Let’s consider two characters—we’ll call them Angus and Zelda. Each is in their mid-twenties, living in New York City.

Angus has lived his life without any clear direction, seizing on opportunities as they materialize in his life, often at the spur of the moment. That approach has led him on many gratifying adventures—an excursion to Beirut with a Senagalese acrobat, an affair in Brussels with a NATO translator from Finland, a trip across the Atlantic on a tramp freighter that lost its captain to suicide off the Hebrides. It has also led him down several dead ends (he was not cut out to be a waiter, even in Paris), as well as a disaster or two (the three weeks spent in a Moroccan prison, the theft of his passport at knife-point in Istanbul).

In contrast, Zelda has always had a strong sense of self and a clear idea of where she is headed. Always good at math and science, she envisioned herself a scientist or a doctor from an early age. When the moment came to decide on a career path—medical school versus a doctorate in microbiology—she ultimately chose on the basis of which direction echoed most strongly with her sense of personal identity (she chose microbiology, in part because she found herself strongly averse to the sight of blood).

One night Angus and Zelda meet at a party and, despite all expectations, hit it off. Rather than being put off by their differences they find they’re intrigued. Angus has such hilarious stories and is comfortable in his own skin. Zelda is so conspicuously brilliant and delightfully curious. They discover that they enjoy their time together and miss each other when they’re apart. Over time, the relationship develops into a deep, genuine bond of affection and mutual respect.

Zelda is offered a research position across the country at Cal Tech, one that is both challenging and a great professional opportunity. Will Angus come with her? Will she stay behind if he asks her to?

According to some philosophers and psychologists, both Angus and Zelda, whether they know it or not, have been living their lives in conformance with a personal narrative. Call Angus’s “The Wild Rover;” Zelda’s “The Woman of Science.” Each of them began developing these narratives in late adolescence, as their adult identities were beginning to solidify—again, whether they knew it or not.

It might be said …

We can’t help it. We love stories because of those we’ve read, heard, watched, or otherwise absorbed throughout our lives. And while trying to find a place for our story in a library of works that has been accumulating through the ages is daunting, the bestselling parody shelf—where Seth Grahame-Smith earned a spot by juxtaposing Jane Austen’s 19th-century social etiquette with undead-slaying violence—is comparatively small.

If you seek time-tested structures that can send your story in a specific direction while still leaving plenty of room for your unique interpretation, you’ll want to look at genres, tropes, and archetypes.

Genres

Genre: a category of literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content

Many career authors help their stories take off right from the start by making use of genre expectations. Readers of romance wonder how the leading characters will eventually get together by the way they are introduced right up front—in the same place that a mystery lover would expect to find a dead body so they can be looking for clues that might identify the murderer. A thriller will promise “thrills” delivered through heroes and villains, increasingly high stakes, ticking clocks, and plot twists.

Are genre writers surrendering their creativity to a formula? Far from it. They adhere to conventions to assure their readers that this will be their favorite type of book. The fresh perspective you add will provide the reason your reader will continue to consume them. Think of it this way: if someone really wanted to read the same story over and over they would—with no need to spend money on yours.

You can find a list of genres and subgenres at the Book Genre Dictionary.

Tropes

Trope: A specific narrative convention or plot device that influences the way a story is shaped.

While tropes also help set clear expectation for both reader and writer, they inform a more specific path than a genre’s broad strokes. Some examples might be a road trip, found family, enemies to lovers, the locked room mystery, and time loops.

A list of more than 70 tropes can be found at Scribophile.

Archetypes

Archetype: A universal, cross-cultural blueprint for human behavior or roles.

Archetypes provide fundamental, primal patterns that resonate across all human cultures and time periods. Heavily rooted in psychology …

I’ve read the book, and I’m not sure the ambassador meant the phrase the way it comes across, but even still, the fact is that it’s there in print, for the whole world to see and dissect. We can talk all day about taking the quote out of context or how he didn’t really mean it that way or all the millions of excuses we can come up with when a powerful, successful man speaks glibly about something important. We can debate whether it’s true or not. We can pontificate for days.

The intent or context doesn’t really matter. What matters is that creating this “rule” (that’s what he calls it in his book) devalues the work of kid-lit writers everywhere.

We’re used to that, in a way. I suppose we just didn’t think the devaluation would come from one of our own.

