THEY’RE NEW, AND I’M SCARED TO DEATH

Let’s start with this passage from the science fiction novel Babel-17  by Samuel R. Delany…

She said something unprintable. When she finished there were tears starting on her lower lids. “What I want to say, what I want to express, I just…” Again she shook her head. “I can’t say it.”

“If you want to keep growing as a poet, you’ll have to.”

She nodded. “Mocky, up till a year ago, I didn’t even realize I was just saying other people’s ideas. I thought they were my own.”

“Every young writer who’s worth anything goes through that. That’s when you learn your craft.”

“And now I have things to say that are all my own. They’re not what other people have said before, put in an original way. And they’re not just violent contradictions of what other people have said, which amounts to the same thing. They’re new, and I’m scared to death.”

“Every young writer who becomes a mature writer has to go through that.”

I think this is almost entirely true.

The “almost” comes in the form of young writers who do indeed have new ideas, something new to say. I feel like that happens more often than Mr. Delany seems to assume here, but still, yes…

Writing is something we get better at, and not because we age, or as we age, but as Delany said, as we mature—if, that is, we allow ourselves to mature. Unfortunately not everyone does. That makes the idea of “a mature writer” a tricky one.

Is it as simple as an accumulation of wisdom—whatever that word even means anymore? Or is it simpler than that? In her essay “The Power of Detail” in Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg wrote:

Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived.

Might a more mature author simply have a bigger set of lived experiences to draw from? A larger group of friends, acquaintances, coworkers, brief encounters… children and grandchildren… from which to draw upon for characters, for offhand remarks, for slang, for jokes, anecdotes, and tragedies? Hirose Tonso seemed to say as much in the 19th century…

People nowadays love writing up the smallest, most vulgar details, thinking these are what “real” is all about. What I take to be “real” though is something else: the actual situations and real emotions of people narrated with no ornament. Young writers today will sketch out the hazards of infirmity and old age, or concentrate on representing mountain landscapes even while they toil daily as public officials.

What results is something they have neither seen with their own eyes nor felt within their hearts: nothing more than rote imitation of words by the ancients. In such cases, even if they’ve represented a scene precisely as if one had seen it, the effect is no different from an actor dressed up in costumes. How can you say this is what’s “real”?

If we can call all the accumulation of real life experiences, books read and written, tragedies endured, as so on “wisdom,” is that actually a good thing? Is there such a thing as too much wisdom? In “Poetry has lost its violence,” Justin E. H. Smith wrote:

Life grows less eventful as we age, and the gap between our quotidian experience and the heroic register into which we spent our youth projecting ourselves only seems to widen.

I can relate to that. My life is definitely “less eventful” now than it was in, say, my twenties—and you couldn’t pay me to go back. I’d hate to have to gather all that wisdom all over again.

But hey, younger writers, never fear—you will gather wisdom whether you damn well like it or not. If you keep your eyes and ears and mind open and keep reading, living, and writing, you might just hit that terrifying place where you realize you’ve got something original to say. How old will you be when that happens?

I haven’t the slightest idea. But didn’t Fran Lebowitz say it best?

Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.

And yeah, I will turn sixty-two this year so I think about shit like this now.

—Philip Athans

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Oh, and remember to do whatever you possibly can to stop the Republican party from burning books. At the very least…

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THE THREE RULES OF GENRE FICTION

I’ve been working hard to stop using the word “rules” when it comes to creative writing—especially fiction, and including genre fiction. I’ve used that word in connection to two things in particular: one scene, one POV and show, don’t tell, but both those things aren’t “rules” at all but techniques.

You can do whatever you want with point of view if the mood strikes you. You could write a fantasy novel in the guise of non-fiction… whatever you like. Those techniques, though, are seen most of the time in contemporary fiction because they work to heighten reader engagement and are important parts of the craft of fiction writing that we all need to learn, pay attention to, and bring to our work—at least most of the time.

So then what, if any, actual rules are there when it comes to writing fiction—and especially genre fiction?

I submit that there are three…

Rule Number One: Don’t be boring.

Rule Number Two: Make us care.

Rule Number Three: Make it worth it.

This is the compact we have with our readers, and woe be unto us when we break or ignore these three rules.

When we sit down to write a fantasy novel (or science fiction, horror, romance, etc.—in whatever combination) we want, as authors, to be read—and not just read but understood. We want our readers to feel something, to be scared or wrapped up in the suspense of the moment or to fall in love along with our characters. We want them to feel immersed in our worlds. Being careful with POV and avoiding info dumps are ways in which we can do that. These three rules tell us why we should.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Don’t be boring.

If you’re writing an instruction manual or text book your first and maybe even only goal is to be precise and informative. But if you’re writing genre fiction, your first and maybe only goal is to entertain. That, of course, does not mean you have to be frivolous or pandering in that effort. You absolutely still must have something to say, some themeyou’re after, but if all you’re doing is writing, say, and anticapitalist manifesto—then write that only. Leave the fiction out of it. But if you want to—I’ll just say it: seduce your readers into that (or whatever other) idea, you better wrap that in an engaging story.

