A group of friends and I co-founded the Tom Grass Literary Prize in memory of our friend Tom, a writer, adventurer and unstoppable traveller. We invite writers to respond to the spirit of adventure, in short fiction or non-fiction.

The theme landed straight away because it best encapsulates Tom, who travelled the world, always had amazing projects on the go, and lived a life too untethered for most of us. It is an inside and outside idea, because adventure takes place on many levels. Two years in, the writers who have approached us have answered this call more powerfully than we could have imagined. Far places have come to us. Voices from different communities have revealed their worlds. Emotions have radiated from diverse perspectives in recognisable, relatable, shared ways, whether the landscape is familiar or not. Judging the prize has been like having a real-time conversation in a global village. It’s been a way of gathering with old friends, with Tom’s family, and with these unknown writers, all us sharing that yen for adventure, even if most of the time this is through portals, from a desk or daydreaming on the way to work.

In this second year, we received 527 submissions from 56 countries across 6 continents. The writers must be unrepresented by an agent and without major publication yet. Emerging is difficult to define – maybe writers are always in the process of emerging. But this prize feels like it needs to be an encounter with writers at the beginning of their journeys, so that the prize is a footstep, maybe the kind of positive footstep writers particularly need in early stages. Many of the pieces however show a deep commitment to writing and a developed sense of individual style and purpose.

Inspired by a talk I went to where Mary-Jean Chan described how they judged the Booker Prize, we used a traffic light system. This year, amber did not feature in discussions. The green lights were clear – although difficult to agree on exactly 10 for the shortlist, and even more difficult to narrow down to 3 finalists. But not impossible! What went on the traffic light columns of my spreadsheet was only part of the process. We went back to the written pieces in the course of our meeting. We read out openings and extracts. We discussed their merits from different angles, from inventive language, to timely subject matter, to story arc. Fellow judges Praise Ukpai and David Clifton, zooming in from Nigeria and Mexico, held their peace with incredible patience, while we took turns listening to each other, checking our interruptions, craning at the laptop screen for subtle argument and persuasion and sensitive observations. Allegiances, individual and majority, shifted, settled and resettled as all views were expressed.

A quick note about AI (can’t not!) As due diligence, any pieces escalating to the longlist and then potentially to the shortlist were put through several rounds of AI checks. Use seemed extremely rare, thankfully. The team however reported that machine checks appear biased towards clearing the piece under scrutiny of plagiarism or being AI-generated (blurred lines between the two). This detected sense of machine bias is based on human judgment, though. I can only describe this feeling as a persistent residue of smoke and mirrors. I know this feeling, from having occasionally read AI-generated work. The sentences at first appear competent, but the meaning increasingly circles empty old hat metaphor. No meaning clearly emerges, no emerging intention, as you get from lived thought or thought lived. Just words unsupported by thought, and a dodgy taste in the reader’s mouth.

This year, seasoned by year 1, there was less talking, no shouting, more system, and most definitely as much passion, attention to detail, and sudden hoots of laughter. What I learned about story from reading the pieces, and rereading the ones we kept coming back to, is similar to this sense we had among the jury – despite conflict, even welcoming the conflict that different personalities always bring – of tending thoughtfully and magnetically towards a sense of shared meaning. As an agent I read hundreds of submissions and many works-in-progress, so this should be obvious to me. But judging the prize gave me a clearer feeling than ever before about the three pillars we looked for in the stand-out pieces: subject matter, story, and style. Of these, story is the only objective language. Exciting or relevant subject matter is in the eye of the beholder and so is style. Meaning, however, triumphs. Audacious, non-narrative, unconventional style is difficult – and, as the prize also revealed – occasionally magnificent. But story speaks and behaves in the shapes we live in, whether in actual real life or because we are drawn to place ourselves in those imagined footprints.

This joy in the shared journey of story reminds me of George Herbert’s sonnet ‘Prayer’, the way it piles up glorious and sensual images, more and more, and then ends in one sentence of two simple words: ‘Something understood.’

She pushed for the parade through Manchester that day to be led by female cavalry – this was the first public appearance of a policewoman on horseback. Dean was the UK’s first leader of a major trade union, and remains one of the most significant industrial leaders in history. She understood substance as well as presentation, helping her in the fight to come and its newly explosive media glare.

Forty years ago, over 54 weeks from January 1986, as leader of the print union SOGAT, Brenda Dean took on Rupert Murdoch and News International in a bitter fight for jobs that was Britain’s last major scale industrial action. A working-class Lancashire lass, proudly so, she was billed in sexist terms as ‘the Blonde’, and rose to become a Labour Party peer in the House of Lords. She was bullied as a ‘Judas’ in ‘film star’ guise, but widely respected for her sense of justice, her management and leadership, and the strong will that powered through her ‘Brenda agenda’.

Hot Mettle: SOGAT, Murdoch and Me is a riveting account of her career, including the long crisis of 1986 when the digital revolution tore through the old newspaper businesses of Fleet Street. In January 1986, 5,500 print workers were sacked overnight by News International, as its main papers The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the Worlds had covertly moved to state-of-the-art premises at Wapping, in London’s Docklands. At first glance, these key events make a clear-cut story of victim and aggressor. But while it was undoubtedly a kick in the teeth for newspaper staff – from print machine workers to cleaners to librarians to messengers to telephonists to ‘telead girls’ to circulation reps – it was a much messier and more complicated process on the inside. Powerful unions had evolved shady practices and, albeit to compensate toxic working conditions, they had negotiated well for themselves. Possibly too well, in the face of technological change then unfolding, as 500 years of hot metal plate printing was rapidly succeeded by desktop computers, with direct text input, and digital printers.

It was a scenario laced with desperation from the start, as a large workforce clamoured to remain in place while the shape of work irrevocably changed, and journalists, among the most able (back then!) to find a position elsewhere, pinioned on tough moral divides. Thatcher’s government had imposed heavy constraints on the unions, for example prohibiting cross-union support, which the miners’ strike of the previous year had drawn morale from. The print strikes, following the nationwide shake-up from the miners’ defeat, was a historic and symbolic moment of rupture that launched the era of digital media, and is the starting-point of my PhD. It’s not quite Murdoch to Musk (with the long view of Gutenberg to Zuckerberg), but given that the figure of media magnate / diabolical visionary features so heavily in the fabric of our lives, arguably more than any other kind of leaders, this pop alt subtitle keeps springing to mind.

The fact that Brenda Dean was a woman, and a woman not from London, but from the North, the regions, shaped how people saw her and how she approached her mission. She braced herself to steer and communicate despite ‘the testosterone among the London print workers, who loved a fight.’ She was well aware of the legendary glamour exuding from the capital city and Fleet Street, and of the higher equity London homeowners held simply by geographical accident. A London print worker, whose energy was fuelled by the hundred pubs on Fleet Street and served by all-night trains running from Blackfriars, had a very different set of pay demands and expectations to regional workers. Dean was also at pains to meet the needs of her entire union’s membership, who were not all in newspapers, but in other areas of printing like packaging and book-binding. They were based all over the country, and did not have the print workers’ power to stop the papers for a night (or longer), depriving the public of news and the proprietor of turnover to run the operation. They had wielded this power to put newspaper groups in jeopardy often, and Murdoch and Thatcher determined, brutally, to end it.

Media, government and colleagues quickly learned not to underestimate Dean, but she was still bullied and derided in headlines pitting her as ‘the Blonde versus Murdoch’, and subject to routine intimidation tactics in the workplace and public life. ‘If you’re doing a man’s job, you’ll bloody have a man’s drink,’ she was told, but she turned down the whisky and got on with the job. She also turned down the offer of VIP tickets to Wimbledon from Robert ‘Call me Bob’ Maxwell (and did not call him Bob; she instinctively loathed Robert Maxwell). She also, probably to the detriment of her union, refused to negotiate with Murdoch singly, behind the back of rival/comrade unionists. These are the kinds of principles she lived by and which seem to mark her as from another era of fair dealing and transparency.

Another fascinating fact I learned from Dean’s autobiography is that the electricians’ union, the EETPU, defected to Wapping early on in the strikes, strengthening News International’s set-up and weakening the union’s base. A parallel today might be the shift in the jobs market from coding and software skills (supplanted by AI) to data centre construction. We may always need cables (and pipes laid by plumbers). The print workers missed more than one opportunity to strike a deal with Murdoch, holding out for a better one that never happened. But even if they had accepted compensation and/or forfeiting their union powers in exchange for employment at Wapping, it’s very difficult to see another outcome in the big picture. Media corporations were conglomerating and scaling up on the back of tech efficiencies and reduced staff.

