Email readers, heads up! For the full effect, pause after the excerpt and decide: Would you turn the page? Vote and then scroll for the reveal!

Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.

Here’s the question:

Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.

So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page. In a sense, time is money for a literary agent working her way through a raft of submissions, and she is spending that resource whenever she turns a page.

Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good-enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.

How strong is the opening of this novel? Would it, all on its own, hook an agent if it was submitted by an unpublished writer?

The transformation occurred at approximately 2:23 AM, Pacific Standard Time. As far as I could tell, anyone who was indoors when it happened died instantly. If you had any sort of roof over you, you were dead. That included people in cars, airplanes, subways. Even tents and cardboard boxes. Hell, probably umbrellas, too. Though I’m not so sure about that one.

I’m not gonna lie. You guys who were inside, probably warm and asleep and dreaming about some random bullshit? I’m jealous. You’re the lucky ones. You were just gone. Splattered into dust during the transformation.

It was a Tuesday, and the calendar had just ticked over to January 3rd. A terrible winter storm had descended on North America, and half the country was buried in snow and ice. In Seattle we didn’t have too much snow that night. But it was well below zero, which was unusually cold, even for

I’ve always been the type of person who’s hyper aware of the passage of time. I know time is fleeting, so when I know I want to do something, I want to do it as soon as possible lest time run out.

That’s been true for my writing, too. I used to crank out drafts in a couple months. They were rough but at least I had something to fix. Later, as I grew busier with my day job, I was still pretty good at finishing a decent draft of a new project about once a year.

And then I had a child. And writing seemed like much less of a priority (and has stayed that way). Plus, there was the sleep deprivation factor, and my focus on keeping another human being alive while trying to do a good job at it.

After a multi-year hiatus, I started writing again. I started tinkering with my current project, “K-drama-esque romance idea” on August 12, 2022. In October 2025 I wrote an outline and started drafting it in November. It’s taken me roughly four months to finish 20,000 words, but much longer if you consider how long this idea has been percolating in my head.

The old me would have stressed about it. Must finish as fast as possible. Must find agent. Must try to publish before imminent death and doom. Over time, though, I’ve realized it’s not that serious. Having children humbles you in a way I don’t think other things can. Kids develop at their pace, in their own way. They have their own ideas and personalities. If there’s a plan it will definitely take a turn, but it usually ends up alright.

If it takes me another year to finish an acceptable full draft so be it. The writing industry is changing, but the need for entertainment isn’t going anywhere. And I want to finish this story for me because I want to read it, and I want my mom to read it (I turned her onto K-dramas a few years ago with Romance is a Bonus Book; now she has a Viki subscription).

Can I write a story that moves me the way Korean dramas do? Am I capable of it?

I want to find out. But I’m not dying to find out. And I want to do it right. I’ve accepted that this process is going …

Those of you who attended last year’s UnConference might remember me mentioning Eriq a few times in my talk, “Writing Oh Shoot Moments.” (My actual title was a bit more direct, but my mother reads my posts, so …) Eriq is an agency mate, and when someone with his instincts for high-stakes storytelling reads your manuscript and shows you how to make it stronger, you listen. His decades of storytelling experience—and his affinity for propulsive, race-against-the-clock scenarios and flawed characters—are on full display in his Martyr Maker crime thriller series. Today, Eriq talks about the origins of that series, his own beginnings as a storyteller, and why, for him, writing feels like the purest form of his muse.

GW: I’ve been starting my author Q&As by asking authors about their writer origin story. The term is typically reserved for superheroes, but I think creatives all have origin stories. What’s yours? 

EL: As a child growing up in Hartford, I wasn’t spinning webs like a young Spider-Man—instead I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom, writing poetry and short stories. I realized very early on that storytelling was my superpower.

I redirected into acting as a teenager, falling in love with the performance of storytelling, especially once I recognized that I wanted to join my heroes on the big screen. I spent several formative years in the business, doing deep character work, spending years on sets, and learning thousands of lines of dialogue. After switching into directing and producing, I worked on a thriller called Mind Prey that helped me to discover my affinity for the genre.

But the form that ultimately felt most true to me was authorship. I had written a few screenplays earlier in life, but I never connected with the harried process of the screenwriting pace. It felt wrong to rush the worlds I was building; I knew I needed a method that allowed me to sit with the work long enough to hear it, breathe it, taste it.