This is where show, don’t tell comes in. If your story stops for the manifesto, that will always and only read as an info dump. If you show your characters living in a world struggling with that thing you’re fighting against, show them fighting against it and winning and losing and losing and winning against it in the actual moment they come up against this thing you’re warning us about, that message will be conveyed in a stronger and more memorable way. We (your readers) will have lived the reality of this, being caught up in an entertaining story that inserts the ideas along the way. The second you fall into didacticism, stop showing and start telling—even if there’s no “message” behind it and it’s just covering your exhaustive worldbuilding—readers will start to drop away. And why wouldn’t they? After all, they bought a novel, not a text book. They came for a story, not a speech.

Entertain your message into their heads with action, suspense, atmosphere, plot twists, magic or sci-fi tech, monsters or wizards, but entertain us, first and foremost.

Make us care.

The real reason behind the things I just listed above: action, suspense, atmosphere, plot twists, magic or sci-fi tech, monsters or wizards, and everything else we love about the genres we love, is to make us care about the people (the characters) who lend humanity to the theme and story. In 1984 we are Winston Smith, a person alive in that grim dystopia. In the great Robert E. Howard stories we are Conan, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth. We are Harry Potter, Bridget Jones, Sam Spade… We care what happens to these people because we’re inside their point of view, living in the world they live in, and we understand what they need, what they want, what they’re scared of, how in love they are… One scene, one POV and show, don’t tell work together to get us, your readers, into this headspace.

Make it worth it.

And then Sally woke up and realized it was all a dream…

No. Right?

Horror might be the only genre where it’s actually encouraged to get to the end and everybody’s either dead or hopelessly insane. All other genres are going to need to get us somewhere. Does that mean some kind of Star Wars-style total victory and everyone literally gets a medal? Of course not, but this speaks to the well-known importance of a satisfying ending.

Wherever we get to, however happy or sad, that ending must feel earned. Your protagonist has earned the win, your villain has earned defeat, your story has earned the time spent to read it.

If the hero just sort of wanders through some plot point then kinda sorts things out, I guess, but, y’know, real life rarely has any sense of satisfaction at the end, so…

Well, fuck real life. This is a fantasy novel. This is a romance novel. Real life…? No one is buying a genre novel to experience “real life.”

According to the first rule you’ve been working to never be boring. Most people’s real lives are mostly pretty boring. A fantasy novel about an insurance salesman who spends most of his morning in meetings and then thinks about where to go for lunch then a few more meetings, a couple telepathic connections with clients, then he stops at the tavern on his way home for a couple flagons of ale, and ultimately falls asleep staring at the fire in his fireplace… sucks as a fantasy story! No one wants to read the real life story of anyone—unless their real lives are in some way extraordinary.

And genre fiction begins, operates, and ends with some version of the extraordinary.

Harry Potter didn’t get into AP math, he got into wizard school.

Winston Smith at least tried to stop being a complicit functionary of an evil state.

Sam Spade didn’t drop the whole thing when the bad guy tried to buy him off.

These are stories that have lasted and continued to resonate because what the people inside them were trying to do was worth it—win or lose.

So there they are, the three rules of genre fiction, and here they are again, so you’ll never forget:

Rule Number One: Don’t be boring.

Rule Number Two: Make us care.

Rule Number Three: Make it worth it.

—Philip Athans

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SUSPENSE VS. EXPLANATION

I’ve been oh so slowly working my way through the old Perry Rhodan books, and made it to #4: Invasion from Space by Walter Ernsting and Kurt Mahr. The quick history of Perry Rhodan: a magazine series of space opera sci-fi stories published in Germany and brought to the U.S. by super-fan and Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest Ackerman, translated by his wife Wendayne, and published by Ace through the 1970s. Even back in the day these books were not highly regarded, but they were popular enough to sustain the series through well over a hundred books. I love old school pulp SF and fantasy and have nurtured the ability to smile through “bad” writing as long as the story is fun.

I’ll admit to a bit of a struggle with Perry Rhodan, but that’s a story for a different day.

In any case, as I’ve done with another long running series I’m oh so slowly working my way through (Doc Savage) I’ve used the Perry Rhodan books as examples of what not to do in terms of the writing, and alas, here we go again with that.

Invasion from Space, like all the earlier Perry Rhodan books, actually contains two separate novellas: Invasion from Space, and Base on Venus. The offending passages are from the latter work.

Before Perry and his intrepid crew travel to Venus they make a stop at the Moon to see if they can salvage more high tech equipment from the crashed alien starship that kicked off the first book. The Arkonides are an ancient and dying species of technologically advanced aliens, and Perry has befriended two of them (though really only one is a friend at this point). Perry has used this technology to basically seize control of the world—also a story for another day.

Anyway, Perry does have some Earthbound enemies, but in the previous story he’s been battling the evil alien Mind Snatchers, who take over people’s minds to put their nefarious schemes in motion. Having dealt with that threat in Invasion from Space, Perry is now free to expand his mini empire to Venus.

Okay then, so Perry and a small crew are aboard his spaceship and prepare to land on the Moon when they spot another ship, one they don’t recognize—really still just a blip on their radar. Assuming the worst, they track the “alien” ship and prepare to defend themselves. Of course, that ship fires on Perry and they retaliate, causing the alien ship to crash on the surface of the Moon. It’s only then, as they’re landing nearby, that they realize the ship they just downed was from one of the two major powers on Earth: the Western Alliance. These stories were a product of the Cold War era, so that’s the US, UK, Western Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. Of course. For a story written and published in what was then West Germany—these are the good guys.

