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The Rise of the Machines: AI ‘story engines’

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If you’re book-Twitter-adjacent you will doubtless have heard there’s an AI book generator out there created by a company called Sudowrite. (As in “Pseudowrite”, which is at least honest. I’m also thinking Sudocrem, which is stuff you put on a baby’s bottom when it’s got sore from sitting in its own excrement. Anyway.)

This purports to generate you a book. According to the promo video, you do a “brain dump” of a vague idea, and throw in a couple of characters if you can be bothered. That gets ‘expanded’ into a synopsis, which gets ‘expanded’ into a chapter by chapter breakdown, which gets ‘expanded’ into text, and lo and behold the AI has written you a book!

Let’s just remind ourself: artificial intelligence is not intelligent. It’s a prediction engine. It has scraped billions of words of text and it offers you what it judges to be the most likely one to come up next. If you spend your keyboard time thinking, “What’s the most predictable word or plot event I can use here, I really need this to be something the reader will totally expect”, this could be the tool for you.

So you feed the predictive text engine an idea (in the sample video it’s an idea which bears a strong resemblance to The Impossible Us by Sarah Lotz, published 2022) and it suggests helpful things like, er, all the minor characters. In the video it generates a Wise Mentor, a Jealous Rival, a Supportive Friend, and a Villain. Amazing, what human could have thought of that. Then it “puts a lot of chains of language models together to figure out what are some compelling beats that would hit the plot points”, which is to say, it looks for the most predictable route the story could possible take.

Then it generates text. Jesus wept. I’ll just quote from my anguished Twitter howl:

The opening of the novel reads “It was a sterile space devoid of personal touches” and I shouted “Ha!” so loud the cat jumped. I mean, if I wrote that in a book about the soul-killing effects of AI generated literature, I’d think, “wow that symbolism is a bit too heavy handed.”

lol* the AI text introduces the man with a summary of his professional achievements and the woman with a description of her “simple form-fitting dress that accentuated her curves” and shimmery hair.

*by ‘lol’ I mean ‘vomit’.

Of course you don’t have to use the completely generated AI text! I mean, you will if you’re a Kindle Unlimited page farmer; KU is about to be rammed with this crap, probably unread by the people generating it, who will be cranking it out as fast as the cliché engine can run.

The website offers a sample of its romance writing:

Lady Catherine’s heart raced as she leaned in to meet the lips of the dashing Marquess of Eastwick. Their lips touched and the air between them seemed to ignite. She felt his strong arms wrap around her, pulling her closer as their kiss deepened. The thrill rushed through her veins and the worries of the world seemed to fade away as they clung to each other, their passionate embrace fueled by months of unspoken longing.

But as they reluctantly pulled away, Lady Catherine’s expression grew serious once more. Though her love for the Marquess was undeniable, she knew that she could not simply surrender her heart without knowing the depths of his conviction. She would not become a gambler’s widow.

“My lord,” she spoke, her voice filled with both tenderness and firmness. “My heart beats for you, but I cannot give it so easily. You must prove your love for me is true and everlasting.”

The Marquess of Eastwick’s heart sank at the thought of losing his love, but he knew that he must remain composed in this moment. “Tell me what I must do to earn your trust,” he implored, his voice filled with sincerity.

Lady Catherine met his gaze with a steady gaze of her own. “You must show your devotion to me until the end of the Season,” she replied. “You must avoid all wagers, cease all gambling, and abstain from any behavior that would cause a scandal. If you can prove your love for me in this way, and if your heart remains true, then perhaps we may consider a future together.”

I think what I find most depressing about this is that it’s just—just—plausible enough that page farmers will hoover it up. They won’t care about the repetition, the grammar errors, the POV switch, the grinding predictability, the way it feels like a very wordy synopsis, the soullessness. It looks sufficiently like writing that you can get away with it, but what’s there to enjoy?

Still, you don’t need to use the generated text! If you see yourself as a ‘real’ author rather than a page farmer, you can ‘collaborate’ with it, and just use it to ‘help’. Here are some of the things its website offers:

When the words just won’t come out – Write can do it for you

Write is like autocomplete on steroids. It analyzes your characters, tone, and plot arc and generates the next 300 words in your voice. It even gives you options!

If you don’t know what to write next, you need to work out why not. Maybe your characters are insufficiently developed, maybe you’re facing a plot hole, may be you haven’t developed your story enough, maybe you’re going down a wrong path. You need to stop and think hard about where you are and where you’re going. This process is literally how you make your book, because writing a book is not in fact a matter of typing till you have 70,000 words.

Pacing too fast? Presto expand-o

No matter how much time you spend planning, you’ll end up with some sections that feel rushed. Expand magically builds out your scenes so the pacing doesn’t take readers out of the story.

If a section feels rushed, that probably requires really close textual work. Why did you rush it—because of driving plot urgency, or because you were skating across a tricky part, or because you were having too much fun to slow down? You need to work this out, because all of those will need to be treated differently, and then you’ll have to think very hard about how to add whatever’s needed without clogging the scene or unbalancing the structure around it. Or you can just get a machine to plonk in some extra words. Whichever.

The process of writing a book is generally one long string of hitting problems. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. You write a book by solving the problems, one after another (what does this character want? where is this conversation going? what am I trying to say?). That’s literally the process. I have again and again discovered what I’m trying to do in a book precisely because I was trying to solve a problem.

I needed to tie up loose ends > I reshaped the entire plot and ending

I got hopelessly stuck > I realised I was telling the wrong story

If you ‘want to write a book’ but you don’t want to create your own characters, and come up with your own world, and weave your own plot, and make it heartfelt or moving or exciting or bewildering, and to spin your own sentences, and to take on this challenge you’ve chosen to the best of your ability…okay, but what part of ‘writing a book’ is it that you want to do? Where’s the satisfaction in looking at the elements of writing a book, and pressing a button that does them for you?

I press a button to make a machine wash my dishes because I want clean dishes and I’m not interested in the process. If you think the process of writing a book is a lot of annoying busy-work that’s obstructing you from your goal of being an Author, then I suppose you would indeed be delighted to automate it, but I can’t help feeling you might have missed the entire point of writing. (Unless you’re a KU page farmer, in which case it makes perfect sense.)

And don’t tell me that you’ll come up with the brilliant parts in the time you’ve saved letting Chat GPT generate your secondary characters and your plot; that you’ll take your predictive text pig’s ear and turn it into a silk purse. You know as well as I do that’s not how it works. If you want to raise wonderful flowers, you need to dig the damn ground.

I’m not being all Protestant work ethic here. I don’t see any moral good in crying over a MS. I’m just saying, art is created by putting in learning, practice, experience, hard graft, personal commitment. You put those in, you get art out. You put in a slurry of recycled text geared for the most predictable outcome…well, you get what you give.

A predictive text machine isn’t going to help you understand the deep reason you can’t get that bloody scene done. It’s not going to suggest that piece of imagery that brings your whole book into focus, or the twist that will make readers tweet incoherently gleeful outrage, or the magical line that makes them cry like it hurts, or the idea that makes them stare silently into the middle distance for a while. It’s not going to dig in to your pains and fears and rejections and dreams, and use them to pluck notes that resonate in other human beings’ souls. It’s not going to identify what’s going on when you can’t write at all. It’s not going to make you a better writer.

You are the one who needs to do those things, because that is what writing is. That’s what makes it writing, rather than typing; that’s what creates something memorable and moving and real. If you outsource the hard work to a text generator, you will indeed get a bunch of words in order. But you won’t have written a book. And you will have cheapened yourself and your work in the process.

Some practical notes:

  1. The Sudowrite AI has been trained on fanfiction (hilariously revealed because it ‘knows’ very specific sex tropes from omegaverse fanfic). The people who wrote the billions of words on AO3 weren’t asked permission to have their words used as a training dataset. Their own creative, lovingly composed, often deeply personal work has been scraped and used without consent or payment to create profit-generating software. That is morally wrong if not legally questionable. Moreover, fanfiction is derivative work and thus not for profit. You can play with my worlds with my goodwill but they’re not yours to sell. So if this AI has been trained on fanfic, it’s been trained on derivative works based on original copyrighted work. I confidently expect this whole mess to bite someone on the arse.
  2. Because AI text is produced by a plagiarism machine, it cannot be copyrighted. (I copied that large chunk of “romance” above without asking for permission, and I could have copied the entire ‘novel’.) Obviously you can still stick an AI McBook on KU and say it’s yours, I can’t stop you. But all traditional publishing contracts have a clause along the lines of this (taken from the Author’s Guild model contract):

Author represents and warrants that:

–Author owns and has the right to convey all of the rights conveyed herein to Publisher and has the unencumbered right to enter into this Agreement; Author is the sole owner of the copyright in the Work (or of Author’s contribution to the Work, as the case may be);

–the Work or Author’s contribution to the Work is original and has not previously been Published in any form

If you’ve used AI to generate your book you cannot warrant this to a publisher, and if you sign a contract knowing that your warranty is untrue, you may be in for a world of pain which you will entirely deserve.

