The conflicts of the famous, the ones that are different from ordinary lives, are well trod territory. Conversely, the banalities of a celebrity’s life—the things we can ostensibly relate to as everyday people—are only interesting because they are famous. This is why celebrity memoir remains a powerful, well-selling category of books. Rarely do these books offer exceptional insight or storytelling, but readers are engaged by the mere fact of the monumental success of their subjects.2 No one cares what you ate for lunch, but if Al Pacino is across the table suddenly you have a sandwich worth telling a story about. There’s a reason successful non-celebrity memoir is an entirely different category of book. If you wrote your memoir like Price Harry’s, from childhood to present day, dealing with every little embarrassment and minor family conflict, no one would be interested.3

A great many people will read Life of M by Rachel Cusk, also known as the novel about Natalie Portman, because it is about Natalie Portman—“disguised” as “M”.4 There is reason for even a well-informed book editor who knows the problems of fictionalized celebrity to be pulled in. If you didn’t know, this isn’t Portman’s first dalliance with our small world of literature, making her a more intriguing subject than your average A-lister. Portman whose intellectualism is well publicized5, had a rather infamous email relationship with the writer Jonathan Safran Foer. Reading these exchanges will give you enough second hand embarrassment to last the year, an embarrassment compounded by the fact that Portman and Foer thought they sounded smart and clever enough to publish them all in the New York Times Style Magazine. Here’s a small taste:

Foer (5:44am): It’s almost 6:00 in the morning. The boys are still asleep. I can hear the guinea pigs stirring, but that might be the residue of a nightmare. People often refer to aloneness and writer’s block as the two great challenges of being a novelist. In fact, the hardest part is having to care for guinea pigs…

Portman (3:36am): My mother-in-law used the word guinea pig when telling me a story in French yesterday, and it’s “cochon d’inde,” which translates to “pig from India.” Who’s right?...

Even the timestamps on these email exchanges are overwrought. Better than many a piece of fiction, this correspondence is delightfully uncomfortable because it reads like two people heavily flirting electronically by trading JSTOR links. Foer got divorced from fellow novelist Nicole Krauss6 shortly after these heavy panting emails with Portman. The speculation was that Foer threw it all away because he thought he had a chance.7 Suffice it to say, Portman’s personal preoccupation with seeming literary and her entanglements in the book world make her the perfect celebrity— editorially, but also marketing wise—for a literary writer to novelize.

Not All Auto Fiction is Created Equal

Like many literary novelists Rachel Cusk had been writing a long time before her career finally took off— there’s a reason Cusk found herself in the company of Portman enough to write about her after all. Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, a series of auto fictional novels championed by renowned literary publisher FSG really took off, perhaps tapping into some of the zeitgeist generated by the auto fictionally tinted Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which exploded around the same time in 2015-2016. While both share a detached narration style befitting auto fiction, the similarities between the two series stop there. Cusk’s Outline Trilogy is equally worthy of its adoration.

The conceit of Outline begins with strangers telling an unnamed literary novelist (Cusk) their stories, primarily on plane rides. The brilliance of these novels is that although auto fictional, Cusk uses this liminal, between space, and herself as narrator/listener to quickly move into the lives of the others. These three novels are cerebral and wide ranging and if you want to give Cusk’s work a try definitely start here. No doubt Cusk deservedly earned herself many fans for life8 with these works, likely including Natalie Portman.

For as ostensibly trapped as being on a plane with a literary novelist could feel, the Outline Trilogy that put Cusk on the map never feels confined in the same ways that the three auto fictional works that have followed the series do. What is so exceptional about Cusk’s first auto fictional works is that everything is filtered through an autobiographical lens but that it’s not the typical narrator directly addressing the reader constantly reminding you the author is working hard away. It contrasts to what doesn’t work about the auto fiction of Life of M. At its worst, auto fiction feels like unedited diary entries, and often passages in M take on this quality—those expecting a narrative of encounters with Portman or even a character study will be disappointed. This is the first but not the last of not particularly profound first-person observations of simple phenomena9:

I was suspicious of the power of distraction that films possessed. Their total sensory invasion was overwhelming. It could sometimes take days to recover from seeing a film. It was as though, by watching the film, you acquired a set of memories that were not your own. For a while, everything looked different, as if the film were still happening outside in the world. Even in the best films things were made to seem more possible than they actually were, especially cruelty. The possibility of cruelty was nearly always present in films. It was as if, in films, people could do whatever they wanted and were simply choosing not to for now. It was as if there was no law.

Unlike Cusk’s first-person perspective of the Outline novels, in Life of M we are treated to a much more self-conscious protagonist, a narrator ready to talk at you rather than sit back and listen. One who goes out of her way to tell us that although she is writing about Natalie Portman she never even watches films—presumably because their “sensory invasion” is overwhelming. That she’s such an artiste that she doesn’t really know who Natalie Portman is, not like all the other philistines who watch movies and care about celebrities. This is accompanied by a common tendency for auto fictional novelists to obscure their identity that can fall into abstraction and vagary foregoing the detail necessary for an engaging read. This starts with unnamed narrators or characters simply named “M” but can quickly spread. For instance, like the characters, none of the films are named in the novel, such that we get a long description of several films, including Black Swan, without them ever being addressed directly.

The benefit of cloaking a celebrity in the anonymity of fiction is that it grants the reader the opportunity for projection and the author to exercise mystery and fiction. For instance, with Life of M the elusive nature of auto fictional pseudonymizing is more effective when an unnamed film businessperson arrives and behaves rudely toward Portman, who has been advised to smile through it and take his abuse as a way to get a job. The reader wonders: who is this person in real life? We fill in the gaps, asking ourselves who could have more power than Portman in Hollywood at this point, it must be some sort of auteur, we think, and so on. An obscene corporatized literary event later in the novel also provides this pleasure, as several renowned unnamed people (writer, director and model) put on an absurd literary “salon” that Portman moderates. Here, hiding identities serves to charge the narrative by making the reader fill in the gaps. But if we’re talking about Black Swan, it’s irritating to pretend that it could be any award-winning film about rivaling ballerinas, it’s frustrating to get abstract over direct critical analysis of the film.

The Celebrity Cliche Check List

What these mechanics all add up to is that Life of M does not manage to capture the gossipy nature of the Portman-Foer email saga, nor steer clear of any of the pitfalls of celebrity as character. Rather than extensively quote the passages, here is a list of the well-trod celebrity territory that is expounded upon in Life of M:

*Celebrities skip lines at airports

*Celebrity homes and spaces are often beautiful and antiseptic

*Celebrities have help—maids, masseuses, cooks—with whom they exchange smiles with, but with whom they are not, in fact, friends

*Celebrities live largely frictionless existences, including temperature-controlled homes and cars

*Commercially successful artists are desperate to be seen as critically successful and as artists

*Relatives are needy and take advantage of their status with the celebrity in kind of gross ways

*Actors become a character in their own public life, so that they are acting both on screen and off

*In large cities where these extremely privilege live at ease, people live on the streets and struggle to survive.

*Normal people are incredibly intrusive, obvious, and/or straight up rude when trying to take photos of celebrities while they are out in public

Occasionally the novel breaks through in a moment of detail or scene and gets away from these cliché observations of fame, like when an actual ballerina punctures how nice everyone else is to Portman and Cusk’s (the narrator’s) sharp observation about this interaction:

When the elderly dancer heard her name she burst out laughing, if laughter was the word for a sound so desiccated and malevolent. You were terrible in that film! she exclaimed. The indefatigable mechanism of M’s smile, which had withstood so many tests, did not fail her, but all the same it took her a moment to recognise this adversary, which was not the woman herself but the strange cruelty of the discipline she practised. M’s performance in the film had been universally acknowledged to be outstanding. She knew that the dancer could not help her remark: she believed that M was terrible because at heart she believed that she herself was terrible. It was her discipline that had convinced her of this, and to the extent that M had been shaped by that same discipline, she agreed with her.

The effectiveness of this passage is contrasted with many others because crucially the point of view of the narrator is trained on two other characters, rather than being stuck alone in a narrator’s head that cannot name people or places directly and must resort to abstract musings about London or Portman as a result. Fiction has many unlimited powers that nonfiction does not, but Life of M did make you wonder if this relationship without all of the unnecessary mystery—but for the legal issues— would have been better as a straightforward memoir? Might it have been more interesting as a brief, weird, art-related flirtation—a la the Foer emails— between Rachel and Natalie rather than The Narrator and M?

How Does Natalie Portman Come Off in the Novel?

Happy to save curious readers some time, let’s explore the question that nearly all readers coming to Life of M will be asking. Portman comes off as fine. It’s basically the checklist of observations above and Portman does seem like she wants to ingratiate herself with prestigious, “high art” artists such as Cusk. It’s not exactly anything you couldn’t glean about Portman if you apply even a semi-cynical lens to her public persona. Cusk also adds a rather blunt, almost Q&A-like passage for readers at the end illuminating all the questions you have about the line between fact and fiction in the novel and how Portman feels about the whole thing:

I don’t like the way you portray me, she said. Actually, it’s hurtful.

But it isn’t you, I said. It isn’t anyone.

She looked at me coldly.

You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity, she said. You’ve made it seem like I’m unable to love.

But you’re just playing a character, I said. The character was invented by me. So if that’s true, then it’s me it’s true of.

M’s big dogs had climbed onto my lap and were licking my face.

I haven’t even googled you, I said. I know nothing about you.

…

She had never been to any of the places I’d described, nor done the things I had narrated. Most importantly, she was not the atomised victim I portrayed her as.

…

Obviously you can do what you want, she said. But I don’t want you using my name.

In the novel, Cusk lets Portman read the manuscript and unsurprisingly Portman doesn’t like the way she is portrayed. Even if Portman’s character isn’t explicitly bad— it honestly might have been a more interesting novel if it was caustic—it’s not exactly empathetic. If anything, this all results in the reader coming away a little sympathetic for Portman—in yet another cliché of how we often feel about famous people in fits and starts—yeah, celebrities can’t really do boring shit without receiving undo scrutiny. Even a literary novelist who claims to not know anything about your filmography will write a couple hundred pages using your few interactions as inspiration. Portman is trying, it seems, to be “normal”—which we know from a century of celebrity analysis is both folly and an impossibility—and Cusk is there, like everyone else, to stop her.

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Having taste is an under-remarked-upon part of being a book editor or any profession that bridges the gap between art and commerce. It’s what is depended on but isn’t talked about, largely because it seems so amorphous to define. As we discuss identifying new talent and computerized plagiarism, taste is more important than ever. There are some people who know how to spot talent and others who don’t. But what is taste?

Recognizing quality and intentional skill where it may not be apparent.

That’s where having taste starts, with the real ability to recognize not only a book’s quality but understand the largely unseen skills that went into producing it. That’s a two-step, not one-step process. It it helps to bring in fine art by way of example. Most people, myself included, can’t tell you what skills make a Rothko or a Pollock special. A lot of people encounter these paintings for the first time and think they are pretty cool or just that they look like kid art. It takes a deeper understanding of the techniques and the evolution of the artform to fully appreciate that these paintings aren’t as simple as they seem. Whereas something like a van Gogh shouts its quality and skill to any casual observer (why van Gogh paintings are on more keychains, t-shirts, and tchotchkes than Rothko’s or Pollock’s). This is applicable to every artistic medium. You have some taste if you can spot a well-written book (more difficult than you think!), but even more if you can explain why that well-written book’s sentences and style are effective. Even better if you work to understand how and why the form has evolved over time.

That’s the first (two-step) part of the definition of taste: discernment. The second part of the definition is where it may not be apparent. Taste demands keen consideration. If the quality and skills are more apparent, i.e. Van Gogh, less taste is required to discern it. After developing the ability to spot something good and understand why it is good, taste is about the work it takes to find and/or explain it. Unearthing a 1995 dystopian novel in translation is an impressive display of taste. Once it goes viral on TikTok, its subsequent discovery becomes less of an act of taste.

It’s important to note that taste is not strictly highbrow. You can be a connoisseur of something extremely simple and accessible and (seemingly) uncomplicated. Have you ever seen a video of some random person taste testing seltzer blind who is able to identify each one out by name? This is a literal taste test, an exercise in discernment. The difference between a seltzer expert and a sommelier is just the complexity, both real and perceived, of these talent spotting skills as recognized by the wider world. However, both your French vintner and your old man in a New York bodega are both on the same continuum—they both are exercising taste.