Perry rescues the crew of the Western Alliance ship but warns them against trying to salvage any Arkonide tech because Perry Rhodan is cooler and smarter and better than any of the world governments so it’s all his.

Again, a story for another day.

Okay, then so what’s so bad about this? There are alien enemies out there, we have a case of mistaken identity, but it’s more or less put right in the end. What do we learn from this as authors of genre fiction?

The lesson comes in the impossibly clunky way in which this scene is presented. I can’t help thinking the authors felt they were being terribly clever in this, but it simply did not come off. Here’s how it plays out.

First we’re in Perry’s POV, on his ship, preparing to land. They spot the unknown ship, track it, then it fires on them, reported by one of Perry’s trusted men, Reginald Bell:

Bell’s eyes threatened to pop out of their sockets. “But this can’t be! They are shooting at us!”

That’s immediately followed by a scene break, after which is the offending sentence:

A few hours earlier the following events had taken place.

If you ever find yourself considering writing that sentence in your own works of fiction, please do whatever is necessary to stop yourself. Like, bite your hands or something.

First, the question:

Who is saying this? Who knows what happened a few hours earlier?

This sentence has no point of view (POV) character attached to it. This is the author himself slipping in to report on what’s going on, not to show the story unfolding, but to explain how we got to this strange ship firing on our hero.

News flash: No reader of genre fiction cares what the author thinks.

At least not in the moment. Indeed, if readers care about who the author is at all it’s usually because that author has the ability to immerse them in a story, to make them feel along with the characters, and feel alive in that moment, in that time and place, as that POV character—however fantastical the fantasy world or SF future. These are the authors readers come back to, not because those authors intrude on their stories but because they know not to.

What follows then is a perfectly workable and entertaining scene from the POV of the captain of the Western Alliance ship Greyhound, who thinks the blip on his radar is a Mind Snatcher ship and fires. This then plays through the Greyhound being hit by the unknown invader’s weapons and crashing. The crew scrambles into spacesuits and abandon ship on the dangerous wasteland of the lunar surface. But they still have operable missiles, so they fire at the still unknown ship.

Another scene break and back to Perry a little time before the firing of the missiles—then they see the missiles but their forcefield deflects them and the story goes on from there.

Besides the lack of POV in that one sentence, what’s wrong with this?

By dislodging Perry and the Greyhound from each other in time, the authors bypass an opportunity for suspense.

I’ve said before that suspense comes from an imbalance of information. We (your readers) know something the POV character doesn’t and so we see her walking into a trap thinking, Oh no! Don’t open that door! Because there was an earlier scene from the villain’s POV where we saw him boobytrap the door.

The order in which these two things happen matters.

If she opens the door and there’s an explosion, that’s a paragraph of terror. Maybe followed by a chapter of explanation as to how that door blew up. But if, in the previous chapter, we see the door being boobytrapped, we have two chapters of suspense. The latter tends to make for a more compelling read.

The imbalance in information in the Perry Rhodan example is clear. Neither crew knows the true identity of the other, and there has been a previously established villain so a reason to be on alert. There is a reasonable motivation behind their willingness to shoot first and ask questions later—but instead the authors show them shooting first then asking questions earlier.

If we knew before Bell reports that the unknown ship is firing on them that this unknown ship is crewed by the good guys (and the Western Alliance is always going to be better than those dang commies!) we know—as the scene plays out in real time—that there’s this lack of specific knowledge on both sides. As readers we’ll be on the edge of our seats hoping they won’t blow each other up before realizing they’re (ostensibly) on the same side, and anyway neither of them are evil Mind Snatchers.

Instead, we get a short bit of Perry not knowing who they are, then a long passage from these new characters’ POV, then the resolution of that, all in large clumps, disconnected in time.

If, instead, the authors switched back and forth between those two POVs—and a scene break is all you need to indicate that—we’d be seeing the thinking behind what both sides are doing, and cringing through their rash decisions in real time.

This is the definition of a story: characters in conflict.

And sometimes that conflict is based on mistaken identity—but it’s still conflict. And immersive writing means this conflict is happening right now, with immediate consequences to immediate decisions. Going back to “a few hours earlier” to report on the fact that “the following events had taken place,” explicitly removes immediacy from three scenes.

So then this week’s lesson: Never remove the immediacy from any scene.

—Philip Athans

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AM I THE CADILLAC LADY?

My last retail “day job” was managing a record store in suburban Chicago. This would have been late 1994 or early 1995, before I got the job at TSR in September ’95. I had outgrown that job by then—and I mean really outgrown it—and most of that last stint in music retail was entirely forgettable. But this one customer has never left my consciousness, and that’s because I made a mental effort to fix her there.

One weekday morning when the store was typically really dead an older woman wandered in. I guessed her to be maybe in her seventies, and I could immediately tell she was a fish out of water. Of course I approached her to ask if she needed any help and, relieved, she said she’d just bought a new car and wanted to “get some music for it.” She quickly added that she liked “the old timey stuff, like Tony Bennett.” Not at all surprised, I happily walked her over to the Easy Listening section and, it being 1994-5 asked the obligatory question: “Do you want CDs or cassettes?”

