This post was first published on Election Day in 2018! It seemed a fitting day to revisit it. Vote on, friends! 

It’s Election Day in the U.S., which you surely know unless you’re living under a sound-proof stone that hasn’t been picked up and thrown at someone. Hard to believe that a few short years ago many of us rarely expressed controversial opinions, choosing to be ‘polite’ rather than overtly ‘political,’ yet here we are.

So let’s talk broadly about tipping points for a minute, and tune in to story.

Consider your protagonist’s world view at the start of your tale:

• What won’t she do?
• What won’t she say?
• Whom would she never betray?
• What or whom does she trust implicitly?
• What or whom would she give up to achieve her greatest desire?
• For whom or what would she make significant sacrifices, even lay down her life?

Now think through what it would take, in each instance, for her to change her mind; to be pushed and shoved out of her comfort zone; to be rattled by a proverbial stone against her skull, or even to pick one up herself.

Don’t tell me she would never allow herself to be tipped, because I do not believe it, and if you do, then you need to dig harder, my friend. Identify the wildcard in her life, and if it doesn’t exist, then build it.

Need help brainstorming? Consider the effect of the following:

Lies

Liars

Injustice

Insecurity

Corrupt forces

Threats to her future

Threats to those she loves

Threats to things she loves

Disempowerment

Abandonment

Victimization

Brainwashing

Addiction

Poverty

Cruelty

Hatred

Illness

Abuse

Chaos

Pain

Fear

Don’t make her flip of nature too easy, either, or it will read false.

Consider:

• How can these things come from someone or something she trusts or trusted?
• How will she realize she has been fooled or manipulated, or unwittingly acted against her own best interests?
• How will she receive this message, and how hard will she rebel against believing it?
• For how many minutes, days, or years will she plug her ears, shut her eyes, turn her back?
• What can’t she ignore?
• What has she already compromised or sacrificed?
• Whom has she already lost?
• How has she lied to herself?
• How many voices will she dismiss as crazy before something finally filters past, nudges her conscience, makes her wonder?
• What will she do with

Recently, I was lucky enough to attend two books events featuring mega-bestselling authors in the same day. One was a small private event for a lecture series; the other was a large public event with roughly 300 attendees. Both authors write stories set in the past, but their work differs in many other ways. And while the content and form of the events were very different, both authors uttered almost identical words when talking about their writing priorities.

What do they consider most important in writing? “Telling the truth.”

Does this sound odd for fiction writers? It certainly did to me, at first. But after some reflection, I think I understand.

Here are three ways you can tell the truth in your fictional work.

To describe what it was like to live in a place and time. Both authors, as I said, write about specific times in the past in their work. Both of them also write about what women, in particular, experienced in those times: the rights they didn’t have, the sexism and patriarchy they fought against, the restrictions they fought to overcome. One author also described how important it was to her to include, not sugarcoat, the racism endemic in her chosen setting. If you’re writing fantasy, you don’t have to think about real-world conditions, though you may choose to; if you’re writing historical fiction, you absolutely must have an understanding of the society you’re writing about, even if (maybe especially if) your characters are outliers in that society.

To serve your characters, not just your readers. One author responded to an audience question about writing the ending of her latest book with thoughts about types of endings readers tend to find satisfying or unsatisfying. She counseled a writer in the audience to consider several questions, among them, “Are you going to give your readers a happy ending, or are you going to tell the truth?” These things aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but you do need to think about whether tying up every single loose end in a big story is a practical or realistic goal. Happy endings, too, can be unsatisfying if you sweep away all the story’s obstacles and solve all your characters’ problems in an overly simplistic fashion. (Deus ex machina, anyone?) It does still sound a little funny to demand realism in fictional genres, but “truth” in the broader sense here applies.

To …

We at writers.com surveyed over 450 novelists at various stages of their work—from those wishing to begin to those with a completed manuscript draft.

Here’s what we learned novelists are struggling with:

Overwhelm.

It takes on three main forms:

1. Self-doubt,
2. Craft challenges, and
3. Anxiety about publishing.

How can we fall back in love with writing our novels? Read on…

1. Self-doubt

The weight of self-doubt often begins before we put a single word on the page. For many of us, beginning to write a novel calls up the question: “Am I the kind of person who could write a novel?” Making your novel a priority to which you dedicate real time—day after day—can feel selfish or like a luxury. You may feel like no one but you is invested in your novel or cares if it’s going well.