In broad strokes we tend to value the former type of taste monetarily (popular taste) and the latter (hyper-specific taste) with cultural capital (that eventually can turn into monetary capital). Figuring out the most addicting flavor of Dorito has more monetary value than knowing how to pick out the best ingredients at the farmer’s market. In book terms this might be the difference between knowing what a great beach read is versus what might be nominated for the Booker translation prize. Similar skills with different applications and rewards.

How Do You Gain Taste?

To gain taste you have to A) push yourself outside your comfort zone of what you understand and B) at least try to understand and appreciate those new things. You have to read/watch/listen to/look at things outside of what you naturally gravitate to. This is a bit counterintuitive because developing taste requires careful study of quality and craft, but it also goes beyond mere specialization. The specialization piece lets you know how certain similar looking things are actually different (like different brands of plain seltzer), but taste says that you can pick which one is better (Vintage, obviously, who would gainsay the true connoisseur?).

Developing taste is all about consuming and then comparing and analyzing books against each other. Oft repeated on Dear Head of Mine is the example of a typical English major going straight into book publishing and trying to apply a classical academic lens to contemporary literature. Having such a narrow view, even if that view is focused on the greatest literary works of all time, prevents you from gaining or having taste. Join a book club and experience reading at the whims of other people— it will help you develop taste more than a graduate program.

In other words, having taste is defined by risk. Whether it is indie films, experimental literature, high fashion, or a brand-new sound, there is far more uncertainty when you’re sticking your neck out for something that isn’t obvious. You can’t have great taste if you stay in the comfort zone of your specialty and rely on a sort of buttoned-up expertise. Just like you couldn’t find a great new painting if you only studied post-modern painters, you can’t understand literature if you just read the classics or just stick to the New York Times bestseller list.

Underrated entirely by snoots the world over is that you must try to understand things you do not like and why you do not like them. The people who I have known who legitimately have the best taste tend to say what they think in a fairly unjudgmental way. They aren’t desperate for you to agree with them or shut you down if you don’t. They could tell you why Dan Brown is good or why they don’t care for Richard Powers.1

Not only does reading widely help you narrow in on the small differences in quality and construction, but it fulfills that second requirement of taste in helping you find new, interesting stuff that won’t ever be found if you stay in your bubble of personal preference and proficiency.

Tastemakers vs. Market Makers

The best way to measure taste is by testing it. You recommend, wear, point out something and other people respond. It becomes something akin to a reputation, the kind of reputation that takes an extremely long time to build— if most people can’t take the time to have taste, then imagine how long it takes for those same people to notice someone else has taste.

While proving your taste is about convincing other people the books you like have value, taste is not popularity. Maybe that’s obvious. The whole point of the concept is that there’s an objective quality outside of what is inherently and naturally appealing to everyone. To extend our food metaphors even further: no one is surprised that you can come up with a new bacon dish that’s delicious, but if you turn a lentil into the star of the show it’s legitimately impressive.

Taste making and market making are two separate but often interrelated and overlapping skills: there’s spotting what is objectively worthy and spotting what will be popular. Plenty of editors—most of them, probably—have a little bit of each. But not all people have both. The true artistes tend to be completely baffled by — and sometimes overly dismissive of — what is popular. The pleasure-minded tend to be completely baffled by— and sometimes overly dismissive of — what is formally challenging. A lot of us exist somewhere in the middle.

Things spotted by tastemakers often develop over time to become appreciated— they start with a few people recognizing their quality and slowly build out. There are taste making literary agents (and editors) who when they send you a manuscript, you open it with a certainty that it will be baseline worth reading from end-to-end—that’s taste even if the manuscript isn’t sold for a million dollars or the book never sells a million copies. Whereas editors and literary agents who are good market makers are good at identifying what will be a hit, the market tests this hypothesis instantly and they receive their scorecard.

Taste BS

Why taste is hard to measure is not because it’s as subjective as many would assume, but because there isn’t a clear or immediate accounting as there is with popularity. Taste doesn’t insist upon itself.

Taste may not be an innate quality— you’re not just born with it, it can be trained—but it probably gets mistaken for one for the reason that taste cannot be faked. We all know someone, whether its in books, film, or music that has a sort of put-upon taste. Like they looked at a bunch of “best of” lists and carefully calibrated their favorites based on how they think others will perceive them.2 Part of what inspired this essay was another essay on Substack about tech bros understanding that taste is valuable and that they want it, but of course, quite laughably, they can’t manufacture it. Take one look at Mark Zuckerberg trying to look like the platonic ideal of a GQ writer and you can see why for yourself.

It is also a funny illustration of the idea outlined above regarding specialization—here’s a group of people with a hyper niche specialization (technology) not realizing that knowledge alone cannot equal taste. Taste is not an equation to be solved. The act of mimicry is inherently anti-taste. What’s so energizing about the concept in general is that it is not a “fake it till you make it” situation. To prove you have taste, you to go out there and plant your flag, maybe shout about how what you’re standing on top of is really good, and do so again and again. Taste is beautifully human, vulnerable, and flawed that way.

People who want to be seen to have taste and lord it over others or try desperately to convince you that they have it usually don’t. If the derogatory term gatekeeper were ever applicable it would be here. These people are trying to convince everyone else that taste is exclusive and monopolized when it is anything but. They are promoting that voice in reader’s heads that says “if I don’t understand this literary masterpiece then I must be dumb,” because if readers really examined closely, they would realize these wannabe tastemakers are emperors with no clothes.

Conviction or Delusion

The work never ends with taste because there is a fine line between having conviction and being delusional. We all get caught up on our own personal likes and dislikes. We get obsessed with aspects of art that we inflate the importance of that, for all intents and purposes, we are wrong about. And yet we must continue to have conviction and own up to admitting they are delusions every once in awhile.

Consider the classic Madievsky Rule in which all literary fiction (especially by women) is rated 3.5/5 stars. That means most fiction is stuck right in between average (3) and good (4) for most readers. 3.5 is a number that perfectly exemplifies the tension between conviction and delusion. It is where the proving grounds of taste is. 3.5 is where art that is trying to both reach people and be unique falls, in the valley between the 5-star blockbuster reads and the 5-star award-winners. At 3.5 out of 5 the voters are saying: we don’t know what to make of this. This is where someone with taste can step in and be a book’s champion.

Make no mistake, nothing is better that someone with taste because nothing saves you more time. Enjoy the people in your life who do this hard work, build the skills to discern and take the time to find great books in this valley. If you can find a good half dozen people who know what they’re talking about, your to-read, to-watch, to-listen pile will be forever filled to the brim. Then it’s your duty to return the favor by sampling widely and taking the risk to say that what you think is three-and-a-half stars is actually five-point-o.

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What has me feeling compelled to write about these scandals are some of the long, quite frustrated comments on my most recent newsletter about how editors evaluate submissions. An extremely different response than the first time I tackled the subject about a year ago. The ground is certainly shifting beneath us. There is a bit of understandable rage from some readers and writers that likely has to do with the recent news story of Jerry Falade. Falade recently sold his debut thriller called Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body for $2.4 million dollars, only for the deal to fall through when questions of AI usage were raised.

I’m not one to obfuscate or dance around the matter: common sense says that Falade probably did use AI, but we’ll get to that. There were a reported 10+ bidders involved in the Falade saga, a fact that had DHM readers taking issue with this statement from Friday’s newsletter: “The best or even the merely good stuff isn’t ‘missed’ by traditional publishing.” Their response, essentially: how could the standards be so high if 10 editors are willing to rubber-stamp AI nonsense?

The honest answer is that both truths exist parallel to each other. What is known as traditional publishing, especially in modern times, rarely misses those literary novels readers fall in love with (just go look at your shelf). For every originally self-published The Martian or indie press star like Carmen Maria Machado (both now with Big Five publishers) there are tons more books that people really admire and agree are incredibly good that made their way through the traditional route of the Big Five. There is always the possibility that there are great novels sitting in drawers or untranslated (there probably are some). But these are exceptions, not the rule. Plus, there are plenty of books that are published that are under-read and under appreciated that are legitimately exceptional—publishing may be close to meritocracy in what books are made available not in how authors are paid and books are distributed or marketed. I like what agent Anna Sproul-Latimer wrote a few weeks ago on the matter:

More than a decade ago, a fellow agent whispered this to me over beers: “getting signed out of the query pile isn’t hard if the book is good.”

She wasn’t lying. There are exceptions, of course—BACTERIA COLONIES, DENISE—in the form of future sleeper hits and surprise market-creating experimental work and whatever, but more often than not, that truth applies.

Traditional publishing also publishes a lot of other stuff that is not “the best” or “merely good” stuff, primarily for profit. Books that don’t have to be good but simply must have demand. Now that demand has shifted — readers lowering their standards for quality — traditional publishers are probably publishing more low-quality books than ever. I do share the profound disappoint at the lack of professional standards the editors and publishers involved in the Falade auction displayed in getting into a bidding frenzy for an AI novel. It is embarrassing. You can see in the comments how this lack of professional standards harms the reputation of the entire industry.

Even Falade himself said, “If the manuscript had shown genuine signs of being generated by AI, it is difficult to believe that every one of those experienced professionals would have failed to notice.” It’s quite obvious how this happened: the groupthink of the market. It’s a situation that happens all of the time—a few editors get excited about a project’s commercial prospects and other editors start to assume, often against their better judgement, that they must be missing something.

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Writers perhaps don’t want to believe book publishing is a meritocracy, and it isn’t in most every regard expect for the binary question of what does and doesn’t get published. The best or even the merely good stuff isn’t “missed” by traditional publishing. Even self-publishing successes usually get “taken over” in due course by traditional publishing. That’s why when it comes to submissions, a lot of the good, completely obvious novels and book proposals—of either high quality or good commercial potential, or occasionally both—are extremely competitive. There is no “gatekeeping” to be performed when 14 other editors want the publish the same book: you want to turn your nose up at the quality of the submission, that’s just fine, there are 13 other editors behind you clamoring to publish it.1

Over the last few years, every editor has found themselves saying some version of “submissions are either selling lightning fast or sitting forever”. It isn’t uncommon for editors to express interest on a project to its agent within hours, overnight, or in days and not even be the first to the punch. A recent project I was interested in set meetings within hours of going on submission and was preempted2 within days. That fiercely competitive process is one end of the spectrum. Odds are that as an editor these hyper competitive submissions won’t result in an acquisition since you’re one of dozens of interested parties. That’s one reason why the submission part of the job isn’t so fun: an editor runs around for a week or two when they get a big submission, rushing to come up with a comprehensive editorial and publishing plan, and chances are that, in the end, all this groundwork will evaporate into thin air when the submission gets sold elsewhere.

The other end of the spectrum is like sifting for gold with your bare hands. Editors receive on average anywhere from 1-3 submissions a day, not a business day, but a day.3 The number of submissions an editor will acquire from this pool is in the low single digit percentages.4 Acquiring these books is also no walk in the park. If there isn’t instant, obvious interest like in the above scenario, an editor must argue the market.5 Without quick and furious outside interest an editor has to go out on a limb and make the case to their editorial higher-ups that what they’ve found is gold and not schist. This is the reality—not so much gatekeeping, but more like an attorney arguing an impossible case.

While it is exhilarating to strike gold, it is not the glamorous work a bright-eyed English major might have been led to believe it is. You’ve probably done the math and realized that it’s impossible to read 365+ manuscripts from start to finish, so an editor often stops reading when they feel certain that they either don’t want to or won’t be able to buy a project. This is why — sans paying you money to publish your manuscript — the highest level of validation an editor can give you is reading a manuscript in its entirety, especially if they know they won’t end up working on it. Below are observations based on a few weeks’ worth of reading submission to add to previous warning signs discussed. What signals make an editor read on and what ones make us cut our losses and go back to the endless pile of submissions for something else. There are six in total: two red flags, two yellow flags, and two green.

Red Flag #1: Bad Genre

Several gimmicks have been devoted at Dear Head of Mine to the idea that some types of stories are harder to get people interested in than others. A thought that ran through my mind while reading submissions recently was: “if it isn’t written, there’s a reason.” Can’t find a shelf full of a similar kind of book at your local store, or at the top of the bestseller list as the submission you’re reading? It’s probably because there is a cultural aversion to it.

A sub-genre like espionage novels presents a good case. A fabulous genre that contains many exceptional novels, but a genre born of out a specific time and place, namely the Cold War. Since the peak days of Graham Greene and le Carré the idea of spies has just become less interesting to people in general for technological reasons (most surveillance doesn’t happen person to person anymore) and political reasons (people are less interested intellectually in the warring ideologies that undergird this genre). That doesn’t mean exceptional books don’t break out of the pack — Mick Herron, Jason Matthews, David McCloskey to name a few. But we don’t read spy novels at the same clip as we read genres like thrillers or romance. I love spy novels, have even worked on one of these exceptional exceptions, but don’t find myself as a reader seeking out a spy novel in a bookstore. There’s some avid espionage readers left, but the genre and its devoted fans were most likely made in the days when these Cold War concerns were at their fever pitch.