Before the digital era, people’s footprints disappeared like yesterday’s chip paper. I wonder what happened to this unique tribe of print men (and they were mainly, perhaps entirely, men in the print machine rooms)? They combined artisanship with manual labour, had the charisma to confront powerful editors like Kelvin Mackenzie and Andrew Neil and proprietors like Murdoch and Maxwell, and knew how to spell ‘rhombus’ and ‘Djibouti’ and lay a word count in a limited space with visual precision and no compromise to grammatical sense. In a conversation with Linda Melvern, author of The End of the Street, she mentioned to me that one of them became a bin man. If anyone has light to shed on this, or comments to make, or references to share, I would love to hear.

Leave a comment

Revisiting the story of the print strikes gives a close view of how radically society and media have changed in a generation. I am looking forward to seeing this play about it at the Kings Head Theatre, Islington, on now and until May 2^nd.

Thank you for reading, following, correcting me if mistaken, and subscribing!

Subscribe now

Even though this is fair week, all the usual publishing business rolls on and it’s not all pumping up advances and scrutinizing royalty rates. On the agenda: a cover at final design stage; ensuring a studio booking and fees for an author to narrate her audiobook; tracking down fonts for title branding as an author moves from one publisher to another; getting letters and proof copies to authors whose endorsement we’d be thrilled for; besides circulating all those sales points and pitches and pulling in responses from publishers... As I touched down briefly at my desk, checked bag and pockets for my final schedule and my pass to Olympia Exhibition Centre, a voice whispers in my ear: are the wheels still fixed to this wee machine / how the hell am I supposed to organize the whole life thing?

London Book Fair, as every literary agency knows, takes months of preparation, from scheduling nearly 150 meetings with international publishers across the few days of the fair; to producing a catalogue to show off all your lovely books; to editing, pitching and selling those books (did I say months of prep? Actually years!); to spreading the word from one market to another, once that first book deal in the home market is done. It’s a marathon, and in our agency, follows the crucial pitch-a-thon, where each agent pitches their titles to the other agents so we all learn the pitches. Caro Clarke wrote this vivid description of what happens at book fairs. Whew! After the huge adrenalin run, post-holidays, in the long month of Jan and the frantically short month of Feb, forgive us for being possibly a bit tired already, before the fair itself begins. Especially if you threw yourself into the wine at the gorgeous HarperCollins party that traditionally opens the fair

.

Apparently this brink-of-Spring tired feeling is normal, as our environment changes in March. (Classic London Book Fair weather involves the illusion it’s warm enough to ditch your coat and sit outside – wishful thinking!) There’s more light and yet more rain when we’re over rain, and our bodies are struggling to adjust like caterpillars desperate to grow wings. Blame me for the metaphor, but this insight into our well-being and how to make the most of it is from Ayurvedic practitioner Geeta Vara. Her forthcoming new book Rasayana, all about ageing well, is a must-read especially for mid-life women and a highlight of my Spring list that I keenly talked up at the fair. Geeta says many clients at her Ayurvedic practice lament low energy as March begins. I heartily recommend Geeta Vara for self-care advice and expert reassurance.

A note of sympathy then to editors who are routinely deluged with submissions from New Year to March, amounting to ten a day at peak times, so some tell me. And that’s on top of ongoing submissions through the rest of the year, and then doing the fair all over again in Autumn for Frankfurt. It’s a lot, but as an agent it feels important to showcase a manuscript or proposal – if it’s ready for market – during this time of intense competition. Everyone’s submitting, and everyone is shopping. At a time when there’s a fair bit of negative talk about the brutal chicane of mainstream publishing, where many a good book gets stuck in the trenches of delay (from agents and then from commissioning teams), the good news is that there’s more acceptance, I think, that a good book can sell anytime, book fair or no. And if a book goes out on submission before the fair, deals are often sewn up after the fair, or between one fair and the next. That slower process is often the reality behind headlines which may suggest multiple deals done overnight. Novels take a long time to read, and publishing fiction is inherently risky. Outcomes are rarely predictable, and that’s part of what makes publishing interesting and somehow addictive. But, sigh, it has become a truism that US editors are faster to respond than UK.

Perhaps it’s also that feeling of emerging from the darkness of winter into the light of Spring that is prompting me to grapple (again) with organization. That’s to say email pile-up, file management, syncing devices, and back-up. The fiddly side-work that occasionally raises its goblin features in our otherwise beautifully streamlined digital lives.

For me, this work is now complicated by having 3 drives: work, personal, and PhD. Work is straightforward. I am super strict about which days are office days and which are wfh, and since covid, I minimise the splurge of documents on my desktop at home. Compartmentalization is key. But the home desktop is now split in 2: going forward, all personal stuff is to be saved on my i-cloud drive; and all PhD stuff to my university one-drive. Old copies and duplicates need weeding out, and PhD files accessed through the one-drive portal only. As folders subdivide and documents proliferate, and the potential for disaster in the case of lost work increases, this is both basic and essential. This outer layer of organization reflects the inner landscape where a great beast of research must be tamed into a clear thesis, beautifully structured and paced, and fully referenced. Oh, to be like this leaf skeleton!

The Great British Spring Clean is coming up late March, and I’m organizing a local litter pick. In a sense this has taken 3years’ planning, in that I’ve been on local activist group LAGER Can’s mailing list for 3 years (in a sense, a lifetime’s prep – I’ve always worried about litter and waste). None of the litter picks happen locally enough for me to get there without neglecting children and busting a gut. So I’m pulling one together on the common near me. It’s taken a few decisions; a string of emails, messages on various Whatsapp groups; agreement on the area to cover; circulating a map; picking up kit from a house nearby; a new WhatsApp group... and next Sunday, off we go! But why on earth did I decide to run a local litter pick when already at organization max?

Sometimes it’s a joy to do a small thing well, like bake fluffy scones or help Spring clean the neighbourhood, as a reminder of how big things get done. If your average day involves swinging both small tasks and really big tasks, my feeling increasingly is that the same rules apply. Plan every project as though preparing a voyage to Mars: ensure steady stream of oxygen; monitor food & drinks intake; manage stress & anxiety levels; know your safe place; have a back-up plan; and label EVERYTHING.

Thanks for reading! Comments and questions welcome and please check out what I’m looking for as agent here - in a nutshell: engrossing fiction and how-to-live non-fiction.

My friend Jessie sent me a link to an interview she did about reading for pleasure, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 3rd Feb (listen at 6.45am). Jessie is an old mum friend from nursery days. Since then, she has become a Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway University. Her big research focus on children’s literacy. Jessie then sent me the link to the full meeting of the Education Committee at Westminster, which her radio interview was based on.

Ministers and civil servants questioned a panel of 6 academics, all women, in fields of psychology, teaching and pedagogy, all dedicated over many years to exploring and advocating for literacy and reading: Professor Jessie Rickett; Dr Jo Taylor; Associate Professor Jeanne Shinskey; Dr Helen Hendry; and Professor Teresa Cremin. All there to explore the reported decline in reading for pleasure among children. Only 1 in 3 children now say they read for pleasure, a 36% decrease since 2005. I’m familiar with this negative pattern from the National Literacy Trust reports. It’s causing anxiety in the education system, and in publishing. Where are future readers/book buyers going to come from? David Shelley, CEO of Hachette, has started a ‘Raising Readers’ initiative to stem the tide. Why is this happening, and how do we reverse the decline?

First, why would we want to? If you’re using Substack, it’s unlikely you’re not already convinced of the benefits of reading. But here’s to note the wide evidence – cited by all the experts on the panel – that reading for pleasure helps with language acquisition; greater comprehension; development of symbolic thinking; human bonding, leading to self-worth and emotional regulation; emotional awareness; communication skills; psychological wellbeing; motivation towards future studies; knowledge of wider cultures; involvement in the social dimension of reading through discussion; sense of consequence to our actions; increased attention span; memory training. These cognitive and psychological aspects influence social behaviour, and lead to higher attainments in school and workplace, and so to a more thriving economy. The deep holistic qualities given by reading for pleasure are markedly different to what is gained by obligatory reading and learning, which in the current system, comes with a lot of box-ticking and assessment. The case for reading for pleasure – reading what you want, of your own free will, for no external givens – is resounding.

So how can we better understand the 36% decline of this life-enriching (and relatively cheap) activity, and what are we going to do about it?