*

Creating books for children comes packaged with a stigma. I feel it sometimes in conversations with other writers—Oh, you write for children? Huh. (Cue turning away to talk to a “real” writer.) I am not a serious writer creating important literature. I am merely a writer playing with words, publishing silly, childlike writing.

Children’s book authors are looked down on as not as skilled, not as literary, not as sophisticated. That’s part of the problem with the ambassador’s comment: We’ve been working for years to be seen as legitimate writers (and let’s face it, he’s legitimate partly because he’s a man), and with one flippant comment, he pulls the rug out from under the rest of us.

I see this stigma in other places, too. On a recent visit, my new dental hygienist asked me if I was working this summer. “I’m an author,” I told her. “I get to work from home.”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh, wow,” she said. “What kind of books do you write?”

Generally, when people ask me this question, they’re trying to see if they’ve read any of my books. So I went ahead and told …

I’ve been burning the candle from both ends lately, so when I realized on Sunday that I was on the schedule for this week and had zero solid ideas in the works, I panicked. Luckily, I found notes from a class I taught for Writer’s Digest some years ago on (ironically) burnout that are still timely. Without further ado, here’s a cliff-notes version of that session.

—

Consider a forest fire, how it consumes something full of life and leaves little but charred earth. It’s almost impossible to feel good about the fire that caused it, right?

Writer’s burnout can be similar. Something that once worked well–writing–doesn’t right now, which might make us feel negatively about writing itself. Negative feelings about the gig lead to less-than-stellar writing, which leads to more negative feelings about writing in general–a bleak cycle you don’t want to fuel.

That’s why it’s good to recognize burnout early if you can, interrupt the cycle, and reset.

The Three Faces of Burnout

Psychologists believe burnout has three faces. Since any one of them might be the match that starts the fire, it’s good to watch out for…

Exhaustion. Writers are often single-mindedly focused on their work, sometimes under deadline pressure, and both of those things can lead to cognitive exhaustion. Exhaustion shades everything gray, so we can’t view our work accurately or be certain that it’s solid. It makes us sluggish and inefficient, so the work we’re not sure about takes longer than it should. It can even make us resentful of the work itself. Watch for insomnia, forgetfulness, a rigidity in creative thinking, a sense of dread about the work ahead, and an uptick in time-wasting activity (which can lead to guilt–a little fire in and of itself).

Cynicism. Scenarios that can breed cynicism are ridiculously common for writers. Consider the story that still isn’t working after years of effort. The beta feedback that contradicts an earlier round of beta feedback. The impersonal rejections. The agent who stops answering emails. The book that stalls out on the shelf. When the effort you make isn’t met with some positive response, your good-natured self can wear down and become cynical. Doubt replaces hope. You resist the work. You make excuses to avoid it. You daydream about cashing it all in to become a banker, pun intended.

Ineffectiveness. The third face sets in when you begin to doubt your …

How do you keep track of your book ideas? Write them down in your phone’s Notes app, on a white board, in a notebook that you keep close, on a notepad on your nightstand?

As with so many things about the writing process, there’s no wrong answer. What works for you works for you.

But while I’ve had a habit of keeping my ideas separate, starting a new note in my Notes app every time I think of something that might turn into a book, I’ve recently tried something new.

Because none of my ideas emerges fully fledged. Again, this may be different for you, but in chatting with my writer friends, many of us have the same initial challenge: we get part of an idea, but it isn’t enough to hang a book on, so it just kind of sits there, fragmented, for years or forever. Maybe you have a setting or a time period, but no plot. Maybe you have a character inspired by a name, but no story to put them in. Maybe you have a brilliant title but haven’t yet figured out the story that deserves it.

Writing down your ideas doesn’t really help if you don’t eventually revisit them. So you do that, right? I’m not great at it, frankly, but just going back and looking at the ideas you’ve written down isn’t the recommendation I’m going to make.

Here’s what I think can unlock potential: adding those fragmented ideas together.

(Again, everyone’s got their own process, so you may already be doing this regularly, in which case it’s no insight at all, but such are the perils of the interwebs. Not everything applies to everybody.)

