Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.

—Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

Although I can claim no awareness of a comprehensive survey on the topic, it’s been my impression as I reflect on the novels I’ve read that an all-too-common way of portraying grief in fiction is as a trope to depict vulnerability, to suggest the character possesses some profound awareness of loss, sorrow, suffering, and thus the human condition writ large, providing a signal to the reader that your character has some gravitas. This can be done reasonably well, as in the first example below, or it can come across as a contrivance, a shortcut, a gimmick.

In her novel The Good Liar, Denise Mina’s protagonist, Claudia, wrestles with the death of her husband, a fellow lawyer who died in a car crash, leaving her and her two sons behind:

The lingering shock of James’s sudden death lent her an air of disinterested sangfroid. Her doctor refused to prescribe antidepressants. They won’t work for you, he said, grief is a rational reaction to your husband dying. The depression is natural, not something that can be washed away with chemical sunshine. You’ll just have to wait until the gnawing awareness of the frailty of life recedes, which it will. I’m sorry. Claudia was sorry too but functioning in low mood gave her a new perspective. It wasn’t insight so much as a world drained of colour, stripped back to clean lines with all the dissembling and distractions beyond her grasp. It had been four months and one week ago and Claudia had been absolutely still, watching the world move around her. Her face still moved in expression-making ways. Her body went to work, came home, cooked, moved from their crappy cramped house in Battersea to an even shitter flat in Lambeth, attended meetings with pastoral care teachers concerned about her boys.

But Claudia was frozen, watchful, waiting for the black to lift, to thin, for the shock to lessen. Adrenalin trilled through her body every waking moment. She felt as if she had woken up at the top of Nelson’s Column and was expected to act as if nothing had changed. All she wanted to do was sit and smoke and sob. But she didn’t. She couldn’t afford to. Ironically, she …

I love books more than bagels. More than jewelry, or cashmere sweaters (and trust me, I love bagels, jewelry, and cashmere). Reading likely kept me from teen pregnancy, heroin, and robbing convenience stores with a badass boyfriend. I’ve read great books, good books, mediocre books, and books so awful they damaged my eyes.

Genre never determined how I ranked books (perhaps because, from the moment I could walk into a library, I chose titles through a mysterious mind alchemy). Then, I became a writer and had the literary caste system thrust into my face.

Readers read. Writers battle to get their vision on the page. Then comes the sale. The novel is framed: Literary! Women’s fiction (because a woman wrote it? Because women will read it? Does men’s fiction exist, or is fiction by men simply… fiction?)  Contemporary? Upmarket? (And if upmarket exists, do we have down-market books? “Buy my book! It’s down market!”)

Some novels deemed “literary” have twisted my guts in the best way. Others buried me in overwrought metaphors until I threw them into the NBR (never-to-be-read) pile. Thrillers have lifted me from couch-stapling despair; others went to Goodwill unfinished. Rom-coms got me through bleak times—others made my life bleak.

Before the age of eighteen, I devoured them all: Rohinton Mistry taught me caste. Doris Lessing taught me rebellion. Gloria Naylor taught me about adult struggles and the support women can receive from friends. Herman Wouk explained bad boys. Harold Robbins showed me gritty adulthood. Philip Roth opened men’s hearts—scarily so. Grace Metalious unveiled small-town sex. Edith Wharton illustrated isolation and rural poverty to this Brooklyn girl. And Jacqueline Susann? She gave me what Stephen King calls the gotta-know.

Which formative reading hours would I have lost if snobbery determined my choices?

It’s a sticky situation, judging, eschewing, or mocking books—often without reading them—because they’re popular. A friend who’d written a well-reviewed, book-club-popular novel had her offer to blurb a debut rejected. The publisher wanted the book positioned as “more literary.” Were they afraid the “popular” writer would drag it into the gutter of commercialism?

My debut was labeled everything from literary fiction to women’s fiction to the newly coined upmarket fiction. Goodreads readers shelved my novels as literary, chick-lit, thriller, contemporary, dysfunction (I can only hope they meant the book), and more.

When seeking blurbs for my debut, The Murderer’s Daughters, I queried authors …

How many pages are in your current manuscript? Every one of them is a momentary story. A story instant. For your reader, that story instant is as important as the grand problem, the giant premise that you established in your opening.

Your reader is only once on the opening page. After that, it is up to each page to tell the story: not the big story—the overall plot, although it may advance that one step—but the little story of right now. This instant. You can bring story effects to bear upon this instant, or you can cruise along on the presumption that, once hooked, your reader will read anything you set down for hundreds of pages.

