and my article on “TV brain prose.” Give it a listen!

Also a reminder that I’m running a subscription incentive for the rest of March to celebrate five years of Counter Craft. If you upgrade to an annual subscription (or extend a current annual subscription), I’ll mail you a signed copy of one of my novels or one of the anthologies I co-edited. This is limited to readers in the United States for purely postage cost reasons.

Just shoot me a message when you subscribe with your mailing address and the book you’d like. The options are:

• Metallic Realms (satirical space opera meets autofiction novel)

• The Body Scout (science fiction / cyberpunkish noir novel)

• Tiny Crimes (anthology of flash crime/mystery stories from Brian Evenson, Laura van den Berg, Charles Yu, and more.)

• Tiny Nightmares (anthology of flash horror tales from Stephen Graham Jones, Jac Jemc, Kevin Brockmeier, and more.)

MFA vs. Publishing

Much of my feeds, on Substack and elsewhere, have been taken up with eternal MFA debates. This round was kicked off by a Paris Review interview of Sarah Schulman conducted by Parul Sehgal. Schulman is a very interesting writer and Sehgal a great critic and interviewer, so you should read the whole interview for its merits. But one comment of Schulman’s about MFA programs and the publishing industry made the internet rounds. Schulman seems to imply that MFAs are determining what is published—“The M.F.A. system is currently both dominant and incoherent, and as a result, American literature is filled with repetition.”—says MFA professors are “working for free for the Big Five,”1 and even suggests that MFA directors should “convene” to collude and change “what we feed into the industry.”

There are two interrelated myths here, in my view. That MFA programs have a vast influence over the writing MFA graduates produce and a vast influence on what is published in the marketplace. I see these kinds of claims all the time, especially here on Substack. Often, the claim is that MFA programs are to blame for the state of literature and by extension why no one reads anymore. The reasons suggested are… contradictory. “MFA programs destroyed literature by making everything dense snooty postmodernism that no one enjoys reading!” “Actually, it was by making everything populist slop written to be adapted for film or TV!” “No, it was by making all literature woke and political.” “Wrong! It was because the CIA instructed MFA programs to make all literature unpolitical!” Etc.

This is all a bit backwards, from my vantage.

The state of literature is far more influenced by larger societal factors—fractured media ecosystem, declining reading rates as entertainment options multiply, LLMs, smartphones, the gig economy, etc.—than whatever is taught in an MFA workshop. MFAs do influence literary fiction, but I think we often forget what a small (and sadly shrinking) slice of publishing that is. The trends that dominate contemporary publishing—Romantasy, James Patterson thrillers, LitRPGs, BookTok novels, Harry Potter fan fics getting the serial numbers filed off and sold to for huge advances, etc.—are not the spawns of MFA programs. Nor are the long-standing genres like Romance and Mysteries that make up most of what is published in a given year.

I’ve seen several people claim that big publishing itself is filled with editors, publicists, and marketers who hold MFAs. This is not the case. Exceptions exist, but it is rare for someone working at a Big 5 publisher or a big independent press to have an MFA. There are some pipelines to publishing, including university-run publishing programs, but they are disconnected from MFA programs. I don’t believe any editor or agent I’ve worked with on any project has held an MFA. They’re rare in publishing.2 (When I posted a comment to this effect on Notes just now, several publishing professionals on Substack agreed. So, you don’t just have to take my word for it.)

Put it this way: If you grab a random book off a bookstore table, the odds are that no one involved—from author and agent to editor and publicist—has an MFA degree.

Publishing Influences MFA Programs More than the Reverse

I assume what Schulman and others mean by “American literature” is restricted to the small terrain of literary fiction. Even there, I think people have the causation backwards. MFA programs don’t shape what is published; what is published shapes what MFA (and non-MFA) authors write. Especially when we are talking about the Big 5 in the year 2026.

This should be obvious from the fact that MFA programs focus on poems and short stories3, both of which are almost impossible to sell to big publishers in 2026. Trends that take off in publishing are echoed in MFA programs. Of course they are. MFA students are pretty likely to read contemporary fiction. But the influence typically comes from what is published, acclaimed, and selling. Case in point: literary fiction has arguably been dominated by genre-bending or speculative literary fiction this century. Yet MFA programs famously were, and in many cases still are,4 hostile to genre fiction. The reason books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—none of whom attended an MFA program—were published isn’t because a cabal of MFA directors sat in a dark room and picked genre-bending fiction as the next trend. But the success of such novels in both sales and acclaim inspired many younger writers in MFA programs to write similar things. And even more so, the success inspired publishers to publish more books in the same vein.

[Editing to add: One thing I should note is that the situation was different decades ago, back when literary fiction sold better, book review coverage was robust, and you couldn’t simply look up authors on the internet. But, we don’t live in that publishing world anymore.]