One learning to emerge from the expert panel is about framing the decline in reading for pleasure as a societal decline. The current debate, and this is writ large in the National of Reading 2026, focuses a lot on children now. But while it’s crucial to look at what children are doing, children are heavily shaped by adults around them. Dr Hendry highlighted that adults are choosing not to read. Adults’ habits have changed, but there is a lack of research evidence around this. Dr Taylor talked about a lack of skills in parents and a possible decline in free time. Dr Shinksey spoke of parental modelling: what parents show children and how influential this is.

The first National of Reading was in 1998, the next in 2008, and the next one this year, 2026. The years in between included global financial crash; austerity years in the UK; the rise of Tech; Brexit; and COVID. I’m not drawing from academic evidence here, but I have lived and can see this sequence. I can see the gap of national effort to maintain the place of books and free-to-access third spaces in our society, in these years of simmering crises. And, alongside these, I observe the closure of libraries and the move to digital. Nearly 1,000 libraries gave closed around Britain since 2010, roughly a fifth to a quarter of them. Digital libraries are brilliant in providing such a wide store of reading material, and they are also cheaper to maintain, but the physical loss of books – and the physical and social visibility that books bring – has a toll over a lifetime.

Historically, technological breakthroughs have shown a pattern of diversification, not displacement. Journals did not replace books, as Thomas Carlyle speculated in 1830s. Television did not kill radio. Ebooks did not replace books. All these co-exist. Audiobooks are not replacing books or ebooks, though their current rapid growth throws the question up again. Podcasts appear to be a factor in the drop in sales of serious Non-Fiction, another reminder to remain alert and adaptable. Inside the publishing business, I can see the resilience of books in many ways. Waterstones is thriving under James Daunt’s smart stewardship. The Works is doing a great job of positioning itself as your high street store for books, crafts, and non-screen activities. But there are missing pieces in the potential pie of readers. When James Daunt, Waterstones MD, says he doesn’t recognise a fall in the popularity of books, this seems to me more relevant to some parts of the socio-demographic range than others.

People using fitness apps, watches, and rings often lament how progress tails off to be replaced by creeping stress about their stats. Tim Hartford, the ‘undercover economist’ has based quite a few of his FT mag columns on the paradox of more data turning up a wisdom deficit. My children quickly abandoned their fit bits. They couldn’t be bothered to track their steps – they’d rather just run around. The downside of accountability culture is that narrow goal-orientation can lead to a good-enough, tick-the-box attitude. It takes away the pleasure, and the potential for pushing beyond the obvious limits. When Dr Hendry was asked what schools can do better, and whether teachers are trained to foster a community of lifelong readers, she put it will real punch by saying that ‘the thing that is measured wins out.’ Reading for pleasure is, by nature, not a make it happen scenario. It can be really difficult to do, and to inspire. And it’s difficult to measure. But far from impossible, as the evidence shows.

Still, what is quickly measured and assessed gets attention. It’s easier to set SPAG tests (Spelling, Punctation and Grammar – not usually associated with pleasure!), than it is to provide a third space within schools, where informal discussion can play out around reading for pleasure. These third spaces – non-transactional, diverse, and open to all, which libraries are – are vital for present well-being and for future-proofing our societies.

All the experts spoke in terms of responsive, child-led teaching, and empowering teachers to allow open child-led spaces, aside from assessment criteria – and for us all to be reminded that this too is of educational (and societal and socio-economic) benefit. As Dr Hendry put it, all these sides of teaching interplay, but ‘something has gone wrong in the balance.’ In a society now preparing to outsource many tasks to AI, even writing basic emails, fostering this space of mental initiative, nuance, and circulation of a variety of perspectives, feels urgent.

It struck me while listening to the Education Committee that policy doesn’t change without a wide body of evidence. Evidence can only emerge over many years, from a phenomenon establishing itself, defining itself, triggering research questions, then surveys, studies, analysis, collating all these, and disseminating the results. Only then are results held up to reality (and that reality, as tech is challenging us all with, may have moved on…) – to produce possible new legislation. This is of course not how social change works. Social change is not top down. But it is how policy change happens, and this gap is what we’re navigating at the moment around social media use.

Listening to the panel discussion, it also struck me how pertinent questions about our literacy landscape are to this moment of digital anxiety – yet how early stage this dimension of research is. I do not want to suggest a cliché about dumbing down (books good; social media bad). And there is not a blanket replacement of one by the other. Our reading landscape is more multifarious than ever, and offers many opportunities for reading material at low cost. Pockets of digital anxiety exist in the context of widespread digital immersion. The evidence is still scant on how reading on a digital device differs from reading a book. Is recall affected? Is comprehension affected? Is reading books being replaced by screens? As Dr Hendry says the ‘grey literature’ (general public discourse across including polls and surveys), says yes. The detailed evidence base is not yet there, but it is emerging. Until it is there, and to help ensure that helpful research does emerge, whatever it might say, let’s not underestimate the power of common sense, trusting our instincts, self-regulating, asking questions. Private discussion has the power to make public noise.

Because it’s where I live and because of the sense of peace in this place of study. Desks and ergonomic chairs and a big sky to daydream with, above a line of Victorian brick houses, shaggy with treetops and zig-zagged with tower blocks.

A fellow student joins me in the room each week. We don’t know each other’s names, but we greet each other warmly. Between long pools of silence, occasionally we stop and explain a little of our work to each other. Mine is an arts-based project about the impact of digital media on literature. His is about forced migration in Ethiopia, where he grew up, where recent government policy is displacing people to make way for tourism in Addis Ababa. Strangers in each other’s fields, we’re mutually impressed by commitment to a specific idea, that tells us about the world and what we might do better in it. I’d like to read that, we say to each other. I love your project!

On Monday mornings, I feel so happy to start the week this way. After many satisfying years as a literary agent, I’ve worked out a way to continue working with authors alongside this new string, one that will analyse some of what I’ve learned, and that answers a creative and intellectual call. I’m thrilled for this quiet room, for good tech and a library. But the house is empty, and our cat Otto is bored and alone on these days of relentless rain.

This Monday, I broke the routine. A neighbour knocked on our door on Sunday evening. Another neighbour had found Otto under a bush in their garden. Otto? Not possible. Another neighbour called from their front door – did we want to come in? Were we OK? Another neighbour, looking shattered, brought me white roses, gentle and pure, and almost as beautiful as him.

It was already a strange day because, the first time we’d done this, my mother came for Sunday lunch with her carer, who it turns out is very afraid and allergic to cats. It’s OK, we chimed, Otto is hypoallergenic and he’s not here now. We weren’t worried. He’d be napping upstairs or next door, or roaming between gardens, or surveying the neighbourhood from the shed roof. But he was not. He had retreated under a neighbour’s bush. With no sign of illness or injury, we had to say goodbye to our magical cat Otto, aged only seven.

Otto was his own mysterious being, and he was also my shadow, under my feet, sleeping on the chair next to me, on my lap, on my keyboard, around my neck if he could get away with it. He was loved and admired for his blue eyes shining from a dark grey mask of Zorro and his extremely soft fur. Being close to him felt like being alive with every love and every loss and joy of my life. I did not expect it, but he hit me with such force of love, I thought he was Emily and her beloved dog Myrtie returned with their torrent of affectionate mischief from years dead. I thought he was my father back to haunt me as a benign ghost, an angel incarnate. Do others relate to this too, I wonder? My husband, to protect me, tells me it is a morbid thought – but it felt like an uncanny yet plausible way to explain how this cat (mere cat!) plunged us in pure love, as maybe only a familiar animal viscerally permits you to feel.

The winter garden in its loneliness shields me for a moment from expecting him. Were it not for this rain, there he’d be, draped on the bench, a princely sphinx bathed in sunlight. The summer garden entwines him in every leaf and tree. You might not notice at first, but by the fan of his tail, there he is in a pool of shadow close by. He should be about to slither beneath from the fence now – but instead I tune myself for birdsong. When I turn from the window, I see him in the doorway, on the bathmat, and hear him on the stairs. I’ll wait for his silent leap onto the bed, once the house is quiet late at night, body curling into a knot of warmth. It will take time not to expect him in the front window, waiting, by the pot I push to the side so he can take his place, or running on ballet paws down the stairs to greet me at the door.

This season has stirred already with a sense of anticipatory grief, as I adapt to my parent radically ageing, and see my children absorb new highs and lows on their emotional spectrum. Perhaps because of past loss, I cherished our cat every day. And maybe for this same reason, I had the foretaste that his life might be lovely, short, and fabulously brutish. So we crammed nine lives of love into each day. And perhaps our cat, in his unstoppable affection and his magnetic instinct for home, for me, perhaps it was he who all along responded in kind to me.