The difference is this: successful novelists know what support they need, and how to get it. You shouldn’t feel guilty or isolated in your struggles—you should make sure your experience is the best-supported it can possibly be.

That means a specific word count every week, structure to carve out the time to make steady, tangible progress within your busy life, a mentor who is right there with you and your novel every step of the way, and a supportive community of fellow novelists.

2. Craft challenges

As the words pile up, so do increasingly urgent questions about pacing, dialogue, character development—craft fundamentals we may be unsure how to implement. The story that once energized us now feels distressingly uncertain.

You can learn a lot about these craft elements in craft books, video tutorials, and the like. The problem with these resources is: they’re not reading your manuscript.

Without someone examining your specific words on your specific pages, you may revise endlessly without knowing whether you’re improving the work—or simply rearranging its problems.

You need access to constructive, expert perspective at crucial moments: someone who can answer the practical questions that risk impeding your progress. “Is this element of my novel working? What specifically needs revision? What’s my next step?” You need specific, actionable feedback on your novel while you’re drafting it.

3. Anxiety about publishing

We may imagine years of work ending in form rejections we’ll never understand—and feeling dismissed by an impersonal and impenetrable industry. For some novelists, the fear and uncertainty around publishing prevents them from ever starting. For …

What’s the difference between ordinary reading and close reading?

I’m sure some wag at Writer Unboxed will say it’s all about how close you hold the book to your face, but that’s not it. The difference has to do with something Marshall McLuhan asserted long ago: the medium and the message can’t be separated. How a message is transmitted–TV, film, print, text message, oral presentation—will influence or even shape the message.

By replacing “medium” with “method,” I want to adapt McLuhan’s idea to reading. How is the experience shaped or affected by how we read?

I first met Yoshie Fuentes at a meeting of the Kalamazoo Writers Disorganization (some wags figure there as well). Even though she is less than a third my age, Yoshie and I had a lot to say to each other.

Yoshie Fuentes owns and operates Mi Cocina at the Kalamazoo Farmers Market. Besides digital marketing for herself, she also takes on projects with friends. She attended the University of Greenwich and the University of London, Birkbeck in the UK. 

At some point, we realized we were conducting autopsies on passages of fiction, using the process of close reading. In short, we were studying what happens when the reader stops reading for what comes next, and slows down to read at the sentence level. I’ve written down one of our talks, involving the analysis of four openings and thought some in the WU community may find it of interest.

The first dialogue involves the opening from a bestseller used by Ray Rhamey in his “Flogging a Pro” feature for July 17, 2025. Many good comments were made, but what follows is a more detailed approach to the process.

The opening of Do Not Disturb, by Freida McFadden:

While I’m washing the blood off my hands in the kitchen sink, the doorbell rings.

I freeze, my hands full of pink suds, the steaming hot water causing my fingers to burn and tingle. There’s somebody at the door. Somebody waiting patiently on the front porch for me to answer. The timing couldn’t be worse.

Could it be a package delivery? Maybe they’ll drop the package at the door and go away. Or else leave me a note. Sorry we missed you! We’ll be back tomorrow!

And then: three hard raps on the front door.

“Coming!” I call out in a strangled voice, even though it’s unlikely they’ll

You know how some stories seize you? We’ve all been there—reading a book or watching a show when suddenly, reality fades away, and we’re sucked into the lives of the characters and this fictional world. All else be damned. We want nothing more than to be a part of this new story, to feel their emotions, to cheer for them, to see what happens.

There’s nothing better, right? That’s likely why we’re all here at Writer Unboxed, because we adore the feeling so much that we wanted to try our hand at creating our own sort of escapes.

I’ve been playing a game lately, marking the moment when I feel the talons of great story sink into me. I don’t mean the chapter or the episode; I mean the exact second I’m snagged.

Yes, sometimes, it’s a sentence or a paragraph or an intimate acting moment or a piece of dialogue that bowls me over. Makes me think: The artist behind this work is courageous and brilliant and talented and I want more! We fellow creators are especially vulnerable to well-executed craft. 

But I’m referring to the times when the actual story grabs you by the shirt, when the characters are as real as your lover, when you must know how things are going to work out.

My little game has revealed that the magic moment is most often about suspense. I’ve been thrown into a state of uncertainty, and I’m now desperately clamoring for clarity.

How will she get out of this situation? Is he the killer? Will they end up together? Who will she fall in love with? Will their marriage survive? What wild thing will the characters do next?

The last question is exactly how Howard Stern built his entire career. People tuned in to find out what he’d do next.