In general, people overestimate the influence of MFA classes on what writers write. A typical MFA program is a couple workshops and a few classes over two years. That will never be as influential as the lifetime of reading and writing before and after those years. I occasionally teach in MFA programs, and I do not see students getting their prose smushed into some imagined MFA mold. They tend to write the kind of work they loved before the program. That’s often literary fiction—MFA applicants are self-selecting after all—but not infrequently it is YA fiction, SFF, or other work rarely taught in MFA programs at all. That doesn’t mean students don’t learn things. But I think they learn to identify techniques they enjoy and hone the aesthetics they already preferred.

Speaking personally, if you read my books and then hopped in a time machine to look at teenage Lincoln’s bookshelf, you wouldn’t be surprised at all. I was reading a mix of weird/surreal literary fiction (Borges, Calvino, Kafka, Barthelme), New Wave SFF and cyberpunk (Le Guin, Gibson, Butler), hardboiled noir (Chandler mainly), and a host of other authors (Nabokov, Carver, Jackson, Marquez) whose influence is clearly stamped on my work today. Sure, I was introduced to some new influences in an MFA program—and have discovered heaps more in the years since—but the core of my aesthetics and preferences were formed when I was younger. I imagine that is true for most writers.

This Isn’t to Say MFA Programs Don’t Influence Literature or Careers, For Good or Ill

None of this is to say MFA programs aren’t influential to individuals or to literature. First, and most importantly, MFA programs provide time and space to dedicate yourself to your craft with a group of likeminded peers. Sometimes, you even get paid to go! So, they help a lot of writers. Time and space to practice and grow are useful for any author, whether you find that in an MFA program or outside of one.

What about the purely careerist advantages of an MFA? Most practically, it is a terminal degree and so allows you to teach at the college level.5 For some agents and publishers in the literary fiction space, they may signal a certain level of experience and dedication. But mathematically, far more MFA graduates exist than will ever get an agent or sell to a big publisher. It’s something that might help your debut manuscript get a closer look from agents. It won’t do a lot more than that. Indeed, any value an MFA might hold to some agents or editors immediately evaporates after your debut. After that, you will be judged by the same factors as any writer: sales track, comps, platform, and so on.

Perhaps the biggest career advantage is simply having a community of peers who may continue to share work, provide advice, refer each other, and so on. Cynically, networking. But this is also the main career advantage of the popular alternatives to an MFA: writing groups, working at magazines, Clarion6, etc. I don’t love the cronyism and careerism in publishing. But, we cannot pretend it is restricted to MFA programs or literary fiction by any stretch. There is every bit—and in many cases far more—cronyism, favoritism, and influence peddling in SFF, Romance, and other parts of publishing.

MFA programs have proliferated in recent decades and tons of writers go through them. So, they have certainly had an effect on American literary fiction, good or ill. It just isn’t by determining what corporate publishing puts out or what readers buy. I’d suggest it’s closer to the opposite. Their influence is in creating a space for literature without a focus on commercial concerns. A place where writers can spend time with likeminded peers (and ideally receiving a small stipend) to focus on their craft while perhaps editing a small-circulation lit mag or interning at a non-profit press dedicated to translated literature. Some will view this as a beautiful thing that preserves and promotes forms of literature that wouldn’t exist otherwise in a culture controlled by corporate algorithms and filled with slop, both human and LLM. Others will view it as a big waste of time that produces authors who can maybe write a decent lyrical short story that appears in a university lit mag but not anything that will sell to a wide number of readers.

To each their own.

If I was to guess what would happen if you evaporated every MFA program in the country, the biggest result would be the near total disappearance of literary short stories.7 The effects on Big 5 publishing would be minimal, and the effects on bestselling fiction almost nil. The idea that it would produce some great new literary culture where millions of people stop scrolling TikTok and watching Marvel movies to rush and support a renaissance of popular and innovative literary fiction… well, that seems like a bigger fantasy than whatever Romantasy series is dominating the bestseller list today.

An MFA Alternative: Working in Publishing?

Speaking to one big five editor about this topic, they brought up something that wasn’t on my radar and that I fear will cause even more despair among writers who feel publishing is already too hard to break into and too much of a “who-knows-who” system. Perhaps skip this section if you fit that description.

Apparently, a fair number of people who work in publishing are selling novels these days. Mostly in upmarket fiction and commercial genre fiction. The editor said it made a lot of sense if you think about how hard it is to get coverage these days. Publishers are looking for safer bets, such as successful self-published authors or authors with large platforms. In this environment, someone who has run successful campaigns for other authors is likely to have a game plan and connections to sell their own book.