Do you think that’s likely? Nah, me either.

So, what can you do to tell the micro-story of this moment? Let’s start with a typical, early-novel half page. What’s the story about? Doesn’t matter. What matters is what this moment is about.

As she turned onto the palm-lined boulevard, Jane remembered her last visit. Her mother had been better then, chipper and excited about her chihuahua’s new rhinestone collar. As if the dog cared.

Her sister had warned her. Mom was different now. The hospital had changed her. A brush with mortality had made her anxious. She wanted to fix up everything that was broken in her house and in her life. That meant making sure that her daughters were now and forever the perfect little girls she remembered.

As if they—or their mother—had ever been perfect.

Mom’s street was a row of look-alike luxury homes, each perfect and perfectly bland. Jane had to check her GPS screen to remember which one was her mother’s. It had been a while.

She turned into the driveway. And froze.

Her stomach clenched.

Hers was not the only vehicle in the driveway. The ambulance parked there was white and ominous. The double-front door to Mom’s house was wide open, as if to make room for a stretcher on wheels.

What was going on?

Nothing good.

Okay, not wholly terrible. The passage is visual. The situation is clear. We know where we are, or at least what it looks like. Jane is visiting her mother for the first time in a while. Mom has recently been in the hospital and that has affected her, not in …

The first time I took the bus from Pennsylvania to New York City I was surprised to discover that the skyline is not, as I had thought, all skyscrapers. Seen from a westerly approach, there are two distinct clusters of skyscrapers separated by blocks and blocks and blocks of shorter buildings. It seemed weird that the city planners hadn’t built more skyscrapers, given how many people want to live and work in Manhattan.

It was a puzzle I didn’t unlock until I found out about the geology of the island.

Manhattan has two areas of solid bedrock—one in Midtown and one downtown. And that’s where the skyscrapers go.

Architects and financiers can dream up the tallest, dreamiest spires they like, but if they build them on the wrong foundation it will be a disaster.

So it is with our writing.

We can dream about best-seller lists and interviews on morning show couches, but without a writing practice that sinks deep piles into the bedrock of our lives, we’ll never get our writing dreams off the ground floor.

An Intentional Writing Practice

The temptation, as a writer with ambitions, is to rush out and take all the courses on story structure, and how to find an agent, and Top Social Media Strategies for 202X. But that’s like picking out the penthouse furniture and buying real estate ads for apartments in the skyscraper before dig the first hole. Without a solid writing practice in place, all of that activity is wasted.

“Do I Even Have A Writing Practice?”

What I’m talking about is nothing fancy: simply ‘the things you do around your desire to write, that help, hinder, distract and move you towards your goals’.

Your writing practice may be haphazard, or laid out on a Gantt chart, but I’m making the case, today, for a flexible yet intentional approach to your writing, that allows you to feel like you’re really making progress.

So, you do have a writing practice, if you’re doing anything writing-adjacent: writing occasionally; taking classes; writing often; reading Writer Unboxed…

My question becomes: Did you create your practice intentionally, based on the needs defined by your goal/desires about your writing career (e.g. that best-seller label or that morning show couch?)

Or did you allow your writing ‘practice’ to develop in the cracks of your life after all the other things take priority?

If it’s the latter, it’s very …

As I started circling this topic for this month’s post, I figured I’d start it with a question: can good writing be taught? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I already knew the answer: no.

Good writing can’t be taught. But a willing writer can always learn.

My use of “willing” there instead of “good” isn’t an accident; I have trouble with the idea that someone either is or is not a good writer, mostly because I know so many writers (and have even been that writer myself) wrestling with self-doubt, asking “Am I a bad writer?” when a draft isn’t going well. It’s not a helpful way to think.

You’re not a good writer. You’re not a bad writer either. Most likely, you are a wonderful and deserving person who sometimes produces writing that succeeds at what you’ve set out to do, and at other times… you don’t, and it doesn’t.

But whatever your level of inborn talent, whatever your instinct for sentence construction or plotting or character development, whatever your access to formal education may be, you can always be a writer willing to learn and improve.

“Okay, hotshot,” I hear you saying, “so if good writing can’t be taught, how are you suggesting a writer learn?”

Here are three ways.

Formal education in writing techniques and theory. Okay, hear me out, because I know on the surface this seems like a contradiction. Can taking classes from a professor who teaches writing techniques, literary theory, and story structure help you improve your writing? For some, yes, but for others, no. And I find the rigidity of some of these lessons dangerous. Writers who rely too heavily on what they’re taught can end up learning the wrong lessons. Applied too rigidly, those bars that could form a ladder turn out to make, instead, a cage. You’re not a good writer because you know what the hero’s journey is and have structured your story accordingly. But if you understand that the story you’re writing is the story of a hero and might benefit from the beats common to that type of story? Then yes, it’ll help you in that particular circumstance.