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If you are stuck on a book, you can ask a human expert rather than a cliche generator to help you work out why!

Law: what is it good for?

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So, as is now my habit, I was soliciting on Twitter for blog post ideas and the following question was raised by @podcastled:

Do you have to learn the rules (“rules”) to break them? I think a post about resisting being super rule-bound would be interesting.

This is extremely interesting, especially to me because I was an editor before I was a writer. Let’s talk about ‘rules’!

When someone says, “I’m tearing up the rulebook” they may mean “I am coming from a tradition with a different set of rules entirely,” which can be hugely exciting, or “I have examined these rules and concluded they would benefit from change,” which is a vital process to keep any way of thinking healthy, or “I don’t care about your stupid rules, nobody tells me what to do, and by the way my daddy has a lot of money,” which tends to indicate a massive jerk who thinks health and safety is just red tape.

Some rules are good (don’t stick a fork in the light socket). Some rules are bad (don’t use split infinitives in English, as if ‘boldly to go where no man has gone before’ sounds like anything a human would say). Some rules are fossils. (When Gerald Durrell got his first job in a zoo, one of his tasks was heating up the giraffe’s drinking water. Several times a day, buckets of hot water for the giraffe had to be lugged out. Eventually he asked why. Turns out the giraffe had had a cold when it arrived several years earlier so the vet had recommended heating the water, and nobody had ever rescinded the order.)

In my view, and this is my blog so suck it up, if you’re going to intentionally screw with How Things Are Done, you are well advised to first consider Why They Are Done Like That. I am bang alongside messing about with form, or punctuation, or narrative voice, or structure, or most things, as long as you know why you are doing it and consider what effect it has.

Let’s take three oft-repeated Rules of Writing on which I have already written, to make my life easier. (Here I will point out that most Rules of Writing are not, in fact, actual rules.)

Image of the pirate Barbosa from Pirates of the Caribbean. Text over image reads, "They're more what you'd call guidelines"

Dangling participles

Or when a subordinate clause that precedes the main clause has come adrift from its referent, as in:

Jogging down the canal, a swan attacked me.

(If you don’t see a problem with that or need a refresher, read the blog post I did on the subject and I’ll see you back here in a minute.)

The rule is, don’t leave your participles dangling. But why are dangling participles bad? If your answer is “because they’re grammatically incorrect”, go to the back of the class. That’s the very definition of begging the question: bad grammar is bad because it is bad, which is bad.

The actual reason they are bad is that the words/grammar used don’t convey what the author means, and risk jarring or confusing the reader. Look at this:

Now the first woman president of the US, he was astonished at how far his ex-wife had progressed.

Who is the president in this sentence, grammatically? Who do you think the author actually means it to be?

Having invaded without serious opposition, the Channel Islands were then occupied by the German forces.

Who invaded who?

If you’re thinking, “oh come on, you know what the writer means”, join the other guy at the back of the class. The actual meaning of the sentence diverges from the intended meaning of the author, and making the reader stop and go back and pick through the wreckage of your grammar to dig out your meaning is poor writing.

I have tried for some time to think of an example of anyone using a dangling participle to good literary effect. (As in, an adrift one, not a correctly used subordinate clause. Do not reply to this with correctly used subordinate clauses or I will tut irritably at you, and that’s not an idle threat: I’m British.) The only cases I can think of are when it’s being used as a joke about the comic effects of bad grammar. Absent a good reason to deliberately break the rule, you should follow it.

Does that apply to all grammar issues? You tell me. What’s the rule you want to break, and why, and what will you achieve by breaking it, and would the upsides outweigh the downsides? An obvious reason to break grammatical rules in dialogue or deep narrative voice is character. Or you might be making an excellent joke in the narrative. Have at it.

Or you might simply think it sounds better that way, in which case, you will have to take the consequences, including criticism that you did it wrong. I don’t usually split infinitives in my novels even though that rule is bullshit because I don’t want to deal with the legion of self-appointed copy editors who will tweet me, email me, or report me to Amazon. Sometimes, it’s just not worth it.

Wandering point of view, aka head hopping.

I wrote an entire blog post on why this is a bad thing and I stand by it. I once read a m/m romance that switched heads without warning midway during a penetrative sex scene and I swear I felt my neck crick. It’s bad style. Right?

The excellent political SF Infomocracy by Malka Older switches point of view literally from paragraph to paragraph. Why? Because the book is based in a world where everyone has in-head access to The Information, a global feed. This has turned the world into a constantly scrolling present, with people switching non stop between vids, newsfeeds, actual conversations, data, so the manner of telling the story as if flipping from tab to tab is exactly right. It gives us a disconcerting feeling of the nonstop barrage of information with which the characters cope. (This is also one of exactly two books I can think of where the use of present tense narration makes a positive stylistic contribution, and it wouldn‘t work just as well in perfect tense.) The style supports the meaning of the book. An editor who told Older not to head hop here would deserve to have his red pen ritually broken.

Does that mean you can gaily switch POV in your sex scene which is not set in an information-overload tech future? Sure. Just put in a line break or row of asterisks to clue the reader in, so it is a transferred POV not ‘head hopping’. Do you think that looks weird and clunky or jarring? Then ask yourself why doing it without flagging it is better. While you’re at it, consider a flashback, or using the other person’s POV in a different scene instead.

Or maybe you’ve reinvented the sex scene, I’m not ruling that out.* But, given the reader issues that head-hopping causes, the onus is on the writer to mediate those problems and make it work.

*This sentence breaches the ‘rule’ against comma splices, and it does so with intent. I’m writing in a colloquial voice and this punctuation deliberately expresses the way I’d say it: a semi colon would be excessively formal.   

Simultaneous action

Ah, my favourite editorial fad, we meet again. I wrote extensively on it here. The premise of this ‘rule’ is that non-simultaneous actions cannot be presented as simultaneous.

He walked into the room, sitting down on the sofa.

Fair enough. That’s very awkward writing. Unfortunately, this concept is then over-applied by editors who should know better, and we end up with the red-penning of totally reasonable action flows such as

Bob drew the gun, pointing it at Janey.

The actual reason for this rule is that action flows can create an absurd effect when badly done. Unfortunately, some idiot decided to extend this into saying that you can’t do them at all, which is nonsense. This fossilised rule is a coprolite.

The question is not, “Can I break the rule?” or indeed, “Must I obey the rule?” The question is, “Is this a meaningful rule, and will the book be better for breaking it or obeying it?”

This applies just as much on the macro level. One of my least favourite romance tropes is the third-act break-up. There’s a pretty common idea that it’s required to keep the drama levels up and test the relationship. Can you break that rule?

Hell yes, because it’s not a goddamn rule, it’s just a thing a lot of people do, often because they’re told it’s a required ‘beat’ by other people, thus creating a vicious cycle of unnecessary third-act break ups. (Do not start me on the concept of ‘beats’, which has been inexplicably elevated from a basic structural analysis of one type of plot arc into some kind of bible.)

Please, I implore you, burn it down. Put your emotional climax elsewhere. Never have a break up at all. Locate all the conflict externally and let the MCs stand against it, or don’t even have them get together till the last chapter. Do whatever you like–as long as it works.

As author and editor, I have always felt that “Is it correct?” is a less important question than “Does it work?” I am still irritated by an editorial note on a line of mine about someone’s “breath dragoning in the frosty air”. The editor noted the word ‘dragoning’ wasn’t in Merriam Webster but said they were going to let it pass because the meaning was clear. Yes, I know the meaning is clear, thank you. It’s clear because I chose the word very specifically to create a mental picture, and I felt free to do so because English was not actually formed by copies of Merriam Webster being dropped by God from the sky.

All that said, “Do what thou wilt” is very much not the whole of the Law. There are always consequences. If the rule is “a romance novel must have some form of happy romantic resolution for the characters”, and you decide you want your MCs to die, then breaking the rule means you will either need to market your book as something other than a romance novel, or take the consequences of enraged readers to whom you’ve sold a pup.

Knowledge, mindfulness, and accountability are the watchwords here. Use those as your rules and you’re unlikely to go wrong.

(If you want a reasonably comprehensive list of damn fool ‘writing rules’ you can absolutely ignore, such as “don’t use was, don’t use passives, don’t use said”, here you are. Don’t say I never do anything for you.)