This editor even suggested working in publishing wasn’t a bad alternative to an MFA program, as long as you worked in part of publishing that reads lots of manuscripts, meaning editing, marketing, or publicity. “You’ll learn a lot and get paid instead of going into debt.” (When I replied that a lot of MFA programs are funded and give students a stipend, they said, “Well, I don’t actually know anything about MFA programs.” Which perhaps speaks to what I was saying before.)

Speaking of Publishing: Slopocalypse Now!

Recently, I wrote about the tsunami of slop books coming to publishing. Well, here are some depressing numbers. Publishers Weekly just reported that the total number of books published in 2025 topped 4 million. That’s a sharp 32.7% increase from the previous year. As you might guess, the number is driven entirely by self-publishing which accounts for 3.5 million titles. (Self-publishing titles had been holding fairly steady at around 2.5 million8 in the years before ChatGPT came out.) Publishers Weekly doesn’t state AI has enabled this increase directly, only quoting Bowker’s Andrew Kovacs alluding to unspecified “new tools” that make every aspect of publishing easier. But, I’d bet money LLMs are powering the surge.

Note that this does not mean that readers are seeking out LLM-generated books. Self-publishing marketplaces are overrun with AI-generated imitations of popular books, presumably churned out in vast quantities on the hopes that a few readers will be tricked. Sometimes these merely imitate the cover styles, genre tropes, or other features of popular books. But often they are straight-up AI dupes (see Seth Harp’s tweet above). When these books are flooded into the Kindle Unlimited store, the grifters can make money even if every reader quits after a half-dozen pages. KU authors are paid by page read, and even a handful of pages adds up multiplied across hundreds or thousands of titles.

Whenever I mention this slop wave, a few people seem to think I’m slagging self-publishing. I’m not. The reason self-publishing was always at risk of drowning in AI text is entirely logistical and financial. It costs next to nothing to spam the Kindle Unlimited with 1,000 AI-generated ebooks or POD books. It would cost a ton of money to traditionally print 1,000 titles, even in small runs, and the various layers of gatekeepers from editors to bookstore buyers make that grift impossible. At least for now.

Anyway, I tried to offer some more hopeful advice to this slop tsunami here:

I have no tidy way to end this post so, well, I’ll just say see you next week when I promise to talk about something other than MFAs or LLMs.

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My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

Processing is Counter Craft’s semi-regular interview series where I talk to authors about the craft and writing process behind their work. You can find previous entries here. For the first interview of 2026, I’m excited to be talking to Andrew Martin about his excellent new novel Down Time, which is out in bookstores today. Down Time is Martin’s third book, after the novel Early Work and the story collection Cool for America. The novel follows a cast of unmoored millennial characters trying to navigate friendship, fucking, relationships, rivalries, art, and just growing older. The novel is set around the time of COVID lockdowns, but if that makes you wary, let me stress that the novel is very funny. Down Time conjures the lockdown period without feeling weighted down by it, and is filled with sharp observations and knowing details about the millennial generation and the strange times we’re all living in.

I talked with Martin about his chaotic drafting process, the importance of revision, and being “drawn to stories about unhappy people making one another’s lives miserable.”

Down Time is a touching and very funny novel about a group of interconnected friends who spend their time fucking, fucking up, masking, and meandering around the era of COVID lockdowns. The novel alternates between four of these characters as POVs, although others recur. The novel also pulls off a move that I at least consider somewhat risky: switching between third person and first person. In this case, four of the POV characters are in third, and one, Malcolm, is written in first.

Can you talk about how you settled on these characters and this structure for the novel? And what inspired the decision to have one character in first-person POV?

I really stumbled backwards into the structure. The characters came first, slowly, over years of writing, originally, in some cases, in what felt like standalone stories, but increasingly in what I realized needed to be a sustained narrative. Once I knew I wanted all of these people to be together in a novel, I started improvising on the ways they could be connected, and on the order of their sections. There were early drafts that were looser about chronology and less strict about the rotation between characters. But ultimately, it seemed the most generous thing to not make the reader do all of this other work in addition to moving between four different POV characters.

Leaving one character in first person was a little bit of a dare to myself, to see if I could break “a rule” and make it work. But I also like the idea of destabilizing the smoothness of the third person narration, having it feel a little bit messier and even have a slightly fourth-wall breaking quality, but hopefully not in a way that actually takes the reader out of the reality of the story.

When you are writing from the POV of different characters, is there anything you do to get into the head or the voice of a character? When you are drafting, do you focus on one perspective at a time or alternate between them?