The look that descended over her face almost made me gasp out loud. It was as if I’d asked her to compare Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to his Special Theory of Relativity, citing sources no older than three years, and only from peer-reviewed journals.

Her answer: “Its a Cadillac.”

Okay, now, again, this was 1994(ish) so at that point I still needed a specific answer. Not wanting to prolong the confusion I asked if she had the car with her and she did, so we walked outside and I looked at the dash and found a cassette player. Mystery solved, we walked back in and she happily picked out a few groovy easy listening tapes and went on her way smiling.

God only knows if she figured out how to play them.

But that interaction left a deep impression on me. In that moment, right after she left the store, I told myself:

Never be that lady.

And not because she was a bad person—she was super nice, actually—but because, at least I felt then as a young and vibrant thirty-year-old, that she had chosen to be left behind. She didn’t have to be some kind—any kind—of audiophile or tech first adopter, but I felt as though she should at least have had a general working knowledge of the world around her. CDs and cassettes were not today’s disruptive new technology. They had both been in operation for a long time. I really felt she should have known at least which format her fancy new car required.

So I made the promise to myself that no matter how long I lived, and no matter how the technological landscape changed around me, I would at the very least know the difference between a CD and a cassette.

And you know what? I’ve kept that moment in mind lo these thirty and more years, and indeed I have not been left behind. You’re reading me on the internet right now. I’ve rolled along with social media, streaming television, upgrading computers and phones along the way. I know what an app is. I know I have an iPhone and how that’s different from an Android phone. I’m not on TikTok or Instagram but I know what they are. I know the difference between Google and DuckDuckGo and have chosen the latter. Though I don’t use every single new thing, I live in the present moment.

And then we get to AI.

Because that new technology attacked me directly by going after writing and editing, by going after artists, my shields went up and I will have none of it. And now, because of that, every instance of those two initials makes my skin crawl and I’m ready to defend myself. The fact that my son graduated with a degree in computer science and works in a super market because the once massively job-rich Seattle area tech scene has been laying people off since the end of the pandemic, which coincided with his graduation… well, that doesn’t help. My daughter is currently unemployed because her career looks to be on the AI chopping block, too.

I understand what things like ChatGPT and Copilot are and what they tell us they’re supposed to do, and how it’s a good thing, but being aware of the technology means I’m also aware of the death toll ChatGPT is now dragging behind it. I’m seeing Amazon flooded with AI generated “books” that are doing enormous damage to the already unfairly negative reputation of indie publishing. And I’m also keenly aware of the abusive relationship I’m now trapped in with Amazon. How do I sell my books without them, even if neither of those books are actually selling very many copies? I’ve gotten used to just clicking on the app and things I need appear in a day or two like magic… though very few of the things I order arrive in good condition or are made with the tiniest eye on quality, so…

And then, because of the obvious and undisguised evil of Jeff Bezos, am I supposed to get a full list of Amazon Web Services’ clients then boycott them too? That would be—trust me—a lot of companies big and small. I just said I’ve been keeping up with technology, and in fact my livelihood now depends on being online. I can’t just find a cabin somewhere and live off the land.

I don’t know what to do… and I can feel myself fading into depression even as I write this.

I don’t think I’m the old lady with the Cadillac when it comes to AI. It’s attacking human creativity, it’s stealing intellectual property, and it’s pushing skilled white collar workers out of the workforce literally tens of thousands at a go. And it is infected with racism, conspiracy stories, pseudoscience, propaganda…

But then we still keep hearing things like, “Oh, no, there might be growing pains, but this is a miracle. It will take away all the little tasks that keep you from…”

Doing what?

Making art that AI has completely devalued?

Working at my non-existent job?

I know the difference between a CD and cassette, and I know the difference between a figurative killer app and a literal killer app.

Or am I just an old fart who’s been left behind by a world that not only doesn’t give a shit about old farts—and that’s been true of America for at least fifty years—but doesn’t give a shit about anybody.

I don’t know, man, point me to the punk rock section of Spotify and leave me there to cry while I try to get it to play “California Über Alles” in my Ford Fiesta.

Does that have Spotify?

—Philip Athans

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HOW LONG WILL OUR WRITING SURVIVE?

This morning I chose a book at random from a stack of books in my library. What I came up with was Selected Poems by Po Chü-i. As with many of the 2400 or so unread books I own I have no recollection at all as to how, when, or why this book came into my possession, but as I’ve said before: I trust my past self. I bought it for a reason… didn’t I?

It’s a general practice of mine to immediately start reading any book I add to “currently reading” on GoodReads. In my continuing extreme deadline energy state, which will remain in place through the month of February, that hasn’t always been the case as time for reading has, unfortunately, been squeezed. But there are certain “general practices,” including reading for pleasure every day, that I not only can but have already started adding back in between editing sprints, so I did sit down and start reading this book this morning.

