William Peace's Blog, page 2

Review: Understanding Marxism

After reading the biography of Xi Jinping, I decided I needed to refresh my knowledge of Marxism. If Xi thinks Marxism is so good, what have I forgotten? So I bought this rather thin book by Richard D. Wolff.

Wikipedia says, “Richard David Wolff (born April 1, 1942) is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs at The New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City College of New York, University of Utah, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and The Brecht Forum in New York City.

Richard D Wolff

I was disappointed in this book. At only 75 pages, it can be read in less than two hours. It was written by an American professor with impressive teaching experience. I was hoping for a learned set of arguments about the benefits of Marxist economics, but what I got was a largely a high school level set of criticisms of capitalism. I know that capitalism treats many people unfairly. What I wanted to know was how and why Marxism would treat every one fairly with universal freedom.

Professor Wolff described how Marx defined various classes of people involved in the productive process, and how conflicts between the classes leads to inequities in the distribution of ‘surplus’. Marx’s theory was that the class of ‘surplus providers’ (workers) should be given an equal say to the ‘surplus appropriators’ (executives and investors), and Professor Wolff mentions cooperative organisations. These organisations can be successful in low technology organisations such as farming, where all class members have about the same level of knowledge. But in a pharmaceutical business, for example, a laboratory technician would not understand market dynamics, pharmaceutical pricing, approval processes, etc, and a cooperative model will not work there. While Marx himself did not advocate it, some communist governments have used government ownership as a sort of cooperative, usually without a formal voting process or much success, because government bureaucrats do not have either the knowledge or the experience to make vital resource-allocation decisions.

Marx appears to have been a social/economic class expert. He wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about modern economics.

If you are looking fora strong defense of Marxism, I would suggest you look elsewhere.

Review: On Xi Jinping

This biography attracted my attention because in covers an extremely powerful autocrat about whom relatively little is known, it had good reviews and was written by a very senior politician, Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, who had personal dealings with Xi.

Kevin Rudd was also a former foreign minister of Australia and the founding president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, and established its Centre for China Analysis. He has a PhD from the China Centre at Oxford University. He is the author of The Avoidable War, among other books.

Kevin Rudd

I found the subtitle of the book particularly interesting: ‘How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World’.

This biography is certainly a scholarly work, covering just over four hundred pages of text, sixty-five pages of footnotes, over one hundred pages of bibliography, much of it in Chinese and a twenty page index. But I found it difficult to put the book down for very long. I was continually thinking tell me more and where is this leading.

The book is very well organised for non-experts like me. It begins with purpose and its core arguments, continuing through definitions of Chinese core ideological concepts, and presents a historical survey of Chinese ideology. Then it moves subject-by-subject through Xi’s evolving ideology, and its effects on China’s domestic and foreign policy. There are three final chapters dealing with China’s future and China’s future after Xi. The book makes it clear that Xi’s ideology has evolved considerably from Mao, Deng, Jiang and Hu.

It is also clear that Xi is deeply intellectually committed to Marxism and to Leninism ‘with Chinese characteristics’, and he speaks about these theories as being ‘scientific’ and ‘proven effective in the Chinese context’.

Mr Rudd backs up every bit of Xi’s ideology with multiple historical references, usually in the form of published quotations. For example, he documents China’s shift in its foreign policy with quotations from high-ranking diplomats.

On the subject of whether or not China will invade Taiwan, he says that Xi has demanded that the People’s Liberation be ready to do so by 2027, and that he would like to do it by 2032, but that if there is a significant chance of failure, he would delay.

Xi clearly thinks that his political ideology is clearly superior to democracy/capitalism. He has apparently conceded that capitalism is superior for economic growth, because he has reigned in the Chinese private sector, knowing that this would slow economic growth. He is aware that Leninism, which Xi has applied to the running of the Communist Party, and Marxist surveillance of the Chinese people represent a risk of revolution. But surveillance is growing, not shrinking.

Xi argues that Marxism is completely congruent to classical Chinese culture, and he enumerates examples of Chinese culture without seeming to recognise the apparent conflicts between the two. Religious freedom, individual freedom and true justice are clear examples. Unfortunately, Mr Rudd and Mr Xi are not able to debate these points, but perhaps Western diplomats and politicians can do so.

This book is a timely, very welcome, thought-provoking study of an influential, but largely unknown national leader.

Writing the Book You Want to Rewrite

Beth Kander is interviewed by Robert Lee Brewer Writer’s Digest (published 12 December 2024) on how she entered a competition at the last minute.

Beth Kander is a novelist and playwright with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. The granddaughter of immigrants, her writing explores how worlds old and new intertwine—or collide. Her work has been described as “riveting,” “emotional,” “expertly crafted,” and “habit-forming.” Expect twists, turns, and secrets, with surprising heart and humor. Beth has too many degrees and drinks too much coffee. Her favorite characters are her dashing husband and their two lovely kids.

Beth Kander

What prompted you to write this book?

This book definitely has a non-traditional origin. I was knee deep in another project when a friend texted to let me know that the pop culture site Hey Alma was having a Hanukkah movie pitch competition. Eager to procrastinate on my existing project, I checked the pitch competition deadline—and found out it was the very next day. Long story short (literally), I threw together a pitch for I Made It Out Of Clay, a quirky romcom-with-a-golem concept, submitted it at the 11th hour, and ultimately won the competition.

Industry folks started reaching out to me to inquire about film rights. My literary agent, Alli, passed along some great advice from a film agent colleague: “Write the book first, not the movie.” So, I set aside my other book projects and prioritized writing this novel. The story immediately provided myriad unconventional opportunities to explore big topics: grief and family dynamics and identity and adult friendships and turning 40 … I got to write about these heavy things while laughing and making monsters. What a gift.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I won the pitch competition in December 2022. I was so inspired, I drafted the novel in two blurry months. My agent took it out on sub in February 2023. It sold at auction in March 2023, and publication was set for December 2024. So all told, a two-year-process from idea to publication. That’s fast—often, the writing alone can take longer than that! I’m grateful that although the acquisition happened fast, I had a great editor and plenty of time to revise the book, several times over. I loved spending the time really developing the story and connecting with each character.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I’ve learned so much in the process of publishing this book that it’s honestly hard to even know where to begin, and there have been plenty of surprises along the way. But if I had to pull out the biggest lesson, it’s this: You just never know.