My drafting process is pretty chaotic, and it can sometimes take me a long time to “get in the pocket” with a voice on the page that I want to move forward with. For me, the voice comes before any other conception of character, if that makes sense. So once I’ve established a rhythm and sensibility for a character’s narration, whether that’s first person or close-third, the other aspects of the character start to come into focus. I gravitate towards these talky, bookish, self-destructive characters, obviously—it doesn’t necessarily take a visualization exercise for me to inhabit their perspectives.

I alternate pretty freely between perspectives and sections when I’m working, possibly as a form of procrastination. I always find it hard to figure out what these people should do, so I do a lot of toggling between scenarios until something occurs to me.

I’ve started asking about specific craft techniques in these interviews. It just seems fun to narrow in on a specific element. One thing I loved in Down Time was your use of (often comic) asides via em dashes, commas, and parentheses. E.g., the parenthetical here: “But Aaron felt, perhaps because Xaviar was not a girl, that he could bully him in a chummy, locker-room kind of way (Aaron did not spend very much time in locker rooms), and thus cut through his mystique.” Or when Malcolm downloads a novel sent by a friend’s pushy father: “I downloaded the PDF—it was watermarked—and began reading.”

How do you think about asides when writing? And, if we can dig into the grammar, how do you view the differences between using em dashes, parentheses, or clauses set off with commas?

One of my goals is usually to make the prose conversational, to try to simulate thought on the page in a way that feels natural to the reader. So those kinds of asides are usually there to mimic the way one might belatedly or sardonically notice something, or even just to create a little bit of a hitch in a sentence so that you can’t just skim over it. It’s a little reminder that the writer is present, active.

As for the grammar, gosh, I suppose I’m mostly operating on instinct. I think there’s a hierarchy of interruption, with commas being the least intrusive, followed by parentheticals, and then em dashes as the most. So I think it depends as much on the paragraph surrounding any given sentence, the rhythm that feels needed, the sense of urgency in the scene. You probably don’t want to be throwing too many parentheticals and em dashes around during sequences of high drama, though since in my books most of the action is interior, it’s not usually a problem.

I really did laugh out loud at many passages in this novel, although Down Time also has a lovely tonal balance alternating between comedy, tragedy, melancholy, and more. I’d love to hear how you think about tonal balance when writing. Is this something on your mind when drafting or revising or both?

My instinct on the sentence level is to be funny, to look for the little twist or wink that will give the reader a moment of pleasure. But I’m also drawn to stories about unhappy people making one another’s lives miserable. While I’m writing and revising, there’s some instinctual titration going on, trying to make sure things don’t get too wacky on the one end of the spectrum, or melodramatic on the other. The only real “fights” I had with my editor on this book were about a couple of sequences where he felt I was going back to the well one too many times, overdoing the joke—once in a sequence near the beginning where a vibrator keeps humming back to life in the middle of the night, another later one in which a little kid has a pee accident requiring intervention from a childless young woman. In both cases the concern was undermining the heavier emotional material by focusing too much on the silly stuff, and I mostly took the notes, though perhaps still not as completely as he would have wanted. (Sorry Milo!)

All of which is to say, I think about it a lot, and don’t always get it right.

This is your second novel (and third book). It’s sometimes said that each novel makes you learn how to write a novel all over again. What lessons carried over from Early Work and what did you have to learn anew when writing Down Time?

Woof, I wish more lessons had carried over from Early Work. The first draft of that novel was written with the wind at my back in a way I’ve very rarely felt since. The bad lesson I learned from it was that I could write a novel more or less intuitively and be carried along by the momentum of a voice. But this project proved to be much more complex, because it required the precision work of short story writing and also the zoomed out architectural work of a multi-character novel with a lot of backstory that needed to be managed. It seems inevitably that the next novel will make me learn how to do it all over again, because I’ve resolved not to do it this way again! But since it turned out OK, eventually, I worry I’ll be tempted once again to not have learned anything.

During COVID lockdowns, I remember it was common to hear people post on social media a version of “there are going to be so damn many COVID novels and movies!” Then, not many actually came out and the complaint seemed to shift to, “Every work of fiction is just acting like COVID didn’t even happen!” I thought you handled the COVID era well, which was such a strange, horrible, and momentous event we all lived through and whose aftereffects we are still living in. What was it like to revisit that era in fiction?

Though it incorporates (retcons might be the term of art) some material from even earlier, I started writing what became the first chapter of the book in September 2020, and did a lot of the initial drafting and sketching over the next couple of years. So I was writing from the middle of it, even if, weirdly, or maybe self-protectively, already with something of a retroactive perspective. It’s very strange how that can happen. I read The Oppermanns recently, about the rise of the Nazis and its effects on a Jewish family business, which was written in 1933. Even that early, the novel has an elegiac quality that one associates more with historical fiction, with work that already knows the ending. In my case I could have it both ways—drafting while the pandemic was all still happening, and then revising and reshaping and rethinking in the aftermath. For a while, as we all remember (or maybe don’t), it felt like that era was never going to end—it almost felt unseemly reading some of the early sections out loud in, say, 2022, like I was going to cause a Covid outbreak just by invoking it. It did feel strange, in retrospect, to sort of prolong my own Covid era by a few years by living inside this book for so long.