We cried and pressed on gently. As planned, I went to the West London Substack meet-up that night and was glad I did (thank you, Amy, Alex, Kevin, and everyone). We cried and pressed on some more. We gather close and feel so lucky to have loved so well.

.

What’s your subject? Specificity is our friend. Specificity and scope - that is, wider resonance. Even if the book promises an exploration of broad universals like love, death, marriage, or cake, vagueness needs pinning down in the writing and in the pitch or premise (Cake! But what special kind of cake?). Whether Amazon is your preferred bookseller or not, it’s instructive to see that Amazon do not have a Memoir category. They have Biography and many other subjects from Arts to Business to Music to Travel and others between. First up, what your book is about will identify it to readers and to you as you work out what you have to say – even if the way it’s written is as integral as the story or event you cover. While H is for Hawk is about grief, the way it is also the highly specific and relatively unheard-of story a woman hawking is a huge part of its uniqueness and beauty.

Touch the nerve. Digging deeper, often a particular emotion motivates a memoir and governs how it unfolds and how it’s read. The external narrative of H is for Hawk – about the hawk! – is fused with a raw expression of grief, pulling all the events and sense impressions through and giving the book a powerful internal compass that readers, like me among many, felt compelled to follow. What’s the most awkward, painful, or the funniest, or the most embarrassing moment that in the back of your mind is itching to be revisited? Even if you leave that off the page, for whatever reason, it may give you a clue as to what’s really driving the energy and the potential emotional affect of your memoir.

Find your structural beat. In Memoir, I think readers look for the same classic satisfactions as fiction gives – engrossing characters, in themselves and in dynamic relationship; a powerful arc of emotional and psychological change; a sense of world or place that is transporting and eye-opening. Often the way in to character is through the body, the physical, through what they’re doing, not just thinking. Time anchors, like the seasons, or a ‘my year of’ frame’ are great, but also, physical anchors can give a memoir a structural beat that’s needed to help capture and shape an otherwise amorphous tapestry. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, the netsuke delight our curiosity – as well as being repositories for family lore, hidden memories and complicated feelings – as well as creating a tangible chain to hang the narrative on. My author Hannah Silva’s recent memoir My Child, the Algorithm invents its own method to explore and challenge nuclear notions of motherhood - it is structured as a conversation about love with a chatbot: prepare for surreal, poignant and lol insight.

What can you leave out? This may help you distil your material and really work out what is essential to put in. If you could only say one thing, what would it be? Memoir is not an account of events one on top of the other, but something much more prismatic. A reflection. An interpretation. This involves selectivity, distillation, and finding a kind of subterranean cohesion that drives what you really must include along the way.

Hold your horizon in view. Fun fact, that may especially appeal to those fresh from seeing Hamnet. Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir I Am I Am I Am, which also explores parental and filial and in this case near-death experience, was going to remain unwritten, unless the Sylvia Plath Estate gave permission for O’Farrell to use Plath’s line ‘I am I am I am’ from The Bell Jar. This memoir gains its structural beat by way of a sequence of near-death experiences – and then lands an even greater rhythm and sense of full and affirmative meaning by zoning in on this line. (I don’t want to give too much away!) The final horizon, its words, rhythm, tone and meaning, pull the whole book together. This is probably true of fiction too, but the conscious and poetic acts of making a memoir from the raw material of life, I think, call for a sense of cohesion, a central principle which transforms experience into a single evolving thought.

So how to publish it? Here come a few obstacles from the market, so we can train open eyes on the challenge. Memoir as a publishing trend is currently in a tricky place. The non-fiction market is competing for readers’ attention spans with a lot of fantastic – and free! – content, in the forms of podcasts and masses of stuff to read online, ranging from great to slop. (Slop! Love the word! Less so the technical meaning it’s now acquired, in the age of AI and the non-stop firehose of digital content). Following some big hits, such as Educated andThe Salt Path, publishers’ slates look full. Stories for instance around trauma, motherhood, illness, grief, and healing through nature have been heavily published into, so they need to stand out as extremely distinctive. Some publishers may feel a little burned, if expensive deals (often with celebrities), have not brought returns. Supermarkets used to turn over lots of high-margin hardbacks, but stock nothing like as many books now. The recent expose around The Salt Path adds a layer of anxiety. Has our search for more revealing and sensational stories come at the cost of truth?

The Salt Path is not an isolated case. One memoir I worked on became quite stressful when the publisher requested signed consent forms from everyone mentioned in the book. This turned out to be impossible to do. The author was long out of touch with her mother, the main concern, and her mother did not read books. Thankfully the publisher accepted this. I sympathised with what they were trying to do, because there had been a spate of litigation challenging authors’ published versions. A Million Little Pieces turned out to be riddled with falsehood, and according to Tim Hartford’s column in last weekend’s FT Magazine, Oliver Sacks was later tortured by the wild exaggerations he made in his bestselling classic The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

Truth – that’s what’s at the heart of memoir. Not only that, but the slippery and subjective nature of truth, as opposed to the accurate amassing of facts in chronological order. This is what makes memoir distinct from fiction or autobiography – and gives memoir its special power to pull what matters most from experience. With the news agenda blazing with strongman headlines from Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ and our lives relentlessly mediated by the dazzle of screens, now feels like a hugely sensitive and necessary time for truth and authenticity. That’s why memoir will always have a place – and those whose lives are remarkable in other ways, from comedy to acting or football or baking or tattooing, will find audiences for their personal stories.

One of the joys of memoir is that it is such a versatile and elastic form. It can be more or less events-led. More or less linear. More or less an argument, manifesto, or mystery to solve. If you have a story busting to be told and a quest or question you must answer through its writing, then nurture that flame, hold your fire, and when it’s ready to be tamed in hand, pass it on. And if the marketplace shuts you up because a memoir is, on one definition, a nobody’s story, you could get creative (and pragmatic) by shaping and calling it a journey, an exploration, an investigation, an argument, a rallying cry, a lament, a love song, an elegy, a debunking, a challenge, an affirmation... Long live memoir in all its manifestations.

Ever since I listened and watched ‘What’s the use’ on NPR’s Tiny Desk,

I’ve been hooked on Mac Miller’s melodic, haunting, and unique hip-hop sound. The feeling of a joke behind his words, equal parts schoolkid prank and fatalistically macabre, is subtle but there all the same. His voice reveals itself gradually as scratched and stretched with cigarettes and lean. Knowing that Mac Miller had died a few weeks earlier (in September 2018) definitely added to my sense of dark wonder and arrested awareness. What a waste that he hadn’t lived… and what an ignorant judgment that might be… what’s the use of this idle wistfulness that I hadn’t followed his music during his lifetime?

My son, aged 14, now expresses a similar nostalgia for listening to Mac Miller, and other hip-hop artists who also famously died young. But mostly he loves the beats for the beats. He compiles hours of playlists, analyses his listening habits on his favourite app, shares links and views with friends, and extemporises with me. Opening gambits go, ‘Some people think this is one of greatest tracks of the decade,’ proceeding to dissect the pros and cons, often careful to separate the art from the artist, and summing up, ‘That is. Officially. A banger.’ He now applies the same kind of encyclopaedic passion to hip-hop as he did to football in younger years. I didn’t listen to hip-hop around the house during those years because, often but not always, the language is too rude, and the beats too aggro. So it’s amazing to get back to it and discover so much more through my son’s eyes, from Frank Ocean to Nujabes to Tyler the Creator to the more obvious names, and listen to it together.

It’s a great feeling finding an artist to love. Hip-hop is an area I’m now diving into on the PhD, since making decent progress earlier this year on the events of the 1986 print strikes, the moment, in my UK-angled telling, of actual and symbolic rupture that initiated the digital transition and the audacious tech leaders headlines can't get enough of today. And since obsessing about the advent of AI, which has landed hard in a way that was not so present when I started research in September 2024. At times, I’ve worried that the fast-moving story of AI now is stealing the show from my longer view analysis of the consequences for reading and writing fiction of moving to electronic media in recent decades. All this must be assimilated into my thesis! – and hip-hop too, an art form also telling a story that moves through orality, literacy, secondary orality (Walter Ong’s term, to mean TV, radio, phone etc: oral comms that stem from printed matter, ‘secondary’ bearing a sequential meaning, not a qualitative judgment), to electronic to digital.