You can spend years working on a story you really believe in, only to have it languish and eventually fade away. You can have an overnight idea that becomes the story everyone’s eager to read. You can’t trust trends or tricks. You just have to keep trying. I think a lot about this two-panel meme, where the first panel is labeled “what people think success looks like” and shows an arrow moving steadily forward and up, and the second panel is labeled “what success actually looks like” and it shows a tangled mess that a forward-facing arrow finally re-emerges from… which feels relevant to the publishing process. But I’ve been over-the-top lucky to work with my agent, Alli, to navigate every detour along the way. And working on I Made It Out Of Clay with my editor, April, and the team at Mira/HarperCollins, has been a delight. Sometimes, gracefully and gratefully, the puzzle pieces slide into place.

You just never know.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

This was the fastest writing process I’ve ever undertaken. To go from a paragraph-long idea to a 90,000-word novel in two months is… well, not something I’d necessarily recommend, honestly. Thank God for coffee.

But what I realized is that I didn’t speed-write this book in a vacuum; it wasn’t an anomaly, or a fluke. It was a culmination. All those years, all those other stories; that was my training for this manuscript-marathon. I doubt I’ll keep that pace up with many subsequent projects, but I’m definitely holding fast to the lesson that even the projects that don’t pan out help shape the ones that will fly.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

There’s so much I hope that readers will get out of this book—catharsis, cackling-laughter, genuine enjoyment, a sense of release. There’s some strange stuff in the story (an actual monster!) but it’s really rooted in characters that I hope are relatable in all their imperfections and deep desires for something better. Most of all, I hope this book gives readers permission to laugh in the midst of sorrow or acknowledge sadness even as they dance for joy; to let complicated, conflicting emotions exist alongside each other on the page and in our lives. The publication of this book intersected with a profound loss in my own life, and I’ve become so grateful for anyone and anything that acknowledges that we can feel many things at once. If readers come away with that affirmation, I’ll be thrilled.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Write the book you want to rewrite—because most of writing is revising! Don’t agonize over every word in a first draft; that will only slow you down. Just write the story. Get it onto the page. Drafting is the stage where you capture the idea. Revising is where you figure out how to really tell the story well.

Setting the Mood

Jo Schulte has an article on the Writer’s Digest website dated May 28, 2025 about how a writer can establish the mood in a story.

Jo Schulte

Jo Schulte grew up chasing fireflies in Michigan, spent many years navigating London’s publishing industry, and now calls Atlanta home, y’all. When she’s not writing, Jo can be found walking her dog, getting distracted by renovation projects, or enjoying a well-earned brunch (the housecleaning can wait).

Jo says, “Before characters speak or plot threads intertwine, before a reader knows the rules of a world or the stakes at hand, what greets them first—quietly, viscerally—is mood. Mood shapes tone, reinforces theme, and interacts with protagonists as deliberately as any villain or ally. It’s the foggy breath in the late autumn woods, the hum of neon lights in a dystopian alley, the salt tang in the air as a ship crests a storm-spined wave.

Mood isn’t just the flavor of a story—it’s the foundation of setting. Before readers know where they are, they need to know how to feel. That emotional tone becomes the lens through which they understand place. Setting isn’t a neutral canvas; it’s an invitation into a living, breathing world. A map might show where the towns are, but mood shows you how those towns feel. It’s where setting really begins.

If you sit down and start describing trees, you’re going to end up with—guess what?—trees. But if you sit down and ask, “What do I want the reader to feel here?”, your descriptions will carry emotional weight. A clearing in the woods can be peaceful, ominous, ancient, or desolate—it all depends on the tone you choose.

In The Whisperwood Legacy, I wanted a setting that felt like nostalgia gone sour. The story unfolds in an abandoned amusement park in the Appalachian Mountains—a place meant to feel like memory: familiar, even comforting, but wrong in the way a dream curdles when you try to hold onto it. The rides aren’t beautifully decaying; they’re stubbornly refusing to collapse, clinging to the past like a bruise that won’t fade. That feeling—of something rotting just beneath the surface—is the emotional tone that shaped every detail.

Tip: Before writing a scene, ask yourself what emotional undercurrent should hum beneath the surface. Is this a place that soothes, unsettles, tempts, or traps? Jot down two or three feelings the setting should carry—not just what it looks like. Let that guide every detail.

A strong setting doesn’t just look good—it works hard. It should reveal something about the characters, plot, or world. If it’s not doing at least one of those things, it’s just set dressing.

In The Whisperwood Legacy, the park is owned by the protagonist’s family. Every broken ride, every dusty booth, every desilvered mirror ties into the central mystery she’s unravelling. The setting isn’t just eerie; it’s personal. It matters to her, which means it matters to the reader.

Tip: Ask yourself, “Why this place? Why not somewhere else?” If the answer is “because it’s spooky,” dig deeper. Why this spooky place? What emotional or narrative connection does your protagonist have to it? Bonus points if it’s complicated.

A well-developed setting doesn’t just exist—it affects. To build one that resonates, you need more than a visual snapshot. The best settings reach into the body: They hum in your ears, cling to your skin, sit heavy in your lungs. They make readers feel something. That’s where sensory details come in—not as decoration, but as emotional cues.

We often talk about five senses, but there are more: temperature, balance, pressure, the sense of being watched. The goal isn’t to check off every sense—it’s to choose the ones that amplify the mood. A sticky floor can make a room feel oppressive. The sharp scent of antiseptic can make a hallway feel sterile and cruel. These choices turn static space into living atmosphere.

Tip: When developing a setting, ask which sensory detail best serves the emotional tone. Instead of listing what’s there, consider what your character notices and feels. A creaking stair might do more than a paragraph of visual description, particularly if it’s the only sound in a house that should be empty.

Setting isn’t static. As your character changes, their relationship to the world around them should shift too. This emotional arc is one of the most powerful tools in storytelling.