Another general practice of mine is to skip introductions so as not to be infected by that scholar’s opinions or cultural or historical biases—for or against—and instead skip right to the text and read it, as much as I can, entirely without other context. I’ll make my own decisions about these poems, ask my own questions, etc. Then, when I’m done, I will go back and read the introduction, extended author biography, etc.

So all that having been said, here is the complete text of the first poem in the collection…

Ten years, nothing but grueling study;

a mistake perhaps, but suddenly my name’s on the list.

Just passing is no real prize, though;

true glory comes when you break good news to parents.

Six or seven friends who passed at the same time

see me off from the imperial city.

Canopied carriages set out in procession,

strings and flutes lift parting sounds.

Success softens the pain of leave-taking;

half drunk, I think little of the long road ahead:

the swift clatter-clatter of horses’ hooves,

the feel of this spring day as I head for home!

Po Chü-i was born in 772 and died in 846, living and writing in T’ang Dynasty China. The poem above was written in the year 800—and it’s immediately recognizable and entirely relatable to this reader, born in 1964 and reading the poem in 2026 in a country that did not exist in the poet’s lifetime.

If written today, only these two lines:

Canopied carriages set out in procession,

 …and…

the swift clatter-clatter of horses’ hooves,

…might have to be revised. Otherwise, this is the story of every college graduate, apparently for at least the last 1226 years.

That thought inspired the question asked in this post’s title:

How long will our writing survive?

Who will read us in the year 3252? What languages will our work have been translated into? What county, what city… what planet will that reader hail from? I’m reading the Burton Watson translation published in 2000 by the Columbia University Press in trade paperback format. What will this book—or anything I’ve ever written—look like in 3252?

Could Po Chü-i ever have imagined that a university not unlike the one he’d graduated from when he wrote this poem, but over a thousand years in the future in this alien language, nation, and society, would publish his work?

He may have imagined it, just as I’m imagining being read on another planet in the year 3252, but one thing’s for sure: he couldn’t have known.

Neither can I, and neither can anyone else.

But we can imagine.

And I’d like to imagine someone 1226 years from now thinking, Wow, maybe revise these two lines, but otherwise I relate to every bit of this poem!

Who knows…?

—Philip Athans

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Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

Please don’t wait another 1226 years to read…

GRAPHING A STORY…?

This week let’s think about this bit that I pulled out of our March 2025 Fantasy Author’s Handbook group read and the first book finished in my 100-Book Challenge, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction by Benjamin Percy:

Make a graph of your story or novel or essay or memoir. Step back and judge it as a whole. Pay attention to how you might balance the physical beats and the emotional beats rather than entangle them. Tell a story; have some thoughts about it. Tell a story; have some thoughts about it. Then your feckless pondering will become feckful.

This is an interesting idea and one that can certainly be useful as we continue our writing journey, which is a learningjourney no matter how long you’ve been doing it or how many books you have or have not sold.

There are apps out there that purport to help you do this, but at risk of sounding like the Luddite I am not and have never been, the process of creative writing—in all its stages—is not something that can be cobbled together algorithmically or in any other way forced into a program or, yes, “graph” of any kind.

Think of it this way: Here is an idea, thanks to Benjamin Percy, but the execution of that idea is entirely your own.

No two authors’ writing process is exactly the same. No two authors’ voices are exactly the same. Not all authors’ literally anything are exactly the same. That’s because no two people are exactly the same across any measure, especially when it comes to any creative activity.

Please lead your life with at least that understanding.

As an author it will help you spot nonsense like Save the Cat or the Hero’s Journey or any version of “AI” (LLM, generative AI, chatbots, etc.) and run as fast as you can away from it. Creative writing, regardless of genre or category, is a creative pursuit, not a mathematical pursuit. It can not be done mathematically. Period. And that means machines (or people) who rely on math to understand creative writing will not be able to understand it, so will not be able to help you.

Breathe that in, authors. You’re on your own out there—and that’s a good thing.

So were these four authors: Aristotle, Homer, Dostoyevsky, and everyone else.

Well, no, actually, maybe that’s not true. We’re not at all on our own. There’s a huge community of fellow authors, editors, teachers, agents, readers, and lots of other creative humans out there that can have a huge effect on your development as an author. Those other four authors I mentioned had some number of people working with them, were inspired by other authors, and so on, going back as far as history takes us.

Still, you are your own first reader. You have your own individual brain that thinks differently from mine and everyone else’s. You have to not just think, but more importantly feel your way through your education as an author.

Back to Percy, and his advice to:

Tell a story; have some thoughts about it.

What does that look like for you?

You’ve finished a piece of writing: a short story, a poem, a novel or a chapter of a novel, an essay… whatever.

Don’t just read it—think about it. Consider making notes on your own work the same way you might while reading someone else’s writing. I write notes in the margins of books (almost) all the time. I keep a “commonplace book” file on my computer where I save things like the quote from Thrill Me that started us off here. Do I do that with my own writing…? Kind of. Not always.

But actually, yeah, at least for longer works I had notebooks full of stuff—things I felt I needed to go back to, more research to be done, questions for my editor, fresh ideas to consider, and so on. I’ve shown what one of my outlines ends up looking like here. That counts, doesn’t it? I was definitely thinking!