Not only is hip-hop a bonus way to bond with my teenage son, hip-hop is an oppositional space, from where I can explore oppositions, contrasts and overlaps between oral, printed, and digital expression, and ways of consuming and disseminating it. Tricia Rose’s books Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994) and Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (2008) are brilliant and seminal. This week, preparing to get back and deeper into Tricia Rose, I read Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, an academic book with a huge range of reference and sophistication of thought written in plain English and still in print well after its 30^th anniversary new edition.

Published in 1982 and aware of its own position on the brink of a digital revolution that succeeded 400 years of print culture, itself succeeding approx. 1,000 years of writing culture, it is a fascinating book. Even the preface brims with insight, situating Walter Ong as a pioneer (albeit an eccentric one) of American Studies – that is, the study of American literature, including quasi-adoption of certain greats such as Shakespeare – as a development in tandem with the thrust of American postwar geopolitics. Prof Ong began his academic career in 1950s, the era of Pax Americana, at Harvard, the founding university of the American republic, where American Studies seeded and grew as a major source of soft power that entwined itself with the more explicitly apparent hard power the US wielded globally then and into the Cold War, and arguably still now. By contrast, but definitely not without shared references, Hip Hop Studies, a field pioneered by Tricia Rose out of her native New York and out of Brown and Yale, offers an oppositional critique.

I’m looking forward to more on this next semester – and meanwhile listening to a lot of hip-hop over the holidays.

If anyone wants to geek out with me about books in whatever form, or send their novel or creative Non-Fiction to agent me, or has questions or comments, please be in touch!

Incidentally, NPR have raised $143,000 to help keep the music playing without paywalls. 13 days left on their goal to reach $150,000, in case you want to help.

is Casa Fuzetta in Faro, Portugal. Here I am for 5 days, as guest literary agent at one of Jacq Burns’ writing retreats. A former commissioning editor and author of Write A Bestseller, Jacq is a highly intuitive as well as practical programme leader. Days are structured around morning writing workshops – a dynamic space of real-time writing in the room, with break-out chats, discussion and plenty of questions. With lots of conversation around the kitchen table, and opportunities to slip away by yourself, we then all reconvene in the evenings for Q&A followed by dinner, deliciously chef’d by Rosie Sykes.

I had a talk up my sleeve for one of the workshops — a whistlestop, inside-track tour of your book’s journey from concept to outcome. Jacq and I discussed it before we left, but we also thought we might go with the flow of the group. We touched on these tips, and covered so much else besides – from sharing synopses and opening chapters for comment, to self-publishing v. traditional publishing, to truly knowing what the premise of your book is. So here, now, in concise form, are my 5 top tips that distil the process of your book from idea to agent to publisher.

1. Think like a pyramid

When talking to authors about their book-in-progress, I often use the metaphor of a pyramid. Does it have a very sharp and defined point? A point that you can press into people’s hands and pass around, in a chain reaction from friends, to fellow writers, to agent, to editor, to marketing, publicity and sales colleagues, to readers and critics out there. This point also radiates in many layers, not all visible at first, but making your book interesting, surprising, and not all hook, but substance too. In execution, it is strong and fully developed, without holes, to support its pitchable premise.

2. Create relationships – not just character

Giving voice to engaging characters we want to spend time with is essential. But consider how your main character is held in tension with another character. (Or 2 or 3 MCs; a bigger main cast usually needs pulling back into focus.) It is often this magical link between your characters which makes the book come alive. It is this between character dynamic that allows your main character to act and not just to think and be, to express themselves, and to reveal an absorbing arc of change and development.

3. Why now?

Your book cannot live in isolation, out of time. Even if it is set in the past, whether deep or recent, how does your book speak of and to our times? What light does it shine on today? This element of timeliness gives your book an extra and concrete-feeling reason to exist today (and there are, unfortunately, in our crowded marketplace, many reasons for it maybe not to exist, even if the writing is excellent.) A good answer to why now may be the reason people want to talk about it (and, see 1 & 2, keep talking about it!)

4. You can’t choose your success – but you can be aware of it and grow it

Sometimes a writer comes to the table wanting to talk about farming and really talking about love, or the other way around. Sometimes a writer wants to bring the most obscure element to the fore, when everyone they talk to wants to hear (again and again!) the one about them rescuing their rabbit from certain death. In your deck, you may have many cards to play, but the gallery have their favourites. In expressing yourself in a book, you too are playing to the gallery and are responsible for but not entirely in control of where the audience will swoon or laugh. This is not to suggest adopting a formula to please an audience. But it is to recommend cultivating a sense of what and how audiences respond, and an understanding of what they may respond to in you, your story and what YOU can bring – and then the challenge and achievement is to bring this conversation, this interplay together.

5. The curse & blessing of comps.

Comps are comparison titles. They are so often used in pitch letters, in order to position a book in the literary and commercial landscape, that editors very often say ‘what are your comps?’ or better, ‘I love your comps.’ Industry voices regularly decry comps as they can be such a limiting description. No one book is entirely like another book. But this instrument of ‘comps’ is useful despite being a bit blunt. It tells us what a book is, and can be used in nuanced ways (shades of X, and a love interest like Y, or feel for landscape like Z…). Comps give publishing folk a plausible model for success. This tool, blanket and blunt though it may be, is very much in use. It can take time to find the perfect one, two or three comps that situate a book, and they might not quite cover it, but this is still a very helpful, widely used shortcut to talking about a book that is yet to be read.

If this whistlestop guide from idea to book to agent and publisher sounds like a tall order, it is! Take heart, break it down, and keep going! I always remember an adage my mother told me years ago, bemoaning books that could be better if sculpted into a shorter space: Dear reader, I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write you a short one. To wrap up, here’s an even tinier tip — a tip after Hemingway’s iceberg approach to writing (little above the surface, and much in the depths beneath):

T h i n k l o n g . Write short.

Thank you if you made it to the end of this post! I hope you enjoy this food for thought and it gives you some practical inspiration. What are your top tips from ideation to action? My substack remains free to read, and covers publishing advice both creative and commercial, as well as (usually!) timely discussion on wider questions in book and media culture, as I gather notes for my PhD, which I’m researching part-time alongside my work as a literary agent. Any questions or comments always welcome!

2010 was the year London Book Fair was a near wash-out because of the ash cloud spewing across Europe from a volcano in Iceland. With flights widely cancelled, few visitors made it to London. Some said let’s not bother with book fairs anymore: we can get it done without physically meeting. Others, like me, disagreed. It’s so energising to meet in person, to talk, sometimes even to negotiate, to socialize, and celebrate. This week, my colleagues are taking their turn at Frankfurt Book Fair. My book fair preparation is done and deals are in motion, giving me a quiet week for other work with few meetings.

It’s often not what happens to us that forms the future, but how we react to it. I again thought of this when I read about Go grandmaster Lee Sedol being beaten by AlphaGo, an AI made by DeepMind. Sadness was reported in the chess community. Understandable, but AlphaGo did not kill the game of Go. A machine beating a human at the game does not dissuade me from playing the game. It is humans who enable the machine to beat the human. Machines will continue to help humans train – but humans must stay in training to build more helpful machines.

One rising fear with AI advancement is that the machine will become more powerful than the human. Before this particular apocalypse lands however, humans must make decisions about the purpose of powerful machines. But doing-the-right-thing seems comically/tragically hard to work out. That is, judging from rampant commercialisation, cybercrime, and the failure of Tech supremos (from product kings like Musk etc to millions of ordinary users) to prioritise, for example, forecasting climate disasters or disease diagnosis or anti-piracy laws in conversations about AI. What priorities are more worthwhile than others? What stories are worth telling?

For a year or more, I’ve been wondering whether the steering of AI into developing LLMs (and LLMs’ use in content creation) is more prevalent than other applications of AI. Or whether I just perceive this to be so because I work in the content business and am exposed to current debates around copyright theft, job losses, streaming platforms flooded with derivative content, and ongoing legal battles.

(Content: funny word. A word borrowed from the internet sphere, suggestive of material either intended as a platform to advertise on, or as marketing material; a word that leaks into other spheres of creation).

Now, I think the answer is yes: disproportionate resources are being used to develop AI for these purposes (rather than eg: for healthcare or education) and there are 2 strands to this. Firstly, LLMs are the holy grail in the currently highly lucrative (within few hands) AI race to geopolitical supremacy. And secondly, this is the fastest way to bringing AI into consumers’ hands, therefore the fastest route to profit, and the new most thorough way to harvest personal data and circle this back to users to create further advertising opportunities. (Advertising has always sat on top of editorial content; social media’s breakthrough was to have users make that content themselves). Many are observing all this with anxiety – see Karen Hao’s Empire of AI or James Meek’s essay in the current LRB, which opens with the grandmaster’s defeat by AI – and I’ve written about it before here.