Many thanks to @podcastled for the inspiration!

Newest release: A Thief in the Night, an Audible Original.

Inheritance FAQs (or, how to disinherit a duke)

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I have just read a review of a British-set histrom. The hero is a duke, but he has a problem: the conditions of the title stipulate that if he isn’t married by the age of thirty, he will be stripped of the dukedom and it will pass to the next heir. Great romance set-up, right?

No. Oh God, no.

There are historical realities you can muck about with, tons of them. Have a zillion dukes by all means. Let them marry governesses and plucky flower girls, fine. These things are wildly implausible, but this is historical romance, and we’re here to play.

And then there are things that you cannot mess with, because they don’t play with the world, they break it. Chief amongst these in British aristocracy romance would be, er, destroying the entire system of British aristocracy. Which is what this plot does.

The point of a system of primogeniture—the whole, sole, single, solitary purpose of it—is to establish that nobility is bestowed by birth. The monarch can bestow a title on a commoner because of their merit on the battlefield/skill in the sack, but once it is granted, it operates under the rules. Nobody ever gets to decide who will inherit their title—not the monarch, nobody. It goes to the first in line: end of story. And once a peerage is bestowed it cannot be removed by anything less than an Act of Parliament or Royal prerogative. Certainly not by a previous holder’s whim.

If inherited titles can be given or withheld on any other basis, if you start asking “Does the holder meet basic standards?” or “But is this really the best person for the job?”, the whole system falls apart. It is infinitely better for the aristocratic system that a chinless idiot should make an absolute mess of his earldom than that the right of firstborn nobility should ever be questioned.

Hence this isn’t a matter of suspending disbelief / plot implausibility: it destroys the entire house of cards. Allow me to quote GK Chesterton:

Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.

A duke marrying a lowly chimney-sweep’s daughter is merely implausible. But a duke whose title can be removed if he doesn’t meet a certain standard of behaviour, or a nobleman who can disinherit his older son and bestow the title on his second? That violates the laws of the aristocratic primogeniture-based world you’re writing in.

Some readers won’t notice of course. But many, even those who aren’t versed in the specifics of those laws, will pick up that you neither know nor care to know about the world you’re writing. And that does rather raise the question, why bother?

***

Herewith some Inheritance FAQs for UK historical romance authors.  See this other incredibly long post for more on getting titles right.

Can my bastard hero (the illegitimate kind of bastard) inherit his father’s title?

Not in England, possibly in Scotland.

A bastard (born outside wedlock) cannot inherit his father’s title or any property entailed to it. He could be raised to the peerage, i.e. given his own title, by the monarch, but he can’t inherit one because that would break the system of primogeniture. A title could fall into abeyance (stand vacant while waiting for someone to claim it) and potentially then be awarded to the bastard son by the monarch, but it would not be in his father’s power to leave it in his will.

In England a bastard cannot be legitimised by the marriage of his parents unless your book is set after 1926, when the law was changed to retroactively legitimise children if their parents married (as long as neither parent was married to someone else at the time of the birth). The legitimised son of a peer is not entitled to inherit the peerage, though he would be able to use a courtesy title if one was available.

However, if a Scottish bastard hero’s parents married as above, he would be legitimised and able to inherit the title, as that has been Scottish law for ages.

Can my hero renounce his title? Can he nobly give it to his cousin instead?

Not before 1963 but see below, and he can’t ‘give’ it to anyone.

When a peer dies, his heir claims the title by making a petition to the Crown, giving his claim in detail. The heir can use the title while waiting for the formal approval to be granted (start calling himself Earl of Bingley) but it’s not actually his until it’s granted. Hence you could have two rival claimants walking around London both calling themselves Lord Bingley, to everyone’s embarrassment.

The petition is reviewed and, if straightforward, presented to the monarch for rubber-stamping. However, if there are complications, the petition goes to the Committee for Privileges. While this is happening, anyone else who believes they have a claim can petition the House of Lords to have it heard.

Let us say the time and place of Lord Bingley’s marriage to his housemaid are shrouded in mystery, but they lived as a married couple and have an acknowledged son, John. When Lord Bingley dies John petitions the Crown for the title. He can’t give details of his parents’ marriage, so the petition is referred to the Committee for Privileges. Meanwhile his cousin Peter comes forward to claim that Lord Bingley wasn’t legally married and that the title should instead come to him. The whole thing then gets thrashed out in the Lords, whose decision is final.

If John doubts his own claim to the title but has no proof either way, he can decline to make a petition to the Crown, and then the title would simply lie in abeyance until his death, at which point Peter could petition for it. Or if the title has been granted to John already, he can refuse to use it and call himself Mr. But while John lives, the only way for Peter or anyone else to be Lord Bingley would be for John to be conclusively proven illegitimate before the title was granted.

The only way you can mess around with renouncing a title is with an heir who isn’t generally known to exist. Let’s say Lord March was a bigamist, has a son Terence by his first marriage who lives quietly in a village, but as far as the world is concerned, his son James by the second, bigamous marriage is his heir. While this remains secret, James and Terence can decide between themselves if Terence is going to lie low or if James is going to nobly declare himself illegitimate–or indeed knowingly lie to the House of Lords to claim the title. But this entirely depends on Terence’s identity remaining a secret. If it becomes known to the Committee of Privileges, only Terence will be awarded the title, and John is out whatever happens.

NB: It was not possible for a peer to disclaim his title until 1963 when the law was changed. A disclaimed title lies unused until the former holder dies and then inheritance operates as normal.

Can my heroine inherit a title of her own?

Depends.

English titles usually descend down the direct male line. For many titles it is specified that the title passes to “the heirs male of [the holder’s] body”, i.e. legitimate sons only. If you run out of legitimate sons, the title goes into abeyance.

However, some titles are deliberately created with a special remainder allowing it to pass to women/down the female line. Many more Scottish titles than English are created this way. And lots of the older English titles descend in fee simple, meaning the title can go to a female heir, or to other relatives if the line of descent has died out, without going into abeyance. These are almost all baronies or earldoms. Where an English title is in fee simple, sons have precedence over daughters.

Take the earldom of Polkington. The earl is called Alan, and has children Lady Bertha, Charles and David, in that order. Alan’s younger brother is Eric.

In the heirs male system, Charles is heir, with David next in line. If both of them die the title falls into abeyance. Eric can then petition to inherit as the only surviving son of the last-but-one Earl; Bertha is out.

However, if the earldom is held in fee simple, the order of inheritance would be: Charles, David, Bertha, Eric. So if you want a heroine to have a title in her own right, there you go.

NB that if Bertha becomes Countess of Polkington in her own right, her husband John Smith does not become Earl of Polkington or get any courtesy title. He remains Mr Smith unless given a title of his own. (He might well take her surname under these circumstances so their children would have the earldom’s family name.) If Bertha’s husband was Sir John Smith, he keeps his title of Sir. If Bertha, Countess of Polkington marries the Marquess of Mandrake, she will probably style herself Marchioness of Mandrake because it’s higher status.

My hero’s mother was playing away and he isn’t the duke’s biological son—can the villain threaten to disinherit him with this knowledge?

No.  

It is not easy to disinherit the heir to a peerage (because primogeniture). If Lord and Lady Welford are married, Lady Welford’s eldest son is the legitimate heir to the marquessate and entailed property, even if he bears a striking resemblance to Lady Welford’s lover. Lord Welford’s heir could potentially be disinherited if it could be proved beyond doubt that Lord Welford could not have had sex with his wife for a goodly period around the time of conception—but that would be “could not” as in “she was in England, he was in China”, not just a claim that they weren’t sharing a bed at the time. (For once, the man’s word on the matter doesn’t carry all the weight! Woop!)

Moreover, Lord Welford would need to repudiate the child from the first and stick to that decision. He can’t come back from China, forgive his erring wife, bring up the boy with his name, then change his mind in five years’ time. And even then the case would have to be thrashed out in the Committee of Privileges.

Can my hero be stripped of his peerage if he fails to fulfil the terms of a will, or removed from the line of succession by his irate father because of his rakish ways?

Literally, and I cannot state this clearly enough, no.

The irate father can leave unentailed property/money elsewhere, but titles are not in anyone’s gift. The legitimate firstborn son will inherit the title. Peerages can only be granted along the line of succession and, once granted, can only be removed by an act of Parliament. This virtually never happens, and only for things like treason, which tend to come with other (terminal) consequences. Once the title is formally granted, that’s it.

This is the case even if there is an obvious error. Suppose Lord Manders has an eldest son Roger who died abroad, and a second son James. James will need to provide proof that Roger is dead in order to inherit the title, and if he can’t, it will not be granted. If it is granted, and then Roger turns up a few years later explaining it was all an amusing misunderstanding, James can’t just renounce the title of Lord Manders and let Roger have it.