The quickest red flag is a type of submission that readers have little interest in—editors are readers, too. If it’s a genre or a slice of a genre that isn’t regularly read, then the question becomes “is this submission exceptional or not?”, which is a much easier question to answer quickly (often “no”).

Yellow Flag #1: The Put Down, Pick Up Test

This is an important yet classic reader test to employ for editors and non-editors alike. Have you ever had the experience of slogging through a book three pages at a time for weeks on end? Elisabeth by Eric Rohmer, reviewed a few weeks ago here, felt like a battle even though it wasn’t a particularly taxing read.

The trickiest submissions are the ones that are good enough to keep going and lack any outright red flags. Submissions have a sneaky way of getting better the longer an editor spends sifting through the pile. A few quick and obvious rejections prime an editor to be more generous as a reader to the next submissions they read for the simple reason of comparison. Some light Googling says this is called the Contrast Effect.

To counteract the Contrast Effect the “put down, pick up” test is useful. Most readers in the wild, to my knowledge, don’t sit in a big stack of books reading a few pages of each at a time to determine which one is best. They read one book and usually not in a single sitting. Putting down a submission for a time can be an important test. Do you want to pick it back up? Crucially, do you remember the story and dynamics when you pick it back up? How a book sticks with you is just as important as its page-turning qualities. Stepping away from a submission often reveals a novel’s true nature: is it forgettable, a slow burn, or a story you can’t stop yourself from getting back to?

Green Flag #1: New Perspective

Nothing makes me give a submission more of a chance than a new perspective. The old hits are the old hits for a reason when it comes to characters: charming old ladies in a small village, rich people behaving badly, moody detectives, has-been novelists. Archetypes done well will always have a place on the bookshelf. But when a writer finds a type of person or point of view you haven’t encountered on the page before, there are few things in a cold submission that engender more curiosity.

At the time, Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay was a revelation. A serial killer killing serial killers. Now Dexter has been copied to death and run into the ground, but one can imagine the first time reading these novels as an editor and being surprised, amused, and enthralled (or extremely confused and put off):

Moon. Glorious moon. Full, fat, reddish moon, the night as light as day, the moonlight flooding down across the land and bringing joy, joy, joy. Bringing too the full-throated call of the tropical night, the soft and wild voice of the wind roaring through the hairs on your arm, the hollow wail of starlight, the teeth-grind-ing bellow of the moonlight off the water.

All calling to the Need. Oh, the symphonic shriek of the thousand hiding voices, the cry of the Need in-side, the entity, the silent watcher, the cold quiet thing, the one that laughs, the Moondancer. The me that was not-me, the thing that mocked and laughed and came calling with its hunger. With the Need. And the Need was very strong now, very careful cold coiled creeping crackly cocked and ready, very strong, very much ready now—and still it waited and watched, and it made me wait and watch.

I had been waiting and watching the priest for five weeks now. The Need had been prickling and teasing and prodding at me to find one, find the next, find this priest. For three weeks I had known he was it, he was next, we belonged to the Dark Passenger, he and I together. And that three weeks I had spent fighting the pressure, the growing Need, rising in me like a great wave that roars up and over the beach and does not recede, only swells more with every tick of the bright night’s clock.

This goes beyond a single character as well. Plenty of dynamics are well represented in literature, all manner of sibling configurations, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, toxic female friendships. But finding a relationship dynamic not well represented in literature, but well represented in life, can immediately hook an editor. Recently, I’ve seen a slew of stay-at-home dads as main characters, something that’s increasingly more common in life but hasn’t made its way into literature. I read a lot of these stay-at-home dad books on submission start to finish and even tried to buy one or two.

Red Flag #2: Boring Structure

Another quick pass, especially in the genre space, is a boring structure. This may be the Contrast Effect speaking and it may not apply to all editors, but a predictable and plodding procedural that starts with discovering a body, then interviewing the witness, etc., etc., is an easy skip. This is an equal and opposite flip side to the red flag of “Bad Genre.” If you choose a “Good Genre” than a submission has to be less exceptional but must find ways to be unique in a sea of similar submissions. A writer who goes the extra mile to subvert or evolve the form is sure to snap the overloaded editor or literary agent to attention on submission.

Yellow Flag #2: Credentials!

This is where all that work that didn’t go into writing the manuscript or book proposal pays off. If you’re a previously published author, work at a fancy literary magazine, come recommended by other respected professionals, have a popular Substack, your submission will get more leeway. These factors, most likely, won’t change the outcome between acceptance and rejection for an editor or literary agent. However, they will get you the next most valuable thing: real feedback. Everyone gives more rope to authority. Think about your own reading experiences. How much longer did you spend reading that Pulitzer Prize-winning book because you were waiting to “get it”? Again, credentials may not get you a publishing deal without doing the work, but they will often get you more serious, longer reads. A literary agent or editor will be forced to read enough to really articulate why it doesn’t work for them. This is free labor the writer should utilize, valuable feedback for the next submission or editorial conversation.

Green Flag #2: Reverse Engineer

The main piece of advice for writers always comes back to reading a lot. But this is true for editors, too! Spend too much time in the submission pile sifting for gold and you’re bound to miss the forest for the trees.6 Editors have to read contemporary published books constantly in order to see what the bar is today and how the manuscripts they read on submission can meet or exceed that bar. An editor must honestly ask themselves: “Would I have bought this if it were on submission?”.

There’s a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking when it comes to published books. Most editors are inclined to lie to others (and themselves) that whichever big successful book of the day is one that they both admire the quality of and would have completely seen the vision for as a big bestseller if only they had it on submission. The surprise, early-2000s feeling hit of Strangers by Belle Burden is not something I could confidently say I would have predicted if it were on submission (notably, Strangers did not have a major book club picks, so a good deal of the industry didn’t see its big potential early on either). But reverse engineer it, dig into the author’s background a bit, and you see why this memoir might have been primed to beat the long odds of the category.

That’s to say, if you want to know what really works on submission go to a bookstore. Every book represents the watermark for what passes muster. Reading a compelling, well-executed, fully-edited and polished published book will show you better than anything what green flags an editor or literary agent will be chasing on submission.

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The reason I’ve stumbled into editing so many thrillers is that of any major genre I find that thrillers have the most variation within a vast readership.1 A thriller can be psychological or domestic, involve detectives or no authorities at all, they can be based in the legal profession or the world of technology or set in space. But it is not just the variety of settings and scenarios. The nature of a thriller is to surprise the reader, and, unlike a mystery or romance or fantasy, readers expect to be kept on their toes rather than served a familiar story (discover the killer, fall in love, hero’s journey). Of my several thriller authors, none of them have clear overlap, their styles, the pacing, the body count, the social commentary, are all wildly different.

So, it’s with a bit of expertise that I look at the New York Times latest “best thrillers of the 21^st century” list a little side eyed. The last NYT 21^st century lists, the 100 best novels and films, were a fun mixed bag to break down. With thrillers it’s a little different. In fact, I’m here to make the argument that half of this list should be thrown out entirely. Let’s offer some scrutinous editorial feedback title-by-title:

Category Fraud (10 Titles)

If you’re going to make a genre-based list, you must be a bit more protective of the genre. The biggest trap voters fell into on this “best of” list is sneaking great literary novels with minor thriller elements onto the list.

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Elisabeth, originally written in 1946, translated into English and published for the first time this year, is by the famous French New Wave film director Eric Rohmer who is no longer with us.2 Like editor Jake Morrissey and writer Marlon James’ wonderful book podcast Marlon and Jake Read Dead People,3 the author in question being dead gives us greater latitude to ignore the never-be-negative conundrum of modern book publishing. It lets us talk about something anyone in or around the book business knows but often only says after a few drinks with another insider: the difference between a good book and a book that’s published well.

Editing is about literary taste, and it is also about publishing. “Publishing,” no matter how you want to dress it up, is a more artful way of saying “marketing and advertising.” That’s an editor’s job: half to make a book art, half to figure out how to advertise it so that people read it. In an ideal world great art is married with great advertising and it makes the book a giant, world-beating success that readers love and everyone admires. Jurassic Park is an exceptional novel, has one of the most iconic book covers of all time, and was turned into an even more beloved and bigger blockbuster film.

But some editors don’t get by on their literary taste, and some books don’t either. Some books are all about the publishing, selling the concept and the author hard, and laughing all the way to the bank as disappointed readers hold the bag. However, before we talk about why Elisabeth is published so well, let’s quickly get why Elisabeth is not a good novel out of the way.

Bad Book

You should not be fooled by Elisabeth’s publishing. You should only read this book if you’re a writer wanting to learn what not to do. Or you might read it as a semi-inspiring reminder that plenty not particularly good books can get published and be published well such that they are commercially successful (but still not any good).

The problems with Elisabeth all fall under the umbrella of Rohmer being a filmmaker, not a novelist, as well as a young man— he wrote Elisabeth in his early 20s — who is overconfident in their artistic point of view (a trait of many filmmakers, it must be said). Rohmer has every hallmark of what happens when a screenwriter attempts a novel and doesn’t adjust to the form. As an editor you read many novels, usually unpublished, like Elisabeth— it’s not, generally, that these people don’t have the talent to write, just that they haven’t studied or practiced writing novels enough to redirect their writing talents. Let’s dispatch these faults quickly so we can move on. First a quick book description for grounding: “A summer seduction set on the eve of World War II.”

#1

Elisabeth has the classic tennis match dialogue that is often necessary in a screenplay but can be entirely inane in a novel:

“What a fucking mess,” howled Moulet. “Wed have done better to go by way of the river, wading. Son of a—”

“Virgin!” Bernard interrupted.

“What?” said Moulet. Then gave a raucous laugh.

“All I’m saying,” he went on, as they reached the second meadow, which was narrower and greener than his first, “is that if I were in your shoes, I’d give it a shot.”

“Well, if you’re such a lady’s man, why don’t you give it a shot? What’s stopping you? Go on!”

“Me?”

“Yeah, go ahead. Go on and join them up there, make your move. I’m certainly not stopping you, am I? What are you waiting for?”

“Idiot,” said Moulet. He grabbed Bernard by the arm.

“Hey, check out those ones over there, behind the trees. See: in the red and blue swimsuits. There!”

“Who are they?” said Bernard. “Do you know them?”

“It’s possible, I can’t quite see. What’s your opinion?”

“Not bad, not bad. Stupid faces. But still!” He made a gesture. “Are they local girls?” Bernard asked.

“What else? Local girls: I call them ‘the concierges” daughters? There’s nothing I hate more than the concierges’ daughters. Emphasis on the con. But what the hell!... Yes, they’re all stupid, stupid. Can’t get them out of my head, though.”

“What do they spend their time doing?”

“Who knows. Every Saturday they stroll along the boulevard with those twerps who work in the shops, it’s all very sweet and decent. The rest of the time they’re bored stiff, poor things!”

#2

When Rohmer lets the descriptions breathe, finally, unfortunately the novel doesn’t improve much. The scenes are over described in a way that feels like a director pointing his camera at each element. Lincoln Michel does a great job of exploring why this style is tedious and not ideal for novelists in his essay “Turning Off the TV in Your Mind.”

Irène seemed not to hear them; gazing down, she continued to break off crumbs of bread with her nails and send them rolling across the tabletop with little flicks. She certainly wasn’t listening; the gray-pink evening light had softened and refined her features. Despite having her hair pinned back far too tightly, she looked quite young now. She raised her eyes; her gaze met his for a moment, then dropped again. She was beautiful, very beautiful; suddenly he remembered something he’d said to her once, or that he’d wanted to say: “You were lovely just now, so lovely that it was impossible to imagine anyone lovelier.” But he knew well enough it was just the evening light that had given her face its temporary air of sweetness, of weariness.

#3

In total, the subject matter of Elisabeth feels like a classic instance of preoccupations of a young man style storytelling. Not being a cinephile enough to have seen any of Rohmer’s films, it is just an educated guess that the same themes of Elisabeth preoccupy some if not all of his films. But it’s much easier to get a viewer to care about good looking young people trying to sleep with each other by the beach when you can put the good-looking people and the beach on camera. However, to watch men think (reminder: avoid “thoughts” in fiction) how much they hate their girlfriend, or chase girls often described as “looking like they’re sixteen” hasn’t aged well on the page.