I don’t want to talk about my newest idea yet — it’s too new — but one of my previous novels came from the combination of a slumbering idea and a fresh one. In graduate school, I read everything by Margaret Atwood I could get my hands on, including the short story “The Age of Lead,” my first exposure to the historical Franklin Expedition. (Two ships of British explorers sailed off in search of the Northwest Passage and never returned. In the 1990s, neither the Erebus nor the Terror had yet been found, though it was known that many of the sailors aboard had probably died with or from lead poisoning due to contaminated food.) The idea of these …

It’s officially summertime and publishing typically slows in this time of the year. So, as expected, there wasn’t quite as much news as usual, but there’s still some noteworthy tidbits. Looks like AI-generated stories are increasingly being submitted—and also increasingly being rejected. BookNet Canada has launched its first survey on the role AI currently plays in publishing. AI is squeezing Europe’s translators and at least one memoir writer reports a significant drop in income due to AI. A growing trend of “cinematic” audiobooks with multiple narrators presents the question—do multiple narrators make for better storytelling? Netflix is launching a hub specifically designed for films and series adapted from books. Bad revenue news for publishers and authors—only 25% of readers actually pay for a new book or audiobook, and 16% are obtained  from free sources, including piracy. In the good news department, the American Library Association is celebrating its 150th year!

AI

Literary magazines receiving AI “slop” submissions

Rakuten/Kobo rejects 45% of submissions after deluge of AI-generated book

How much AI is too much?

What’s lost when writers turn to AI

BookNet Canada launches survey about AI in the book industry

Memoir writer says pay is cut in half, as memoirs are being written more by AI

Despite rise in AI, there is still a need for Europe’s translators

Audiobooks

Audiobooks power the UK publishing industry

Do multiple narrators make for better storytelling?

Meta issues gag order for “Careless People” audiobook and author sues

Booktok

“Hot Girls Read “on Booktok stirs controversy

Books to film

Neflix launches hub for books to film

Libraries

American Library Association turns 150 this year and raising millions for libraries to celebrate

 Publishing

Only one-quarter of readers actually pay for a new copy of a book

Why books cost more now

Is the Australian publishing industry releasing too many books too soon/

To boost adult reading, Booker Prize releases “Quick Reads”

Australian Publisher in crisis over accusations of antisemitism…

I attended the US Book Show in the early summer of 2026—a publishing industry event held in the heart of Manhattan and hosted by Publishers Weekly. And no matter how hard they tried to avoid it, almost every conversation came back to “AI: What Does It All Mean?!”

Since you’ve probably heard, talked about, and imagined many of the worse-case scenarios already, I thought I’d bring you news from the Optimism Front, the place occupied by all the higher-ups in the publishing industry, who are desperately scanning the horizon for the silver lining that has to be hiding behind the clouds (right? RIGHT?!).

Operations, Not Creative

The good news is that people in charge of big publishing houses are interested in ‘putting up guardrails’ around the creative parts of the process: authorship, cover design, translation. The slightly-less good news might be that none of them offered any evidence that these guardrails are in place in the form of actual policies or guidelines yet. But, from listening to a panel of CEOs from variously sized publishing houses, it seemed clear that they all agreed that:

A, We need to protect authors’ ability to license their work, and protect their copyright.

B, AI detectors don’t work, so editors must build stronger relationships with their authors to deepen their understanding of where manuscripts originated and how they were developed.

C, AI has the capacity to help them on the operations side—something publishing badly needs. (David Shelley from Hachette said that, currently, the vast majority of their customer queries were from bookstores asking ‘where are my books?’, something more streamlined systems could eliminate. Of course, if they don’t have these logical, automated systems built for this by now, with existing technologies, I’m not sure AI is the logical first step. You need operations people to ask smart questions before you start throwing technology at the problem…)

But I promised optimism not cynicism, so let me get back on track.

From Gatekeeper to Connector

I heard a lot of talk about how publishers used to see their role as ‘tastemakers’ and ‘curators of culture,’ pushing the intellectual and cultural conversation in the country, through the titles they chose to publish and promote.

At this event, there was a sense that their next job might be that of  ‘connectors’: finding ways to connect readers with the books they need at any given moment.

The industry …

Showing is not automatically better. Indeed, the tyrannical dictum of “showing” leads commercial and literary writers alike to believe that the power of story lies mainly, if not entirely, in what readers can visualize. If we can “see” it, then it must have meaning and emotional force.

That is rarely if ever true.

Which is not to say that visualizing is unimportant. The type of imagination used by readers to bring story alive in the mind and heart has two triggers: visual cues, yes, but also emotional cues.