But I really want my elderly duke to force his handsome son, nephew, and bastard to compete over who will inherit the dukedom!

Tough shit. They’ll just have to fight over money like everyone else.

Talking of bastard dukes, my latest release is Any Old Diamonds, in which Victorian jewel thieves collide with degenerate aristocracy.

Do Not Mess with the Happy Ever After: defining the romance novel

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There is a recurrent thing in discussions of romance novels which bubbles up every couple of months: Books That Aren’t Romance Being Listed As Romance.

Obviously this isn’t car manuals sneaking their way in. It’s books that are marketed as romance novels (or series) when one of the protagonists dies, or they part for good, or the romantic relationship in which we’re invested is otherwise ended or ruined. It’s lists of romance novels that include, say, Wuthering Heights, where they both die and about time too, or Me Before You, where the disabled hero serves the heroine’s emotional growth and then commits suicide (shall we not), or much of Nicholas Sparks’ oeuvre (death and tragedy represent) and so on and so forth. These are stories about romance and romantic relationships, yes, but they aren’t romance novels.

Let’s do a thing. Think of the one word that defines the romance genre. What is it you go to romance specifically for, what are you expecting and needing to find? I’ll give you a clue, it’s got four letters, ends with ‘e’.

…

…

…

If you said ‘love’ go to the back of the room. You get love in all kinds of books, including those mentioned above. The guy in Lolita is in love, in his way, and if you call that a romance we have a problem.

What romance novels specifically offer us is hope.  Hope that two people can come together and be better happier humans as a result. Hope that marginalised or disregarded or unhappy people can find love and joy in a hard world; hope that however flawed you are, however scared, however much you feel like a piece of the jigsaw that doesn’t fit, there is a place and a person for whom you are just right; hope for the future. That’s the HEA/HFN promise that the romance genre offers (Happy Ever After/Happy For Now) and the key word there is happy. If a book doesn’t fulfil that by leaving us with the protagonists happy and together (for whatever definition of happy and together works for them) and us hopeful for their future as individuals and as lovers, it is not a romance novel.

This isn’t a criticism of books without HEA/HFN. Wuthering Heights isn’t a bad book because Heathcliff and Cathy don’t live happily ever after; it would be a far worse book if they did. It’s absolutely fine not to have an HEA/HFN. It just isn’t a romance novel without one.

Nor is this, as many idiots think, an indictment of the romance genre. The HEA/HFN requirement is not a limitation, it’s a definition. The HEA/HFN is to a romance novel as being warm-blooded is to a mammal: you can have a lot of variety within that classification, but if you don’t have that specific characteristic, you’re not part of that kingdom.

The reason this taxonomical stuff matters is because when you market a book–when you give it a title of a certain sort, with carefully chosen typography and cover treatment and a well-crafted blurb–you are making readers a promise as to what they’ll get. Imagine a book called The Sallow Road. The blurb reads, “In a surreal land, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.” The cover shows a shadowy road stretching through disturbingly unnatural scenery, and four odd-shaped silhouettes: three sinister humanoids, the fourth all too clearly a schoolgirl. All that adds up to some kind of warped dystopian fantasy horror, quite possibly by Clive Barker. And the reader will thus have every right to be annoyed when they open it to read, “Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife.” (Credit to Rick Polito for this amazing blurb for The Wizard of Oz, tweaked for my purposes.)

Say I write a novel where we see a named person commit a murder in the first chapter, and the book is about the murderer living undetected, and the impact of the unexplained death, which is never suspected or investigated, on her and on the people around her. This sounds like a pretty good read in a dark Gothic psychodrama way, or even a savage social satire, but the one thing it isn’t is a detective novel. Detective novels need a crime to be solved and a solution, and if I market my no-puzzle no-solution book as a detective novel with a mystery-type title and cover and blurb, and my advertising is specifically directed at detective-novel readers, I will get a lot of angry one-stars on Goodreads. This doesn’t say anything meaningful about the merits of my book vs the detective-novel genre as a whole, or about reader expectations vs the right of authors to tell whatever story they like. It’s just the inevitable consequence of offering A for sale and then supplying the purchaser with B.

Let’s put this another way because I’m hungry: You order gazpacho for lunch. You sit there happily awaiting the cool joy of a cold, tangy, refreshing tomato-based soup with a garlicky kick. And what you get instead is a hot, steaming bowl of minestrone. “What?” says the waiter. “It’s a Mediterranean tomato-based soup with vegetables and garlic, isn’t it? Yes, fine, I told you I’d bring you gazpacho, but don’t you think it’s a bit childish and predictable to expect every bowl of gazpacho to be cold? This isn’t your mother’s gazpacho! We’re reinventing soup!”

Well, you might eat the minestrone; you might even love it. But I suspect you’d be far more likely to send it back and/or leave a one-star on TripAdvisor, because you ordered gazpacho, your tastebuds are lined up for gazpacho, your personal circumstances, sitting in a Spanish courtyard on a hot day, are calling for gazpacho, and in the end it doesn’t matter how good the minestrone might be because if you’d wanted goddamn minestrone, you would have ordered goddamn minestrone. And this goes for the people who are ‘reinventing romance novels’ by writing things that aren’t romance novels but marketing them as romance novels in the hope of getting a slice of the largest and most voracious reading demographic, and then claim to be doing something special instead of just misleading advertising.

Of course some people can play with genre and even change (some of) the rules. Agatha Christie turned detective novels on their head with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. (I won’t spoiler: if you don’t know the twist do not Google, just read it.) There was a furious outcry and it remains a jaw-dropper even now. Sometimes you positively want to be played with: Heston Blumenthal’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant The Fat Duck, is all about presenting you with a thing that your eyes/brain say will taste a certain way, but does not, and it is indeed amazing. That’s fine for Agatha Christie, and a selling point for Heston Blumenthal. But it isn’t a licence for every passing jerk to serve minestrone while selling it as gazpacho.

The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

–Carl Sagan

When I pick up a romance novel, I might get werewolves; I might get dukes. I might get people desperately carving out happiness in dark oppressive periods of history, or a demographically implausible special ops team, or a small town where every family has six hot brothers who get married in birth order, or pretty much anything else. But what I am sure I’ll get when I close the book (or finish the series) is a sense of hope. Of love that lifts up the people involved, of people caught in a golden moment, of joy and fulfilment and things just being right, for once. That’s why people read romance novels, that is what romance novels do, and if you promise us that catharsis and snatch it away, you’re letting readers down.

It’s as simple as that. Don’t make false promises and you won’t get angry readers. (Well, not about that particular subject at least.) And if your question is “But KJ, how do I get my hands on all that sweet romance cash if I don’t want to write yawnsome predictable happy endings that don’t satisfy my soul’s dark cravings/desire for higher literary status?”, my answer is: You don’t, so don’t call your stuff romance and we’ll all be fine.

*****

Relevant to the above: My new book The Henchmen of Zenda is a queered version of the classic pulp adventure The Prisoner of Zenda. It’s packed with sex, swordfights, and skulduggery, and I had an enormous amount of fun with it. I would probably call it “pulp adventure with strong romantic elements”, and romance readers who need to know about endings first should check my GR review and click on the spoilers.

Amazon

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Swordfights, lust, betrayal, murder: just another day for a henchman.

Jasper Detchard is a disgraced British officer, now selling his blade to the highest bidder. Currently that’s Michael Elphberg, half-brother to the King of Ruritania. Michael wants the throne for himself, and Jasper is one of the scoundrels he hires to help him take it. But when Michael makes his move, things don’t go entirely to plan—and the penalty for treason is death.

Rupert of Hentzau is Michael’s newest addition to his sinister band of henchmen. Charming, lethal, and intolerably handsome, Rupert is out for his own ends—which seem to include getting Jasper into bed. But Jasper needs to work out what Rupert’s really up to amid a maelstrom of plots, swordfights, scheming, impersonation, desire, betrayal, and murder.

Nobody can be trusted. Everyone has a secret. And love is the worst mistake you can make.

A retelling of the swashbuckling classic The Prisoner of Zenda from a very different point of view.

Readers say:

…a classic ripping yarn of swashbuckling Ruritanian highjinks, which is unabashedly gay AF.

… KJ Charles is always a delight and this book is no exception – her nuanced exploration of historical queer identities and her restoration of women into the narrative puts the complexity of history back on the page. Sarcasm, swordfights, and sex – what’s not to love?

… a story with murder, treason, double and triple crosses, where characters change allegiances every few chapters, where all the players have their own motives, and the reader is left breathless, wondering what in the hell could possibly happen next.