At the beginning of The Whisperwood Legacy, the park is a decaying monument stuffed with history. Then it becomes a puzzle. By the end, it’s something else entirely. That change in how the protagonist sees her surroundings reflects her internal transformation.

Tip: Identify two or three key locations in your story. How does your protagonist feel about each one at the start? How does that evolve? Let the setting mirror or contradict their emotional arc.

The most memorable settings aren’t pristine or sweeping—they’re specific. They’re strange. They have a sense of lived-in oddity that makes them feel multidimensional. The best details are the ones that make a reader pause and think, wait, what?

In Whisperwood, I could have just created a park with aesthetic attractions, but instead every facet of the park is connected not just to fairy tales, but deeply personal histories. For example,  the house on the park grounds isn’t just a home with vibes, it’s a clapboard mansion where the basement is off limits, the bedrooms are decorated and referred to by colors, and all the landlines have been ripped off the walls. These aren’t generic moody images—they’re eerie because they’re specific, and because that specificity matters to someone. Everything has history. Everything has a story.

Tip: Add one weird, memorable detail to every major setting. Make your world feel like it has secrets and history.

Ultimately, setting isn’t just where the story happens—it’s why the story feels the way it does. It anchors emotion, drives atmosphere, and creates the lens through which everything else is experienced. When you start with mood, you’re not just sketching a backdrop; you’re inviting the reader into a world with its own weather, weight, and wonder.

So set the scene like you mean it. Choose a mood that distorts the light into the temperature of your choosing. Build a place that does more than exist—make it ache, thrill, hum, lure, swoon, or unsettle. Turn a setting into its own story.”

Can AI Edit a Manuscript?

The Conversation website has an interesting article on this subject, written by Katherine Day, Lecturer, Publishing, The University of Melbourne, Reneé Otmar, Honorary Research Fellow, Faculty of Health, Deakin University, Rose Michael,Senior Lecturer, Program Manager BA (Creative Writing), RMIT University, and Sharon Mullins, Tutor, Publishing and Editing, The University of Melbourne, all of whom,presumably, are Australians. The article is dated February 12, 2024.

They say, “Writers have been using AI tools for years – from Microsoft Word’s spellcheck (which often makes unwanted corrections) to the passive-aggressive Grammarly. But ChatGPT is different.

ChatGPT’s natural language processing enables a dialogue, much like a conversation – albeit with a slightly odd acquaintance. And it can generate vast amounts of copy, quickly, in response to queries posed in ordinary, everyday language. This suggests, at least superficially, it can do some of the work a book editor does.

We are professional editors, with extensive experience in the Australian book publishing industry, who wanted to know how ChatGPT would perform when compared to a human editor. To find out, we decided to ask it to edit a short story that had already been worked on by human editors – and we compared the results.

The experiment: ChatGPT vs human editors

The story we chose, The Ninch (written by Rose), had gone through three separate rounds of editing, with four human editors (and a typesetter).

The first version had been rejected by literary journal Overland, but its fiction editor Claire Corbett had given generous feedback. The next version received detailed advice from freelance editor Nicola Redhouse, a judge of the Big Issue fiction edition (which had shortlisted the story). Finally, the piece found a home at another literary journal, Meajin, where deputy editor, Tess Smurthwaite, incorporated comments from the issue’s freelance editor and also their typesetter in her correspondence.

We had a wealth of human feedback to compare ChatGPT’s recommendations with.

We used a standard, free ChatGPT generative AI tool for our edits, which we conducted as separate series of prompts designed to assess the scope and success of AI as an editorial tool.

We wanted to see if ChatGPT could develop and fine tune this unpublished work – and if so, whether it would do it in a way that resembled current editorial practice. By comparing it with human examples, we tried to determine where and at what stage in the process ChatGPT might be most successful as an editorial tool.

The story includes expressive descriptions, poetic imagery, strong symbolism and a subtle subtext. It explores themes of motherhood, nature, and hints at deeper mysteries.

We chose it because we believe the literary genre, with its play and experimentation, poetry and lyricism, offers rich pickings for complex editorial conversations. (And because we knew we could get permission from all participants in the process to share their feedback.)

In the story, a mother reflects on her untamed, sea-loving child. Supernatural possibilities are hinted at before the tale turns closer to home, ending with the mother revealing her own divergent nature – and looping back to offer more meaning to the title:

pinching the skin between my toes … Making each digit its own unique peninsula.

Round 1: the first draft

We started with a simple, general prompt, assuming the least amount of editorial guidance from the author. (Authors submitting stories to magazines and journals generally don’t give human editors a detailed, prescriptive brief.)

Our initial prompt for all three examples was: “Hi ChatGPT, could I please ask for your editorial suggestions on my short story, which I’d like to submit for publication in a literary journal?”

Responding to the first version of the story, ChatGPT provided a summary of key themes (motherhood, connection to nature, the mysteries of the ocean) and made a list of editorial suggestions.

Interestingly, ChatGPT did not pick up that the story was now published and attributed to an author. Raising questions about its ability, or inclination, to identify plagiarism. Nor did it define the genre, which is one of the first assessments an editor makes.

ChatGPT’s suggestions were: to add more description of the coastal setting, provide more physical description of the characters, break up long paragraphs to make the piece more reader-friendly, add more dialogue for characterisation and insight, make the sentences shorter, reveal more inner thoughts of the characters, expand on the symbolism, show don’t tell, incorporate foreshadowing earlier, and provide resolution rather than ending on a mystery.

All good, if stock standard, advice.

ChatGPT also suggested reconsidering the title – clearly not making the connection between mother and daughter’s ocean affinity and their webbed toes – and reading the story aloud to help identify awkward phrasing, pacing and structure.

While this wasn’t particularly helpful feedback, it was not technically wrong.

ChatGPT picked up on the major themes and main characters. And the advice for more foreshadowing, dialogue and description, along with shorter paragraphs and an alternative ending, was generally sound.

In fact, it echoed the usual feedback you’d get from a creative writing workshop, or the kind of advice offered in books on the writing craft.

They are the sort of suggestions an editor might write in response to almost any text – not particularly specific to this story, or to our stated aim of submitting it to a literary publication.

