Why am I quoting statistics on pet ownership in a literary blog? Well, because it got me wondering about just how big—or small—a role fictional pets play in the lives of fictional people. In children’s novels, pets (as distinct from animals generally, for the purposes of this piece) appear frequently. Sometimes they are the main character; for instance, in a childhood favourite of mine, Nicholas Stuart Gray’s wonderful novel, The Stone Cage, which masterfully reimagines the fairy tale of Rapunzel from the point of view of the witch’s snarky cat, Tomlyn, and verbose raven, Marshall. In another childhood favourite, the Tintin comic book series, a perky white fox terrier, Milou, loyally accompanies his master on all his hair-raising adventures, getting into the odd bit of mischief himself here and there, much to the delight of readers. Cats and dogs aren’t the only animal companions appearing in children’s fiction, of course: there’s also horses, rabbits, and birds. A particular favourite bird story of mine is Harry’s Mad, by Dick-King Smith, about a very clever African grey parrot named Maddison–Mad for short–and his young human companion, Harry. When I looked at children’s books on our own shelves, in the library, and in bookshops, I found that it’s more common than not to have some mention of a pet or some kind of animal companion within the story. The fact the majority of households globally have a pet of some description is strongly reflected in children’s fiction, no doubt recognizing that children often develop special bonds with pets, in life as well as fiction. Adults are also fond of their pets yet pets are a lot less common in adult fiction.

Leaving aside a classic like Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and …

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 prologue opening of this novel—would it, all on its own, hook an agent if it was submitted by an unpublished writer?

When the police arrive, how will I explain the dead bodies in the house?

Only one dead body would be easier to explain. People die after all—circle of life, etc., etc. But more than one becomes trickier. Not that I have a lot of experience with it, but it’s just common sense. One person can die by accident. Multiple deaths…well, the police start to think about things like murder.

Furthermore, it will be very difficult to explain other things to the police. Like what happened to those dead bodies before they died. I expect a lot of raised eyebrows. Possibly handcuffs.

Speaking of which, those sirens are getting awfully loud. They’ll be here any second.

A gust of wind blows the stench of scorched flesh into my nostrils. Every molecule in my body is screaming at me to make a run for it while I still can. I’ve got a tiny

And it’s that tiny word, want, where the trouble begins.

In cognitive‑behavioral therapy (CBT), this idea is foundational. It’s not the event that upsets us, but the meaning we attach to it. And if you can shift that meaning, you can shift the emotion. And before we get too deep into analyzing ourselves, let’s turn this to fiction because your characters often go through this shift too. It can be at the mid-point of the story, where the character’s motivation changes or at the “dark night of the soul” moment, just before they confront the enemy.

It’s not the event, it’s the interpretation

CBT breaks emotional reactions into a simple chain: something happens, we interpret it and then we feel something. But we often skip straight from event to emotion, as if the interpretation in the middle doesn’t exist.

Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice are perfect examples of this, repeatedly. But there is one point where Darcy makes a stiff, awkward remark at a ball. That event itself is harmless, but Elizabeth interprets it as arrogance, disdain, and she takes it personally. Her interpretation fuels her irritation, which drives much of the first half of the novel. And Darcy is no better. He interprets Elizabeth’s wit as mockery, which he takes personally. It’s the same event, but they both assume different meanings and go into different emotional storms.

We could go on forever about how these misinterpret each other’s actions, but you can also look at this in your own work. Pick a moment when your character is upset and ask: what did they think this meant? What would happen if they changed that interpretation to match the other character’s intention? That shift is likely to only happen later in the story, after the character has had some self-realization, at which point they will change behavior next time or even go back and …

The idea with plot twists – the thing that engages your readers’ emotions the most – is to create both surprise at the twist and a sense that they should have seen it coming all along.  One way to do this is to give your setup some other reason for being in the story.  Essentially, it’s authorial sleight of hand – you get your readers to look at one thing while you’re doing something else.

I mentioned this in passing last month, when I described how Jane Langton worked the massive ‘32 foot organ pipes that play a role in the final twist seamlessly into the story.  Each time the pipes (which haven’t been delivered yet) are mentioned, they have another reason for being in the story.  Characters ask why the organ is taking so long to finish or comment on how the organ has no “bottom,” the organbuilder main character explains that the ‘32s haven’t arrived.  Because readers think they know why the pipes are part of the conversation, they miss the real reason – to set up the ending.

I also mentioned authorial sleight of hand in another piece I wrote more than a decade ago, which also has a good example from Sue Grafton, if you’d like to check it out.

Both Jane Langton and Sue Grafton were writing mysteries though, where readers expect that the writer’s trying to hid something from them.  They know just from the conventions of the genre that one of the characters is a killer, and part of the fun of mysteries is trying to figure out who.  But to prove that effective plot twists can make any kind of novel more engaging, I’d like to look at an example from a writer whose genius I’ve been exploring lately – Jane Austen.