Netflix’s Beef plays on the same court (mild spoiler). The first and second seasons are both masterclasses in suspense. Each season features a separate story and cast, but they both explore the idea that a small beef between people will spin out of control if someone doesn’t let up. In an early episode of the second season, one of the characters suffers a medical emergency that she blames on her enemy. To get revenge, she breaks into his house and does something that made my heart stop. Consider me suspensified. It was in that moment …

When people pick up a novel in a bookstore, they often picture its writer as some kind of savant, whipping up perfect manuscripts while living and working in a mountainside villa or clicking away on their laptop while sipping espresso at a bohemian café. But anyone who has ever written a novel, or anything else for that matter, knows this is rarely the case.

Novels, especially good ones, take years of dedicated work to complete, and most of the people who write them are more or less like everyone else. Many writers have day jobs. A close friend of mine writes in an unheated garage. And all of us need to figure out ways to set aside time in our often busy schedules to write.

Most successful writers got that way because of their willingness and ability to sit down and write even when they don’t feel particularly inspired, even when they’d much rather be doing just about anything else. For many writers, the best way to accomplish this is to establish a daily writing routine to which they will actually stick.

Years ago, when I first started thinking about creating a writing routine for myself, the first thing I did was look at what other authors’ routines were like.

Ernest Hemingway was known for his habit of writing early in the morning. In a 1958 interview with The Paris Review, he said, “I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you . . . You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.”

Other authors, like Stephen King, sit down to write at a set time every day and don’t stop until they have reached a pre-determined word count. In interviews, King has often said that he gets to his desk at eight o’clock every morning and stays there until he’s written 2,000 words. He does this every day of the year, and says doing so is non-negotiable, regardless of what else might be happening in his life.

Some writers find it easier to stick to their routines if they write in a particular location. Maya Angelou worked in a rented hotel room every day from seven a.m. to 2 p.m., …

It challenged me because I am a third-generation native of Colorado, and identified very strongly with what that means, to grow up with the imposing line of mountains on my back, to have an altimeter on my phone because we all get so arrogant about the altitude in this exact spot. I was proud of my ability to tolerate thin oxygen and my powerful hiking legs.

But as I’ve written here before, I moved to Oregon without a backward glance in the winter of 2023. I still haven’t looked back. It sometimes feels like I was just waiting to get here, that I’ve been driving toward life in a beachside town since the second grade, when my grandmother took me to Oceanside—then a little beachside town itself. Now, in place of the altimeter on my watchface, I have a tide guide.

And yet Colorado is still part of me, part of how I understand the world. Maybe that’s one of the most interesting things about place: it shapes us so deeply that even when we leave, we carry it with us.

Let’s talk about place. That encompasses setting, but goes much deeper. How does place influence your characters, your plot, the vibe of your tales? Sense of place is an element that can elevate even the simplest of tales.

Place is a complex set of parameters that influences everything about your setting and the people who live there—language, weather, and landscape, of course, but also the cultures that first occupied that space, and the immigrants who came in; the religions and cultural practices that shape ideas about who we are.

Maybe that’s why I find myself writing again and again about the connection of characters to a particular place.

I’ve spent the year writing a novel about a woman who leaves her home in Hawaiʻi after a tragedy smashes through her life. She flees the warm, languid shores of the North Shore of Oʻahu for Boston, as far as she can fly, as different as it is possible to be. She does it to erase herself, her memories—and maybe her pain. When she’s lured back by a mysterious map, she’s forced to face the map of her own …

It can be a useful tool for those snapshot moments with a single overriding emotion. Humans are complex creatures, though, and our feelings are more like Italian seasoning than simple oregano. If shown a character living in their rattiest sweats and staring blankly out a window, we’ll all get that they’re depressed, but probably won’t care much. Why? Because we understand, either through lived experience or instinct, that depression isn’t merely sadness in overdrive. It’s flailing around in an emotional stew, kicking a chunk of rage aside in the hope of clinging to a slippery sliver of joy, splashed in the face by a gravy of sadness infused with notes of regret, denial, and nostalgia.

We all swim in our own constantly evolving stew. So do our characters. As authors, it’s our job to figure out how to deconstruct and then enhance the recipe enough to entice readers to jump on in.

I originally intended to invent a character and over-the-top example to illustrate how this might be done. Then I lived through August and September.

I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

Step One – Who is Your Character?