I also knew I needed to build up the courage to consider myself capable of becoming an author. I remember the little voice in my …

This year, for The Buzz series, I am interviewing marketing-minded authors and other book-loving creators who are doing great things in our industry. In my last post, I spoke with popular books podcaster, Courtney Marzilli. Today, get to know how two popular bookstagrammers— @electric_bookaloo (Jen) and @the_unwined (Sophia)—operate.

A few quick pointers about working with bookstagrammers from someone whose agency has been doing so for a decade:

• Get to know them. Follow them and engage with their posts first.
• Pay attention to what genres they read.
• Don’t have expectations that this unpaid influencer will love your book, post their review to all retail platforms, post on your publication day, and recommend you to their local libraries and personal book clubs.
• Don’t have the expectation that a bookstagrammers post will lead to book sales.
• Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. Don’t be so focused on the size of a bookstagrammers following.
• Be gracious.

How long have you been a book influencer, and what are your preferred platforms?

@the_unwined I’d say I got more active in the book influencer community around 2019, so around 7 years now! I mainly focus on Instagram, consistently posting and always growing. I’m active on Goodreads but use it more for my own personal tracking ( I do try to keep it as updated with reviews as I can!). I cross post to Facebook so all my Instagram posts automatically post there too. I use Netgalley more as a means of discovering new titles and not so much to read off of (I hate ebook!) 

@electric_bookaloo I was an early adopter of Goodreads – been on there since 2007!  Early on I just rated books and over time I began to review everything I read. I joined NetGalley in 2014 so posted reviews of those books there as well. I started a book blog in 2017 but it never became a really big thing and I no longer post there.

Are you a paid influencer? 

@the_unwined The short answer is no. Funny enough, I was offered a few paid opportunities back when I was a newer influencer but it was only once or twice and nothing much to speak of.  I was once offered a small sum to post a children’s picture book. When I received the book I didn’t feel it was appropriate for children and asked if they’d like me to send back the book, …

There was a discussion recently on an editors’ group about whether to work on AI-generated content or not. Everyone who commented, more than 70 people, said that they would not.

Some of the editors refused to be the ones who would “put the humanity” into the words since that should be the responsibility of the person who would ultimately benefit from the text. Others commented that the text was often not up to a standard they would accept anyway, AI-generated or not.

The discussion was pertinent since Hachette cancelled a novel recently that was said to have been written at least partly by AI. The author claims that an editor friend had introduced these AI generated parts of the text.

I found this an odd defense for a few reasons, but mainly because I found it troubling that an “editor” had inserted significant sections of text into the manuscript. It’s not an editor’s role to improve the text by writing or even rewriting the text but to point out where and how the author could improve their own work.

This is a serious ethical question for a lot of people in publishing since many of these AI models were trained on copyrighted text without the consent of the original authors. Even though some of those authors are finally getting some money, the “take now and apologize later” attitude of the AI companies rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, to put it mildly.

Like most people involved in publishing, I’ve been seeing increasing amounts of text produced using by AI over the last year or two. Even established authors are using AI for some aspect of their writing. Can people in the industry, such as editors, keep refusing this work and stick to strictly human authors or do we accept that this is increasingly how writing will be done?

A force for some good?

I can see that there may be some situations where AI can help. For anyone with dyslexia, for example, large language models (LLMs) in particular, like ChatGPT, can be useful. Or for people who for one reason or another have not had the advantage of a solid education in writing or at least writing for an audience. These AI models can, at least in theory, offer an opportunity for many marginalized people to get their stories into the world.

I also know a …

Sometimes.

If you apply that detail indiscriminately, it’s equally possible that you’ll entangle your reader and dilute your story’s point. When seeking a balance between enticing and telling all, remember to leave room for the reader who wants to enter your story.

While reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, for instance, “my” Ryland Grace looked nothing like Ryan Gosling, even though I was aware he would soon star in the role. Description is minimal because the book begins in deep POV as he tries to figure out who he is and why he’s alone on a spaceship—he’s not looking for a mirror to see what he looks like. Yet I owned my version of what this middle school teacher looked like the first time he lobbed a hacky sack toward a student while asking a science question—and no additional 50 words of detail about his looks could have taken that away from me.