Practice. The more you write, the better your writing gets. Not on an individual project, mind you — spending 80 hours on a chapter isn’t guaranteed to make that chapter better than if you’d …

AI is in the news yet again. There’s an update on the Anthropic lawsuit, there are new guidelines on the use of AI in publishing from the Authors Guild, and a freelancer for The New York Times was fired for using AI to write, of all things, a book review. It’s no surprise that Netflix adaptations of books boost sales, sometimes 500% or more. Read about it below. The people have spoken and most say they prefer physical books to ebooks—at least according to one survey. A new ruling from the Supreme Court undercuts authors’ effort to slow the tsunami of book pirating. Another right-wing publishing imprint is established (Tucker Carlson Books), with 24 books slated for release starting next month, and Jane Friedman offers insights as to why book sales figures are so hard to get and sometimes even harder to interpret.

AI

The Authors Guild develops a new contract clause addressing the use of AI in publishing

Update on the Anthropic lawsuit

New York Times drops freelancer who used AI to write a book review

Gotham issues AI guidelines for ghostwriters

Where does AI now leave authors and publishers?

Audiobooks

Audible updates it royalty payment plan for authors

Book Bans

The top 10 books that are frequently challenged

Update on the Federal book-banning bill

The Authors Guild claims partial victory in Iowa book-ban case

Film Adaptations

How Netflix adaptations heat up the bestseller lists

Libraries

Administration withdraws appeal, securing victory for Institute of Museum and Library Services

Publishing

Demand for paperback vs hardback books

Is independent publishing pushing out the big guys?

Looking ahead to publishing’s possible future

Book Manufacturing Institute predicts big changes for the book industry in 2026

The state of literary translation

Supreme Court ruling undercuts copyright owners being pirated

Survey finds readers still refer physical books

Why book sales figures are so hard to find and interpret

Hachette employees working toward unionization

Right wing commentator, Tucker Carlson, is starting his own publishing imprint

The pioneer of desktop publishing has died

 …

There’s one reason why my words stand before you, one reason why I feel this desperate calling to share my thoughts on the craft with other writers. It’s to pay forward all the generosity bestowed upon me by creators over the years. What would we do without our teachers, our mentors—the selfless people who were willing to step out of their own worlds to give us a lift up?

One person in particular had a profound impact on me: Leila Meacham. She was a proud Texan, a football lover, a beloved English teacher, and a novelist who hit the big time (seven-figure deals) later in life. To me, she was more than my writing mentor. She was my hero, and I’d like to pass along some of her wisdom.

What’s funny is I never met her in person. But by the end, she treated me like family. Whenever I get the opportunity to help a budding novelist, I jump on it, because that’s what Leila would do. She didn’t have to help me, this eager yet green scribbler of words, didn’t even have to bring me into her orbit, but she opened her arms to me, and in the years leading up to her passing, changed my writing and my life.

While my family and I were living in eastern Washington State, my in-laws came to visit in 2014 via a ship that cruised inland on the Columbia River. While the ship was at port, my wife, Mikella, boarded to have lunch with her parents. I was working, so I missed out on my one chance to meet Leila, who also happened to be on the cruise. 

My mother-in-law, who is another mentor of mine and one of my biggest supporters, had met Leila, learned who she was and talked me up. During lunch, Leila introduced herself to Mikella, chatted for a moment, then left everyone to their meal. But then she pivoted and returned to the table. 

To my wife, she said, “Something just now told me to turn around, that I need to connect with this Boo fella.” So began one of the most important relationships of my career, all by phone and email, seven years of communication. You should know that when Leila wrote an email, it read like a letter she’d sent via the postman, because there was never a misplaced word, never a hurried sentence.…

I’ve always written about monsters. The human kind of monsters. Hopefully, I write the kind you can’t tear away from. The ones who force you to ask yourself the uncomfortable questions about human nature and the choices we make.

My stories have always lived in the adult space—where tension builds like a pressure cooker, danger is inevitable, the story unravels slowly to that huge climax, and the question isn’t just what will happen, but when, how, and how to stop it from happening or happening again.

Knowing all of this, I didn’t expect that writing a young adult book, filled with monsters of a literal kind, would challenge me in new and frustrating ways.