Last week, Kemi Badenoch denounced English and other arts degrees as a ‘rip off.’ Yet brilliant use of language is the dazzling frontier luring the world’s most powerful companies and the capitalist visionaries at their helms; attracting eye-watering levels of venture capital; and pitting the world’s 2 most powerful economies (US and China) against each other in a race akin to the space race and the race for nuclear power. Brilliant use of language may be luring them precisely due to the very elusiveness of this quest. Deductive and rich in inference, capable of jokes and poignancy, ambivalence and ambiguity, language is the final frontier of AI invention, the peak of pseudo-human supremacy. Brilliant use of language has so far eluded AI developers: AI is good, but not that good. It is improving – but at huge cost. Costs that if (big if) recouped financially are unlikely to see the same bounce-back from a plundered environment. Certain applications of AI could be great for humanity, but determining what these right uses are is far more troubled.

Last week, too, I’m so proud and delighted for my fellow PhD research student at the University of West London Cesar Portillo, who was the Judges’ Winner of the Vitae 3MT competition’s National Final. This is the competition to present your PhD project live, without notes, with a single slide, in 3 minutes’ flat. We competed within the university as 3MT finalists, and Cesar proceeded to national level. He told a story about his childhood best friend who was blind and yet always beat him at video games, so today in his PhD he uses sound and haptics technology to make Virtual Reality an inclusive experience for the audiovisually impaired. What a fantastic project and worthwhile goal, which Cesar expressed to us by telling a story that is beautiful and true. Story and science unite here. With fair access and opportunity, human ingenuity is boundless. As the only specie who knows how to interpret themselves to themselves, those ‘rip-off’ arts degrees, that create stories and nurture critical insight and brilliant use of language, seem to me more urgent than ever.

Written in the aftermath of his mother’s death in 1977, it is a personal, idiosyncratic book about last moments – and it turned out to be his last book. To me it feels enmeshed with the strange circumstances of his life and death – and it was strange to read it in the week that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was killed and footage of the gunman fleeing the scene was rolled out online by both major news and social media sites.

Barthes was raised by women, his father killed in World War One when he was a baby. He lived most of his life with his mother. He nursed her at the end of her life and he wrote Camera Lucida in that aftermath. Soon after its publication in 1980, still overcome by grief, Barthes was returning on foot to his apartment after a cultural lunch with President Mitterrand. Crossing a street near his building, he was run over by a laundry van. He died a few weeks later. He had no children. Speaking of his ancestors in this book, he uses the language of language itself to remark on ‘the lineage of which I am the final term.’

In Camera Lucida, Barthes observes the way that photography arose just as ritual and religion were on the wane: at a time ‘contemporary with the withdrawal of rites.’ Barthes was not so much interested in exploring photography as a technique, or in its economic or cultural context. He wanted to understand it more deeply from an anthropological perspective. Defining photographs in essence as ‘what-has-been’, and often weighed for the viewer with a sense of already knowing whatever disaster was to come, Barthes wanted to understand: ‘the anthropological place of Death and the of the new image. For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.’

Barthes could not find his mother in any photograph, until he found her pictured aged five, in a winter garden with her brother. At last, he felt like this was the authentic air of his mother. Astonished by this, he was also struck by the way this image that so moved him was of a child he never knew. Characteristically, Barthes does not reproduce this, or any, photograph of his mother in the book. So potent to him, yet the image would be ‘indifferent’ to us.

One of the most famous photographs included in the book however, is that of Lewis Payne, the Confederate soldier who formed part of President Lincoln’s assassination plot. Taken in 1865 by Alexander Gardner, in his cell during the month before he was hanged, Lewis Payne’s direct gaze, his languid posture, his dark collarless top that seems of any time and of our time, the manacles at his wrists, and his good looks – all these are extremely confrontational. Payne has a film star air about him, attesting to why this photo has been reproduced so often since it first came into public circulation in 1955, after remaining in negative without being printed for almost a century. This photo of Payne then began to appear in books, exhibitions, newspapers, and famously in Barthes’ Camera Lucida. You can see an amazing colorisation of it by Marina Amaral in The Colour of Time. Barthes makes two major observations of it – one that the young man is ‘handsome’. This visceral admission contributes to the uncanniness of his next observation, that this photo depicts a time when Payne was alive, while being seen only through the certainty that ‘he is going to die.’

Barthes acknowledged the photo’s erotic charge, as he does within a few pages about a bare-chested photo of Robert Mapplethorpe, drawing a connection between these two male subjects, despite one being a man going on trial for attempted murder. He comments little on Lewis Payne’s photo otherwise. This, among other subtle cultural biases in his response to other photos, has attracted scholarly commentary (as in this article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17514517.2024.2353472#ack) My own sense is that Barthes’ concerns in Camera Lucida were so subjectively constrained around his mother’s death that he could not deviate to more detailed analysis of Lewis Payne’s photo, and that he too had cultural blind spots despite challenging so much orthodox thinking and being generally resistant to systems and lazy assumptions. He declares Camera Lucida a project in which he follows his own desires and curiosities – making ‘not a corpus, but a collection of bodies.’

But in this collection, a point of view emerges about photography being real, evidential. Photography is ‘what-has-been’ and ‘it is authentication itself.’ But it also so perishable, so shallow, so constrained by its ‘platitudinous’ nature by comparison with language: ‘It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not be able to authenticate itself.’ What a challenge and a call to think beyond platitudes this is!

Several teenagers I know have been shocked to see footage of Charlie Kirk’s murder, both his body and his killer, fed to them on Instagram - and I am shocked and sad for them seeing what they can’t unseen, unbidden, without context. I was uncomfortable watching mainstream news sites like CNN replay the moments the gunman fled across the rooftop, the commentator noting the way he leaves impressions of his palms as he scrambles away, which would be used to collect his DNA. This footage is criminal evidence of a particularly violent crime. As was Payne’s photo, though he did not succeed in his task of killing a man, and there’s no evidence to suggest this now famous portrait of him as a convicted felon was ever printed at the time. I was reminded of the distinction Barthes drew in Camera Lucida between pornography and the erotic, where head-on depiction of sexual content elicits no desire, curiosity or feeling. I don’t think it adds to my understanding of last week’s shooting to see the footage. Perhaps, I worry, it even diminishes it.

A high-concept and/or multi-layered structure is not necessary to every novel, and not always what I look for as a literary agent, but these 2 novels remind me how much I love a robust, integrated and meaningful structure.

Because I’m talking about writers’ work-in-progress suffice to share only general details here, without any of the individuating elements that make these 2 novels special (which we hope to share in time!) So: one writer takes an inciting incident – a disappearance – and the rest of the novel explores a range of character POVs who have touched on the disappeared person’s life and community, creating a melting-pot community of a novel that centres on the beating heart of finding the disappeared. The other uses a more conceptual framework, of named and numbered sections from a particular cultural calendar to tell, again, a multiplicity of individual stories connected by one seismic event. This last approach may remind you of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, which unfolded via an ingenious structure based on astrological movements.

Two aspects seem to me key to the chances of success with such an ambitious structure (which will then depend on many aspects of execution, including convincing characters and quality of writing). First, that the structural concept is not a floating idea but is meaningfully bound into the novel, with deep relevance to its culture and ideas. In other words, the structure cannot exist as concept alone and must have a narrative function. Secondly, for a multi-layered structure to be effective, I’m longing to see how the disparate parts of the novel are also connected by a single unifying plot element. That’s to say, a narrative backbone strings the sections together into one architecture, one experience and mood. And the parts add up to more together, in the 360 degree experience of the novel, than the sum of their parts side by side.

In my conversations with both authors, we have talked about the importance of how the individual characters’ stories will co-exist and interrelate with a larger narrative arc. How each one will fold back into the through-line narrative and how each – through-line plus the more tentacular stories – will illumine the other in richer ways than if they existed by themselves. In the novel structured according to a special twelve-part calendar, each section will be linked by the voice of a single character running through it; in late life, bereaved, seasoned by personal ordeal and by historic forces. This voice will not so much have a separate story to tell in each transition from one section to the next – this would risk overloading the other stories and result in confusion – but will have an emotional force, a mood, a subject, that will drive their own and everyone else’s stories forward with binding momentum, emotional coherence, emergent intention, and a sense of interrelationship (on all levels: plot, character, and dread but convenient word ‘theme’ – for more on theme, I love Brandon Taylor’s substack).