Here are four tips to help you make your decision about what to include.

1. Think “who they are” not “what they look like”

Consider the following two descriptions.

My father stood five-foot eight. His receding hairline was hidden beneath a Mack truck baseball cap. Only a few curly strands of brown could be seen reaching toward the collar of a flannel shirt, worn to cover a sweat-stained tee. It looked like the steel toes sticking out from beneath his oil-stained jeans were the only thing holding his work boots together.

What have we learned about this man’s character? Very little. This fabricated description fails to drive story: he could be a farmer just in from the fields or a hedge fund manager who won’t trust anyone else to tune up his Bugatti sports car.

Now consider this excerpt from Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir, Educated.

My father was not a tall man but he was able to command a room. He had a presence about him, the solemnity of an oracle. His hands were thick and leathery—the hands of a man who had been hard at work all his life—and they grasped the Bible firmly.

Suggesting the power this authority figure exerts over young Westover connects title to description to plot intrigue: how will this smart young woman gain the education she desires while her overbearing, fundamentalist father stands in the way?…

The question stopped me short, because it made me think about the many times in my life I’ve felt driven to write, in order to process intense emotion. And yet it’s almost always been because I needed to process something hard, something that knocked the steel from my knees and the breath from my lungs. For me, writing my way through painful experiences helps me regain my equilibrium; happy feelings don’t elicit the same need.

I finished writing my fourth novel last year. I started writing it during the pandemic, during a period of intense grief in my life when I’d suffered loss after loss. Writing fictional characters who also suffered loss and yet found a way to come through it was my lifeline, the one thing I could cling to when everything seemed dark. I’m still not sure if I’ll publish it, or find a publisher, which has made me wonder: Why do I write? Do I write to get published, to have others read and respond to my work? Or do I write for myself? Or some combination thereof?

The answers to the Why do I write? question are as varied as we are, we writers, we joyful, tormented souls. You can find a great compilation of quotes from well-known writers on why they write here. When I really thought through this question for myself, I came up with this list:

I write to process my own feelings. I became a novelist in my forties, when my husband and I made a cross-country move and I had so many intense feelings about leaving behind our home in Oregon—the first house we’d ever owned, the house we’d brought our babies home to, the neighborhood where we’d established deep, life-long friendships—that I didn’t know what to do with it all. So I started writing a story about a woman who had to sell a house she loved because she was getting divorced. I could pour all my sadness about the move, my passion for my house and my hopes for the …

We’re thrilled to have former WU contributor and multi-published, New York Times bestselling novelist Allison Winn Scotch back with us today to share some of what she’s learned! Eleven novels in, she’s learned quite a lot about what it takes to stay in the business longterm, and we’re here for it.

Speaking of that 11th novel, The Insomniacs, which releases on April 14th, marks a genre-pivot for Allison–to thrillers! From People.com:

Scotch’s new novel follows four strangers, who each are suffering from insomnia. There’s Sybil, a mother who is trying to navigate life as an empty-nester; Zeke, a pro baseball player whose career is in flux after an injury; Julian, a secretive retiree who is trying to rekindle a relationship with his daughter and Betty, a waitress who sees the group as an opportunity to fix her own problems. Over the course of a few months, the late-night cohort becomes more like a found family — one that is uprooted when a member of the group goes missing one evening. Suddenly, the strangers-turned-companions are thrown into a gripping mystery that it’s up to them to solve.

“Whip smart…a compelling mystery whose ending readers won’t easily predict.”—Library Journal

You can learn more about Allison and her novels, including The Insomniacs, on her website.

Glad to see you back on WU today, Allison!

Hi Writer Unboxed! Thanks so much for having me. Many moons ago, I was a regular contributor here, and I’m thrilled to return with a few lessons I’ve learned between then and now. I feel like a battle-worn veteran of the industry these days, but that doesn’t mean that I know everything there is about publishing.