Good Publishing

Published by McNally Editions, an imprint of the influential and successful New York City bookstore McNally Jackson, Elisabeth is a masterclass of good publishing. I purchased Elisabeth after walking into a McNally Jackson and seeing it on their store’s bestseller shelf— whether or not it was actually the #1 bestseller in the store is dubious, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it were true.

It was a reminder that even an editor buys a book often because it reminds them of something else they loved reading — a look and other surface level similarities. This was a rare impulse purchase for me because so much of its copy and packaging was reminiscent of Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich, an old novel recently translated that has sparked a minor obsession.4 They are both translations from the mid 20th century never seen before in English about a tumultuous relationship published by a prestigious imprint and packaged as a modern classic to read in the summer.

This is the essence of publishing and why every thriller has a house on it and every romance novel has two illustrated people smirking at each other and every literary novel, for a while, was a blob of abstract colors: we’re trying to remind readers of a book they already loved. It’s why the same joke in every cover design meeting is “make it look like every other big bestseller, but completely original and fresh!”

A List of Good Publishing Choices

Design

The cover design of Elisabeth is A+ brilliant with a creamsicle summer color scheme that is par excellence. Putting a moody female figure on the cover is laser targeted at the typical literary fiction reader. The “French flaps”— has to be for a French filmmaker— along with colored endpapers and heavy paper stock are all strong signals of a classic.

Selective Praise

Something a book buyer might not notice until they actually read the book is that all of the glowing praise on the book jacket is for Rohmer as a filmmaker, not as a writer...

Team Up With a Tastemaker

Was it cool when the bookseller tucked a postcard made by The Criterion Channel of one of Rohmer’s movie stills at checkout? Your damn right it was. It’s not exactly rocket science: getting another cool company or cool person to endorse your product makes it cool. Books are objects of status and personality and a Criterion Channel postcard was a cheap, effective, and clever way to further signal this was a novel for the type of person who lives in Brooklyn and shops at Independent bookstores.5

Keep the description short!

If publishing is advertising then editors are best to remember that the best ad copy is incredibly simple. “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup” or Gillette’s dynamite “The best a man can get.”

The entirety of the book description for Elisabeth is one long sentence and hits every single pleasure point for why a reader might want to purchase the book.

Suggestions for Further Research

If you want other examples of books whose publishing might have outstripped their quality, go back and revisit the list of most important books of the decade for many prime examples of where the publishing is as good as, if not better than, the actual book. This is not an insult to their quality, but an observation that the more of a commercial juggernaut something is, the greater the chance that the packaging and messaging is carrying the day rather than what’s actually in between the two covers. And then go gossip among yourselves about which books from living authors have excellent publishing but aren’t very good.

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After seeing the film and dipping toes ever so slightly into “the discourse”, it is quite baffling to hear such a critical reception from many corners of the Internet. The question that kept rattling around in my head after watching the movie and thinking it was pretty darn good if not great is: What More Do People Want?

Perhaps my positive reaction — anecdotally, everyone I’ve spoken with in book publishing has unabashedly loved the movie so far — to The Odyssey is because working in a creative industry you become aware of how rare and difficult a big-swing creative project like this is. Yes, the film cost $250 million dollars, but as someone on the Internet pointed out so did the live action version of Moana. A creative professionals reaction to The Odyssey is similar to how we posited that “no one knows what good writing is” a few weeks ago— paradoxically, being a creative professional makes you less harsh than the average viewer because you know the sheer time and energy it takes to produce something decent let alone good.

The conversation around the film also illustrates something fascinating about our current culture— the desperate need for cultural commenters to nitpick. Maybe it has always been this way, there was probably plenty of Titanic hate back in 1997(why didn’t Leo just get on the door!). Ancient Greeks might have been saying Homer was a one-trick hack, who knows. No film or book is perfect.

The reason these loud voices of internet discourse can be so maddening is that they don’t match reality for most everyone’s viewing experience. The Odyssey, a film that is neither sequel nor franchise, has a 97% audience score. The vast majority of people really like it, and with that in mind here are 7 things to appreciate about Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey. Spoilers ahead, although you probably know most of this stuff even if you haven’t read the book and, besides, it’s worth seeing even with spoilers.

1. Movies Are a Visual Medium

When we talk about book-to-film adaptations, the first thing that should be remembered is that text is flat and relies on imagination, whereas the magic of a movie is it can actually show you the thing! The Odyssey does a film’s primary job spectacularly. Even if you throw out the narrative side of the equation entirely, it’s hard to deny the movie looks great. The most fun question to ask anyone who has seen the film is “what is your favorite visual moment?” There are many to choose from.

The most impressive examples might be the three phases of Odysseus’ journey that are such good literary stories that most people have a pop culture level of familiarity with them even if they were never assigned The Odyssey in high school.

Let’s start with the Trojan Horse. Before the film you probably pictured this:

Nolan’s more humble Trojan Horse dares to imagine the obvious: how uncomfortable it would be to stuff a couple dozen men into a metal horse. The claustrophobia and the horror that this shows on screen when the horse becomes submerged in the tides and fills with water, is an indication of what the whole film manages to do visually: it turns myth from fantasy to a tactile reality.

The most challenging visual task is the cyclops, the first truly mythical creature to appear on screen in the film, and something that nearly everyone knows and has an image of even if they’ve never heard of or read The Odyssey. What a reader imagines the cyclops to be is almost always scarier, historically, than what has been rendered on the silver screen, which often comes off as cartoony.

Using a half dozen techniques, including puppetry and full-body prosthetics, the cyclops is genuinely a masterpiece the likes of which we haven’t seen since the original Jurassic Park brought dinosaurs back to life. It feels as if Nolan took one of the defining features of Greek mythology— that gods could walk among people— and took that idea seriously for his aesthetic vision. Extending this sense of tactile “real” nature to the mythological is a daring and impressive artistic choice and feat. The cyclops as a result is legitimately unnerving.1

While the Trojan Horse and Cyclops are parts of the story that must be shown, in the final piece of pop culture familiarity Nolan showed clever restraint in not showing us the sirens. We only see these notoriously sexy half-human, half-bird creatures — that have become largely become blended with mermaids visually at this point— shrouded heavily by mist and in the distance. Instead, the film leans on the psychological idea of the sirens. It is a subtle choice and proves that Nolan isn’t just a great technician rendering myths realistically but is making all the visual choices intentionally to tell his version of the story as effectively as possible.

2. Immaculate Story Editing

A lot of stuff happens in The Odyssey. It is a nearly 3,000-year-old poem. Part of my personal weariness and low expectations was not just how the visuals would play in a CGI-plagued world but how Nolan could possibly fit this epic story into the tight space of a film. The pacing is largely excellent, with some clever techniques to balance the flashbacks between what’s happening at home and the real juice of the story of Odysseus’ journey. Nolan uses the novelist’s technique of often encasing a flashback as a story being told by a present-day character, for instance we see a good part of the Trojan War when it is related by a solider that fought alongside Odysseus. The pace is expertly mapped out, and it wrangles the often-circuitous conventions of ancient storytelling into a thoroughly modern form without losing the essentials. Writers should take note of this technique: flashbacks are often used as a lazy structural cheat code but encasing them in one character telling another about the past is a good literary way of making flashbacks feel artful and more natural.

3. The Book!

One of the highest compliments you can give the film is that it encourages reading or re-reading of the book. With such a lush visual language and a simple-to-follow story, the film gets the big stuff right. With the basic story and images in mind it encourages the literary inclined among us to revisit the text for the depth and poetry that only a book can provide.

One of the film’s biggest and most notable literary detractors has been Emily Wilson, whose new translation of the The Odyssey was a huge success and downright literary event back in 2017. Wilson has a host of criticisms of the film, but mostly they boil down to that it lacks the complexity of the original, or, to let her do the talking: “every second is jam-packed with incident, lights and noise, and nothing is ever at a human scale.”

With respect, what Wilson might miss, being too close to her subject, is that a film’s simplicity and a book’s complexity can work hand in shield. The shortcuts required to make a three-hour epic movie are not wholly betraying the text at every turn but showing how durable Homer’s story is after several hundred years. The Odyssey shows that the incident that Homer cooked up still grips our imagination and connects humanity through a common thread back to ancient times.

Wilson’s reaction feels a bit academic and like looking a gift horse in the mouth—although given her expertise, maybe she has a good natural instinct to inspect horses closely. Sales of various editions of the book have doubled and tripled over the last two weeks, selling tens of thousands of copies. The movie is a huge win for the power of literature.2

4. IMAX Film

I didn’t see The Odessey in IMAX. Chances are, given there are only around fifty 70mm IMAX theatres on the entire planet, that you didn’t see The Odessey in IMAX either. By now you may have heard that because the film itself is so large they had to shoot this epic movie 3 minutes at a time. A crazy technical challenge when you’re filming massive vistas in real places with hundreds of extras. But as a friend of mine pointed out, and has been reported elsewhere, the film size also means that an IMAX film can’t be longer than three hours.

Rejoice! Even if you didn’t get to see The Odessey in its intended grandeur, the format is a benefit to us all. It’s no secret the runtime of auteur-made movies has been creeping up and, frankly, non-auteur films that have no business being several hours long have been creeping up with them. It’s genuinely amazing to get a film this epic in an under three-hour package these days.

It’s also could be a big reason why the story editing is so compelling and why nearly every shot in the film feels intentional and considered—it had to be. There’s no messing around when you are forced into a 3-hour container. Changing the ginormous film canister every time you want to go over three minutes probably makes you rethink the economy of every scene, every line of dialogue and every shot. It is funny that this concept of super constraints came up in another film on the opposite side of the budget spectrum a few weeks ago, the one-location, four-actors film, The Invite.

Writers and editors don’t have as strict budgets, so it’s up to us to impose somewhat arbitrary constraints—pick a page count and stick to it, force yourself to use no flashbacks, make yourself show every character’s point of view in a single scene. Whether you have $0 or $250 million dollars to spend on your next project, remember that arbitrary constraints force creativity, they don’t limit it.

5. Has Nolan Beat the Charges?

One of the biggest charges against Nolan is his fraught history with writing compelling female characters and his, some would say related, penchant for killing fictional wives. He’s therefore graded on a bit of his own curve. Nonetheless The Odyssey feels like a pleasant surprise in this regard. No doubt there will be a bazillion critics who go back to this well of criticism (it was one of Emily Wilson’s many), but it feels a bit disingenuous. A bit unwilling to give Nolan a little bit of credit for improvement even if The Odyssey is far from a feminist masterpiece.

An epic is a smart choice for Nolan because it is a rather straightforward genre. Complaining about the depth of the characters feels rather silly all around— no character gets much depth! Man or woman or witch. Odysseus gets some depth because Odysseus is the hero. Everyone else gets a few lines. The most significant monologues are given to trans actor Elliot Page — probably the best in the whole film — and Anne Hathaway. Overall, the criticism of Nolan’s sexism feels more of the “if you go looking for it” rather than of the blatant, completely legitimate critiques of his past films. It is the rare instance of The Disease of Comparison working in someone’s favor.3

6. A Horror Epic

Although it will probably never be classified as such, this is probably one of the best horror films of the year. For a popcorn blockbuster there is a lot of upsetting stuff happening in this movie. The whole animal sequence with Circe4 is upsettingly disgusting and filled with dread. There’s the aforementioned Cyclops as well as several other scenes where Odysseus and crew are fighting for their lives and not in any kind of fun action movie way. It sure does remind you that you never want to get out on open waters in a wooden boat. For writers it shows how even a literary adaptation can involve heavy doses of genre when called for.

7. Big Themes

The other big knock on Nolan is that his film’s lack depth or that they are pseudo-intellectual. In picking a centuries-old story, by luck or by intention, he set himself up with a film genre that is not built around nuance. He doesn’t have to explain the space-time continuum or have a novel observation about the moral greyness of building the atomic bomb or try to force a square peg into the round hole of making a superhero movie serious.

The Odyssey is a myth, a type of story traditionally meant to be simple to follow and whose lessons are supposed to be somewhat obvious to the audience. Fittingly, the two major themes of Nolan’s film are obvious but no less effective for it. The first is the golden rule, or “Zeus’s law”: respect your neighbor and treat them how you would like to be treated. The second, relatedly, is that war is horror and the worst possible violation of the golden rule.

The Odyssey might be the best anti-war film in years. As the old saying goes, every war film valorizes war by making it look beautiful. And if you want a 1:1 comparison, go look at how Troy (2004) treats some of the same material: it makes war look sexy and cool as hell.