For this discussion, let’s just go with a fifty-something married mom of two adult daughters reluctantly living in Dallas, Texas. Writer. Art lover. Blind in one eye. A bit neurospicy. We’ll call her Kim.

Step 2 – What led up to this current emotional state?

Kim probably didn’t just wake up depressed or enraged or anticipating the best day ever. Things happened to beat her down, piss her off, or give her something to look forward to. Let’s map not only the chain of events leading her to this place, but ALL the corresponding emotions each of those things caused. Brutal honesty is key. Bonus points if two conflicting emotions battle for dominance. Kim’s distress = engaged readers.

Let’s have some fun, shall we?

A sample rundown of recent events might look like this:

• Kim pays a long-overdue visit to her happy place on Georgian Bay in Ontario (anticipation/elation/peacefulness)
• While there, she reconnects with friends she hasn’t seen in years (excitement/nervousness)
• She also helps

I’m sure that most of you reading this will have heard of (and maybe filed a claim in) the historic Anthropic copyright settlement. If not, the backgrounder I wrote last year has all the details, but here’s the tl;dr.

In 2024, a group of authors filed a copyright infringement class action lawsuit against AI company Anthropic over its creation of an enormous library of digitized books to train its Claude chatbot. In addition to buying and scanning physical books, Anthropic also downloaded millions of works that had been illegally uploaded to pirate sites.

In 2025, the judge in the case ruled that Anthropic’s digitization and training on legally acquired physical books was fair use, as Anthropic claimed—but its use of pirated works was a massive infringement of copyright that justified a trial. Facing potentially catastrophic payouts for hundreds of thousands of infringed works (under US copyright law, the maximum in statutory damages for willful copyright infringement is $150,000 per work), Anthropic chose to settle, agreeing to create a fund of $1.5 billion (yes, billion with a “b”) from which the copyright owners would be paid.

The final settlement was approved this summer, and payouts are scheduled to start going out by the end of the year.

The settlement–said to be the largest copyright recovery in history—as well as the process of navigating it have raised some new considerations for writers, and also shed light on some surprising lapses in the publishing industry. Even if you weren’t eligible for inclusion, they are issues that are likely to be relevant to you going forward.

ANTHROPIC MAY ONLY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST

The Anthropic lawsuit isn’t alone: a host of other copyright infringement class actions that also focus on AI companies’ use of pirated works are working their way through the courts. Most have not yet been resolved or even certified, but additional major settlements are a distinct possibility.

It’s something to keep an eye on. One of the best resources for doing so is a website called ChatGPT is Eating the World, which is tracking all copyright lawsuits against AI companies across the world (a gobsmacking 156 of them, as of this writing). I am also following this issue closely, and will report on any new information on the Writer Beware blog.

THE  CLAIMS PROCESS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SO MESSY

The Anthropic settlement administrators created a list of eligible …

It’s the end of October, folks. Time for scary stories. Last year, I talked about ghosts and zombies. This year (cue the spooky music) I have something even more frightening in mind: giving and receiving feedback.

Why does the very thought of feedback on our writing make our shoulders and our defenses shoot to the ceiling? Is it because feedback means critique and critique means criticism and criticism means becoming an outcast from society and dying sad and alone? Or is that just me?

I think the fear of feedback may have to do with the fear that our writing and hence our deepest selves may not be seen accurately and judged compassionately. Or worse, seen accurately and rejected anyway. I suspect many of us are writers rather than stage performers or marketing executives because we fear the gaze of strangers and the dispassionate judgment that arises from being seen.

But the alternative is even worse: not being seen or heard at all. Our words want to find a home with others who will benefit from reading them, people who will vibrate in sympathy with the notes we strike. And so, hands quivering and hearts palpitating, we let others read them, generally starting with others in the field, be that editors, agents, or other writers.

Cue the critique group. Over the years, I’ve learned that the most useful comments come when I can articulate what kind of feedback I need. My desire for feedback falls into roughly three categories, based on my current stage of writing and editing:

At the beginning of a project I just need encouragement. I’m aglow with the enthusiasm of a shiny new story and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the best I’ve ever written (or maybe that anyone’s ever written in the history of ever). I know that the tender little seedling on the page cannot withstand the winds of a serious critique and will drown if examined in detail. That’s not the purpose at this stage. Instead, I need my critique partners to cheer me on and to confirm that the mere fact of writing is evidence of success. The content of the writing doesn’t matter so much at this point; rather, I need people to agree that writing itself is a worthwhile process and I should continue to do it. Write on.

In the middle of the project, I need …