…an absolute delight.

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“Just How Things Were”: bigotry in historical romance

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Historical detail is my jam. I am not here for histrom that is modern day people in silly hats; that takes all the fun out of it. I don’t want magic horses that are basically cars with legs, or letter-carrying boys who work with the speed of text messages, and I really don’t want dukes who come with belief in full social equality ready installed. If I want modern things I’ll read contemporary.

Regency romance in particular has as one of its main joys the social stratification, the play of power and status and reputation and responsibility. I wrote a Regency about a marquess’s brother in love with his valet where the entire conflict depended on the power imbalance between the two, and it took a good half of the book for the lord to get beyond his ingrained assumption that he makes the rules, that he is the one who gets to decide that this relationship is impossible and morally wrong, and the valet has no input into that decision. (The valet disagrees.) It was massive fun to do precisely because the power imbalance and the attitudes were such a big gnarly mess.

Social attitudes of the time are a huge part of historical fiction. But historical fiction is still a thing of its own era. If you read books written by Victorians set in ancient Rome, you’ll learn a lot about Victorian England, because people write themselves, their concerns, their views of what’s right and wrong.

I don’t see that as a flaw in historical fiction; I see it as a feature. I am writing books in 2018 for an audience reading them in 2018, and I don’t think the fact they’re set in 1818 is a reason in itself to write things that will be repugnant or wrong to a modern audience. My characters can be at least partially people of their time without being rancid by my own time’s standards.

I dare say you’ve encountered the form of ‘historical accuracy’ often used as an excuse by writers or a critique by certain readers. This is the ‘accuracy’ that insists that any woman in a medieval type setting must be raped, preferably on-page. That everyone in the past must have been virulently homophobic, that everyone was a bigot, that it’s impossible that humans ever cared about people unlike themselves. This is the ‘accuracy’ that denies mixed marriages happened before about 1980, and doubts that white Brits in the Georgian period would have boycotted slave sugar, and writes to inform authors that their white hero was implausible for not raping their black heroine on sight. (All examples recently seen in the wild on social media. God help us. It’s funny how rarely you get told off for not being progressive or liberal enough, for ignoring the many people who fought for other people’s rights, or who fell in love and lived happily, or who existed as people of colour in Europe before 1950. It’s almost like some people have a vested interest in making the past seem a crappier place.)

I am not, of course, arguing that historical romances shouldn’t deal with hard subjects or have bigotry on page.  Writers like Alyssa Cole, Piper Huguley, and Beverly Jenkins engage with American racism continually and directly; Rose Lerner’s True Pretenses deals with English anti-Semitism; EE Ottoman’s The Doctor’s Discretion handles transphobia, homophobia and racism; and I could name you a dozen more historical romances that take on appalling historical attitudes, sometimes even voiced by the main characters.

But these narratives don’t simply present bigotry as a thing, a fact of life like corsets and taxation. These books show us the cruelty and wrongs done by bigotry; where main characters are responsible they learn as part of their arc that earns them a HEA; where other characters are responsible, the narrative engages with that. These books critique past attitudes from the perspective of the present, because it is not the Regency now. It is 2018 and I am not here for historical hatred as a feature, a bit of window dressing, just how things were. Don’t make a fuss, it’s historically accurate. That’s very easy to say if you’re not the reader who’s been slapped in the face by another bit of dehumanisation or violence presented as entertainment.

Romance is all about our engagement with the main characters. Well, I’m not engaging with unredeemed bigots. I don’t want to see their HEAs; I don’t want them to have the happiness they’d deny to other people. I don’t care if it’s probable that someone in 1800 would have displayed unexamined bigotry; that doesn’t entitle them to an HEA in the book I’m reading right now.

And that is not shying away from historical reality. On the contrary, I think refusing to engage with historical attitudes that present bigotry as acceptable is shying away from current reality, in which the same attitudes are making a comeback. Historical attitudes changed because people fought them. Sometimes failing to take a stand is a stand.

Authors don’t have to deal directly with bigotry when writing historicals, of course. You can just not put it in the book, along with all the other things we don’t put in books. Very few historical romances mention headlice, or menstruation, or bad breath, because those are not things most readers want to dwell on, and I’d far rather read about the MCs’ headlice than their hatred. Or you can sketch bigotries in lightly, without shoving them in the reader’s face. Or you can give those attitudes to someone who isn’t the hero or heroine of the damn book. You can do a whole lot of things.

But what you can’t do is depict vile attitudes without examination or consideration, and expect modern readers not to care or object or decide your character can go step on Lego just because the book’s set in the past. It may be; we’re writing and reading right now.

________

NB: I have delected a specific reference to a book from this post because the situation is more complex than I originally realised. My general principle stands. 

 

Writers: Stop Doing This!

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So I was on Twitter yesterday (my first mistake) and I came across this gem by an actual literary agent with an actual literary agency.

Delete all the adjectives and adverbs from your book. All of them. Get rid. Your book will read better, and be more appealing, as a direct result.

The direct result here was that the agent got body slammed from forty directions at once and took the tweet down. So perish all stupid writing tips. Except it won’t perish, because the tweet in question had been liked 40+ times and retweeted eight before Writing Twitter descended in a cloud of harpy wings. Some people read that and thought, “Ooh, agent advice!” and ran off to take all the adjectives and adverbs out of their MS. This stuff does harm.

I asked on Twitter for the stupid prescriptive writing advice people receive. Here is an incomplete list of the responses.

  • Don’t start with the weather.
  • Don’t use “said”.
  • Don’t use any speech verb except “said”.
  • Don’t use any dialogue tags at all.
  • Don’t use indirect speech.
  • Don’t use prologues. Or epilogues. Or flashbacks.
  • Don’t use dialect.
  • Use proper names, not pronouns.
  • Don’t overuse proper names.
  • Don’t use epithets instead of names (ie “the ninja” or “the short woman” or “my boss” or “the Duke”).
  • Don’t use passive voice (“I was being chased by zombies”).
  • Don’t use present participles (“I was eating a sandwich”).
  • Don’t use “was” at all.
  • Don’t use the verb “to be” in any form. (Seriously.)
  • Don’t use auxiliary verbs because they ‘slow things down’. (“I had met him before”, “you could go”.)
  • Don’t use fragments (i.e. every sentence must have a verb).
  • Don’t have simultaneous action. Two things cannot happen at the same time, apparently.
  • No disembodied parts. (“His fingers slid down her leg.”)
  • Don’t use first person narrative.
  • Don’t use second person narrative.

(wait for it…)

  • Don’t use third person narrative.
  • Don’t write in present tense.
  • Don’t use run-on sentences, or subordinate clauses, or semi colons.
  • Don’t begin sentences with adverbs or conjunctions.
  • Don’t use adverbs.
  • Don’t use adjectives.

I swear to you, all the above are responses to one tweet. This is stuff writers are being told, and they are being told it by agents, editors at publishing houses, freelance editors, beta readers, teachers, blog posts, every jerk who did one term of grammar and thinks CMOS has legal force, and other writers who have internalised the drivellings of the above.

If you’re at a loose end, a fun thing to do is go through that list and find brilliant counterexamples. It won’t take long. Here, I’ll go first.

  • Don’t start with the weather.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

(1984, George Orwell.)

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

(Bleak House, Charles Dickens, and there’s another four paragraphs of this.)

 ***

There are, I think, four things going on in that list of idiocy. One is good advice turned into bad rules, one is pig ignorance, one is personal preference/prescriptivism, and the last is bias. Let’s do the easy one first.

Good advice turned into bad rules

Sticking with the weather example: Anyone who has read slush, or English homework, will be painfully familiar with books that open with the weather, and wimble around in unengaging description until the author finds the plot. It’s an easy way into the story, and people taking the easy way rarely do their best work. (There’s a reason “It was a dark and stormy night” is a classic bad-book quote.)

Weather openings can indeed be slow and unengaging. But you don’t have to stop doing a thing because some people do it badly. You just have to do it well.

That summer, the summer all the rules began to change, June seemed to last for a thousand years. The temperatures were merciless: thirty-eight, thirty-nine, then forty in the shade. It was heat to die in, to go nuts in, or to spawn. Old folk collapsed, dogs were cooked alive in cars, lovers couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The sky pressed down like a furnace lid, shrinking the subsoil, cracking concrete, killing shrubs from the roots up…

(The Rapture, Liz Jensen.)

The same principle applies to this delightful string of admonitions.

  • Use proper names, not pronouns.
  • Don’t overuse proper names.
  • Don’t use epithets instead of names (ie “the ninja” or “the short woman” or “my boss” or “the Duke”).

You just know what’s happened here, don’t you?