Stage two: AI (re)writes

Next, we provided a second prompt, responding to ChatGPT’s initial feedback – attempting to emulate the back-and-forth discussions that are a key part of the editorial process.

We asked ChatGPT to take a more practical, interventionist approach and rework the text in line with its own editorial suggestions:

Thank you for your feedback about uneven pacing. Could you please suggest places in the story where the pace needs to speed up or slow down? Thank you too for the feedback about imagery and description. Could you please suggest places where there is too much imagery and it needs more action storytelling instead?

That’s where things fell apart.

ChatGPT offered a radically shorter, changed story. The atmospheric descriptions, evocative imagery and nods towards (unspoken) mystery were replaced with unsubtle phrases – which Rose swears she would never have written, or signed off on.

Lines added included: “my daughter has always been an enigma to me”, “little did I know” and “a sense of unease washed over me”. Later in the story, this phrasing was clumsily suggested a second time: “relief washed over me”.

The author’s unique descriptions were changed to familiar cliches: “rugged beauty”, “roar of the ocean”, “unbreakable bond”. ChatGPT also changed the text from Australia English (which all Australian publications require) to US spelling and style (“realization”, “mom”).

In summary, a story where a mother sees her daughter as a “southern selkie going home” (phrasing that hints at a speculative subtext) on a rocky outcrop and really sees her (in all possible, playful senses of that word) was changed to a fishing tale, where a (definitely human) girl arrives home holding up, we kid you not, “a shiny fish”.

It became hard to give credence to any of ChatGPT’s advice.

Esteemed editor Bruce Sims once advised it’s not an editor’s job to fix things; it’s an editor’s job to point out what needs fixing. But if you are asked to be a hands-on editor, your revisions must be an improvement on the original – not just different. And certainly not worse.

It is our industry’s maxim, too, to first do no harm. Not only did ChatGPT not improve Rose’s story, it made it worse.

What did the human editors do?

ChatGPT’s edit did not come close to the calibre of insight and editorial know-how offered by Overland editor Claire Corbett. Some examples:

There’s some beautiful writing and fantastic themes, but the quotes about drowning are heavy-handed; they’re given the job of foreshadowing suspense, creating unease in the reader, rather than the narrator doing that job.

The biggest problem is that final transition – I don’t know how to read the narrator. Her emotions don’t seem to fit the situation.

For me stories are driven by choices and I’m not clear what decision our narrator, or anyone else, in the story faces.

It’s entirely possible I’m not getting something important, but I think that if I’m not getting it, our readers won’t either.

Freelance editor Nicola, who has a personal relationship with Rose, went even further in her exchange (in response to the next draft, where Rose had attempted to address the issues Claire identified). She pushed Rose to work and rework the last sentence until they both felt the language lock in and land.

I’m not 100% sold on this line. I think it’s a little confusing … It might just be too much hinted at in too subtle a way for the reader.

Originally, the final sentence read: “Ready to make my slower way back to the house, retracing – overwriting – any sign of my own less-than more-than normal prints.”

The final version is: “Ready to make my slower way back to the house, retracing, overwriting, any sign of my own less-than, more-than, normal prints.” With the addition of a final standalone line: “I have seen what I wanted to see: her, me, free.”

Claire and Nicola’s feedback show how an editor is a story’s ideal reader. A good editor can guide the author through problems with point of view and emotional dynamics – going beyond the simple mechanics of grammar, sentence length and the number of adjectives.

In other words, they demonstrate something we call editorial intelligence.

Editorial intelligence is akin to emotional intelligence. It incorporates intellectual, creative and emotional capital – all gained from lived experience, complemented by technical skills and industry expertise, applied through the prism of human understanding.

Skills include confident conviction, based on deep accumulated knowledge, meticulous research, cultural mediation and social skills. (After all, the author doesn’t have to do what we say – ours is a persuasive profession.)

Round 2: the revised story

Next, we submitted a revised draft that had addressed Claire’s suggestions and incorporated the conversations with Nicola.

This draft was submitted with the same initial prompt: “Hi ChatGPT, could I please ask for your editorial suggestions on my short story, which I’d like to submit for publication in a literary journal?”

ChatGPT responded with a summary of themes and editorial suggestions very similar to what it had offered in the first round. Again, it didn’t pick up that the story had already been published, nor did it clearly identify the genre.

For the follow-up, we asked specifically for an edit that corrected any issues with tense, spelling and punctuation.

It was a laborious process: the 2,500-word piece had to be submitted in chunks of 300–500 words and the revised sections manually combined.

However, these simpler editorial tasks were clearly more in ChatGPT’s ballpark. When we created a document (in Microsoft Word) that compared the original and AI-edited versions, the flagged changes appeared very much like a human editor’s tracked changes.

But ChatGPT’s changes revealed its own writing preferences, which didn’t allow for artistic play and experimentation. For example, it reinstated prepositions like “in”, “at”, “of” and “to”, which slowed down the reading and reduced the creativity of the piece – and altered the writing style.

This makes sense when you know the datasets that drive ChatGPT mean it explicitly works toward the word most likely to come next. (This might be directed differently in the future, towards more creative, and less stable or predictable models.)

Round 3: our final submission

In the third and final round of the experiment, we submitted the draft that had been accepted by Meanjin.

The process kicked off with the same initial prompt: “Hi ChatGPT, could I please ask for your editorial suggestions on my short story, which I’d like to submit for publication in a literary journal?”

Again, ChatGPT offered its rote list of editorial suggestions. (Was this even editing?)

This time, we followed up with separate prompts for each element we wanted ChatGPT to review: title, pacing, imagery/description.

ChatGPT came back with suggestions for how to revise specific parts of the text, but the suggestions were once again formulaic. There was no attempt to offer – or support – any decision to go against familiar tropes.

Many of ChatGPT’s suggestions – much like the machine rewrites earlier – were heavy-handed. The alternative titles, like “Seaside Solitude” and “Coastal Connection”, used cringeworthy alliteration.

In contrast, Meanjin’s editor Tess Smurthwaite – on behalf of herself, copyeditor Richard McGregor, and typesetter Patrick Cannon – offered light revisions:

The edits are relatively minimal, but please feel free to reject anything that you’re not comfortable with.