The visual part does matter, and it’s not just visual. All sensory cues (sight, sound, taste, touch, smell) when present on the page send readers searching their experiential memory banks for reference. Readers can “hear” the toll of a church bell, or “smell” the pungent, earthy odor of a horse barn, experience of which they’ve had either directly or second hand.

As a story unfolds, we “see” its action—the slow lifting of a spoon, say—and so the story seems to us real. That’s fine, but as I said that is only one half of what triggers story imagination. The other half is emotional cues. As we read, we are presented with signals to feel. It would seem, then that simply reporting what characters are feeling would fulfill the requirement, but that also is wrong.

As I explained in The Emotional Craft of Fiction, psychological research shows us that readers do not feel what characters are feeling. Not at all. Not even a little bit. Readers are on their own emotional journeys through a story, constantly searching their emotional memory banks for experiences that are analogous to—like—the one reported on the page. Readers find those and “get” the emotion, except that what they “get” is not a character’s feeling but their own.

And even that is incomplete. Readers “get” an emotional moment in a story only when they have to work for it. Force feeding “hope” or “fear” on the page doesn’t work. Evoking a feeling in the reader does.

Which brings us to the practical side of telling. If showing is flat, nor does reporting emotions get readers to feel anything, what does? Is there anything that evokes a moment better than pure showing or telling?

The Third Way

Let’s get at it through a challenging example, something …

I teach 8th grade English, and as soon as my school year ended, I launched myself into full-on Summer Sarah, or, as my husband likes to say, Summer Wife. Yes, I’m aware this seasonal nickname sounds gross, perhaps a combo of domestically alluring and vapidly submissive, but it’s purely ironic. Summer Wife is neither domestically productive nor come-hithery. Sure, she’s a little vapid, but it’s a situational vapidity rather than a permanent condition. 

In reality, “Summer Wife” just means Sarah is 10-20% cheerier and 20-30% less sleep-deprived.

It means she’s not fretting about what AI is doing to her students’ beautiful brains, worrying about her students’ wavering mental health and waning attention span, or attempting to decode their ever-evolving slang.  

It means she can tackle the piles of who-knows-what that have been piling up since September. To clarify: Summer Wife doesn’t get rid of the piles; she simply makes time to move them from place to place. She might also fold her laundry. And maybe deep clean the washing machine.

The real reason for her lack of domestic productivity? Every summer (at least before summer 2026), nothing–not even a somewhat stinky washing machine–was as important as this: Make Progress on the Novel-in-Progress. 

But Summer 2026 is different. This summer, because her debut novel comes out on August 18, Summer Wife is now Marketing Wife. She must figure out how to get her soon-to-FINALLY-be-published novel, Lucy in Between, into the hands of readers.

Marketing Wife? Ugh. 

Marketing Wife

Promo Wife

Hype Wife? 

HypeWyfe! 

And now, without further ado, Sarah, DBA HypeWyfe, will sashay back into first-person narration.

Beyond rebranding myself via weird nicknames, I don’t thrive in marketing mode. Hype in any form, especially self-hype, is neither my forte nor my bailiwick. Most important: I don’t know how to do it.

So this summer, I am researching how to create a marketing strategy that is manageable, doable, and stay-saneable. I do have a fabulous editor, as well as a creative, responsive publicity and marketing team. They will help with anything I need. I just have to figure out what I need. 

After much Googling, I created a Hype laden to-do list: 

• Be consistently active on every social media platform! 
• Develop a newsletter and consistently generate content!
• Build my website! 
• Be active on Goodreads, Bookbub, Substack, TikTok, BookTok!
• Reach out to libraries and indie bookstores!
• Pitch ideas for author visits

Over the past six months, I’ve been working on yet-another-final-draft of a novel. As I got to the end of this draft, I thought I wanted to tell you the story of how I got through it, how I got myself unstuck, how I went from “will I ever write again?” to “I love working on this book!”

But things fell apart while trying to work on the video. At the same time, a slightly different thing came out of the mess I made.

You’ll have to watch it for yourself to see if you think an interesting thing came from the rubble, but I think the overall realization is that it’s important to ask the question, “WHY am I doing this thing?” The reason may change over time depending on what’s going on in your life. Among other things, my dad’s dementia is informing a lot of things for me right now. And so I’ve been thinking about the importance of scrutinizing what’s important.

I almost threw this video away, but then decided that I did have something I wanted to say, even if it was different than what I thought it was when I started.

When you ask yourself why you’re working on your current writing project, do you come to any interesting or surprising conclusions?…