In contrast The Odyssey puts the most glorious fight scenes chronologically first and then we spend the rest of the film watching Odyssus & Co. get mercilessly killed without a fighting chance. (A more real spoiler warning.) For the better part of three hours men get eaten by the cyclops. They get turned into pigs. They are psychologically tortured by Sirens until they die. They get plucked into the sky by an unseen creature. They are caught in a thunderstorm that throws them violently into the sea. And perhaps the most effective anti-war scene: they arrive on an island of giant man soldiers who completely hack them apart, their only option being to flee. Not even the mighty, all-powerful Odysseus can strike even one of these giants down. It was this scene that drove the point home: forsake war because eventually the massacrers always become the massacred.

The Odyssey will no doubt face a sort of Marvelization-of-literature backlash from high-brow film critics because it is a big blockbuster. Yet is the intentional horror of 90% of the film’s story — along with the fact that there is no CGI and that filming took place in several real locations all across the globe — that helps The Odyssey beat the charges that it is just a superhero movie in sandals. The message made so explicit is less about the hero’s journey and Odysseus’ or any other character’s development. It’s a message that is timeless and timely right now: even in “victory” those who inflict the pain of war on others are bound to suffer. It’s why, even if the characters do sometimes lack depth, the film does this mythic story justice.

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DHM Confidential – Bonus Nitpicks

I did say above, “no film or book is perfect”, no?

1. Too Many Famous People

Matt Damon is perfect. He’s believable as an old man who could kick your ass. A natural leader who’s smarter than everyone else but also too clever for his own good. Not every actor is exceptional in the film, but even with extraordinary visuals you have to get Odysseus right for this to have worked at all. But Damon notwithstanding, the real casting complaint for this movie shouldn’t have been about race or gender or sexual orientation, but that almost every actor is A+ famous. Some of the performances are great, some are good, some are ok, but what happened to giving great actors and more unknown ones a shot? I happen to be reading As You Wish (fun book) about the making of The Princess Bride for my work: Robin Wright and Cary Elwes — the two faces of the film! — not stars at all when they got their iconic roles. In a film that’s otherwise wonderfully visually transportive, having a face that you see on the cover of People magazine every other minute certainly pulls you out of The Odyssey more than necessary .

2. Travis Scott

Travis Scott as the bard was the only real casting stumble. Rapper equals the bard, we get it. My main bone to pick is that there are a dozen other better rappers-slash-actors to choose from who could’ve delivered a better performance, Donald Glover, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), or my pick Method Man. This casting definitely felt the most “the marketing department says this will play well on social media” in the entire movie.

3. Domesticity

While we’re super nitpicking, the domestic scenes back in Ithica with Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, and Robert Pattinson (see what I mean about too many famous people?) didn’t have as much juice. Nolan isn’t as good at the talky, political bits and if you want to knock his lack of nuance, this is where you’d home in. He even liberally employs my favorite cliche “kicking the dog” so on the nose that the villains actually kick a very cute dog. Luckily the Ithica storyline is pretty well spread out after the opening of the film. The weakness of the Ithica timeline makes the strongest case that the film’s real meaning is as an anti-war statement not a hero’s journey. Because — sorry for this — the final parts in Ithica don’t bring the character arc of our hero home in a compelling way.

4. Final Battle

Here’s where Nolan let’s himself down a bit. When Odysseus comes back to Ithica and single-handedly fights about 100 men at the same time. This does become a bit of a Marvel superhero scene, with Tom Holland even playing his faithful sidekick so that Odysseus and Telemachus might as well be Iron Man and Spiderman. It even has some of the levity of a superhero, joke-while-fighting quality with Robert Pattison— the main bad guy— staying out of the fray and shouting “grab the spears!”, “grab the shields!” as the evil suitors attempt to arm themselves against superhuman Odysseus. This final battle scene slightly undercuts the effective message of the whole film— it might have been better if Odysseus avoided so much killing through cleverness, truly learning his lesson. But to be fair to Nolan, Odysseus slaughters nearly every suitor in Homer’s original, so maybe he was just being faithful to the book.

But word hate, we must remember, is cultural. Someone made the persuasive argument to me the other day that referencing your “partner” as a straight person has become sort of ridiculous. What started as a way to be a queer ally of sorts has been totally subsumed as to make speech opaque and confusing. It’s as if tomorrow we all decided to call our moms and dads our “guardians” in solidarity with the people not raised by their biological parents. If you’re in polite, liberal society you don’t have to be unnecessarily cagey and make the person you’re talking to do the guess work (I kind of bought the argument if you can’t tell. If you aren’t swayed consider: Elon Musk recently referred to his “partner” Shivon Zilis — they aren’t married, she is Indian — to try to dispute the irrefutable evidence that he is extremely racist).

Words we hate can be instinctual audio/visual reactions like “moist”— for similar reasons my wife hates when I (admittedly) over-use the word “congeal.” But if it isn’t about the gut feeling then word hate is all about usage. I came to this topic through one of David Foster Wallace’s barn burners of an essay, “Authority and American Usage.” A large part of the essay is extolling an even better authority on usage, Bryan A. Garner and his aptly titled series of reference books Garner’s Modern English Usage.

Garner’s usage guide, as Wallace argues, is probably the most fun reference book you’ll ever read though. Garner tells you how to use words, how to not use words, and how words are being used, both correctly and incorrectly. He has all these fun little mini-essays that sometimes run a paragraph and sometimes a page or two. I learned a lot more about how to use language by reading it than in I did in many English classes over the course of my life. An idiosyncratic inspiration, Garner also developed his own ranking system to allow language to evolve.

Stage 1: A new form emerges as an innovation (or a dialectal form persists) among a small minority of the language community, perhaps displacing a traditional usage.

Stage 2: The form spreads to a significant fraction of the language community but remains unacceptable in standard usage.

Stage 3: The form becomes commonplace even among many well-educated people but is still avoided in careful usage.

Stage 4: The form becomes virtually universal but is opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts (die-hard snoots). See the entry for snoot, p. 756.

Stage 5: The form is universally accepted (not counting pseudo-snoot eccentrics).

Among English-major types “literally” was contentiously debated a few years ago, as people started to misuse it in speech much more often to mean “figuratively.” This is from Gardener’s usage manual published a number of years ago, but even back then Gardner rated this 3 on his scale. Personally, I never had a problem with this one and tend to air on the anti-snooty side that Gardner does when it comes to usage. People literally use “literally” for extra emphasis, and it can be dialed up in writing to be funny or surprising or just to reflect the real way people speak. Gardner even does this, making a joke at the end of the entry for “literally.”

LITERALLY = (1) with truth to the letter; or (2) exactly; according to the strict sense of the word or words. Literally in the sense “truly, completely” is a SLIPSHOD EXTENSION.

• “For Chip Sullivan, former club professional turned PGA Tour pro, life literally [delete literally] has been turned upside down.” Randy King, “PGA Life Different than [read from] Being Home on the Range,” Roanoke Times, 15 Jan. 1997, at B1. (On the use of different in that headline, see different (A).) A New Yorker cartoon that appeared on 28 February 1977

(p. 54), by Lorenz, had this funny bit of dialogue: “Confound it, Hawkins, when I said I meant that literally, that was just a figure of speech.”

Although W3 (1961) acknowledged that literally could be used to mean “in effect, virtually,” it didn’t record the complete reversal in sense that led literally to mean “metaphorically” or “figuratively.” This reversal appears to have been first recognized in the early 1970s. See “What Is Literally Literally?” 48 Am. Speech 210 (1973).

LANGUAGE-CHANGE INDEX

literally for figuratively < we’re literally toast > : Stage 3

We also must be aware that often hated words can be a proxy for older people hating that young people have their own language. Language can represent young people having something old people can never have again (their youth). Adults hated the proliferation of “like” when I was growing up. I get it. And as far as verbal ticks go, you do sound a lot smarter and more authoritative when you pause instead of saying “like” or “um” or any number of other verbal ticks. But railing against “like” is peak “get off my lawn” word hate behavior.

With all of that out of the way, we have a paywall coming up where I will reveal my currently most hated word, but even if you are not a paid subscriber please share this newsletter along with the word you irrationally hate and if your word has you feeling spited please write your own Gardner mini essay on why.

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The worst case with a literary sequel is what happened with Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird is arguably the most-read book in America thanks to seventy-plus years of it being a default reading option for high schoolers. Back in 2015 the sequel to this iconic novel, the only novel Harper had ever published, was released into the world. Without any inside knowledge of the situation, it is on its surface a sad one. Harper was 88 when the sequel published was, by all accounts, in terrible health (she died a year later). There were accusations of coercion. It takes no research or fine parsing of the situation to state the fact that the manuscript that would become Go Set a Watchman sat unpublished for 55 years in Harper’s desk drawer. Given this fact, do you need a legal degree to determine that she might not have wanted it published? That a change of heart would have had to be extraordinary in the very last year of her life?

Literary sequels occupy a unique place in the publishing firmament. Sequels, especially in movies, have an innate commerciality. The 2010s were dominated by Marvel, superhero and extended universes with tons of sequels and blockbuster reboots. With the relative failure of some recent movie sequels and the massive success of, instead, original films like Backrooms, Obsession, and most recently The Odyssey’s $250 million worldwide opening (for this exercise we’ll consider an adaptation of one of the oldest books new again). Even in commercial terms it seems people are ready for something new. There’s something antithetical about literary sequels in this context, almost oxymoronic when compared with the driving forces of TV/Film sequels. Inherent in the designation of “literary” is that the project errs on the side of being made for reasons of artistic, not commercial purposes. It’s why it’s understandable that some writers chase a sequel, but makes it a little harder to stomach. Regarding Go Set a Watchman — surely, whatever the situation was, the publisher salivated to publish a sequel to a book that sells 750,000-1,000,000 copies a year.

A literary sequel, a term that is completely made up, is not just a literary writer deciding to write a series. Marlon James set out to write a fantasy series with The Dark Star Trilogy but his upcoming novel, despite not being described as such, feels like a literary sequel to his Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. Coming out this September, The Disappearers is a 700-page novel taking place in Jamaica in the two decades following A Brief History, that is (likely) a sprawling, multi-perspective in the way his most successful novel was. The inciting incident is also a murder.

Literary sequel is not an exacting term. It is meant to describe a sequel that was unintended at the time of the original—an exercise that is mostly pure conjecture. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments is a great example of a modern literary sequel. The Testaments was written, it must be posited, because of the enormous success and renewed social relevance that The Handmaiden’s Tale took on after Trump’s first election and the popularity of the television adaptation. A literary sequel, like Atwood’s, in many ways is defined by being a response to the market.

Here’s the interesting paradox happening with literary sequels, they are happening more than ever and there is no real example of the sequel ever being bigger than the original. That’s typically the understood the opposite tradeoff in film: no one is expecting Iron Man 3 to be artistically better than Iron Man or Iron Man 2, but they are expecting it to be commercially better. Despite universal approval ratings and inevitable top 100 novels of all time ratings for To Kill a Mockingbird, its literary sequel is…not beloved to say the least. The sales of Go Set a Watchman are a fraction of a fraction of the novel it based off of. But a small fraction of one of the best-selling novels of all time is still a good day’s work.

Do We Want Literary Sequels?

Colson Whitehead is a personal favorite—before he embarked on his Harlem Trilogy, the final volume of which published this week — The Cool Machine — he was an appointment viewing author.1 Whitehead did not plan from the outset for this historical crime project to be a trilogy, making these novels certified literary sequels. Harlem Shuffle, the novel that started the series, is amazing in the idiosyncratic way many Whitehead projects are—a literary take on crime fiction and an incredible reimagining of New York Harlem that recreates an all-Black bubble of an atmosphere in a credible yet fantastical way. But the series, judging by sales figures, had a big cooling off for Whitehead fans and readers after the first installment. About one fourth of the readers from the first book in the series Harlem Shuffle returned for the second Crook Manifesto, one assumes the same ratio will apply to the third.

The context is that Whitehead had about as much commercial and critical success as one author can have or maybe has ever had in the modern publishing era. Prior to the trilogy, Whitehead won back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes and sold a cool million copies plus of both The Underground Railroad (perhaps the most important book of the decade) and Nickel Boys. Clearly this trilogy for Whitehead was a sort of break, an artistic escapism that was reflected by its genre escapism. It’s doubtful that he expected this trilogy to completely cater to the market of his previous, heavier historical novels. It seems Whitehead knowingly defied the commercial drive that is the impetus for many literary sequels, but what’s fascinating is that it is still a response to market. He got the world in terms of market reception and retreated into something completely different.