Our typesetter has queried one thing: on page 100, where “Not like a thing at all” has become a new para. He wants to know whether the quote marks should change. Technically, I’m thinking that we should add a closing one after “not a thing” and then an opening one on the next line, but I’m also worried it might read like the new para is a response, and that it hasn’t been said by Elsie. Let me know what you think.

Sometimes editorial expertise shows itself in not changing a text. Different isn’t necessarily good. It takes an expert to recognise when a story is working just fine. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It also takes a certain kind of aerial, bird’s-eye view to notice when the way type is set creates ambiguities in the text. Typesetters really are akin to editors.

The verdict: can ChatGPT edit?

So, ChatGPT can give credible-sounding editorial feedback. But we recommend editors and authors don’t ask it to give individual assessments or expert interventions any time soon.

A major problem that emerged early in this experiment involved ethics: ChatGPT did not ask for or verify the authorship of our story. A journal or magazine would ask an author to confirm a text is their own original work at some stage in the process: either at submission or contract stage.

A freelance editor would likely use other questions to determine the same answer – and in the process of asking about the author’s plans for publication, they would also determine the author’s own stylistic preferences.

Human editors demonstrate their credentials through their work history, and keep their experience up-to-date with professional training and qualifications.

What might the ethics be, we wonder, of giving the same recommendations to every author asking for editing advice? You might be disgruntled to receive generic feedback if you expect or have paid for for individual engagement.

As we’ve seen, when writing challenges expected conventions, AI struggles to respond. Its primary function is to appropriate, amalgamate and regurgitate – which is not enough when it comes to editing literary fiction.

Literary writing aims to – and often does – convey so much more than what the words on screen explicitly say. Literary writers strive for evocative, original prose that draws upon subtext and calls up undercurrents, making the most of nuance and implication to create imagined realities and invent unreal worlds.

At this stage of ChatGPT’s development, literally following the advice of its editing tools to edit literary fiction is likely to make it worse, not better.

In Rose’s case, her oceanic allegory about difference, with a nod to the supernatural, was turned into a story about a fish.

ChatGPT is ‘like the new intern’

This experiment shows how AI and human editors could work together. AI suggestions can be scrutinised – and integrated or dismissed – by authors or editors during the creative process.

And while many of its suggestions were not that useful, AI efficiently identified issues with tense, spelling and punctuation (within an overly narrow interpretation of these rules).

Without human editorial intelligence, ChatGPT does more harm than help. But when used by human editors, it’s like any other tool – as good, or bad, as the tradesperson who wields it.

35 Years Teaching Writing at Columbia

There is an article on the New York Times website by Emma Goldberg, dated 25 May 2025, which is interesting in that it reports on the methods of a high level, successful professor at a prestige university.

Sam Freedman has taught for thirty-five years at Columbia. His students have obtained 113 deals for 95 books.

Emma Goldberg is a business features writer for The New York Times. She reports on cultural, societal and economic change.

Sam Freedman leading the course on book writing that he taught for the last time this spring. “This is a big part of my life’s work,” he said.

Ms Goldberg says: “The night before the start of his final semester teaching, after 35 years, Sam Freedman had a dream that he was going to miss class. He woke up with a strange jolt of relief. What comfort, he thought, to know that after three decades he still couldn’t shake his pre-semester agita.

The most difficult work, he has always believed, ought to evoke fear.

“All these years later I’m still anxious the night before, still concerned about getting here at 7:15 in the morning to be ready for all of you,” he said, facing his students on a Monday morning in January, wearing the same dark suit that he purchased in 1989 at Rothmans when he was first starting to teach and realized he needed formal professional attire.

The seminar that Freedman teaches at Columbia Journalism School began in 1991 as something of an experiment, testing whether students could, in the course of a semester, produce a book proposal to sell and hopefully publish. The results have proved his hunch: The class has led to 113 book contracts and 95 published books, out of some 675 people who have taken it.

This spring Freedman taught the course for the last time. He didn’t want to become one of those fading professors he remembers from college, the types who used laminated notes and made students wish they’d been around to take the class in its glory years. The journalism school does not have plans to continue the class in the same form after his departure.

“The course is an institution in itself and you could almost say that about Sam — his retirement is certainly the end of an era,” said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, who regularly meets with Freedman at an Upper West Side diner to trade ideas about books and teaching.

Freedman began his career as a reporter at the Courier-News in Bridgewater, N.J., and later worked on the culture and metro desks at The New York Times. He went on to write 10 books, including one following a New York City public-school teacher for a year. But he realized, at a certain point, that teaching the book-writing seminar for young journalists was one way of creating something that would outlive him.

“This is a big part of my life’s work,” he told the class on their first day of the semester. “Teaching this class, it feels like it’s OK for me to keel over.”

The day had echoes of a religious induction, as Freedman told his students to be “worthy of the ancestors,” his term for class alumni. He projected onto the whiteboard at the front of the room a photo of his office “shelf of honor,” crammed with most of the 95 books that came out of the class. Midway through that first day, four ancestors came to speak.

“If he believes you have a book in you,” said Grace Williams, the author of a 2024 history of a women-owned bank, glancing around the classroom, “you definitely have a book in you.”

The relationship between books and authors is obvious and glorified, but the relationship between books and teachers is less clear. The teachers behind books are often invisible, not the hand stirring the ladle to make the stew but the hand that once wrote the recipe down on some well-worn index card.

When I wrote a book in 2020, about young doctors graduating from medical school early in the pandemic, I reached out for guidance to Freedman, the father of a childhood friend, because I’d heard about his Columbia course. He shared audio clips and met with me, over Zoom, to explain his approach to narrative writing.

What struck me then was the exactitude with which he approached the craft, the lessons he pulled from his own career and then passed around the room: that the reader should never know more than the character, that authors should master methods before trying to subvert them, that narrative is an equation comprised of character, event, place and theme (N = C + E + P + T).

“Nothing in the class is contingent on having a gift, or having the muse speak to you,” said Leah Hager Cohen, who studied with Freedman in 1991, which led her to write Train Go Sorry, about a school for the deaf.