And round and round we go. (Since you ask, the answer is obviously to use all three mindfully and in a varied way. “Jenny gripped the rail and tugged at the gun in Natalie’s hand as hard as she dared. She needed it and the bloody woman wasn’t letting go.”)

The same goes for many more prohibitions, “never do”s that ought to be phrased as “keep an eye out”. “Consider your use of adverbs carefully” is good advice; “cut all adverbs” is not. I did an entire blog post on the absurd “disembodied parts” shibboleth which sums up most of my feelings on all this.

Pig Ignorance

This plays a larger part than you may think. Look at this lot.

  • Don’t use passive voice (“I was being chased by zombies”).
  • Don’t use present participles (“I was eating a sandwich”).
  • Don’t use “was” at all.
  • Don’t use the verb “to be” in any form.

What’s going on here? Well, “don’t use passive voice” is a very common bit of writing advice. We all mock the politician who says “mistakes were made” instead of “I made a mistake”. And passive voice can be distancing or unengaging. “The bell was rung, the dogs were released, and the fox was quickly brought to ground” is not a thrilling description of a hunt.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use passive voice. It means you should use it carefully, e.g. when you need to foreground the object of the action rather than the actor. If Zainab is being unexpectedly invested as Queen of the Fairies, we might well write “The crown was placed on her head, and rainbow light flooded the room” rather than wasting everyone’s time with specifics of who placed the crown. Equally, if our POV protagonist Jim has been captured and has a bag over his head, it makes sense to write “His arm was jerked up behind his back” rather than “Someone jerked his arm up behind his back.”

Note that, in giving the above examples, I used two passives: Zainab is being invested, Jim has been captured. Have a quick go at rewriting the para in the active voice and you will swiftly see why passive is useful there.

So “don’t use passive” is bad advice. Yet people give it, and having given it, they extrapolate to this extraordinary and bizarre belief that “was” indicates passive voice. So you will find people telling you that “He was hit by the zombie” and “He was running from the zombie” are both passive. (I am using zombies here as there is a helpful rule of thumb: if you can add “by zombies” it’s passive. Thus “The crown was placed on her head [by zombies]” and “She was crowned [by zombies]” are both passive, but “She was queen” and “She was ruling Fairyland with an iron fist” cannot have [by zombies] and are thus active.)

Now, there is nothing wrong with not being able to analyse a sentence for passives, gerunds, or participles. Plenty of people are not native speakers, neurodivergent, or didn’t get that sort of education. You can easily have no idea what gerunds are while using them impeccably and effectively in your speech and writing. But there is everything wrong with giving prescriptive advice based on things you don’t understand, and people need to stop that right now.

Because what’s apparently happened is that people have taken the already bad advice “don’t use passives”

he was hit by the ball

and extrapolated it to “was –ing” forms that look like passives

he was hitting the ball

I was going to the shop

and then extended that to the frankly insane ban on “was”, as though you can use English while eliminating the verb “to be”.

I was the queen at last!

This is ridiculous nonsense whipped up out of half-understood precepts. Anyone who tells you not to use “was” is an idiot and should not be listened to, by zombies or anyone else.

Preference and prescriptivism

  • Don’t use first person narrative.
  • Don’t use second person narrative.
  • Don’t use third person narrative.
  • Don’t write in present tense.
  • Don’t use indirect speech.
  • Don’t use prologues. Or epilogues. Or flashbacks.
  • Don’t use “said”.
  • Don’t use any speech verb except “said”.
  • Don’t use any dialogue tags at all.

That’s not writing advice, that’s “things the speaker doesn’t like”. The two are not the same. If you can make second person present tense work, and you’re doing it for a reason, more power to your elbow. Using only “said” is dull, using a string of “averred/opined/murmured/voiced/pronounced” is irritating. One story may need a prologue and another doesn’t. It depends.

  • Don’t use run-on sentences, or subordinate clauses, or semi colons.
  • Don’t use fragments (ie every sentence must have a verb)

Prescriptivist garbage from the school that says you shouldn’t split infinitives because Latin didn’t. What do we want? Verbless fragments! Why do we want them? For effect! How do we use them? Mindfully!

This stuff makes me genuinely angry. Authorial voice depends on choices like tense and person. The rhythm of your prose depends on varying sentence length and structure. Advice like the above is intrusive and damaging, and worst of all pointless. I strongly recommend asking why any of the above is bad, and seeing if you can get an answer better than “I don’t like it”, “I heard it was wrong” or “It just is”. I bet you won’t.

Bias

Just take a look at the list of don’ts. Don’t use adverbs, adjectives. Always use active voice. Write simple sentences. Don’t play with form. Don’t use dialect.

What it means is “write like a certain type of author”. Write like Hemingway, or Elmore Leonard, or Raymond Chandler, or whatever other white American man the speaker has in mind. (I’m sorry, but let’s be real here.) This is advice coming from the belief that there is, in the end, only one good and proper way to write. And that is simply not true—as anyone who has read with any variety and diversity at all will know.

***

This epic is titled “Writers: Stop Doing This”. What I want you to stop doing is sharing, listening to, and worrying about this garbage.

That doesn’t mean you don’t take advice or accept crit. It means that when you see a “don’t do X!” you ask yourself why, you think of counterexamples, you look at how X works in the sentence and if it is causing problems, and consider whether there is a clearer or more effective way to do it. In fact, write mindfully.

We can all, always improve as writers. But we won’t do that by following the advice of some jerk on the internet who tells you to cut all the adverbs.

_______________

KJ Charles is an editor of 20 years’ experience, a full-time author, and pretty much out of patience.

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Sensitivity Reads and You

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Or, I Read Something Annoying So Now I Have To Rant About It: The KJ Charles Story.

Specifically I read a piece about sensitivity readers. I am not going to put you through it because those are minutes of your life you’ll never get back, but suffice to say the linking tweet read “Sensitivity editors apparently believe they are entitled to some say in a process they may not understand or respect” and the piece was, remarkably, even worse. This is an idea that keeps popping up, mostly in the opinions of white authors of literary fiction who are given media platforms bafflingly disproportionate to the number of people who read their books.

Notwithstanding what Lionel Shriver seems to believe, a sensitivity reader doesn’t appear out of the blue like a politically correct fairy godmother to say “You hurt my feelings,”  or tell you to take out the bits where bad things happen. A sensitivity read is a part of an editing process that basically checks two things.

1) Is your representation accurate?

2) Is your representation perpetuating harmful stereotypes and clichés?

Point 1 is basically fact checking. I’m white, neurotypical, cis. I have written point of view main characters who are people of colour, neurodivergent, non-binary. In all those cases I got people from those groups to read the MS, and in every single case someone pointed out ways I could make it better. Things I hadn’t known about, but which were obvious omissions to people with those experiences; reactions or phrasing that seemed implausible to them; extra ideas about what someone in the character’s position might do.

Sometimes this is purely factual. (Different types of hair need different types of hair care. Your character with one hand is simultaneously holding a gun and opening a door.) More deeply, the sensitivity read checks for feel. Does this character, her reactions, her emotions, sound right to someone who has comparable life experience? Can a black/Jewish/disabled reader look at your black/Jewish/disabled character and think, “If I were her, I can imagine feeling that way”? Does it ring true?

I have had quite a few neurodivergent readers say nice things about the portrayal of Clem’s dyspraxia in An Unseen Attraction. I don’t think this would have been the case without my team of readers. My sensitivity readers shared their own (and often painful) experience in a multitude of tweaks and ideas and observations. They helped me turn Clem from my neurotypical idea of what it feels like to be dyspraxic to a character informed by the experience of dyspraxic people. If that character rings true, it’s because people shared their truth with me.

An author can do all the research she likes into dyspraxia; a dyspraxic person will always know more. I can’t believe I had to say that in words. But if you spend any time on Book Twitter, you will see multiple instances of authors insisting, “I looked into this and I’m sure I’m right” to people who’ve been living it for twenty, thirty, forty years and who are telling them they’re not.

I do get how this happens. The author creates a character, knows them intimately in her head. It is not easy to be told, “This is wrong, he would never react like this.” Excuse me? I know exactly how he’d react, because I created him! And yes, of course I, a white British middle class 40something woman, can understand and write a black teenage boy in the Chicago hood. We’re all human, are we not? Isn’t it appallingly reductive and divisive to suggest we are so different, so incapable of mutual understanding? I am large, I contain multitudes. Watch me Art.