Could your “graph” just be five or ten minutes of letting a poem settle in your head? Could it be a page or more in a notebook where you list out things you were happy with and things you were less than happy with? And don’t forget to identify the good, and not just the bad! Are you a bit more analytically inclined than me? Do you want to create a questionnaire for yourself? Could you adopt some version of this list of questions from author Steve Rasnic Tem in an interview in the book The Horror Writer, edited by Joe Mynhardt (another of our group reads)?

I think critical, “aware” reading is essential. If you want to write short stories, I suggest you read at least a thousand of them representing all genres and styles critically. How did the writer begin the story? How did he or she end it? Make a list of the beginnings and endings you particularly like. If you do this conscientiously you will develop an inventory of possible beginning and ending strategies for your tales. It’s an area that can be especially troublesome for inexperienced writers. Do the same for “middle” strategies. How did the author get from point A to point B? How did the author keep you reading? Was there some sort of structure involved? Rising and falling action? Subplots? Complications? Just pondering these issues in specific examples can teach you a great deal about writing.

Can we even see all this stuff in our own writing? I think we can. Not as clearly as an experienced editor could, which is why people like me remain an important part of the world of writing and publishing, but we can, as authors, at least think about these questions.

And so then however you get to the “have some thoughts about it” stage and what that looks like for you, as I jotted down on this page in Thrill Me…

Always be creative, rather than analytical, in the creation of art.

—Philip Athans

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

What came out of that outline was…

BENEATH VS. UNDER

Writing trends can be weird. They can come out of nowhere and come and go so fast most people don’t even see them happening. The English language, maybe even more so than any other language on Earth, is an ever-evolving, living thing. That said—that understood—I don’t spend too much time wringing my hands over neologisms and alterations or additions to accepted usage—especially since “accepted” implies there’s someone in charge to either accept or reject things like the singular they, disrespect used as a verb, and so on.

For the record, no such authority exists.

That said, I can be at least a bit of an old school curmudgeonly copy editor, and anyway, I have a deep and abiding respect for the language. So when, over the course of the last few months or so, I started seeing author after author drop out the word under almost completely in favor of beneath, I just have to ask…

Where the hell is this coming form?

I can’t help but think this might be another grammar check hallucination (another new usage I wish we didn’t have to adopt). That is actually a thing now, and those hallucinations are easiest to see in fiction, which is the hardest form of writing to apply algorithmic rules to. This was true when all of a sudden said was being changed to spoke and I had to change it back—dozens of time in dozens of books.

Now I need to attack the creeping influence of beneath, which, yes, is indeed a word with many perfectly fine uses, but it does not replace the accepted ,and more importantly expected idiomatic uses of under. I see this now, and I see it a lot:

The ground beneath his feet.

They’re digging beneath the wall.

She jumped beneath the wagon.

Hear me, all authors of all things. It’s:

The ground under his feet.

They’re digging under the wall.

She jumped under the wagon.

It just really actually is.

Need some extra authority? Here’s what The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage has to say on the matter:

beneath. Over the centuries, beneath, below, and under have tended largely to overlap. It would appear that, by the end of the 19C., beneath had become somewhat restricted in use: ‘a literary and slightly archaic equivalent of both below and under. The only senses in which beneath is preferred are 7 (“beneath contempt”), and fig. uses of 4 (e.g. “to fall beneath the assaults of temptation”).’ (OED). Fowler (1926) judged that, apart from the ‘beneath contempt’ sense, ‘it is now a poetic, rhetorical, or emotional substitute for under or below’.

Be that as it may, beneath has a wide range of idiomatic contextual uses now. Examples: 1 (in a lower position than) Lowe dropped to his knees, as if to drive the knife upwards beneath Leiser’s guard—J. le Carré, 1965; I watched a child drag a butter-box on wheels beneath the cold streaky sky—T. Keneally, 1980; drinking pre-lunch aperitifs beneath crystal chandeliers—P. Lively, 1987; his body was positively abloom beneath the riding mac—T. Wolfe, 1987; the pipes and conduits that jostle each other beneath the street—New Yorker, 1988; (fig.) The Dog Beneath the Skin—W. H. Auden and C. Isherwood, 1935.

2 (not worthy of) he considers such work beneath him; she had married beneath her (i.e. to a man of lower social status).

Here are noted three instances in which beneath is not necessarily preferred, but used anyway, with some examples of authors going it on their own. Even then I have to admit I’m working from a terrible old, third edition of Fowler’s from all the way back in 1996.

Okay, yeah, I do need a new edition of that, eh?

Still, I would respond to Fowler’s agreeing with me with these simple revisions, entirely more welcoming to a contemporary ear:

Lowe dropped to his knees, as if to drive the knife up under Leiser’s guard—le Carré was an English author so in any case in the US it would be upward, or in this case, actually, just up.

I watched a child drag a butter-box on wheels under the cold streaky sky—heck, U2 knew it was Under a Blood Red Sky!

drinking pre-lunch aperitifs beneath crystal chandeliers—though it may be terribly old fashioned to drink pre-lunch aperitifs, you’ll actually be doing that under crystal chandeliers. And, y’know, ya gotta get a chandelier!

I’d probably give this one to Tom Wolfe, but… his body was positively abloom under the riding mac works just as well.