Freedman focuses particularly on demystifying the book proposal, a piece of writing that he likens to the albino alligators which, according to urban legend, once lived in the New York City subways — surviving without exposure to the public world, and therefore evolving to be mysterious and often misunderstood creatures. During the semester, his students draft such proposals. Afterward, he sometimes connects them to agents who he feels might be interested in their reporting topics, though he emphasizes that this won’t always lead to representation.

“He’s been the godfather to an awful lot of publishing over the years,” said George Gibson, the executive editor at Grove Atlantic.

Over the decades that Freedman has taught, the publishing industry has gotten far more corporate. And other mentors who work with aspiring authors noted a recent increase in programs that support young book writers outside of journalism school, which can be costly to attend.

What has stayed consistent, Freedman insists, is the need for an obsessive work ethic, and many of his lectures are paeans to just that.

He emphasizes that there is no such thing as writer’s block, only a failure to have done enough reporting, or an ego that’s getting in the way of putting words on the page. He closes the classroom door at 9 a.m. and those who are late have to wait outside until the first break, at least an hour later. (“Latecomers will be seated at intermission,” read the sign he used to post on the door.) He tracks every grammatical error a student makes, with the expectation it will never be repeated.

Kelly McMasters, who took the class in 2003 and went on to co-teach with Freedman, recalled that when she was his student, he got so fed up with her use of parentheses that he drew her a picture of parentheses, curling up like an old pet near a rug and a bowl of food, and showed it to the whole class. “Your parentheses are fine,” she recalled him saying. “Here’s the rug they can lie down on, here’s their food bowl. You may never use parentheses again.”

“I was so mad and hurt,” McMasters said. “But you know what? He was one hundred percent right.”

If Freedman enters his classroom a bundle of nerves, his students do far more so. One current student, Ally Markovich, 29, was so intent on getting into the class that she flew to Ukraine last summer to begin reporting her book proposal even before she had applied. Another, Carl David Goette-Luciak, 33, made a ritual of meeting his girlfriend for cheap pizza every Monday night so he could share with her the notes he took during Freedman’s lectures. “You can’t go to the bookstore to tell the reader what you meant,” one of them read.

What a great experience to have had a professor like Freedman!

Building Tension in a Fictional Marriage

On the Writer’s Digest website, May 5,2025, author Paul Vidich examines the way three novels portray deception in fictional marriages to build tension and compelling stories.

Paul Vidich is the acclaimed author of The Mercenary, The Coldest Warrior, An Honorable Man, and The Good Assassin, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, LitHub, CrimeReads, Fugue, The Nation, Narrative Magazine, Wordriot, and others. He lives in New York City.

Paul Vidich

Paul says: “What is more intimate than trust in a marriage? My new novel,The Poet’s Game, explores the marriage between a widower who left behind a long career in the CIA and his new, younger wife who works as a Russian translator in the agency. I wanted to examine a loving relationship that is full of joy and laughter, but where one spouse has a toxic secret that calls into question the loving relationship.

“Can two people love each other and still betray each other?  In The Poet’s Game, Alex Matthews and his wife, Anna Kuschenko, are trained to use lies and deceit in the course of their intelligence work, and they ultimately contend with a dark secret that will forever keep them from being entirely truthful with each other. How does a couple that uses deception in the normal course of their professional duties, approach intimacy in marriage?

“The marriages portrayed in The Odyssey, Rebecca, and Berlin Game artfully depict the tension between love and deception, and I studied the texts to see how the authors succeeded.

“Odysseus’s wife Penelope, often described by the epithet, long-suffering, is surrounded by suitors seeking her hand in marriage during her husband’s 20-year absence. He is gone and presumed dead. Penelope defends against the suitors’ entreaties, but it becomes increasingly difficult for her to remain steadfastly faithful. When Odysseus returns, he appears in disguise as a beggar, recognized only by his household’s elderly swineherd. He hides his identity from Penelope. Is he suspicious that she betrayed him and he doesn’t want to reveal himself while he investigates? His deception is one of the epic’s curiosities, but Odysseus’s withholding makes their ultimate reunion more satisfying and Odysseus’s deceit adds dimension to his character.

“Odysseus’s behavior is a good example of what John Le Carré said of complex characters: “The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”

“Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 romantic thriller, uses suspense and deceit in a marriage differently. The unnamed first-person narrator, a naïve young woman in her 20s who is a companion to an older woman in Monte Carlo, happens to meet a vacationing wealthy Englishman, Maxim de Winter, a 42-year-old widower. They fall in love, marry, and he brings his new wife back to his estate in Cornwall – Manderley. Maxim’s household servants, and particularly his spinster housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, take an immediate dislike to the young wife—comparing her disparagingly to the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca, who died a year earlier in a sailing accident. 

“At Mrs. Danvers’s suggestion, the new wife dresses in Rebecca’s clothes to please her husband, who mourns the dead Rebecca. But rather than please Maxim, he is angered. The new wife suspects something is not right in their marriage, but she is helpless to discover what is wrong. Only a freak storm one night that sinks a ship off the coast results in the discovery of the missing sunken sailboat, and Rebecca’s body. The discovery causes Maxim to confess to his new wife that his marriage to Rebecca was a sham. Rebecca was cruel and selfish, took many lovers, and on the night that he murdered her, Rebecca confessed she was with child from a beau.

“Layers of deceit are drawn back in the final scenes and all that was hidden from the narrator about Rebecca’s death comes to light, drawing Maxim and the narrator closer together. Jeopardy of the shared secret deepen their bond.

“Len Deighton’s 1983 novel, Berlin Game, features the loving couple of Bernard Samson, a middle-aged British intelligence officer working for MI6, and his wife, Fiona, also an MI6 intelligence officer. They have two children, live a respectable middle-class London life that is filled with the demands of parenting, family and friend obligations, and office scandals of adulterous colleagues. Samson is charged with exfiltrating an important East German asset and in the process confronts uncomfortable evidence that there may be a KGB traitor among his MI6 colleagues. Samson’s suspicions of treachery are confirmed when he is arrested in East Germany as he helps his asset escape, and is confronted by his wife, Fiona, dressed in a KGB uniform. She joined the enemy as a young college student drawn to communist ideology.