Working out a structure for your novel is a breakthrough, and worth thinking about even without resolving its plot. It may give you the confidence to write towards a plot resolution that is created in real time, presenting itself during the writing process. For genre novels, eg: Crime or Romance, known structures exist and the formula must be followed to satisfy the reader (and publisher). For literary novels, which I define as any novel that does not conform to genre, structure is not prescribed and structural stepping-stones are far less apparent. BUT a sense of structure – including essential beats of location and timeline – can still be help you write and help the reader read. My friend Sally Bayley believes plot to be a nonsense. Sally speaks and writes beautifully against the concoction that is fictional plotting, because it conveys nothing of what life is like and nothing of the artistic experimentalism in her work. I love her linguistic patterning and think she will be read for years to come, but perhaps because I have been trained in the publishing business, I enjoy structure in reading and find it helpful in writing - while Sally’s wisdom is a warning against the contrived and too coincidental.

The Overstory by Richard Ford is a novel with one of the most ambitious structures I have ever read. Taking a tree’s understory as both subject and central metaphor, turning that on its head and applying this notion of interconnected root systems to character, the novel has many characters, each with a detailed story, in an overarching story cast wide yet ultimately woven together. An awesome achievement, with so much to take in! Perhaps inevitably, I remember some parts more clearly than others, but what helps me remember any of it well is the connecting sinew – and this is also what gives it meaning and resonance between and over and above its various parts.

Sometimes writers divide themselves into those who plan and those who fly by the seat of their pants, but I think in practice novels happen via both. Here’s a podcast with 5 writing tips where I talk about this more. For early stage planning, I love this advice from the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien, in a letter that is a manifesto for the Impressionist technique (and challenge to classical, formal technique) and a lesson in how to approach writing a novel/making an artwork, always keeping a sense of whole as well as parts, cultivating a 360-degree instinct and grasping the overall vision:

‘Paint the essential character of things, try to convey it by any means whatsoever, without bothering about technique. When painting, make a choice of subject, see what is lying at the right and at the left, then work on everything simultaneously. Don’t work bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere, with brushstrokes of the right colour and value, while noticing what is alongside. Use small brushstrokes and try to put down your perceptions immediately. The eye should not be fixed on one point, but should take in everything, while observing the reflections which the colours produce on their surroundings. Work at the same time upon sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis and unceasingly until you have got it...’

This seems a great way to look at preliminary work for a novel – mapping it out without constraint, and aiming for an experience for the reader that is inter-relational and three dimensional. But then, the linear work comes in. Chronology as an anchor to your structure, working together with elements that echo and move forward and back. Even if your novel happens in several locations and/or timelines, a linear chain, present more or less explicitly, will help you (and the reader) manage the non-linear.

I’m really excited for these writers and for the mind-expanding ways their novels are working, for the way they carry both intimacy and a great scope of time, place, and action. Of the several draft novels I have read recently, searching for the few new writers in a year I have the capacity to commit to, this is what has lifted them above others – not only a strong premise and driving question, set in an interesting world, but an extra dimension that binds their stories together in a way that touches the messiness of experience and rawness of emotion, and our quest for meaning. Every story is fragment of another story, but whether a novel tells one story or many, it is the way each tangent is made to matter that gives a novel power. Different to what we find in real life, and different to what AI can produce given that AI collates surface text, with neither authentic provenance nor process of thought, novels arise from a duet between order and chaos.

Please share your writing tips and questions or comments, or get in touch to pitch your novel via Watson, Little. Thanks for reading!

A popular piece of advice for emerging creative writers is ‘show not tell.’ In other words, don’t explain what your character wants or needs or is conflicted by, or what your near future world is about. Instead, show the reader what’s eating them through sensitive choices of languages and specific detail. For example, not so much, ‘He was afraid of his mother’. Rather, ‘Whenever his mother turned up, his mind turned to jelly.’ This is useful advice and I’m not disputing it. Readers need to feel a character’s emotions, conflicts, and motivations to want to carry on believing the magic spell that is their fictional world. But I’d like to add a plea for ‘show’ as well.

Take some famous opening lines:

‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.’ (Ulysses, James Joyce)

‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.’ (The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath)

‘The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several week before we came to understand the gravity of our situation." (The Secret History, Donna Tart – always reminded me of The Bell Jar opening above!)

‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ (Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy)

‘Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.’ (Moby Dick, Herman Melville)

‘Elizabeth had always preferred the company of books to people.’ (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen)

In each of these openings, the character/s is brought into central focus, and often named directly. And at the same time, in the same breath, the dramatic scenario (for Joyce, a matter of character and language itself) is brought forth, central stage: the city is apocalyptic and the character is lost in it; a group of friends are isolated in a possible murder situation; this unhappy family is going through unique dramas; etc.

These openings proceed with the flourish of tell. They also communicate a particular emotional patina. The language chosen imbues their circumstances with this, whether from well-chosen adjectives placed in unusual context, or from smart juxtaposition (remote setting with murder; mysterious vagabond on epic journey; thinking heroine who rejects average company), or sheer rhetorical flair as in Tolstoy’s happy/unhappy hypothesis. Show and tell are working together. Even tiny details contribute to the effect of character, emotion and storytelling working together, such as ‘we’ in The Secret History. Most novels use third- or first-person singular, but ‘we’ instantly brings in a further dramatic layer, indicating a close group together confronted with this situation. Here is not only dramatic scenario, but the tension of relationship.

Novelists have played around and come up with thousands of variations and ways to open, from witness statements, to text messages, to prologues exploding one element or another of a fragmented timeline. Here is a much more show approach, suggesting a slow, atmospheric reveal of the world, in description that feels symbolic, and words with an almost biblical weight:

‘To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.’ (The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen)

This show style (some might even call it ‘showy’! - a debate for another day) is often seen as the ‘literary’ approach. But this is a slippery term and in many ways a false dichotomy between good and bad writing. A query I often make to writers of work-in-progress is: please can we have more information. Not dumped, sure, but filtering through a writer’s words. Often, I read work-in-progress where the character is identified only by pronoun, when their universality does not warrant this; or a crucial fact or set of facts is missing, particularly flummoxing when it comes to the relationship between characters or other key elements like time and place. Eg: protagonist returns to site of past trauma, (a nice loaded promise bubbling away here), but the relationship with the place (parents’ burial ground? Their old school?) is withheld. Or, conversation had about inheritance, but oh, I get it, they’re sisters, or whatever it is that holds the elements in a special tension.

Writers, take heart and confidence in revealing your hand! Perhaps, fear of not being able to sustain suspense and revelation holds a writer back from upfront reveals. Or perhaps, a lack of clarity about what the crucial detail is holds things back – touching the nerve, I sometimes call it, or the point of the pyramid that you can feel in your hand and then radiates across the rest of the novel. This is worth thinking about a lot, and if it’s vague, great! Chase that weird feeling; there’s a book in it, but find your expressive, dramatic building blocks too.

Here is an illustration in Sally Rooney’s opening of Normal People. Close observation, tiny gestures and dialogue about the everyday, but soon into the second paragraph: ‘People know that Marianne lives in the white mansion with the driveway and that Connell’s mother is a cleaner, but no one knows of the special relationship between these facts.’ But by close observations made in the opening lines, the reader already has a clue, a privileged clue, slightly steamy, increasingly so, and then for the entirety of the rest of the novel, this is what we explore. The nerve centre is laid bare upfront, by show and tell. A close and specific show, and occasionally an audacious tell, both serving a defined point of tension.

Dr Stacey Patton has a fantastic substack – I would love to be her student even for a day! I love her one this week leading with the call ‘write for the skin, not the brain.’ The skin is our body’s largest organ and most immediately sensitive and reactive. That’s where we sweat, flinch, wince, blush and swell. Dr Patton calls for verbs (and I love verbs: select that verb and, verb by verb, show me the character!) that ‘don’t just tell, but show and haunt.’ Haunt! Books we love stay with us like a haunting. Hauntings arise to tell us something. Novels are a tell form as much as a show form. There in one breath, now in the fleeting moment, now leaping across time, in the precision of word and detail, they show and tell.

Thanks for reading and please get in touch for comments and chat!