We may be all human, but we’re also all shaped by our experiences, environments, bodies, natures, other people’s reactions to our bodies and natures. I don’t know what it’s like to experience a lifetime of racism or homophobia or transphobia, any more than my male Chicago youth knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of misogyny and the specific ways those experiences manifest and shape our reactions. We can be aware those things exist, of course, we can imagine and draw comparisons, and we can learn. But that requires listening, and a willingness to hear, and definitely not handwaving it away with “in the end, we’re all the same”.  We’re all equal. We really aren’t all the same.

Donald Rumsfeld got a lot of flak for his speech about unknown unknowns, but it’s a spot-on concept. There are always areas of other people’s lives that we not only don’t know about but don’t know that we don’t know about. That’s why we have to ask—not just “Did I do this right?” but “What didn’t I do?” If someone doesn’t have the curiosity to ask, the urge to find out, and the longing to get it right…well, they don’t sound like much of a writer.

And this is where the bit about checking for harmful stereotypes comes in. Some authors see this as people trying to dictate what they’re allowed to write about and how they can tell stories. “God, [group] get upset about everything. They try to prevent anyone else having a say, they overreact to everything, they’re destroying literature!” wail such authors, who were all apparently sick the day their MFA course covered irony.

There are of course authors who just want to say what they like without taking any consequences. They want reviews that say “a searing look at our politically correct culture” and “fearless taboo-busting” rather than “grossly misogynist” or “wow, what an arsehole”, and when they do get the latter, they write thousand-word blog posts that can be summarised as “it’s fine for me to give offence but how dare you take it”. Those authors can go step on Lego.

But there is also the Well-Meaning Person who has put in a lot of work and done lots of research, and really honestly thinks that their story is valuable. Their story about a Jewish woman in a concentration camp falling in love with the Nazi commandant, say, or the enslaved person on a plantation who’ll do anything for his beloved “master”, or the disabled person who kills themself to set their loved one free to live a full life, or gets fully or partially cured as part of a happy ending. The story with gay characters who all die heroically/tragically, or the child abuse victim who becomes a serial killer to show that child abuse is bad.

I hope that previous paragraph made you cringe your skin off. If it didn’t, you need a sensitivity reader. Because that kind of book is published all the time—let alone books with subtler, smaller, less obvious fails. And almost every time the author is baffled and distraught by readers’ failure to understand. Look, my book clearly says racism is wrong, how is that offensive? My book shows that we’re all people and love can cross boundaries, how is that bad? I’m one of the good guys!

Because the author may well have thought hard and sincerely about the message she wants to give…but she hasn’t realised the message she’s actually giving. We all have unconscious assumptions, we all find it horrendously easy to stereotype, we can’t all know everything, and we may simply not realise that our brilliant idea is someone else’s “Oh please God not this again”. (Romance authors should be particularly aware of this: every four months someone comes along announcing their totally fresh and original new take on romance, in response to which everyone wearily cites thirty examples of people who did the thing in the 1990s. There’s nothing new under the sun, as the Book of Ecclesiastes told us about two centuries BC.) Basically, much though the Lionel Shrivers of this world like to stand on the platform of untrammelled free speech, a sensitivity read isn’t about saying “Don’t write this because I don’t like it”, so much as “This reflects or supports prejudice and stereotypes.” Less easy to go to the barricades over that, isn’t it?

It comes down to humility. Humility is often confused with being self deprecating, which is rubbish. Humility isn’t saying “Gosh, I’m not very good”; it’s about saying, “I can always strive to do better”. It’s about accepting you can be wrong, or crass, or biased, because that allows you to improve. It’s about knowing there’s always more to learn, and that other people can teach you those things. It is, in fact, about respecting other people.

As an author I need the confidence to believe that my stories are good enough for your time and money. But I also, simultaneously, need the humility to accept that they might need improvement, and the determination to do something about it (preferably before asking for your time and money). That improvement might be a development editor for the story, a line editor to point out my timeline is utterly borked, a copy editor for the poor grammar, a sensitivity reader to check the book’s concepts before I even start and to look at the characters and reactions as I go along, or all of the above. It’s all part and parcel of making a better book.

And sometimes people are wrong; groups are not monoliths; a sensitivity read by a single trans person does not give you “Approved by the NonBinary Community (TM)” status. It’s is always down to the author to do the work and take the responsibility. But sensitivity readers can help you do that work by giving you actual insight into the lives you’re depicting, and telling you: “This thing is incorrect, this thing is missing, this thing is a cliché, this thing just doesn’t ring true to my experience.”

We started with that Hurt Litfic Feelings tweet: Sensitivity editors apparently believe they are entitled to some say in a process they may not understand or respect. Well, I know where I feel the lack of understanding and respect lies. It’s with the person who looks at an opportunity to make their book a more accurate, more deeply informed, wider, better depiction of other humans, as part of the editing process, and says, “No thanks. I already know best.”

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Edited to add: Sensitivity reads are work; work should be paid. A good publisher should pay for a reader if such as required as part of the editorial process. Whether they actually will is another question. The only publisher I’ve worked with who has paid for a sensitivity read is Riptide Books, and more power to them for doing so. I’d like to hope more publishers will see the value in this, but given the constant chiselling away at editorial costs throughout the industry, I’m not holding my breath. If you are self publishing on a sensitive subject, you need to budget for this, same as for a copy editor, and if your publisher won’t stump up you need to do it yourself. No, that isn’t fair. (And IMO you should book the reader early on in the process and run your ideas by them, just to check you aren’t happily skipping into a field of mantraps.)

The formalised concept of sensitivity readers is relatively new, and authors are very used to just asking “would anyone who is of X group beta-read my MS?” I don’t think that it’s unacceptable to ask for beta readers once you have done all the work you can to make sure your representation is good–though others may disagree with that. But a full-on sensitivity read is something between a development edit and a line edit, including notes, and may potentially be very difficult for the reader (not only reading painful and unpleasant things but then having to communicate the author’s failings with no guarantee she won’t throw a “don’t call me racist!” tantrum). That is hard work, and a professional service, and it should be recognised as such.

And FFS, don’t throw a tantrum.

Hey, Everyone, Be Nice!

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At RWA 2015, an editor from Pocket Books answered a question on diversity by saying that ‘diverse’ topics/authors were published in a couple of particular lines and not as part of the general list. The implication was that authors (not even just books, which is bad enough) would be channelled to lines based on ethnic origin. (Obviously, agents representing non-white authors would thus find them a harder sell, with fewer chances for publication.)

Rightly, the RWA has come down on this like a ton of bricks, refusing to accept corporate flannel from Pocket (who say this isn’t their policy) and demanding a clear commitment to equal treatment for all RWA members. This is a professional issue and that’s what they’re for.

Today board member Alyssa Day tweeted this:

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‘Be nice’. Be nice.

The RWA is a membership organisation for professionals, with a substantial admittance fee. Its remit is to protect members’ interests. They are doing their job by going after a publisher who, according to their own editor, are behaving in a way that damages some RWA members’ interests.

And someone thinks they should be nice? Nice! What has ‘nice’ got to do with a professional dispute? What is there to be nice about?

There is currently a horrendous, damaging row going on in m/m romance. Some LGBT people reacted to material they found offensive and hurtful in forthright (or rude) terms; other people basically told them to shut up and sit down, it escalated. And a lot of people have ignored the hurt being complained of, and instead focused on the tone and manner in which the complaints were made. Because they were angry and blunt about stuff people liked. They weren’t being nice.

Now, I’m an author. I know words matter. I know people react differently to different tones. I know that it’s possible to put your case politely, and can be much more effective to do so.

I’m also a woman. I know that putting your case politely can also make it much easier for people to ignore you. I know that it’s possible to say the same thing politely a dozen times, and be ignored, and then when you finally stop being polite, they say, “Calm down, love!” or “There’s no need to shout!” as though raising your voice the thirteenth time is completely unreasonable.

And I’m a human being. I recognise that actually, sometimes, people are no longer able to put their case politely because they are driven to expletive-peppered fury by the relentless goddamn bullshit of other people…

…who then turn around and say, “Hey, be nice!”

Be nice when someone’s treating you as if you don’t matter, as if people like you have never mattered, when your pain is dismissed as less important than the comfort or embarrassment or convenience of the person causing your pain. Be nice.

Of course I don’t mean it’s good for everyone to shout and rage all the time, as if that’s the only alternative. I prefer civil discussion to shouting and raging too. I would much rather that everyone spoke respectfully, which is only likely to happen when everyone listens respectfully. Let’s try to do that, shall we?

But let’s have a clear example about telling people to be nice.

When my 7-year-old son comes up to me whining, “It’s not fair, my horrible sister won’t play with me because she’s horrible,” that is a teachable moment. That is a time to talk about tone, and being nice, and how the way you approach people makes a difference to how they listen.