“The villain in Berlin Game is the wife. But, in spite of Fiona’s treachery, her relationship to Samson has all the appearances of an affectionate marriage with young children, an active social life, and the little intimacies of a hard-working couple. 

“In each of these marriages, one character’s lies and deceptions deepens the complexity of the relationship, and provide the surprises that make for a compelling story. One partner hides an important detail of their life, and the revelation of that detail operates to bring the couple closer together, or thrust them irreversibly apart. The reveal provides an insight into what a character wants from the spouse—Odysseus wants to test Penelope’s fidelity, Maxim wants to protect his new marriage, Fiona wants to hide her treason. Deception and a surprise reversal in the relationships propels the plots of these stories.

“Exposition is helpful to establish scenes and context, but dialogue provides the beating heart of the relationship and deployed effectively reveals the dynamic between husband and wife. Dialogue is used to imply, suggest, and hide and always for the purpose of adding to the unstable relationship between spouses. When characters come in contact with each other, sparks fly and the reader is riveted by the uncomfortable arguments and unexpected intimacies. The appearance of trust masks the inconsistencies and lies that point to betrayal. The best scenes are laden with uncertainty.

“A character’s hidden motives make use of complex maneuvers to maintain the dark secret, all the while under cover of a gauzy film of intimacy and love. The layering of intimacy and artifice creates three-dimensional characters who come alive on the page.” 

AI-gatha Christie Is a Crime

In response to the article mentioned in my last post about the AI-powered service available from the BBC consisting of digital tutorials by famous writers like Agatha Christie, there is the article below which thoroughly trashes the idea. This article was published on the 3rd of May in the Telegraph and was written by Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Ruth Dudley Edwards (born 24 May 1944) is an Irish Unionist historian and writer, with published work in the fields of history, biography and crime fiction, and a number of awards won. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she has lived in England since 1965, and describes herself as British-Irish. Her revisionist approach to Irish history and her views have sometimes generated controversy or ridicule. She has been a columnist with the Irish Sunday Independent, the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and The News Letter.

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ms Edwards said, “I try to be positive, so in my frequent Luddite moments I call upon my inner Pollyanna and remind myself of the many blessings of technology. Yet the news that the BBC has added to Maestro, its educational streaming platform, a course of 11 short online videos in which a recreated Agatha Christie tells you how to write crime fiction made me feel appropriately murderous.

Indeed, it’s given me inspiration for another short story deriding and killing publishers. But I won’t be asking AI for help. It’s likely to be the nuclear weapon employed by Big Brother to destroy original thought.

Yes, James Pritchard – who through Agatha Christie Ltd is the custodian of her legacy – has insisted that all writing advice given in 11 videos by his great-grandmother’s recreated voice and face be drawn wholly from her own words.

But after a lifetime of reading crime novels and more than four decades writing them, I think the whole idea of a disembodied voice mouthing the words selected by a team of academics is a horrid and dangerous way to go.

Agatha – which as a fellow member of the Detection Club I feel entitled to call her even though she died 20 years before I was elected – was a genius. She became the world’s best selling author because of her innate gifts when it came to plotting and her rare, unsentimental understanding of human nature and good and evil.

I read all her books in my youth, sneered at her writing in my pretentious years at university and during a bad bout of flu in my early 30s reread her and repented. I imbibed from her and others of her contemporaries like G K Chesterton and Edmund Crispin a love of the genre, especially when humour was added to the pot.

And then, unexpectedly, I was invited to write a crime novel, joined the Crime Writers’ Association and discovered a world of fun and friendship and very varied lives, for our members included cops and ex-convicts, doctors and nurses, musicians, bureaucrats and publicans. We would swap stories of how an episode in our lives had inspired us to have a go at telling a story from an improbable viewpoint. No subject was off-limits.

I’ve had several occupations, including in academia, public service and journalism, and have never come across such a congenial and sociable bunch as crime writers and readers. There’s a humility about them that I love and found rarely among academics and the literati. You couldn’t get from an algorithm or from lectures what I’ve learnt from my lovely, irreverent, self-deprecating and sometimes mad companions in that world.

You learn how to write primarily through reading. I don’t believe it can be taught, though I admit some people benefit from good editing, and there’s nothing wrong with handy hints. Indeed, I was a contributor to the highly entertaining Howdunit – published in honour of the 90th anniversary of the Detection Club – in which 90 of the living and some dead members muse on our trade. We collaborate on books occasionally, our planning meetings are hilarious and we donate the proceeds toward subsidising the next communal dinner.

My passion is free speech, and my blood freezes at the thought of how AI will be used by Big Brother. I bet all the casual racism and other kinds of wrongthink expressed in throwaway lines in the work of Agatha and her generation will not survive the first algorithmic sanitising.

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell taught us.

AI can see off originality, courage, and truth in no time.”

Agatha Christie a Writing Teacher?

This article by Benji Wilson was in the April 30th issue of the Telegraph.

Benji Wilson

Benji Wilson is a journalist based in London. He is a feature writer and interviewer for The Sunday Times, TV critic for The Telegraph and a columnist and critic for Private Eye. He is also the London correspondent for Emmy magazine as well as writing for USA Today and the Sydney Morning Herald. is the world’s best-selling author, so if you wanted to learn how to write a crime novel she’s the first person you’d ask.

Benji says, “Agatha Christie is the world’s best-selling author, so if you wanted to learn how to write a crime novel she’s the first person you’d ask. Unfortunately, she died in 1976. But in the age of AI, with a plot twist that would assuredly have had Christie herself itching to incorporate it in a book, death need not be the end. A new BBC Maestro course of online video lessons, made in conjunction with Christie’s estate, brings the queen of crime back to life.

“First and foremost, for me, this project is about looking at her process as a writer and paying homage to that,” says James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson and the Chairman and CEO of Agatha Christie Limited. “One of the things I am proudest of that has happened over the last however many years is how seriously Agatha Christie is taken, which I don’t think was always the case. She is now held in the regard and esteem that she should be as a writer.”