Never use the New Yorker’s bizârre antíquarianne stile güide for any-thing unless you know you’re write-ing for The New Yorker.

And finally, Auden and Isherwood, please proceed with my compliments.

—Philip Athans

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As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

WHAT THESE AUTHORS SAID…

Join our group on GoodReads!

Fantasy Author’s Handbook is also on YouTube!

Did this post make you want to Buy Me A Coffee…

Send me a book from my Amazon Wishlist? 

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Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

MICROSOFT WORD FOR AUTHORS

A couple weeks ago I challenged authors to go ahead and pay the $60 a year for the non-AI (Copilot) version of Microsoft Office, and so of course y’all have gone and done that as a new year’s present for yourself, right?

If you’re just starting out, or have been using it for a little while and have gone down some of this gigantic app’s various rabbit holes, please allow me to introduce you to All the Word You’ll Ever Need.

First of all, write however you please—whatever works for you. I write some stuff by hand. I write other stuff in a more condensed single-spaced form—in fact, I’m writing this in that state, since I know it’s going to be pasted into the WordPress editor anyway, and no one but me will read it until it’s published.

But once you’re ready to share this with agents and editors, the standard manuscript format is your friend. Not only that, it’s your best and only friend. This is how you send your manuscripts to the professional world. Please, please believe me that that remains true, even in the era of tech disruption and… whatever…

What is the standard manuscript format, you might ask? Well, I made a handy document you can download here in .docx format that goes into detail on that, but especially if you’re new to Word, or are working from styles maybe set by your employer, or what you’ve cobbled together that works for you to write in, here’s how a working author sets up Word, which you’ll see is mostly by turning stuff off.

All these examples are for the current Mac version, so Windows might look a little different…? I don’t know, but most likely not. Anyway, please let me know in the comments if there are any major differences.

Let’s dive in, first with Preferences, which can be found under Word in the top menu. Click that window open and start with General, which looks like this:

General

Click on these boxes and none of the others to be exactly like me.

You’re welcome.

If you like Dark Mode or have a Pen… knock yourself out. But this keeps things clean as is.

We really get into the nitty gritty in View:

View

Notice I have almost nothing selected here, but the most important thing, especially when you get into revision and editing, is to click on All under Show Non-Printing Characters. this allows you to see into the formatting. You’ll now see if there are two spaces between words or a space before or after a paragraph mark, or if you accidentally had your finger on shift when you hit return and inserted a manual line break instead of a paragraph mark. Ever wonder why your indents all of a sudden stop working for no apparent reason? That’s the reason, and it’s apparent when you can see the non-printing characters.

Next up is Edit:

Edit

I like it set up this way, which gives me the greatest measure of control.

Not much else to say there so I’ll jump to Spelling, which is kind of a big one:

Spelling

I used to have all this shut off but have learned to appreciate the little red lines under misspelled words—or much more often for an editor working primarily in the fantasy and science fiction genres, invented words that aren’t in any real world dictionary.

But what’s most important here is that I have none of the boxes checked under Grammar. Every once in a while I experiment with that to see if they’re improved it at all, and though it’s a little better than it used to be, it returns far more incorrect results than correct results. It does not understand punctuation around dialog, has some inexplicable ideas about commas, and otherwise does not understand the first thing about fiction or creative writing. If you’re still learning the craft of writing, this will teach you up wrong. Just say no to grammar check. Instead, learn how to write.

Next is a source of almost constant frustration, AutoCorrect:

AutoCorrect

These sets of tools try to understand what you’re going for without asking you and start to format stuff in seemingly random ways, forcing sentences into lists, adding links, and otherwise causing havoc. Allow yourself to decide how you want to format your manuscript. But please do check the two boxes here to make sure you don’t have straight quotes, which are used to indicate minutes and seconds in latitude and longitude, in some stricter style guides feet and inches, but are not quotation marks! And being able to just type two hyphens and have them magically transformed into an em-dash is one of the world’s great delights!

Okay then, so you’ve got your basic settings established, now it’s time to open up a new document and make it editor-ready. What you’re going for is something that will, when edited, look like this:

Edited Manuscript

See all the non-printing characters and where I changed a manual line break into a paragraph? Here’s how you make all that work. Looking up at the Format menu on the top like, leave the Document format well enough alone—that tends to be a basic page that works. But you will need to address the Paragraph menu, which looks like this: 

Paragraph

Just make yours look exactly like this, starting with everything flush left. You can go in and center a few things like chapter heads and scene breaks, but do that manually, not with styles! That’s a big one, actually. Just like there’s only font (12-point Time New Roman), one color of ink (black) and one color of paper (white), there is only one style and it’s Normal. Period. Your headers and weird scene breaks and borders and shading and literally anything else might make it look all fancy when it’s printed out but it’s 2026 already, ya’ll. No one is printing this out.

Embedded styles, especially anything you’ve created yourself, just adds unnecessary difficulty to the busy professional you’re sending this to, who is only interested in the story and the writing, not your style sheet acumen.

I know… but please believe me. No styles!