On the question of whether there’s too much or not enough written about this and all that, I had to pretend ignorance on the discourse in order to write and edit the damn thing, and to try to believe that if the work is interesting as a work of art, the subject matter isn’t that important. At least one foreign publisher was put off by “the COVID of it all,” but they (publishers) will always find a reason not to publish something.

Can you talk about the process and timeline of writing, revising, and publishing Down Time? Whatever you’re comfortable sharing.

The writing was such a disparate and prolonged process. It was some combination of second novel syndrome, the distractions and stress of the pandemic, preparing for and then raising a baby (now toddler), run-of-the-mill need to make money, etc. It was the first book I wrote with a suite of serious adult responsibilities, I guess, and it proved very difficult. I gave a much messier draft than I usually would to my agent and wife and a few other trusted early readers, and their feedback finally helped me find my footing with the structure after struggling with it for years. Molly Atlas, my agent, is very good at not letting me send things out until she’s satisfied that they’re as good as they can be, so I went back and forth with her on it for a while. Once I had a draft she was happy with, we sent it to Milo Walls at FSG, and thankfully he took it. Then I worked closely with Milo on a few big rounds of edits over the course of a year or so. Whatever else happens with the book, it benefited so much from having these brilliant people give it so much time and attention in what felt like true collaboration.

I normally ask authors about artistic influences on their novels that aren’t other novels. However, there’s been some bizarre discourse recently about whether authors benefit from reading other books. So, can I ask you first what books provided inspiration for Down Time and then what inspiration from any other artistic mediums (movies, video games, whatever)?

I saw this discourse in your newsletter, which serves as my keyhole into the social media conversations that I otherwise usually miss! Truly strange. I recently talked to an otherwise smart and well-read guy who doesn’t believe in revision. I’ll be very curious to read the books that arise from these philosophies.

Two of the books that influenced my thinking about the structure and general approach to this novel were The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing and Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge. Both take a multi-angled approach to both personal and world history, creating a kind of compound eye effect. Golden Notebook is a rare novel that moves freely between first and third person, though in an explicitly self-reflexive way, since they’re all versions of the same consciousness. And Unforgiving Years is almost a series of four interconnected novellas, though all of the characters fit together in surprising and moving ways. My original conception of this book was influenced by Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, a slightly looser “novel in stories” approach that I eventually tightened up on. Gary Indiana’s Do Everything in Dark also snuck in there I think.

Movies are a huge influence on my writing. The one I was thinking about the most for this was Robert Kramer’s Milestones, an absolutely incredible epic film about leftists wandering through the seventies, trying to find their place in the wake of/after the failure of the cultural and political revolutions of the 60s. It’s a kind of docufiction—for example, there’s an actual live birth in it—and I was really excited about the way it decentralizes the narratives of these different characters but somehow holds them all in balance. Eric Rohmer’s films are often on my mind, his zoomed-in and generous portraits of young and youngish people trying to understand themselves and their relationships. And then Hong Sangsoo, one of his contemporary inheritors, takes that approach in a more experimental direction, scrambling up timelines like puzzle pieces and asking the viewer to make more of the connections. I was also watching a lot of Fassbinder while writing this, but I don’t know if that really made it in there.

The novel features some struggling writers, so as a final question, what advice would you give to anyone reading this interview who is also struggling to finish or find meaning in their work?

The practical advice I would give is: get to the end of the damn thing, whatever it is. Even if it’s provisional and stupid, even if you know that’s not the right second half of the novel, it’s important to find a way to zoom out enough to see it holistically so that you can figure out what it needs. The sooner you get to some kind of end, the sooner you’ll realize that this book—even if it’s Infinite Jest—isn’t going to do everything you want it to do, or say everything you want to say. And that realization will hopefully help get it to the best version of itself it can be. Some kind of deeper meaning, for me, so often comes in revision, or later. It’s rare that a book says what I thought it was going to say.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

This past month marked my five-year anniversary of launching Counter Craft. When I started, I thought I’d run out of steam after two dozen articles or so. Apparently not. Five years of a (fairly) consistent weekly schedule means I now have several hundred Counter Craft articles. A bit hard to believe. And I received a very nice anniversary present from you lovely readers who put me past 20,000 subscribers.