It’s that esteem that will encourage wannabe Christies – in this case, myself – to pay their £120 for a Maestro subscription (which gets you a year’s access to all manner of courses from Stephen Bartlett to JoJo Moyes to Jo Malone). The new Agatha series is a short lecture course given by a recreation of the writer herself, with Christie’s face and voice somehow grafted on to a (brilliant) performance from the actor Vivien Keene. Delivered across 11 videos, all of less than 20 minutes, you sit and are spoken to – nothing interactive here – as Agatha takes you through plotting, structure, detectives and satisfying resolutions.

The difference to all the other BBC Maestro courses is that Christie’s writing advice is only sort-of delivered by Christie. But the message does come from the horse’s mouth, so to speak – it was one of the stipulations of the Christie estate that every one of the words that Keene speaks should have come from Christie’s pen.

“It had to be her lessons; it couldn’t be some made up thing,” says Prichard. “So we had a team of academics under Dr Mark Aldridge [an acknowledged Christie expert] to see to that.”

In order to fit with the BBC Maestro credo – ‘Let the greatest be your teacher’ – “It had to look and sound like her,” says Prichard. “And what they have done is extraordinary. The final thing was that it had to be of value to both aspiring writers and fans. And I think it does that. All I can say is I was speaking to my father on Friday and both of us agreed that we’d learned a hell of a lot from her that we didn’t know.”

If AI-gatha’s Maestro course could teach her own relatives a thing or two – Prichard said that he learned from the course that Christie’s books work because “they’re actually about people, and people never really change” — then surely it could help me? I was lucky enough to get an early view of the Christie course and can report that watching Agatha, or ‘Agatha,’ dole out aperçus on story structure, cast creation, plot twists, red herrings, and the art of suspense, was most of all… unnerving. A half-smiling Christie-bot stares barrel-straight down the camera with schoolmarm-ish supremacy. She seemed to sense my self-doubt, my daft plot ideas, my general unease.

There is also some mild unease at having AI involved at all. To authors, AI is perceived as a threat more than a boon.

“I’d be lying if I said there weren’t worries [about using AI],” says James Prichard. “But I believe and I hope that this is using AI in both a helpful and ethical way. The AI model of Agatha doesn’t work without the performance of Vivien Keene. This was not written by AI. It is a leading academic unearthing everything that she said about writing. And I believe that what we are delivering here in terms of her message is better presented and will reach more people as a result of being presented, if I can use inverted commas, ‘by her.’”

What kind of tutor is AI-gatha? The course shows that Christie plainly studied her craft and while she opens up saying, “I don’t feel I have any particular method when it comes to writing,” which is disappointing, she does in fact adhere to a broad methodology founded in meticulous planning.

“And I take it seriously,” she says, looking serious.

The importance of saying something – not preaching but there being some form of moral backbone to your story — is emphasised throughout. Readers like to see justice served, she says.

“I write to entertain but there is a dash of the old morality play in my work – hunting down the guilty to protect the innocent.”

But where to even start? That’s my problem. Agatha recommends – glory be! – idleness (but not sloth) as a fallow field where ideas can take seed. She encourages eavesdropping on conversations on buses as a source of characters and dialogue, and so I head to that virtual bus that is the Internet.”

Benji finds that Telegraph readers are keen on air fryers and he concocts a short, very silly story about people being murdered by exploding air fryers.

Are You an Imposter?

Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers sent an email today about how writers are vulnerable to Imposter Syndrome.

Imposter Syndrome

He says: “Writers are hopelessly vulnerable to Impostor Syndrome.

That might be part of our psychological make-up (dreamy, introverted, bookish) – but I don’t think it’s mostly that. Perhaps it isn’t that at all.

If I were a stone-walling guy, I’d drop my tools in the late afternoon and look at my day’s work and think, ‘Yes, I just built that.’

If I were a drainage-contractor or a chimney-sweep, I could count my accomplishment in yards of drain unblocked, or so many vertical feet of chimney cleared. (I once cleaned my own chimneys, then set the house on fire, but it was only a little fire, and the fire brigade came, not once but three times, and the kids were all at home with friends, and got to watch everything, and the firemen let the kids try on their helmets and climb around the fire engine, and everyone had a very nice time.)

And, OK, lots of white-collar jobs can’t be measured by the yard, but there’s still a rhythm of feedback: client meetings, reports, ad campaigns, emails. What’s unusual about the job of novelist is that you have essentially two ways to measure accomplishment, the first of which is phoney and stupid and you know it to be those things. So, novelists can measure accomplishment, via:

Word Counts. Which gives you a sort of feedback, the way a dry stone wall gives you feedback as you build it, but if the words are sh*te, then the feedback is meaningless. And because you know that, you don’t trust the feedback. And because first drafts are first drafty, the words probably are sh*te, so you are right to be suspicious.Book deals. And yes, a book deal comes with an actual contract, signed by a serious and moneyed counterpart. And there’s money. And there’s the whole hoop-la of publication. So this is serious, meaningful feedback. Same thing with self-pub: you don’t achieve meaningful sales unless your work has been good, so sales is also a metric that matters. But book deals come along once in a blue moon. I mean, if you produce a book a year and work with a standard two-book deal, then you only get confirmation that you’re not an idiot once every two years. That’s a very long time.

So authors get regular meaningless feedback (word counts) and very, very infrequent feedback that matters (book deal, or successful book launch.)

And a lot of what we do involves creating a bad first draft so we can then turn it slowly into a good final draft.

The result? Impostor Syndrome is endemic among writers. It’s endemic among proper published authors too. I know plenty of top 10 bestselling novelists who are pretty much guaranteed to feel like their work is hopeless before they (once again) do what they do and produce an excellent book.

The solution? There ain’t no solution, except to recognise the problem. You will feel that your work is inadequate, because – right now – it is inadequate. And that’s fine. That’s a stage we clamber through to get to adequate and then excellent.

The ladder from rubbish to excellent is editing. It’s self-editing to start with and – even if you’re wise enough to get a professional manuscript assessment – it’s still self-editing after that, because it’s still you that has to choose how to react to your editor’s comments. So. Write, Edit, Publish, Repeat. You may only get meaningful feedback on your output about once a year. That’s just the way it is. Other indicators may not be accurate. You are not an impostor. You’re a writer.”