Anyway, set your Indentation to zero and select First line and use the default .5”. I know, printed books tend to have shallower indents than half an inch, but this is not a printed book we’re making, it’s a manuscript—and all of this we’re working through today goes directly to that. You are not typesetting here, you’re writing, and expecting only a few professionals to read it—professionals who are keenly aware of the difference between a manuscript and book and do not need you to show them what it’ll look like when it’s published, or what you want it to look like… Do all that when you decide to publish it yourself—or hire a typesetter/designer to do that for you—but this is a manuscript, and all this is how you make it look and function like manuscript.

And please do not fiddle with Spacing. It’s zero, zero, and Double. Be sure to check the box: Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style. Since you only have one style (Normal), that means there won’t be any extra space between paragraphs.

Next up, how did I make it so you can see all the things I changed, and read the comment about which vs. that? First, from the Tools menus, select Track Changes and then Highlight Changes.

Track Changes

Then click all the boxes:

Track Changes

There are options in terms of how you see this on your screen. Here’s how I have that set up:

Track Changes

This you’re finding in the Review pane under Markup Options (check all) then check Show Revisions in Balloonsunder Balloons, because balloons are fun.

No, seriously, this makes the text itself cleaner by showing what you deleted off to the side, not right next to what you added in its place, which can get pretty confusing pretty fast.

This feels like a lot, but it’s a one-time setup that will be your forever default, so a small bit of fire-and-forget effort that let’s you do the most important thing, and that’s writing amazing works of literature. And remember when I said don’t waste the time of busy professionals? Well, you’re a busy professional too, right?

—Philip Athans

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

HOW DO I LOOK BACK ON 2025?

This is the last Tuesday and so the last Fantasy Author’s Handbook post of 2025…

Am I really going to write some kind of year-end wrap-up for what has been a great year for me, and one of the worst years ever for me—along with seemingly everyone else here in Republican-ravaged America… a crime still in progress?

But yeah… this isn’t a “political” blog, is it, so let’s set national and world news aside (for the love of all that’s holy) and instead just be happy with our own personal triumphs, however small or even seemingly insignificant they might be in however grand a Grand Scheme of Things you’re tempted to inhabit.

Did I have New Years Resolutions from last year? I don’t even remember and feel no need to go back and check, which pretty much sums it up for resolutions in general. I will work to be a bit more like Benjamin Franklin, and I do have a nice big home repair/renovations to do list… but to do lists aren’t “resolutions” are they? Whatever you call it I do have more to finish by the end of 2026, and really, really have to get to a few “mission critical” components to that taken care of. If I’m looking back on the personal level in 2025 that was probably the biggest failure: putting the required time and energy into those home projects. I guess I’m “resolved” to get that stuff done in 2026… but you don’t care about that.

But no, wait, I was meant to look back, wasn’t I. Okay, then, let’s try looking back and leaving “the news” aside… at least once I mention that I participated in my first ever protest this year.

Okay? Now, off the politics, except that no one who loves books (or intellectual freedom, the US Constitution, personal freedom, basic human rights, and other little things like that) can fail to mention the unprecedented assault on books, authors, booksellers, publishers, and maybe especially librarians that are, in many places in this country (and one place in this country is one place too many) still going on. This is where I once again ask all authors—at any point in your career—to be a part of…

Okay, so then now no more politics.

I don’t know, y’all…

Anyway, thanks to Reedsy I’ve been super busy—that’s where the positives are. Not only was business up, but the books that came to me this year were some of the best I’ve worked on in ages. There are enormously talented authors out there writing fantastic books and with this level of quality and imagination and creative energy, oh, wow are the genres I love in good hands, with more hands being added daily. Thank you, Reedsy, and everyone who found me there in 2025. And as we move into 2026 I remain…

That really was the big moment of gratitude for me in this weird-ass year.

I read some great stuff otherwise, too, and had some fun talking about them on YouTube while I work through my 100-Book Challenge.

That’s when you read a hundred books you already own before you can buy any more books. I’ve gotten to be quite the I buy books, therefor I am  kinda guy over the last almost all of my entire life, so this has been hard—the not buying books part. But reading a lot of books this year was great. I set my 2025 GoodReads challenge at 60 books and am currently at 59 with the possibility of finishing one more today or tomorrow. Of those 59 books, the last 39 were part of the 100-book challenge, which works out weirdly symmetrical. If I do finish one more before the clock strikes 2026 it means if I set the same 60-book target for next year I will finish the 100 book goal right at the end of 2026. Won’t that be tidy.

Hopefully I’m as busy or even busier with work in 2026 because once that 100-book Challenge is completed holy bananas will I start buying books. Lots of books. Like, maybe a reverse 100-Book Challenge where I have to buy 100 books before I can read one I already own. That should take me about a week to finish up, so check back with me on that around January 8, 2027.

Anything else…?

Yeah… no, that pretty much sums it up because I’m not going to talk about AI.

We’re ignoring that out of existence, right, people?

Right?

Happy New Year everybody, let’s keep this reading, writing, and editing train a’rollin’ in ’26!

—Philip Athans

Join our group on GoodReads!

Fantasy Author’s Handbook is also on YouTube!

Did this post make you want to Buy Me A Coffee…

Send me a book from my Amazon Wishlist? 

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Check out my eBay store…

Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.

And buy this book already…