The move from adult to YA didn’t seem like a huge leap. I mean, darkness is darkness, am I right? Fear is a language that’s universal and speaks to us all in one way or another. Whether the threat was from a person or a…vampire, the mechanics of suspense, tension, conflict, and character building were still basically the same.

Or so I thought.

Turns out I was mistaken.

Writing From a Different Lens

Maybe not mistaken, per se. Maybe more like I misunderstood what was expected of me. I overestimated myself because I’d gotten comfortable in what I’d already been doing and thought I could do the same here. And I underestimated the new challenge I was taking on. Writing from a different lens.

I thought writing for a younger audience might require me to pull back some. You know, simplify, soften edges, not curse as much, not be as deep or condescending as adults can be. LOL. I thought maybe I’d have to level down and deliver less because younger readers wouldn’t want all of that.

But instead, as I began revising the draft I’d written, a new realization began to unfurl: I hadn’t given enough and I needed to give more of everything.

More tension.

More suspense.

A different kind of unease and how conflict is tackled.

A different type of character whose mindset, and how they saw the world and the issues plaguing them, would be more intense, more complicated.

And a deeper exploration of what that character was becoming.

Most importantly, I had to be more emotionally honest and channel that through my characters in my writing than I’d ever had to before.

You know…more.

In adult thrillers, fear …

When this happens, when I’m struggling with a book, lost in the spaghetti messiness of it, I fret and worry and storm around the house. I moan to my husband that I’ve really done it this time—the world will see that I do not actually know what I’m doing.

He nods pleasantly, rubs my back, essentially answers in his calm, English way, “Yes, dear.”

The truth he understands after twenty years with me is that some books are easier than others and some are very challenging, and yet, somehow they all get written.

I should have known this book would be a challenge. The last one, A Thousand Painted Hours, had been ripening in my imagination for over four years. It was like a juicy peach, waiting to be plucked. Not that it was easy, or a gift book, but I was deeply hungry to dive in and do the work.

Usually, such a book is followed by one that makes me dig ditches, sweat in the sun. I have to work much harder to find the soul of it. That does not mean it will be a lesser book—in fact, some of the ones that have tortured me the most have turned out to be some of my stronger offerings. It’s just that books are like children, and no matter how many you bring into the world, no two will ever be alike.

This recalcitrant toddler has tested me, and for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been relying on pure grit and discipline to get the words on the page.

It works, but it’s hardly enjoyable. I might as well be going to the dentist.

A few nights ago, I happened across a TikTok of a woman urging us to forget discipline and instead focus on devotion. Honestly, I only watched the first thirty seconds and had to hurry away to think about this more deeply. *

Devotion. Oh.

Discipline is the way most of us learn to get the words on the page, day after day. It certainly can’t be done without showing up. On even the worst day, I can eke out 750 words.

But frankly, discipline hasn’t been cutting it. …

Clearly, negativity in the bookish online world drives clicks. Why else would so many BookTubers and Bookstagramers be using it? Since I began noting its prevalence, I have seen scores of negative content with titles like: “The Worst Books of the Year So Far,” and “My Five Least Favorite Classics,” and “Deep Dive Into the Worst Books on TikTok (subtitled: It’s Worse Than You Think”).” Or how about: “Books Are Bad Now—So Much Yikes!). And then there’s my favorite: “Tropes That Make Me Want to Pluck My Eyes Out!” (I kid you not!)

Since I’m a negativity newbie, and I generally disregard negative content, I’m not too clear on how this works. Now that I’ve got you here, am I supposed to keep you in suspense as long as possible? Probably. But I suspect you’ve already guessed where I’m going.

It’s the negative clickbait content. That’s the bookish thing I hate.

Since We’re Here

It says a lot about society in the internet age, that we can be so drawn to see punches thrown at the very things we purport to love. I’m so annoyed by bookish negativity, I started clicking the “Not Interested” or “Less Content Like This” buttons on negative posts that show up in my social media feeds. And I STILL get fed a ton of the stuff. I can only imagine how much I’d see if I clicked, even occasionally.

I hope my annoyance doesn’t come off as a humblebrag. Maybe it’s just the writer in me that’s repelled, defaulting to empathy. Whenever I see a “worst books” list, I can only imagine how I’d feel if one of my titles was on it. Hence, maybe it’s more like “thin skin projection.”

In any case, now that my little experiment has brought us this far, why waste an opportunity? Maybe I should let my negativity flag fly for once. Just for the day. While I don’t have anything I genuinely hate about actual books or stories or authors, there are some book-adjacent topics, types, and trends of which I am—shall we say—less than fond? May as well seize the moment, and unload a few of my darker thoughts. While I …