One of the things that makes the ending of Sense and Sensibility so satisfying is exactly the sort of plot twist any mystery writer would be proud of.  (If you haven’t read Sense and …

As I watched the Knicks win the NBA finals unexpectedly and joyfully after decades of drought, I started thinking about what it means to dedicate yourself to a team, and, more importantly, what it means to be a part of a legacy. The idea of legacy is a deep, enduring aspect of humanity that centers around questions of WHY. Why chase that goal? Why make that choice – and how will it affect others? Why does what you do matter? As a historical fiction writer, legacy is something I’m always thinking about; how our past has shaped us, what we have inherited, and how we can improve upon that inherited legacy, or change it entirely. A legacy can be tied to something concrete, but it is also about our actions, and how those actions are an illustration of who we are. How we touch the lives of others that might create a ripple effect for future generations.

Of course, these questions of legacy are essential in our fiction, too.

How does legacy play a part in our fiction?

A great character and a great story more or less reflect people and themes that feel true. A character’s legacy carries a very powerful link to that truth. Here are a few ways we can integrate this theme into our stories:

Concrete items: land, properties, heirlooms, art portfolios from books to paintings to musical pieces and more like artifacts, heirlooms, portfolios of our arts and the things that we make.

Familial Legacy: Children bearing our names, both biological or through adoption, who will carry on the family legacy and/or the gene pool.

Legends and Curses: Coveted stories that illustrate the glory of a person/family, or perhaps that unlock some secret past. They can also be a warning passed down

Sins of the Past: Bad behaviors that can be either cyclical in families like alcoholism and abuse, or systemic societal issues. The dreaded  ‘isms’ and oppression in all its forms from gender bias to racism or sexism, and ageism.

How to Use Legacy in Fiction to Create Conflict:

How we use legacy to create conflict will, of course, depend on both the kind of story you’re telling and the journey of your protagonist. Let’s look at other ways can we beef up this theme:

• The echoes of past mistakes. A character can carry the sins of past generations. What are those

Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament.

Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

In last month’s post (“What We Write About When We Write About Grief”), I provided examples of authors depicting grief in three different genres: fiction, poetry, and memoir.

Most of the comments responding to the post focused on how credible or authentic (or not) the various excerpts were in describing what it felt like to grieve.

Although it is obviously critical to develop an ability to convey to a reader a character’s experience of grief, this often puts the character in a passive role. Grief is something that happens to them, like an illness. And as with illness, this suggests that grief is something we endure until it dissipates and ultimately disappears. We are its victims. And the best we can hope for is simply getting to the end of it, or at least to a place where the grief is not all-consuming.

A slightly different take is to recognize that, because death is inescapable, grief is simply an element of our fate as mortal beings. This is not to minimize it. The Stoics advised, since it is not just inevitable but universal, we should allow it to teach us to be more compassionate and less self-centered. How we face our fate is far more important than what it inflicts upon us.

In the second analogy (fate), agency arises to play its part, but there is still the sense of grief being something endured.

The issue of agency suggests itself in how the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön differentiates pain from suffering. She distinguishes the direct experience of grief with how we come to think about it. The direct experience produces pain. Suffering comes from all the narratives we build around that experience: When will it end? How will it end? How will I survive? What will it take to get through this? What am I supposed to do until then?

In this scenario, by trying to do something about the pain or simply grapple with it, we create imagined disasters that cause us to needlessly suffer.

But is it really possible, or beneficial, to endure months of grief without in some way trying to figure out not just how to get through it but what getting through might mean? Is perhaps some suffering necessary to make sense of the pain?…

A similar book hangover lingered after reading the science fiction novel Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. That setup was even more restrictive—one man on a suicide mission to conduct vital scientific inquiry in deep space—but left me wanting to run right out and see the movie.

The tight quarters on the rocket brought to mind Emma Donoghue’s 2011 release, Room, psychological fiction in which a mother creates a loving environment in which to raise her son while they are being held hostage in a locked shed. I thought about that one a lot while held hostage in my own room during Covid.

Here are some of the ways these authors used small casts and geographic constriction to cook up a gut-punch of a story.

1. Time is running out to achieve a goal.

Wild Dark Shore: The island’s global seed bank contains millions of species. The Salt family’s final task is to rescue as many of them as possible. A ship will be coming in two weeks to collect both humans and frozen seeds—but inside the vault, the temperature and floodwaters are rising.

Project Hail Mary: Microscopic Astrophage is slowly depleting the sun’s energy. Ryland Grace’s mission is to stop it before Earth is plunged into another ice age. But when he wakes from his coma in deep space as planned—but alone—he must make up for his dead crew mates’ competencies while his limited fuel stores dwindle.