I still publish every article for free initially and plan to keep doing so. But I have paywalled many older pieces. If you want to dig through five years of articles, interviews, and reviews, then consider upgrading to an annual subscription. Being a free subscriber is very nice too. However, to incentivize anyone on the subscription fence I thought I’d offer a five-year anniversary subscription incentive: I’ll send you a signed book.

Subscription incentive details: if you purchase an annual subscription—or extend a current subscription for another year—I will sign and mail you a copy of one of the above books. Either one of my two novels or one of two anthologies I’ve co-edited. (Postage costs mean I can only do this for readers in the US, I’m afraid.) If you’re interested, simply send me a message when you subscribe with your address and which book you’d like. And also say if you just want it signed or dedicated to a specific person. Substack allows you to send a message when paying for a subscription.

The book options are:

• Metallic Realms (satirical space opera meets autofiction novel)

• The Body Scout (science fiction / cyberpunkish noir novel)

• Tiny Crimes (anthology of flash crime/mystery stories from Brian Evenson, Laura van den Berg, Charles Yu, and more.)

• Tiny Nightmares (anthology of flash horror tales from Stephen Graham Jones, Jac Jemc, Kevin Brockmeier, and more.)

I’ll offer this from today until the end of March.

Interior Decorating Tips

I got a great response to my last article, “What Not Reading Does to Your Writing,” which looked at tics and deficiencies I see in prose from writers who do not read much fiction. I had quite a few professors, editors, and agents say they see the same issues in submissions and more than a few readers expressed distress at realizing they default to those same habits. To the latter group, I have two bits of advice. 1) Read a lot of good books. You will absorb good habits. 2) Don’t stress too much about having issues in your writing. This is what revision is for. Truly. No writer gets everything down in their first draft. Revision is exactly the place to balance out chapters, see what needs to be amped up or toned down, improved or cut. So, read and revise. Simple enough.

However, several readers asked me a more specific question: “How do you actually add interiority to scenes?” A lack of interiority isn’t the only feature of what I called “TV brain writing,” but it is the one that provoked the most questions. Other questions I saw asked whether using interiority “violates show don’t tell”? And does fiction really have to have interiority? I figured I’d answer these questions, as best I can. That means this will be more of a fiction 101 post than I usually write. These are things I consider basic, but there is nothing wrong with being refreshed on the basics. And sometimes what seems basic to one person isn’t to another.1

So, What Is Interiority?

In fiction, interiority is relating the internal world of a character to the reader. Their thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, anxieties, memories, motivations, and so on. This is a simple yet consequential thing. Every one of us lives simultaneously in the external shared world and our own private worlds. These two realities are constantly colliding, separating, and distorting each other, whether that’s something as small as snapping at a friend because you are “hangry” or having a life-altering epiphany at the image of, I dunno, a dove flying over a lake that symbolically completes your character arc because you are a protagonist in a literary fiction short story published in a university literary magazine.

I kid, a bit. Still, it is true that our interior worlds are as vast as anything outside of them. If your fiction is missing interiority, it is leaving quite a lot out. This is true in a grander, philosophical sense yet also in a very practical craft sense. Readers tend to connect to stories through the emotions and desires of the POV character(s), and interiority provides that connection. The simplest story structure might be a character wants something but obstacles get in the way. This is a classic and powerful story, but only when the reader understands the character’s wants.

Interiority provides far more than just desires and goals. An interesting character will typically have a gap between how they act or speak and how they think or feel. Here’s an old CW class chestnut: In every scene, you should know what a character says they want, what they think they want, and what they really want. This can be applied to anything from prize-winning literary novels to pulpy superhero films. In this scene, the villain, Dr. Evilguy, says to the security guard that he wants to just use the bathroom but what he thinks he wants is to steal the blasto-ray 4000 omegagun prototype and conquer the city yet what he really wants, deep down, is to please the daddy that never loved them.

There are more things interiority provides than I could list here. One point I would hammer is that while visual media has many advantages over text, access to interiority is one of the advantages of prose.2 It is a form uniquely suited to exploring psychology and thought process. And it is usually smart to lean into the advantages of your medium.

Doesn’t Interiority Violate Show Don’t Tell?

Luckily for us, the Show Don’t Tell law has not yet passed Congress, much less been tested in court. There is no jail time for “violating” it. The prose prison doors are unlocked. Run free!

Look, “show don’t tell” is a fine rule of thumb. It is. In general—and with many exceptions and caveats—readers are more engaged by something they can visualize than something they can’t. “I’m mad” or “I was extremely mad” don’t give the reader as much to see as even a cliché like “She screamed and gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white”. A general rule is not a commandment. It does not follow that showing is always superior to telling in every context much less that every sentence should be showing and never telling.