The real answer may be that all literary sequels, while a response to the market, are all alike in that none of them are the same. Jason Mott’s sequel People Like Us to his National Book Award-winner and Read with Jenna pick Hell of a Book is better—but it sold less and won no major awards (despite its clever cover design). Another Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer wrote a literary sequel to Less in Less is Lost. Like many others, it didn’t reach the lofty heights of the original. The same is true for other literary sequels that are artistically exceptional like Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy and Elif Batuman’s autobiographical fiction series, the latter of which has miraculously avoided a series designation on Amazon. It would appear that critical reception (its own market of sorts) is also a motivating factor for writers to follow-up with sequels.

Perhaps nothing better summarizes the literary sequel grip and reader’s apathy toward them than this hilarious satire(?) that you may not understand2 about the potential for a literary sequel to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Literary sequels are at best uneven, but you understand the impulse. It is hard enough to find one literary success—when you do, why not try to hold onto it? The answer from readers however is that they are much less interested in sequels than literary anomalies. The pleasure of literary fiction is not in its continuity. Sci-fi and fantasy may buck this emerging culture movement, but by and large readers want new, they want original, even from authors and artists they already love.

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The Invite is a whole movie that takes place in a single, extremely beautiful, apartment in San Francisco. There are a grand total of four actors—two neighboring couples that have a dinner party. The runtime is 1 hour and 47 minutes. This week’s newsletter considered the cultural regression this year in publishing has been. The Invite is a more welcome kind of throwback. A time twenty or thirty years ago when you could walk into a theater without buying a ticket in advance, go see a movie whose runtime was under two hours, walk out while the sun is still shining and go about the rest of your day. One old New York lady behind us in the theater remarked “it could’ve been a play” (delightful, but wrong). In a world where every director feels like they’re a dinner guest overstaying their welcome, The Invite is a film based on super constraints—one setting, four people in a room— that results in more creativity than your average four-hour fantasy, sci-fi, superhero blockbuster.

The film, directed by Oliva Wilde and written by Cesc Gay, Will McCormack, and Rashida Jones, got me thinking about the role extremely confined stories play in enhancing creative freedom. Very few artists, even great ones, do their best work with unlimited resources and choices. Even directors and writers like Martin Scorsese or Stephen King, who are still putting out amazing work, were at their best when they didn’t have unlimited run times and page counts.

This is DHM Confidential (Vol. #2), a new series for paid subscribers. Reminder: the free weekly newsletter continue uninterrupted. Thank you all for your support.

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Watching the trailer for The Odyssey and reading Matt Damon’s comments about the film were a wakeup call: “It felt like the movies when I started working — and I know that that’s going away…I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this.” That bygone era he’s referencing? The year 2000 when Gladiator won best picture.

Toxic masculinity and its close friend body negativity are back in the biggest way possible. 1 in 10 people in the US are on GLP-1s, a weight loss drug you have to take for the entirety of your life for it to remain effective and results to continue. When society briefly became woke1 for 2.5 seconds in the 2010s, cultural products from the early 2000s like The Man Show and Extreme Makeover started to seem like borderline insanity.2 Those shows would somehow fit right in with the ethos of 2026. Bunny XO’s memoir Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic was the second biggest nonfiction book of this year. Under remarked is that the biggest female-led podcast, Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, originated from noted repository of early 2000s male toxicity Barstool Sports (whose founder is currently #1 on the bestseller list).

The clear frontrunner for the “One Book” of 2026 is Yesteryear, a genre-blended, social issues, book club novel. No sooner was Dear Head of Mine bemoaning the loss of this type of book-club bait in a round-up of the most important books this decade than Yesteryear appeared and brought back a staple of the early and mid aughts. Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, the other biggest book of the year so far, also feels like a throwback, an Oprah-backed powerhouse with a healthy dose of underlying author privilege. Both represent a bygone era of book publishing and culture we thought was dead (social novels, book-club memoir) suddenly brought back to life.

Meanwhile the remnants of the Harry Potter generation linger large with Romantasy. A genre on the wane a bit in 2026 so far, but with the two biggest authors in the space, Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas (who appeared on Alex Cooper’s podcast to announce her next books!), sure to change that in the second half of the year. The debt a book like Fourth Wing owes to the early 2000s fantasy juggernauts is undeniable.

Perhaps all of this parallelling to the early 2000s is cherry picked3, but consider our final datapoints as to why, if someone was transported from the past to 2026, they would hardly realize they time traveled at all. Author of The Help — a notoriously huge book (and movie) whose white savior narrative received intense scrutiny — Kathryn Stockett returned with her first novel since The Help and it is one of the top 5 bestselling novels published this year. There is even a sudoku-like puzzle craze happening. And the capstone on all of this: Queen of Millennial Culture Lena Dunham released her first book in twelve years.

Young Writers—Are They Back?

Lena Dunham is an interesting avatar for a generation of creatives. Her creative debut was so loud, popular, and successful that it cemented her celebrity for the next two decades (reminder: she gave a toast at Taylor Swift’s wedding). Like elder millennial Phoebe Waller-Bridge post-Fleabag, Dunham took this extreme early success and has done…very little with it. Since the last of Girls’ 62 episodes aired in 2017, Dunham has written 22 episodes of television, creating two different short-lived series. Putting aside personal feelings and conversations of privilege, it’s frankly a heartbreaking output for someone with as much creative talent, industry support, and genuine demand for their work from fans—if someone with so many advantages can’t do it, then who can from younger generations? The reasons for her creative paralysis are apparently discusseed at length in her new memoir.4 It’s hard to believe but two years ago we were pondering “Where Are All the Young Writers?”, thinking about a generation of literary millennial writers whose writing output wasn’t as robust as one would hope given their early success. Two writers mentioned for their enormous early critical and commercial accomplishments, Yaa Gyasi or Brit Bennett haven’t announced any new adult novels since their sophomore breakouts in 2020.

Well, in 2026, young writers have arrived. We have two relatively massive literary debuts in the heatedly discussed Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash and Lázár by Nelio Biedermann. Biedermann is 22 years old, which is crazy. Both of these writers technically fall into the Gen Z generation—speaking of our Groundhog Day theory of 2026 we’re minting new ingénues. What’s happening in books reflects the larger cultural landscape, where 20-year-old Kane Parsons and 26-year-old Curry Barker have directed two massively successful debut horror films. The question is whether Cash and Biedermann (Parsons and Barker) can or will ever do it again. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait three to five years for their next novels, and that these early returns aren’t just the start of a history repeating itself.

Flat, Flat, Flat

Still, the cultural reality of 2026 matches the economic reality of 2026 so far: book sales are flat, new book deals are slightly down to flat. Now, as it is always important to remember, this doesn’t mean there aren’t new good books happening—there are always good new books if you’re willing to look hard enough to find them. If the dominant cultural forces look a lot like retrograde throwback, it behooves us to dig deeper. We have to appreciate the new signs of life happening in our literary corner of the world and other creative fields, it’s very possible that the cultural revitalization we’re looking for resides with artists who don’t even remember the year 2000.

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This week I made the somewhat provocative statement that “No One Knows What Good Writing Is.” I joked in one of the footnotes that voters might prove this statement wrong depending on how they judged a few writing samples. However, I was pleasantly surprised to be…completely right.

Readers roundly voted on nine sentences and paragraphs from incredibly well-respected books and authors as mostly passable or actively bad. The best rating any of the writing samples received was a 50% “good” rating (shoutout, as always, to Jen Beagin). These results proved a bit of a hypothesis. The poll results, reactions, and reader commentary gave me a few extra thoughts on the three ways I pointed out that readers are subconsciously judging what good writing is. It also made me consider, in contrast, what is bad writing and what exactly are most readers taking for granted?

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Lots of bashing of Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash has occurred since it emerged as a surprising literary success earlier this year. A lot of the scrutiny has to do with Cash herself being somewhat of a personality—not many debut novelists get a full profile and photoshoot in The New York Times. Lost Lambs is by no means a perfect novel (few are) and we looked at some of its flaws and covered some of its coverage before on Dear Head of Mine. What’s surprising, however, is the criticism Lost Lambs has received for its line-level writing from a number of writers on Substack, including, most recently, this one that has racked up 335 likes and 63 comments. The bashing of Cash’s writing seems to have to do with the fact that her novel is both successful and was published by a prestigious literary imprint—a sadly common experience for the rare literary novel that finds some readers. When people are told something is the next great thing, the next great writer, they get their knives out if the writing isn’t undeniable.

The essay is well argued in places with some good close readings of Cash’s prose, but often falls into the trap of “this isn’t very good” subjectivity without substantiation. Joy Williams is given as a counterpoint of a good sentence-level writer. He offers similar minimalism from each writer and comes to an opposite conclusion: Williams is brilliant. This is neither wrong nor surprising, Joy Williams is 82 and published her first story in 1965. Her works are considered modern classics. Put that up against random close readings of sentences from a twenty-something writer and you’re going to feel that Williams’ writing is tighter, more controlled, and less wanton, even if you can’t put your finger on exactly the mechanics of why that is in total. Most anyone who reads books for a living, however, would tell you that Cash’s writing is high level when compared to the thousands of novels written and published each year.

What is going on here? Do all of the kinds of readers described above have no taste? Are they unable to tell what is good and what isn’t? Certainly not. Not entirely. The truth is that most readers judge a whether a book is well written primarily by how much they like it. The line-by-line analysis and justification of this opinion tends to follow. The reason Cash is catching flack for her sentences, some fair, some unfair, is probably because readers don’t find the book to be the great work of literature they were promised, not because she is a terrible writer.

But what is good writing anyway? As the old comedian saying goes, explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. Today, let’s dissect that frog. First, go forth and vote. What do you think of the writing in these examples—is it good?

Example One: Settings

Example Two: Similes

Example Three: Character Descriptions

The Three Ways We Unconsciously Judge “Good” Writing

Lyricism

Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Harper Lee—most sane people will universally agree that these are good writers. Not because they share any kind of stylistic or even linguistic similarities, but because they are all canonized. Most readers judge writing by reputation first. And by reputation we foremost mean pretension and intellectualism. If you read Pale Fire for your book club, no one can accuse you of having bad taste in writing. Likewise, because most readers’ conceptions of “good writing” is steeped in classics, they will default to saying contemporary prose that looks like classic works is also “good writing.” Most classic writing that readers default to just happens to be, stylistically, more recognizable, usually more digressive and romantic. Take this paragraph taken at random from Pride and Prejudice:

“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

At nearly seven lines long, with an SAT word or two, even without much context most people could identify this passage as being from a literary work and say that it has merit on the line level. Even today, as style has evolved considerably, readers default to judging “good writing” on the basis of some level of lyricism. That is, the complexity of the punctuation, word choices, and musicality of the lines. Many readers default to judging good writing as if a sentence in a novel is supposed to be like a beautiful line of poetry. It’s why so often critiques of the line-level variety fail and why readers are apt to say that most every contemporary book isn’t good writing if they don’t like it.1 We are often subconsciously applying old standards based upon a select few all-time greats — it’s worth remembering that a lot of people wrote in this style in Austen’s time but we hardly continued to read all of their work for hundreds of years — to the novels of working writers in the 21^st century.

Clarity

A theory for why readers have a difficult time telling good writing from bad these days is there are no longer the clear signals of musicality, lush language, and overt intellectualism to cue the reader in that what they are reading is supposed to be high literature.

Even being no Hemingway super fan, it is hard to deny his influence on how the overall writing style in novels has evolved. Hemingway is the avatar for a brevity revolution that hasn’t ceased since he came on the scene. Now, most every writer to some extent is writing with clarity at the forefront, with musicality and complexity of language taking a backseat to the writer communicating their meaning and the feelings of the work effectively and economically. Even the literary writers.

Here’s the truth: almost every example you voted on above is from a prize-winning or prize-nominated novel.2 We’ll see what the results are, but these are all contemporary literary writers. They are good writers in an absolute sense in terms of their ability. What you’ll notice is almost none of them jump off the screen in the same way that Jane Austen does. The accepted style for most novelists has simply become much less florid. Instead most writers prioritize clarity with the occasional flourish.3

This is not to say that the old styles are better than the new styles or vice versa. There are good writers in every generation, at every level on the scale of complexity and language. But because we don’t have the same benefit of hundreds of years of hindsight to pick and choose the best books from right now, readers have a hard time picking out good writing from a line up.4

What is Good Writing?

It’s easy when picking apart sentences and paragraphs to focus on the beauty of the individual parts (lyricism) or the function (clarity) and forget that analyzing good writing is about the ideas the words are communicating, not just their construction. What is always hard to capture in conversations about a line here, a paragraph there, is that good writing is about original thought, not just lyricism or clarity. It’s the third, often overlooked ingredient. The one that actually makes “good writing” the trickiest to define. The truth that a few dozen unremarkable words arranged in the right way can create something remarkable.

