Why Do AI Similes and Metaphors Miss the Mark So Often? This is Essay 3 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. The Comparison That Contradicts Itself […]
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: Simile and Metaphors Must Make Sense Read More »
Why Does AI Pile On the Adjectives and Adverbs? This is Essay 2 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. The Sentence That Cannot Stop
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: The Modifier Epidemic Read More »
This is Essay 1 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, which examines the specific deficiencies of AI-generated fiction and the corresponding strengths of fiction written by human authors. The series is addressed to readers who buy novels, who give them their time, and who deserve to know what they are holding
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: Alphabet Soup Read More »
I. A Word Most Readers Have Never Encountered Ask a hundred readers what a colophon is and perhaps three will know. Ask those three whether they have seen one in a novel published in the last decade, and the number will shrink further. In most readers’ minds, the colophon, that brief inscription at the end
Why Does an Author Need a Colophon? Read More »
—and why the instinct to keep it was correct. I am a relentless line editor. Nothing survives my revision passes by accident: not a clause, not a comma, not an adverb that has wandered in without earning its place. And yet, across three different novels, passages have arrived in single drafts and remained untouched through
The Sentence That Has Survived Every Revision Pass Read More »
There is a sentence I keep returning to when I think about how to write the ancient world: a writer must disappear into it, not explain it from the outside. Mary Renault understood this better than almost anyone who has written historical fiction in English, and most novelists who have come after her, myself included, are
What Mary Renault Got Right That Most Historical Novelists Still Miss Read More »
There is a passage in one of my novels where a prince stages his own death at a woman’s feet. He enters the feast hall not as a lord but as a stag—darting, pausing, tossing his head to scent the wind—and when the drum thunders to its crescendo, he falls before her, bares his throat,
On Writing Desire Without Writing Romance Read More »
I knew some of this before I began. Not in depth, and not as a coherent body of knowledge—more as fragments encountered at random, in craft books read out of sequence, in advice absorbed before I had the experience to evaluate it. What the novels themselves taught me was different in kind: not information, but
Lessons Learned Writing Novels: What Each Book Taught Me Read More »
People sometimes tell me that archaic English is unnecessary. That it creates distance. That modern readers want transparency, immediacy, a prose that gets out of the way of the story. I understand the argument. I disagree with it not on grounds of taste, but of accuracy. When you set a novel in the fifteenth century,
Dead Languages and Living Prose: Why Archaic English Is Not an Affectation Read More »