There are also things that cannot be dramatized in scenes and must be told through interiority. A character’s thought process, emotional arc, or the contrast between their hidden feelings and stated words. To pick a classic example, consider Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” in which the bulk of the story takes place in the character’s mind as she moves from despair at her husband’s death to the joyous realization that she will now be free as a widow in a way she never could be as a wife.

And there are entire modes of storytelling that prioritize telling over showing. Fairy tales, for example, and those have been popular for quite some time.

Lastly, I have always thought that “show don’t tell” is better thought of as meaning a visual image (or other sensory detail) will be more powerful than an abstraction. The distinction here is that you can provide a visual image to the reader in ways other than action3 and dialogue, most obviously through metaphor. Here’s a section of the opening of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” which has one of my favorite metaphors in literature. I do not think it would be improved by instead describing a bunch of the narrator’s physical movements and facial gestures.

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the high school. And at the same time I couldn't doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream. This would always be at a moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had once said or done.

Must You Include Interiority in Fiction?

No.

If you have read my newsletter, you know that I love fiction for its protean form and infinite possibilities. Anything can be done. There is nothing you have to do. I write about books I love that have no real plot, have no real characters, deploy experimental structures, use illogical worldbuilding, or otherwise break “the rules.” My critique of what I called “TV brain prose” is that it seems to be a default mode of writing that lacks intention. Although, well, I can’t access anyone else’s interiority4, my impression is that the lack of interiority is not so much a conscious choice done to create specific effects and more something the writer just isn’t thinking about. Or not thinking about enough.

There are also intentional reasons to avoid interiority that should be avoided. Plot-focused authors—and especially the twist-focused author—may want to avoid spilling the [spoiler redacted5] or otherwise revealing information that would undermine the plot twists. Again, anything can be done. But this move is usually cheap and irritating. If your character knows something relevant, and we have access to their interiority, the reader should know it too. At the very least, you need a strong character-based or at least in-universe reason for the information to be hidden. Ishiguro earns it by having his characters be so repressed and restrained that, yep, you believe those buttoned-up Brits might block things out of even their own thoughts. If your only reason to have, say, a murderer who avoids thinking about the crime they just committed is because you don’t want to spoil the reveal of the killer, well, you might need to rethink your POV character.

What are good reasons to avoid interiority? (When there is truly no interiority in a third-person narration, this is called third-person objective6.) Since we relate to characters through their thoughts and feelings, a lack of interiority can productively distance readers from the characters. Make their actions seem more ambiguous and the story colder and meaner. Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics” is a classic example. You most commonly read third-person objective storytelling in non-fiction, in journalism. Reporters craft a narrative by their selection and ordering of details and quotes, but they don’t editorialize and directly state their feelings. That is also an effect a writer can harness. Shirley Jackson’s infamous “The Lottery” would not have such a shocking ending if the story didn’t lull you into complacency with the removed, journalistic narration:

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 27th. But in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

Interiority also isn’t a matter of yes or no. Interiority can be strategically added and removed to create interesting effects and moods. Another favorite very short story is John Cheever’s “Reunion.” It’s two pages, so go read it. But I’ll describe it too. This story opens with a long paragraph where the narrator, Charlie, relates how excited and invested he is in a visit from his father during a train layover:

He was a stranger to me—my mother divorced him three years ago and I hadn't seen him since—but as soon as I saw him I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom. […] I hoped that someone would see us together. I wished that we could be photographed. I wanted some record of our having been together.

After this wide window into Charlie’s feelings, his interiority drops out. The rest of the story relates scenes of his father being an asshole to a variety of waiters—Charlie doesn’t even speak—and getting them kicked out of restaurants. It is all action, description, and dialogue.

“I don't like to be clapped at,” the waiter said.

“I should have brought my whistle,” my father said. “I have a whistle that is audible only to the ears of old waiters. Now, take out your little pad and your little pencil and see if you can get this straight: two Beefeater Gibsons. Repeat after me: two Beefeater Gibsons.”

This goes on for some time until finally his short window time is up. Charlie says, “I have to go, Daddy, it’s late.” He leaves. The final clause is simply “and that was the last time I saw my father.” Although Charlie’s interiority isn’t related after the opening, you can sense his thoughts and the emotional devastation of realizing his father is a drunk asshole who can’t even make a real effort for his own child. But, you only feel that because of the interiority groundwork laid in the opening paragraph.

How Is Interiority Deployed in Fiction?

There are lots of ways to relate interiority, and most probably do not need much elaboration. A first-person narrator can simply speak in a monologue, state their thoughts and feelings, or describe their memories. A third-person narrator can either directly or indirectly7 relate their interiority. Plenty of famous works of fiction even open this way: “I am an invisible man” (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man). “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog” (Saul Bellow’s Herzog). “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida” (Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”).