It’s hard to say that something like “She turned heads wherever she went, including the heads of infants and dogs” in isolation is a brilliant sentence, one worthy of printing on a postcard. But taken with the entire paragraph, with the pages around it, this simple sentence starts to evolve, taking on some of the qualities of a lyrical line or keen observation. Good writing isn’t always about making every sentence pristine. Conversely, a string of pristine sentences won’t make you a good writer. In context, a little throwaway fragment of a sentence “including the heads of infants and dogs” starts to add up to originality. A way of describing, explaining or viewing that becomes more compelling than the sum of its parts.

A mysterious thing starts to happen when you read contemporary literature for a living. It becomes easy to identify “good writing” almost immediately. There are, contrary to the popular opinion of readers, tons of good writers. But after reading hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, good writing by some of the traditional sentence-level metrics ceases to be sufficient. Whether it’s a literary memoir or genre mystery we begin to look for not just sentences that dazzle but originality in the way the writer looks at the world. If you were compelled by a story or moved by a novel but closed the book thinking that the writing was just okay, then you probably need to reconsider what good writing is.

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The way to win in publishing seems to be to run a simple playbook: pay seven figures for a tentpole debut novel and/or a book by an extremely famous person and, as Mark Twain said1, “put all of your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.” A big advance followed by celebrity book club pick by Good Morning America, Reese, Oprah, or Jenna, followed by whatever traditional wall-to-wall media coverage there is left, followed by a splashy film option with a movie star attached, followed by entrance into “the flywheel”—a magical place where only 6-12 books exist, constituting the books that will be recommend you whether you search Amazon, ask a bookseller, friend, or coworker what to read next. That’s the playbook for books like this year’s Yesteryear (11-way auction, GMA, Anne Hathaway) and Strangers (undisclosed advance, Oprah, Gwyneth Paltrow).

If you’re part of this feast, the publishing process is extremely fun: the editor/publisher starts the hype machine and everything rolls downhill. Once you hit flywheel Valhalla, the work continues, but with wind at your back. For everyone not invited to the feast, this publishing strategy is…not as fun. These big winners put into starker contrast how hard this business is if you’re not one of the 6-12 default recommendations of the year. Worse is in trying and failing in this strategy: You can get one, two, three, or even four of the four factors and not make it to the plateau. Or, more likely, you get none of these four sure-fire drivers of attention and you have to make it happen in other ways.

Worse for all the writers, editors, and publishers living in the land of famine is always The Disease of Comparison. Is this trad wife novel or divorce memoir really 100x better such that it should suck up the entire oxygen of the industry? This line of thinking lets hopelessness settle in. But is it really true that the four-quadrant, all-in strategy is the only route to be a successful author, a successful editor, a successful book publisher?

The Data Says Feast or Famine is a Myth

Feast or famine seems like an inevitability. The data tells a different story. In fact, while a boom or bust fervor has taken hold, an obsession with all-in bets and the flywheel, the bell curve of success in book publishing remains intact or even has flattened and become more democratic in the last decade. Despite the illusion and often an irrational insistence that publishing is built around all-or-nothing bets, more and more blockbusters don’t come from the four quadrant playbook but sprout up out of seemingly nowhere.

Now, make no mistake, when it comes to fiction especially the blockbusters have always carried the industry—the top 100 of top 10,000 fiction books in a given year account for 50-60% of all new fiction books sold. The top 10 a near 20-25%. That’s ten books representing 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 fiction books of every new release sold. The concentration is less pronounced on the nonfiction side, which naturally covers a wider swath of subjects and genres. The top nonfiction bestsellers in any given year can be in categories as varied as cookbooks, D&D guides, history, and self-help manuals. The top 100 nonfiction titles range from 30-40% of the entire market. The top 10 about 1 in every 10 books purchased.

Still, overall, the surprising answer to whether the book publishing industry has become more feast or famine is no.

This kind of data is inherently choppy, but what we can see is that last year (2025) was the least dominated by big hits of any of the six years above from past and present. A decade ago, in 2015, the top 10 fiction books accounted for 3% more and the top 100 nearly 4% more of the entire market for new fiction. Although 2024 was the year most dominated by the Top 10 books — accounting for 26.42% of every book sold, driven mostly by Fourth Wing and the sequel to Fourth Wing —even with these massive hits, the top 100 bestsellers of 2024 maintained less dominance than they did a decade prior in 2013, 2014, or 2015 at 56.39% of the market. Nonfiction publishing has changed little in terms of its top-heaviness over the last decade or so, and it’s consistently about half as top heavy as fiction. Nonfiction authors also writer fewer books, or in some cases never repeat (one wouldn’t expect a second Brittney Spears memoir any time soon, for instance). The biggest change over the last decade for nonfiction is dwindling sales overall. So, let’s home in on fiction, where these dynamics are more pronounced and less subject driven.

The Nature of Big Books Has Changed

Perhaps the firm insistence that book publishing is a winner takes all proposition is because this long-held paradigm is slipping. Not only is the dominance of our largest novels waning, but the books at the top of the charts are increasingly coming from unpredictable places. A decade ago in 2013, 2014, 2015, the “random” meteoric successes were far and few between—I counted a total of three, All the Light We Cannot See, The Girl on the Train, and The Nightingale, and one collection of manga.2 Predictable names like King, Patterson, Evanovich, Sparks, and Baldacci filled the top 10 and top 100 titles of the year almost every year a decade ago with little room for anyone else.

In 2025 three of the top ten new fiction books were complete debuts—Broken Country, The Correspondent, Alchemised—and sophomore series authors that previously came “out of nowhere”—Rebecca Yarros and Callie Heart. These novels did not check off every box in the holy four with the exception of Broken Country.3 The Correspondent was a midlist novel that became a phenom. The three big romantasy authors may have had big advances, but all of the institutional support, like the Fourth Wing movie deal (Michael B Jordan???), is post-fact of their mega success.

An important, subtle distinction emerges when we look at the specifics of this feast or famine conundrum: was the success preordained and planned, or did all the markers of success come in after it caught fire with readers? Increasingly the answer is the latter. Even if the concentration stats remain slightly down (essentially flat), the nature of blockbuster authors and books has essentially changed from building giant, predictable brand names to launching specific, one-off projects into the stratosphere.

Zero Sum Game

The truth is that there are more readers than we could ever serve. The number of copies sold that it takes to become a madly, wildly, decade-defining book are relatively quite small. Being super generous let’s take Fourth Wing, the bestselling book in this dataset, and say it has sold 6 million copies in the US. That doesn’t even crack 1% of the US population. For context, A Minecraft Movie sold 35 million tickets (10% of the population) last year alone. As many people watched the auteur-driven, prestige film One Battle After Another in a movie theatre as read one of the most popular novels of the decade in Fourth Wing. The negative view of these statistics says that these numbers prove books are an insignificant form of media. The optimistic view is that even with concerningly low literacy and reading rates, it’s a far cry from there being a finite number of readers that publishers are competing for.

This doesn’t stop the zero-sum mentality that often pervades the minds of writers, editors, and publishers. Especially at the literary end of publishing, you understand how this mindset comes to be: if you set your sights on impressing a small number of critics, tastemakers, MFA programs, and awards committees, then indeed publishing becomes a knives out endeavor. What should be encouraging to writers is that massively popular literary fiction has emerged as a serious category for the financial viability of the publishing business. Starting a decade ago, authors like Anthony Doerr went from being a decently well-known, career mid-lister to a Pulitzer-Prize and world domination.

These “one-off” success stories are now an increasingly consistent part of the calculus. In 2024, Liz Moore and Alison Espach went from doing well in the grand scheme of the publishing landscape to extraordinary success, both entering top 10 status after publishing multiple books. Instead of having one outlier among nine Stepehen King- or John Grishim-like authors (Grisham and King haven’t give up their top ten spots in the past two decades), the dominant forces in fiction are spread out more evenly between reliable huge bestsellers (Grisham and King), pre-destined bestsellers (your four-quadrant Yesteryear type publications), and complete surprises that emerge from carefully planning, lots of work, and a not insignificant amount of luck.

This last group of books, the complete surprises, shows that the zero-sum mindset is largely an illusion. We see it dispelled every time books break the containment zone of avid and consistent readers. The life cycle of success of a book goes in concentric circles, the first being power readers, the second circle is average readers— people who read 1-10 books a year. But what happens when you really have a breakthrough success and go to millions of readers is that the non-readers come to the party. Given the size of our market, clearly a lot of people that can read don’t. When a book reaches critical mass, it starts to pull these lapsed readers back into the fold. The tricky part comes in trying to retain them and move them into the “average reader” category.

Why Won’t We Let the Feast or Famine Model Go?

Publishers get stuck in the zero-sum mindset because they get trapped into competing for the readers they know rather than tailoring each campaign to the readers on the sidelines, which is a much more labor-intensive process. Part of this is inertia and lack of confidence, part of it is that it is legitimately difficult to do this for fiction. At least with nonfiction you might have a clear subject matter that appeals to someone who generally doesn’t read, a book about current events, or science, or a public figure that groups who don’t read might make an exception for. But how do you identify the reader who read Agatha Christie as a kid but never graduated to reading mysteries into their adulthood? Is it worth aggressively targeting the Project Hail Mary readers, a younger, more male demographic, or is Ryan Gosling starring in a blockbuster movie the only mechanism to get them to pick up a sci fi novel?4

Why does the concept of feast or famine publishing still exist if we know it is just as likely to breakout one book by putting all the eggs in one basket as it is to spread those resources to, say, ten books, knowing reliably that one more modest book will rise from the pack? As a business strategy, publishing the ten books is almost certainly more sound in the long run. Publishing the ten books with the expectation that 1 in 10 will really work, 4 will be solid, and 5 will tread water or sink has a number of benefits. Firstly, it’s vastly more diversified risk. Betting the house again and again means that a small run of bad luck can be ruinous. There are other benefits to not following Twain’s advice of watching one basket of eggs. Spreading the wealth is harder work, but in that work, everyone involved builds valuable skill. Writers, editors, and publishers hone their craft and raise the floor of each subsequent publication. They build relationships and reputations that can help launch an Anthony Doerr or Liz Moore into the clouds.

The answer to why the feast or famine mindset persists is that it is easier to fail once than fail nine times. The labor required to publish a book does not scale up exponentially with the amount of resources dedicated to its publication. Writers, editors, publicists, marketers, influencers— we put as much work in on the losers as we do the winners. On the attention front, it’s more costly to do ten books rather than one even if the profits even out in the wash. The four-quadrant, feast or famine model feels less risky than rolling the dice on ten midlist authors and hoping one will break containment. The psychological reason this is the case is that when you try to pre-ordain success and turn out to be right, you can claim ownership over that success.

Strategically, money is often its own justification of worth, offering yet another illusion to the editor and publisher of control and influence. In an environment where the grip of a sure-thing is slipping further, the only thing that guarantees media, Hollywood, or celebrity book club’s attention is a publisher paying a truckload of money for a book. Money is the rare signal of confidence. A signal that the publisher will not let the book die on the vine easily and will back it up with further resources. It’s the only way to reliably ensure serious consideration from reviewers, booksellers, readers, and media.

On the flip side, working hard and admitting that the breakouts will happen more or less at random is a hard pill to swallow—it’s an admission of lack of control. In a nutshell it’s easier to laud or bemoan stratification than to embrace the chaos. Other forms of faster-moving media, television and film and music, all point to where books are going. There are, by my informal count, approximately 1,000 television shows, and a couple dozen that are exceptional at any given moment. Yesterday it’s Succession and Severance, today it’s Widow’s Bay and Cape Fear. Even if you just watched only the hugely buzzy shows you, wouldn’t have time to watch them all. That’s where the land of books is likely heading, less ubiquity but more big—rather than massive—hits than ever. No longer a feast or famine, but a slightly bigger table where more people than ever can eat.

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What Even is Plot?

A literary novel like The Palm House makes you start to wonder about the nature of plot.2 What happens in a story, we are led to believe these days, is supposed to be the thing that draws you in and keeps you glued to the pages. But just as often we find ourselves as readers or watchers or listeners pulled into a story for reasons we can’t quite explain. Something hooks your interest that doesn’t have to do with cause and effect, with finding out what happens next. That’s the providence of Gwendoline Riley and a certain kind of literary fiction.