Room: Seven years ago, a teenaged woman was abducted by Old Nick and shut up in a shed, where he repeatedly rapes her. Two years later she gave birth to a son. Ma yearns for freedom yet the only way to keep Jack safe is to stay put—but Jack is getting too big to sleep in the wardrobe and Ma will not have him witnessing …

Look, interviewing someone as famous as Michael Jordan is hard. What can you ask him that he hasn’t been asked—and answered—a million times? I read everything I could find in preparation, and I mean everything, even an interview he’d given to Sports Illustrated for Kids in which the kids asked him all the usual kid questions: What’s your favorite food? What’s your favorite movie? What’s your favorite color? One answer stood out: He said his favorite movie was Ghost, the Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore tear-jerker about a dead man and the woman he loves.

I had 30 minutes to interview Jordan and I was nervous and he was polite but not too excited or exciting. Desperate for something different from him, I said, “I read that Ghost is your favorite movie. Why?”

Suddenly, he came to life. He sat up and leaned forward, and really looked at me. “Because I’ve always believed that after we die, we come back to watch over and protect the people we love,” he said. “And since my father died, I’ve felt him watching over me. And the whole reason I decided to leave baseball and come back to basketball is because that’s what my father is telling me to do. Right now.”

It was an incredible moment, the story made news, my editor was happy, and I understood on a gut level the huge importance of the one-word question “Why?”

And as I’m embarking on writing my fifth novel, I remind myself every day that I need to keep asking “WHY?” You know the important basic questions about story: What does my character want? What’s my character’s flaw? How does this flaw affect my character’s life and world? What does my character need? We all have to do that work. But for me, “Why?” is the key.

I got the idea for this new novel, my fifth, almost a year ago. It was an interesting idea with a hint of magical realism and I felt intrigued but I wasn’t inspired …

I’d started working on my second novel, We’re All Damaged, by then, but, with two young daughters toddling around the house and a fulltime job in advertising, my progress was slow. Really slow. As in, years went by. Distracted, perpetually exhausted, and unsure of what I was even trying to say, I kept making the age-old, momentum-killing mistake of stalling out and starting over. And over. And…yeah, you get it.

“This time,” I told myself night after night as the clock ticked toward midnight, “it’ll finally come together.”

Eventually, somehow, it did. After sinking into mild depression, developing an unhealthy relationship with caffeine, and wondering very seriously if I was just meant to be a one-novel writer, I managed to finish my second book. We’re All Damaged, a foul-mouthed dramedy about a heartbroken young man returning home to the Midwest to say goodbye to his dying grandpa, had a beginning, middle, and end. To me, that felt like a triumph.

My agent sent the book off to my editor shortly after—sometime in 2014, I think. Unfortunately, when we eventually heard back, the news, as you might expect, wasn’t great. The problem wasn’t that the book was bad, necessarily. My soon-to-be former editor assured us that the manuscript was solid. The problem was that too much time had passed. My previous successes—whatever those were, exactly—had been too modest. The world had moved on. Readers had forgotten me. The marketing efforts required to re-launch me were deemed simply too much. So, on a random weekday afternoon, my publisher dropped me.

I experienced all the emotions you’d imagine: sadness, crippling self-doubt, etc. You know, a struggling writer’s greatest hits. Mostly, though, I was shocked. At the time, like many writers new to publishing, I was under the impression that once you heard “yes” you’d never again have to hear “no.” Boy, was I wrong. Not only had my original publisher just said no, other publishers quickly lined …

Many of my new business calls focus on:

• The differences between marketing and PR
• What does media/PR for an author look like
• Why reviews are hard to come by
• What leads to sales
• Fact vs. fiction in terms of book tours
• Why advertising doesn’t directly sell books but why you should still do it
• Why social media isn’t for everyone and building a platform takes a long time
• Why the word viral should be used minimally
• Why I can’t promise one’s book will be a BookTok sensation

Here are a few articles in recent months that every writer should carefully read.

On Book Reviews

The New York Times, Dwight Garner, Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone: What the rise of A.I. and the gutting of books coverage across U.S. media will mean for literature

On Book Tours

So You Want to Write a Book/ Substack, Rea Fry, A Book Tour Isn’t About Selling Books: The Paradox of the Modern Book Tour

What Actually Sells a Book?

C-SPAN’s “America’s Book Club”: Author Ann Patchett discusses what she believes drives book sales.

Summer Reads in 2026

Town & Country, Emily Burack, The Hottest Beach Read of the Summer is Nonfiction: Forget packing a romance or a multigenerational family saga in your tote. Summer 2026 is all about narrative nonfiction and buzzy memoirs

On Book Identity and Discovery 

Writing, Marketing and the Universe with James Blatch / Substack: The New Rules of Book Discovery

What’s Your Social Media Book Content Saying?

Attention Economy / Substack, Leigh Stein: On Pity Marketing

And How Does That Make You Feel? BookTok and “Emotional Weather Reports”

The Point, Selen Ozturk, Common Readers: Booktok’s Critical Values

Have you read anything on book marketing and PR that you’d like to share? Drop it in the comments below.…