Even the “show don’t tell” tyrants are able to use interiority since it can involve action or dialogue. You can do this in memory:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

(The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Or in fantasy:

She nearly stopped forever just outside Ashton, because she came to a tiny cottage buried in a garden. I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin…But the cottage was far behind, and it was time to look for her new road, so carefully charted by Dr. Montague.

(The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson)

When writing in third-person POV, you can also use a technique called “free indirect discourse,” which is the writing program jargon for moving into the thoughts or voice of a character without direct signaling like she thought or he felt. Direct: “I hate that stupid, ugly dog.” Indirect: She glared at Barkles and said he was a loathsome cur. Free indirect: She glared at the ugly mutt. What kind of idiot names their dog Barkles in the first place? To pick a real example, consider this passage from James Joyce’s “The Dead”:

He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

So, I’ve said a bunch about what interiority is and looked at some specific examples of various types of interiority. How specifically do you deploy these? The possibilities are endless, but a few starting points:

• Contradiction. Show that your character says one thing while they mean another. Explain how they hide their feelings, perhaps even from themselves. Reveal what they are behind the facade they show the world.

• Variation. Most good scenes—though, as always, exceptions exist—offer a variety of narrative elements. Some combination of action, dialogue, description, interiority, etc. If you have a section of dialogue you want to break up, add some interiority instead of just action. If you want to pause the physical action, explore the mental action. Mix interiority in with description, dialogue, and everything else.

• Addition. There’s no reason to think of interiority as separate from other elements. It can be interwoven with them in a paragraph or even in a sentence. We think while we act, remember while we look, and feel while we talk in the real world. Our characters can do so on the page too.

• Tension. The stakes of the story depend on the emotions of the characters, and every scene will be more tense and dramatic if we know what the characters want. A long passage of increasing apprehension can also make the moment or revelation all the more powerful.

• Information. If showing is often more emotionally powerful, then telling is often more intellectually powerful. If you are dealing with ideas, you probably want a lot of interiority. And in any event, telling can be a more efficient means of imparting information—whether about characters, plot, the world, or anything else—to the reader than showing something in scenes.

• Immersion. We experience the world through the narrative perspective, which means interiority is an ideal place to immerse the reader in the tone and world of the story.

The Character Filter

There is another level of interiority that is the most interesting to me, which is using your character’s subjectivity as the filter for the entire story. Interiority isn’t merely the character’s thoughts and emotions. It is also how they see the world, summarize events, interpret actions, and describe settings. We all have different interests, ideologies, and identities. We can look at the same event and single out different details or eat the same food and prefer different dishes. Two roommates might describe the same living room in contrasting ways that reveal their different characters and feelings. “A cluttered, depressing mess filled with Jessica’s tacky trinkets and ‘inspirational art’” vs. “A cozy, peaceful place where you just feel relaxed…at least when Cheryl wasn’t moping about or reading aloud from one of the angsty poetry books she left strewn around the apartment.”

The point is we all experience the world filtered through our own interiorities. If your passage is in first person or close third, then everything from descriptions to summaries should be viewed through both that character’s physicality (e.g., what they can see) and the character’s interiority (e.g., how they see it).

This is something most writers know, but can easily be forgotten when writing. Even in first-person stories, I often see passages of summary that read more like a Wikipedia entry than a character speaking. “I drove into the town of Townville, which had a population of 40,000 people and was located between South River and North River outside of Centerville. Founded in 1934 by Edward Town, the town of Townville had once been home to a miniature town model factory that employed one third of the town during…” Unless your character is a local historian, that’s probably not how they think about the town.

A particularly amusing manifestation of this habit is when a writer gives extremely specific details about things like the makes of cars, the types of wood used in various furniture items, or the brand names of clothing pieces with no regard to the character’s mindset or knowledge base. I assume this stems from the idea that concrete details are always stronger. But details only work if they make character sense. “Tom was panicking. Someone had just stolen his dog! Poochie! No! Tom sprinted after the dognapper past a 2022 Ford F-150 in Carbonized Gray, two silver Kia sedans, a 2024 Lexus ES in Moonbeam Beige Metallic, a 2019 Chevy…” Unless Tom works in automobile manufacturing, then he is probably not aware of specific car models much less clock them as he sprints after his stolen dog. (On the other hand, the obsessive listing of designer clothing items in American Psycho fits into the shallow and status-obsessed mind and world of Patrick Bateman. It makes character sense and thematic sense.)

Filtering through your character’s interiority allows for much richer prose because the sentences are doing double duty. They’re conveying setting information or advancing plot or establishing atmosphere and they are deepening character. If you use your character as the filter through the world—and summarize and describe from their minds—you achieve the richest interiority. Make your character’s mind be the brush that paints the world.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.