Here are some insights I’ve gleaned of late:

Burnout Is Real (and not that spectacular)

For the younger readers, that’s a Seinfeld reference. 😊 I’ve been in some phase of burnout since about 2020, and I know so many others are as well. The changing landscape of the industry is one aspect, but the weight of the world is another, and in private conversations, so many of us are saying: How do we keep doing this? What is the point? Why do I feel like I’m just treading water? The solution to burnout will be different for everyone, but just giving voice to it helps others understand that right now, this is so so so normal. Veteran writers, new …

When my first book came out, I was working full-time, writing, and parenting two kids under three. It was, to say the least, hard to find the time to write. It was also hard to find a place to write.

Neither of these problems were insurmountable. (Obviously, because my first book was not my last.) Because my schedule was tight, I was good about making use of time when I had it. On weekdays, I’d finish work at 5 and pick up the kids from daycare at 6. Once they were down for the night, I could often squeeze in more writing time before I got too tired to function. Weekends and holidays were writing time too. As for places, I learned to write anywhere and everywhere. At home, I’d most often write at the dining room table, but I could also bang out words with my laptop on my lap as I sat cross-legged on the couch or with my legs stretched out in front of me in bed.

But home wasn’t always writing-friendly, so I wrote in other places too. I’d get a babysitter for a couple of hours on a weeknight and spend that time writing at the local coffee shop. (It didn’t have wi-fi, so those times were particularly productive.) I learned to push back my seat and write sitting in the driver’s seat of my car in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. As the kids got older, I kept snatching these moments–in the stands at soccer practice, in the coffee shop closest to the dance studio, in the chilly bleachers at the ice rink, in the waiting room at the dentist’s office–to make progress on my work. As the pandemic lockdowns began to ease and I was desperate to write somewhere that wasn’t my house but not ready to sit indoors with strangers, I wrote outdoors on benches and restaurant patios, bundled up in a coat, scarf, hat, and fingerless gloves.

My mantra was simple: write anywhere, write everywhere.

I’ve gotten to the point that I write better outside my house than in it. Even though our current house has an office with a desk, that office also has a washer and dryer. Nothing turns an hour of free time into 20 minutes of writing time like laundry. So I’m still writing anywhere and everywhere outside the house: waiting rooms and school pick-up lines, ice …

Please welcome author Ruth Knafo Setton to Writer Unboxed today! Ruth is the author of two novels, The Road to Fez, and her latest, Zigzag Girl, “[a] mystery that understands how easily a performance can become a crime—and how dangerous it is to confuse the two.” (Kirkus Reviews)

From Ruth’s bio:

(Zigzag Girl was) a finalist for the 2026 International Thriller Writers Award for Best Standalone Novel, and recipient of the Grand Prize in ScreenCraft’s Most Cinematic Book Competition, and the Daphne du Maurier Foundation’s First Prize. An NEA fellow, she has studied magic with Teller, Jeff McBride, and Eugene Burger, been sawed in half and in thirds, and escaped from a regulation straitjacket. She is a multi-genre author whose work has been widely published in journals and anthologies. Her screenplays have received honors from Austin Film Festival, Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab, and Page International Screenwriting Awards. She has taught Creative Writing at Lehigh University and with Semester at Sea.

You can learn more about Ruth Knafo Setton on her website, by subscribing to her monthly Substack for creatives, and by following her on Instagram.

Thanks for being with us today, Ruth!

It began with Venetian blinds.

I was eleven, watching a black-and-white movie on late-night TV. A detective knocks on the final woman’s door—a motel room, maybe. He was trying to solve the case of a murderer who slashed women’s faces. He knocks repeatedly. Calls her name. No answer. He turns and walks away into the dark. The camera shifts to the window. Through the slats of the blinds, a woman’s eyes appear, then her face—already slashed, disfigured. She watches him go, the only person who ever tried to find her, the only one who might have believed her. The blinds close. The screen fades to black.

I didn’t know the word “noir” yet, but I felt it in my bones: hope snuffed out, dread made visible, yearning trapped behind bars of light and shadow. Noir speaks in visual language, expressing what words cannot.

When I began writing my new novel, a murder mystery set in Atlantic City’s haunted theaters and seedy boardwalk, I returned to noir—that magnificent, morally crooked tradition born from the wreckage of the twentieth century. I wandered through Chandler’s labyrinthine Los Angeles, Hammett’s fog-choked San Francisco, the suffocating psychological interiors of In a Lonely Place. I rewatched the films that forged noir’s …