Last week came with two big challenges, two milestones passed with a sense of relief, achievement, and team pride. For whatever you got through too, please can we pat each other on the back?! I was a 3MT Finalist, a competition in universities where PhD students present their thesis live in 3 minutes to the whole PhD community. It was a test of distilling our studies into a cogent talk for a general audience. And a test of the neglected skill of memorization. And a test of nerve in standing up and delivering this to friends, staff, and judges in the lecture hall. In the same 24 hours, the co-founders and I announced the inaugural Tom Grass Prize shortlist, the result of several months’ hard work on this new writing prize. An amazing flow of writers entered by our deadline at the end of March – 682 in the final count!

Among many unexpected elements here was a discussion around the disqualification of a possible candidate for shortlist, because he admitted he had used AI for his piece. He confessed a poignant sense of wrongdoing, explaining that he had used AI for translation. It was – it is – hard to judge in this scenario where the line between a generative and a functional use of AI lies. Is translation a functional, mechanical process of X equals Y? It is a valid question, given that in some cases (for directions, or recipes, or basic conversation, for instance, and arguably for some popular books) the answer points to yes. But in other cases, such as literature where word use is highly specific, nuanced, and may be unique to its original language, the answer is no. Some literary stylists would even argue that translation is always a betrayal. Samuel Becket chose to write in French by mid-career, because English seemed to carry too much distorting style. En Attendant Godot was his original play, but he translated it and so we have Waiting for Godot and can be sure of it being also by Samuel Beckett.

In the case of our prize, the entrant was disqualified. The situation highlighted some of the borderline questions being raised by the spread of AI use. Some books are easier to translate than others. Most books do not credit the translator on the cover; others do and their translators are celebrated for their creative act in rendering the original to another language. Some books, books that are driven more by content than by style, lend themselves to AI translation tools better than others. But again, the line between cases is porous and subjective. And the commercial roll-out of translation tools has human consequences which need careful consideration, a live debate and an active transition taking place in publishing now.

Also this week, two newspapers (the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Sun-Times) ran a fake summer reading list. It was generated by AI and 9 of the 15 books on the list do not exist. Due to their well-established authors, these books might have existed, but the inconvenient truth is that they do not. I don’t want to name the journalist who produced the piece – it’s been widely publicised but gives me a queasy feeling of naming and shaming. Both the journalist and the newspapers seem equally culpable in not having a handle on correctly sourced and verified material. This case is black and white, but often, questions of judgment spring to mind. In what situations do we shortcut, in the hope that it may be right, sound right, and save us time, and just ask AI? This is not a bad new umbrella term for ‘Google it’, given the way Google now aggregates online sources to produce a summary answer, instead of taking the user to sources that address the search question. Those sources may themselves be wrong or insufficient, but they do not pass themselves off as authorless truth, and they tend to appear in a list most of us know is governed by SEO, suggesting that further research and a variety of sources could be consulted.

These questions about research and the authenticity of facts, of knowledge and truth, may once have seemed too obvious to articulate, back when our main sources were books and material with clear by-lines and publishers. The democratization associated with the internet – one-click and masses of knowledge for all with computer access; the dissolution of barriers to knowledge once locked behind library and university walls – is marvellous! But it comes with its opposite: the aggregation of unaccredited and possibly wrong information, and a severely tiered and competitive world, where billions are being invested in AI centres for purposes that appear reckless of consequence (eg: massive resource intensiveness; and copyright infringement, fostering a generation with little awareness of copyright, permission for use, fact-checking), and geared to purposes (medical? Financial? Infotainment? US-China power play?) that appear increasingly eaten up in the heat of the race to succeed.

These are some of the questions I explored in my 3MT. My PhD examines the consequences of the digital transition for writers and writing, from media mogul Murdoch to Muskocracy. There are many moving parts here, and it is an amorphous subject in some ways. Other people’s 3MTs shed ground-breaking light on life-changing research – sustainable solutions in construction; breakthroughs for the visually impaired; devising legislation for the protection of the Amazon’s indigenous lands from illegal mining. It was exciting to take part in this university challenge and so inspiring to be in the room listening to an array of cutting-edge projects, geared to improving lives particularly for more vulnerable communities. Sometimes, from my vantage-point of writing, publishing, and a nascent PhD stemming from these bookish interests, I worry at giving these questions disproportionate importance. And I wonder if I’m not only cynical but narcissistic in noting so much public attention to AI use in the creative arts and basic office practice (instead of on its potential in cancer treatment and climate solutions), and speculating this is not only because creative arts are often understood as where humans most differ to machines, but because Tech giants are creating this agenda as a gateway to mass-market take-up of AI products. Just a thought!

But listening to others’ projects was also a reminder that we are all involved in each other’s concerns. We benefit from multiple expertise, and quality of life is made from many elements together. It was also a reminder – seeing us all start by logging in and end by uploading photos – that attention to a Tech plutocracy that is indispensable and in which the business of writing and circulation of knowledge is increasingly embroiled is something to keep asking questions about. Back to the books then!

Thanks for reading and comments welcome.

There are few greater satisfactions than the sound of that paper crunch when the Empty Trash command does its job. Whoever designed that sound, a sound in three dimensions with added tactility, akin to the juicy old-fashioned click inbuilt to mobile phone cameras, understood this. A task is only really done when we see it - but if we can’t see it, because it’s digital, then we need to hear it.

I refuse to upgrade my cloud storage from £0.99 per month to £1.99 per month and definitely not £2.99. For a long time, I clicked away those notifications, reminding me of back-ups and storage management I needed to do but could probably get away with not doing for a while longer. Now, I actively delete them, intending never to take up the offer, convinced that unfettered digital storage is one of the hidden environmental crimes of our time. Vast data centres sit in desert regions of Spain, Arizona, the Middle East, demanding agricultural quantities of water for the cooling systems of giant servers, tucked inland far from the risks of corrosion and fire from sea water on rare earth electronics. Data storage represents 40% of Microsoft revenues, and 50^% of Amazon’s operating income. Google has the other major market share. More is being built. 78% more as currently planned. More data centres for people with more devices and more digital essentials to store and store under more photos and videos and music files and emails and last but perhaps most key to life’s milestones (births, marriages, mortgages, wills, publishing contracts): simple text files bearing a few crucial words and a signature.

My solution is to delete as much as I can. And unsubscribe as much as I can. Every purchase comes with the ask of an email address, loyalty scheme or no, after which streams of emails land, offering 25% off selected lines of wood flooring, magnesium supplements, and new season stock to browse. Dislike and unsubscribe! I deleted 503 ‘conversations’, as gmail puts it, in less than 5 minutes this way. But I have 10,000 more. Photos need a hard drive, or careful selecting and printing for albums (surely what the kids are suddenly useful for?), but otherwise I’ve come to a point where radically less stuff needs saving. See how you feel after the first year. Delete. Crunch.

The explosion of AI will hugely expand the cyberjunksphere, even while breakthroughs are made – but that’s a discussion for another day.

Aside from (and partly due to) this anxiety around data management and being baited into lifelong and ever-mounting subscriptions for stuff I little see, I’m a few months into a PhD. I began this in October 2024, at the London School of Film, Media and Design, part of the University of West London, and will continue with it part-time alongside my work as a literary agent. I’m researching the digital transition that has taken place in my lifetime, from the 1986 Wapping dispute – when Rupert Murdoch clandestinely set up new printing facilities in London’s docklands making 5,500 print workers redundant – to the advent of the tech giants we love to hate/hate to love today. What does this mean for writers and for citizens and what does it feel like? The print strikes of 1986, lasting a full year and taking place so soon after the Miners’ Strike, was one of my first memories of news and politics, no doubt because my father was a political journalist, but also because even as a small child, with no use for the words ‘chutzpah’ or ‘imperialist ambition’, the Falklands War and putting down these strikes seemed defining moments in the Thatcher era and the brash yet briefly burning 1980s boom. Brief, so it turned out, but cyclical, and I wonder if the individualism often ascribed to the 1980s is really our retrospective lens. Perhaps it is or was more an attitude that took root subsequently, from the 1990s, after the irrevocable loss of so many jobs which, if replaced, shifted from physical roles to service, retail and finance – sweetened by the lure of democratic content creation and self-care. What’s not to like?

Whether I have the confidence to live blindly without on-screen reminders of where I measure in the multiverse of data storage, that I doubt. From this tech-dependent normie place, I may need another decade to attain such zen-like transcendence.

Key sources: the non-profit investigatory organisation SourceMaterial and the Guardian’s investigation, April 2025.

Share Laetitia Rutherford