The Palm House isn’t neatly wrapped up in one plot engine or one central tension that’s easily described. The novel starts in London with a conversation between the narrator, writer Laura Miller, and her friend magazine editor Edmund Putnam. From the outset you can tell Riley has a knack for subverting expectation. Not many novels concern the conversations of two completely platonic, straight (presumably), single, middle-aged friends. This novel-as-conversation technique is reminiscent of Riley’s near-contemporary British novelist Rachel Cusk. The Outline trilogy, Cusk’s most popular works, likewise uses the conversation device to immediately sideline the first-person narrator. In The Palm House Riley’s (presumably) autobiographical writer narrator lets her friend Edmund Putnam do all the talking for the majority of the novel.

This conversation point of view shift is a tricky technique to pull off. Because it gives the storytelling an almost hemmed in (“limited”) 3^rd person quality.3 Laura Miller is the puppet master through whom Edmund Putnam’s story filters. In part one we’re only learning about Putnam, but through the lens of what Miller relates and frames. Step back and think about that lens and you’re really learning about Miller because she’s selectively sharing episodes of her conversations with Putnam.4 How she relates these interactions is its own kind of judgment that says as much about her as him. This makes The Palm House both a sort of scant first person and limited third person novel all at once.

Putnam’s story is that he works at a magazine that has a change in management. An incompetent suit is brought in to take charge, derisively nicknamed “Shove”, which in terms of economical characterization gets an A+ because that’s all you need to know to get the picture. What is clear from the way our narrator frames the story, but largely by letting Putnam speak, is that Putnam is both a sterling employee and also completely that old man who cannot and will not change.

I remember one night, in the Crown, holding the edge of the table, looking at my knuckles and wondering why they weren’t white. He was under a malignant spell. From sheer bloody-mindedness, I kept trying to break it. I tried to be rigorous, and straightforward.

‘Will you look for another editing job?’ I said.

‘Oh, nobody’s going to want me, he said.

‘What, because of your prison record? What are you talking about?’

‘Do you know how many offers I’ve had?’

‘You haven’t applied for anything, I said.

‘Not one,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Not a dicky bird!’

‘You haven’t applied for anything!’ I said, again, as if that were relevant to the point he was pushing.

He didn’t want reassurance. He didn’t want sense. He didn’t want fellowship. He did not want a substantive conversation. I found it mind-bending, to be faced down by this wilful ignorance from one of the cleverest people I knew. I felt like a prey object.

Putnam was forty-nine! And as well as living, had he not spent a good proportion of those years reading, thinking, watching films? Had none of that given him an inkling of how to face life? Some model for elegant survival? Maybe this was all one in the eye for that old myth, Or new myth, was it? Newspaper-pedalled? If I thought of it that way I was less lost.

Why should he have learned anything? Was that a way to look at it? Or had he absorbed something else? Was this a sort of bovarism I was dealing with?

‘Well, maybe that’s right,’ he said, softly, about the job offers that had not appeared by the power of suggestion or by dint of a natural justice in which I’d never elsewhere heard him express any faith.

‘Maybe it is,’ he said.

By way of eye contact I tried to bring him back to earth. By way of serious, searching eye contact. But his face, I discovered, did not then look at all resigned or rueful or sigh-some. Rather this was a face you might see on a storm-swung pub sign: eyes agleam with ancient, pagan malice.

‘Nobody cares about the things I care about,’ he said, or scoffed.

‘People used to care..’ he said.

I looked around the Crown’s small back room: the wooden floors, the mirrors, the other drinkers - and there was the young Chinese barman, collecting glasses, and there was a dog: a black Labrador, wagging a meaty tail. All evidence of life outwith Putnam’s mood. To my right, Putnam kept going.

‘Funny how things turn out..’ he said.

‘Yes, it’s funny how things turn out,’ he said.

While the average reader might feel the difference in effect of Riley’s prose style, digging more deeply into her construction reveals that writing style is more than just vocabulary and sentence structure, it’s choices. It’s the peculiar, non-standard, but effective choice to give Putnam multiple lines of dialogue in a row with full breaks. It creates the impression that Putnam is not the type of man to listen and by proxy is not the type to adapt to new circumstances no matter how unfair. Subtle, intentional choices like this—the repeating dialogue— reveal the difference between what engages a reader in a commercial novel vs. a literary one. You get the sense that Miller—and Riley by proxy—is the type of person that likes to listen to strangers rather than talk their ears off. She likes to allow events to reveal themselves, not keep you on her string waiting to know what happens next.

Incident vs. What Happens Next

What draws you in is not the plot of The Palm House—neither the narrator nor the reader really cares if Putnam gets a new job. The predicament isn’t really the point. Where the absorption comes from is in the more existential questions that the point of view implies. Riley has a command of incident and detail, not to be confused with plot. The Palm House is not about what happens next, it is about what is happening in each moment. This is what makes literary fiction always difficult to neatly describe without slipping into talking about broader themes: it’s all the little details, not the blow by blow, that make the incidents enthralling.

There’s no way to describe this quality without getting a bit spiritual. A literary novel like Riley’s has an energy to it. Even though it’s never neatly spelled out, the reader feels there is a purpose behind sharing these collected incidents. For as autobiographical as the narrator seems, this is not some arbitrary diary of events. Riley has the eye for what is emotionally urgent without employing the two most natural storytelling devices conflict and tension. And that is a sort of magic.

The most virtuosic section of The Palm House is part two (of five), which is the only part that does not include Putnam at all. The connections between all five parts are completely left up to interpretation—again, incident not cause and effect. Part two is ostensibly a flashback, but not at all used in the way we talked about a few weeks ago with regard to time structures. Riley isn’t interested in plot, so this flashback serves only tangential backstory purposes. The past and present aren’t meant to neatly meet at the end to solve the mystery. Likewise, the first-person narrator is so shadowed that the backstory of the first-person narrator in part two is similarly a shadow to this shadow. Riley, like many good artists, learns the rules of time structures to break them. A literary novelist might often use the “next important moment” theory of pacing a novel, but The Palm House deliberately cuts against that principle in several ways with part two, starting with the opening, which is intentionally mundane and nearly unrelated to what follows:

My grandfather flew Dakotas, in the war. I remember the framed photograph of him in uniform on top of my grandmother’s TV. He had a thin moustache and round cheeks. He’d enlisted when he was seventeen.

Later he worked at the Vauxhall plant in EllesmerePort. He died before I was born.

He’d been ‘very imaginative’, my grandmother used to say. His shed was his workshop. He used to make dioramas, of farms, beaches, railway stations: ‘English scenes, she said. He used to paint wooden clothes pegs to look like famous people. He set things in epoxy resin. I didn’t see any of the models. I remember a clothes-peg Paul McCartney, and a paperweight that looked like a plastic bag of Liquorice Allsorts.

After my grandmother died I helped my mother to empty the shed. I had to wear thick gloves and I had to be careful. Rusty tools meant tetanus.

Together we relayed cracked plastic crates out to the skip, and decomposing cardboard boxes, and shredded plastic bags.

I remember the evacuated gloom; the bare metal shelves, the cobwebs that crackled.

Reading the opening of part two of The Palm House probably cannot do the subtle arrangement of this opening proper justice. Suffice it to say that this opening is a misdirection of sorts, a feint that leads to more incident in a dread-filled, powerful way. More happens after part two, we return to Putnam, “Shove”, and the preoccupations of two middle-aged writers. We even learn more about the first person narrator and where she ends up. But what happens to both characters is not the point. Incident and fine detail continue to pile up. What you make of the story? That requires that you lean in and listen closely.

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Can Reading “Steal Your Writing Voice”?

“Reading too much” is both a myth and acts as myth-building tool. The implication that consuming other people’s words and styles could rob the writer of their “own voice” carries the subtle implication that the writer has a skill so singular that it must remain unsullied by other people. This kind of talk is more often than not likely part of a Genius Publishing Strategy, used primarily by more literary writers.

Like every great lie we tell ourselves, there’s some shadow of truth involved. Reading can have some effect on how you write. But it’s in the same way every input can affect creative output. Anyone who has watched the same TV show way too much or spent the majority of their time around the same group of friends probably has experienced some form of mimicry. Spend enough time in one environment and you might start making jokes like you’re on 30 Rock or using the same random words as your tight-knit group. Listening to and reading Rob Harvilla’s 60 Songs that Explain the 90s certainly influenced this newsletter’s style for a couple of weeks.

Another variation of the “no reading rule” is that a writer will eschew all contemporary reading for only great classics—as if to try to conflate their writing with literary giants and say dabbling in any lesser reading would poison their prose. Take Olivia Nuzzi’s grandly titled American Canto—here’s a description of her process via the New York Times: “Nuzzi, 32, lives in a tiny house in the heart of Malibu where lizards crawl into her kitchen and the King James Bible and ‘The Divine Comedy’ — two books she was reading while she was writing ‘American Canto’ — sit on her dining room table.”1

Reading isn’t some special class that is extra influential to writing, but the idea of the solitary and therefore wholly original writer persists. One thinks about the highest achieving teenager of all time in Mary Shelley, and her masterpiece Frankenstein. While this classic certainly feels unencumbered and singular (most classics do), it is also confirmation bias to feed into the genius myth in this instance. Shelley’s influences are clear, from the Bible to Milton to Darwin (not the Darwin you’re thinking of, but his grandfather). While it is true that her lack of experience in general helped her write something unique, Shelley didn’t pen a fantastic original novel because she stopped reading.

Can You Read Your Way into Becoming a Great Writer?

Let’s go back to Gordon Lish, the subject of the reader’s initial inquiry. A person who read for a living, and one of the many examples of the editor-turned-writer. The temptation is to say that focusing on other people’s work— reading and editing— poisoned Lish’s creativity possibilities. We are, again, dealing with grains of truth that hide some other realities.

Reading probably didn’t ruin Lish’s ability to write so much as that no amount of reading can guarantee the execution of a certain style. Let’s take the Harvilla example again. One can adopt the cadence of his jokes in 60s Songs Explain the 90s after listening to and reading hours of his work, but you won’t be able to reproduce it in the same way, ever. A good analogy is standup comedy, almost all great comedians have a distinct, mimicable style — think Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin — but just because you can recite the jokes, even well, doesn’t mean you can write them, let alone perform these new jokes in a style that will get anywhere close to the original.

We see an inability for writers to copy each other all the time with the estates of big franchise authors who are deceased, like Tom Clancy and Robert B. Parker— a good writer can do a decent impression, but it will never feel like the real thing. With enough study you can mock and do a decent imitation of the beats of a style, but it’s near impossible to copy someone’s writing style because writing is not only skill but a culmination of how someone’s mind, their unique experiences and perspective, channels that skill.

Studying vs. Practicing

It doesn’t help that Lish was trying to write short literary minimalist fiction, a type of fiction with an extremely high degree of difficulty. Serious readers and people who do other types of writing for a living tend to seriously underrate how hard the skill of writing fiction is. Editors are also prone to this: seeing what’s wrong and even how to fix it is an entirely different skill than generating something from scratch. If you spend your time around writing and words, it gives a false sense of proficiency. The classic example is lawyers, highly educated professionals who read and write for a living. A good number of lawyers have made their way writing novels too of course—John Grisham most notably. But, like editors, it is a group of people who often come in with an overinflated sense of their fiction abilities. You may have a decent writing base, better than most, as a book editor or lawyer, but there’s still a tremendous amount of work to do to become good at writing fiction.

The grain of truth to the “too much reading” myth is that Lish was moonlighting as a writer. He was trying to write the kind of fiction that people like Carver dedicated their whole lives to. Being a highly engaged, full-time editor as it seems Lish was will rob you of time to develop a lot of other skills2, writing fiction included. A lot of editor writers run up against a separate, related problem: they spend their reading time reading as editors not reading as writers. Reading is one of the best ways to learn how to write, but reading to learn how to fix and ask questions is different from reading to figure out how to build a sentence, a scene, a plot from the ground up. As an editor, to become a great writer you would almost have to double your reading commitment so that you can spend time reading as an editor and a writer—from an already crazy amount of reading—plus find time to practice write. Toni Morrison had to wake up at 4am every morning to do it all.

The Lesson

Lish’s example provides a good number of lessons and should help debunk the “too much reading” myth that goes around. There is not a danger in over-reading for writers so much as there is danger in swapping all of your time practicing writing fiction for reading. On a grand scale, studying, while generally less difficult and more comfortable, provides some illusion of learning a skill. Observation and understanding cannot take the place of doing, practice, and experience. The doubly disappointing news is that to get good at something, both study and practice are required unless you are born with some preternatural talent (and even then). More or less, myths like “too much reading” develop because we’d like to find shortcuts, writers tell themselves they don’t need to study since they spend all day practicing, editors tell themselves they don’t need to practice because they spend all their time studying.

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