When my 7-year-old son comes up to me with a cut lip shrieking that a boy hit him and took his football, I don’t tell him, “Speak more clearly and don’t cry, your tone of voice must be calm and reasonable.” I don’t tell him, “You’re angry, and anger isn’t nice, so that boy deserves the football more than you do.” Instead, I try to fix his problem, his real and legitimate distress, because that is what we do when someone is actually hurt.

Assuming we give a damn for people’s hurt, of course. Which we would, if we were nice.

Let’s be nice.

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In a Huff: why writing should be paid

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I was just thinking I haven’t rageblogged in ages, and feeling happy that I have my Twitter feed curated to be interesting and challenging but not aneurysm-inducing, and then this comes along.

It seems this quote was said by the editor of the Huffington Post UK (who is not the tweeter)huffpo

 

I have a lot of things to say in response to this. Most of them are two-word phrases ending ‘off’ or ‘you’, but let me try to be a little more articulate.

I don’t know anything about the Huffington Post’s payment to writers, never having written for them. I do know they ‘broke even’ on $146million revenue in 2014, and there has been speculation that it may be sold for $1billion. Apparently it’s not turning a profit because of investment, but this is a huge site bringing in huge amounts of money through advertising revenue. They are not unable to pay writers. If they don’t, one can only assume it’s because they don’t want to.

This is not an unusual state of mind. The Twitter account @forexposure_txt quotes the many and varied ways people have of asking other people to give their time, skills, experience and talents for nothing.

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Our society has a general idea that content, knowledge and creativity should all be free. Free: it’s such a glorious word, isn’t it? Free, free as a bird! The creative heart should be free to sing, and the creative mind should be free to imagine. And the creative work they produce should be free to anyone who’d like to use it for their own profit on an advertising-festooned website.

Let’s just look at that quote, shall we?

We know it’s real… It’s not been forced or paid for.

‘Real.’ That’s the holy grail, of course. We want writing to be genuine and real and heartfelt; we despise the false and the fake. The opposition here is clear: either writing is ‘real’ and from the heart, or it is ‘forced’ and thus insincere. And what could cause someone to write in this ‘forced’ and fraudulent way?

Well, the nimble coupling of “forced or paid for” shows us that. The villain here is greed, of course, sordid financial considerations. Writing, according to this, has either literary worth or financial worth but not both. In fact, assigning financial worth by paying writers negates the potential worth of what they write. Because if it’s paid for, it’s not real. Instead of writing because your Muse compels you, like a proper artist, you’re just doing it for filthy lucre. You sell-out scumbag.

Let’s be honest: if producers don’t pay people to write, then the people writing are the ones who can afford not to be paid. Which, as with publishing internships, means that the people who can get ahead are the ones with money. The rich parents, the lucrative day job, the well-paid spouse. When producers don’t pay for content, it privileges the voices of the wealthy.

That all seems rather at odds with the internal memo from Arianna Huffington quoted here for a HuffPo strand saying they should:

start a positive contagion by relentlessly telling the stories of people and communities doing amazing things, overcoming great odds and facing real challenges with perseverance, creativity and grace.

You know what’s a real challenge for many people? Paying their rent; feeding their families; keeping afloat. You know what makes that harder? Not being paid.

I face the challenge of my monthly bills with ‘perseverance’ because I keep writing in the face of people who pirate my books and pay me puny sums for hours of work. I face it with ‘creativity’ because creativity, writing, is what I’ve got to sell. But I’m fucked if I’ll face it with ‘grace’ when someone who’s probably on six figures tells me that the very act of putting value on my work makes it intrinsically less valuable.

The thing that actually makes writing forced for many authors is the knowledge that you have to jam out another thousand words, meet that deadline, do that goddamn article, somehow wedge another book in this year because otherwise you aren’t going to earn enough. It’s not the act of being paid that leads to soulless writing for profit: it’s the fact of needing money in the first place.

Paying authors lets them write. It doesn’t make them less genuine, or less hungry (except in the actual literal sense, obviously), or less heartfelt, or less busy. It just makes them able to live and thus do their job, ie writing. In which it is exactly like the salary paid to the people who edit magazines and websites that ask writers to contribute for nothing, which I assume they don’t turn down because they’re keeping it real, man.

And you can trust me on this. After all, I wrote it for free.

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KJ Charles is a full time writer and freelance editor. Rag and Bone is out from Samhain on 1 March.

Starving Artists, Team Players and Plagiarists

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One of the go-to observations about authors is that we’re not team players. Ask an editor/publicist about trying to organise authors for an event and the phrase “like herding cats” is liable to be used. When I tell most people that I work on my own all day in a shed, they ask things like “How do you cope?” and “Isn’t it terribly lonely?”, whereas authors tend to reply, “Oh, you lucky cow.” Authors say plangent and meaningful things like, “Writing is one of the most solitary activities in the world.” We are the isolated figure in a garret, alone but for the cast of characters in our heads.

Writing isn’t actually like this.

It’s all very glamorous-sounding in a ‘drinking yourself to death on absinthe’ kind of way. It is, however, a pile of crap.

Unless an author does her own covers and her own editing and no marketing and never communicates with readers, she has a team. Here’s a rundown of the people with whom I collaborate:

The agent who sets up and manages deals, holds my hand, looks at proposals and helps plan my career

The editor to whom I send the synopsis

The publisher’s team who sign off on the deal

The contracts person with whom I dicker over terms

The covers team who turn my cover art brief into something plausible and saleable

The designer who takes that brief and makes it lovely, and who listens to me when I raise objections and makes changes

The beta readers who look at my drafts and help me get the thing into shape for the editor

The development editor, who works on the story and characters, raising problems and identifying issues

The line editor, going through the MS to pick up my inconsistencies, my echoes, my infelicities, my clumsy phrasing and overused habits and poor stylistic choices and unintended implications and dangling threads

The copy editor, hitting the million tiny errors inexplicably still in there, oh my God I suck

The proofreader, saving all our necks at the last pass

The marketing team who put together promo materials, get the book into offers and magazines, send review copies

The rights team, who push the foreign and audio rights

The finance team who make sure all the copies I sell are properly accounted and my royalties promptly paid

The book bloggers and magazines who make space for me

The reviewers who read the ARCs and write and share reviews

The readers who choose to join my Facebook group or follow my blog or send me emails, who support and encourage me because they like my books. They owe me nothing, but when they choose to help and support me, they’re my team and I love them for it.

The fellow authors who hold my hand, talk me down when times are bad and rejoice with me over successes. Who understand, as only people ploughing the same furrow do.

And there are other and greater teams, of which all authors are part. For me there is Team Queer Romance, pushing the equality of everybody’s love story. Team Romance, the people who work separately and together to promote the genre we love. Team Author, the other people who get what you’re doing and understand what it means, why it’s the best job in the world and why it sucks.

That’s a lot of people to let down when you screw up.

When Laura Harner plagiarised m/f romances to make them into m/m romances, she didn’t just commit a theft of intellectual property from Becky McGraw and Opal Carew. She let down her teams: the readers who supported her by buying her stolen books; the m/m romance community of readers and authors that had created a market for them, the LGBT+ community whose lives she travestied by switching pronouns to make a story “gay”; the bloggers and conference organisers and cowriters who worked with her; the whole romance community who stand up for each other against the contempt of lazy journalists and litsnobs to whom she’s handed us on a plate as a target of idle mockery; the romance writers who put their heart and souls into their work; and the whole author community because for those who live by words, stealing them is an unforgivable treachery.

At least Harner self pubbed. I was the editor of a plagiarising author once, and I promise you, the sense of rage and betrayal inside the publishing house was tangible when we found out. I’m still angry. Publishing may be a business but the vast majority of publishing staff care deeply about books, and don’t like being treated with contempt any more than anyone else.

Authors aren’t isolated figures, and our choices don’t take place in isolation. We have responsibilities. We have responsibilities to the publishing team who works with us to make the books better, make them pretty, make them sell. We have responsibilities to the people who invest their time in reading and maybe reviewing, their money in purchasing. We have responsibilities to the people we depict in our books, the humans who see themselves in our stories (or don’t), the lessons our stories teach. We have responsibilities to other authors: not to make each other’s paths harder than they need to be, not to bring the genre or the profession into disrepute, not to shove each other down in the effort to get ahead ourselves.

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Writing really isn’t like this either.

Authors are part of a huge complicated web of relationships, just like every other human in the world. It may not feel like that alone in the metaphorical shed. But if I plagiarise, treat others disrespectfully in my writing, or otherwise mess up, through commission or omission, I am letting more people down than just myself. And I forget that at my peril.

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KJ Charles is an editor, writer and organiser of Queer Romance Month. Her most recent release is the short story “The Ruin of Gabriel Ashleigh“.