Inputs and Outputs
Surprise, we tend to write like the works we read.
I caught a substack post asking if people reread books. Fellow admits to re-watching movies, but a bit confused by re-reading a book. I didn’t say it to him, but re-reading great stories brings me joy. I might suggest expanding the library.
While at a writer’s workshop this weekend, I was approached by a new-to-writing author asking if my writing is “sophisticated,” a search term I yearn for. I had recently come from the stage having made our audience laugh.
I wonder if these two experiences come from the same place. On Saturday, while at the workshop I responded to a ’Stack note from @caehawksmooredits about the term “commercial fiction”
They call it “commercial fiction” like that’s an insult
You mean people actually want to read it?
Shocking
-Cae Hawksmoor
While at this event, I heard agents and others discuss both “genre fiction” and “commercial fiction” as nearly equivalent terms. As they provided their coaching from the stage, I felt a bit left out. I seem to have failed at 100% the suggestions made by agents. Frankly, I would not make those suggestions to fellow writers (psst, don’t listen to me).
During my moment on stage, I admitted that my techniques for developing tension are drawn more from music and poetry. I stated that I have more poetry books on my desk than any other types of books. While listening to Beethoven 7th Symphony, I am regarding the lovely dandelion puffs as illustrated on the cover of Leslie Williams’ “Success of the Seed Plants.”
My education and upbringing are unusual given I was raised by a successful novelist whose father also supported himself as a novelist. They both worked in the news media for a while. This history spans over 100 years.
I understand that I learned a craft at the knee of a master who learned at the knee of his father and thus back to 1920. Yet, my education and efforts slammed against my dyslexia. I scraped by way through university with a 2.65/4.0 GPA. My GPA was as high as it was because I could tell a story (and I discovered spell check on a 1982 IBM PC). I’ve had to admit that my training came as a story teller, more than a writer.
The phrase from the computer industry is: “Garbage in, garbage out.” To turn that phrase around, one might explore what has inspired great writers and great writing. Regardless of your dot on a map, culture and language of our family, be voracious. Be child-like (even dog like) in exploration: smell it, touch it, taste it, and if you hate it, shit on it or spit it out. Even in the rejection, you’re better off.
Input matters!
Good Coaching
Wanna write well? Read well. Ralph Waldo Emerson said as much in his essay “The American Scholar”
(https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEEmersonAmerSchTable.pdf).
In this essay, Emerson eschews the fad, embraces diversity in scope, and warns of myopia. And for the younger reader, please accept that Emerson transcends the use of the terms “man” and “men” to mean “us”, we morals. Avoid being the bookworm, find your path, and broaden your influences.
Fair to say that our experiences as readers/listeners manifests in our storytelling.
The corollary to this axiom is read deeply and boldly. Later, return to books you love. I hadn’t seen Emerson’s essay two decades, likely since before going to Iraq in 2005 for a year. Yet, in my pocket, I carried poetry by Longfellow folded inside my copy of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
Our literary history spans millennia. We may still be telling stories that our human ancestors told 30- maybe 40-thousand years ago. To provide a proof statement, regard the night sky, find the Seven Sisters, often called Pleiades in European-based cultures, Subaru to the Japanese, al-Thurayya in Arabic. The same or similar versions of a Seven Sisters story can be found in Africa, Asia, ancient North America for tens of thousands of years. One might think that the stories travelled with ancient humans as they migrated out of Africa when the planet looked differently from today’s configuration.
Unlike the advice of agents present at this workshop, stretch your reading, go back hundreds even thousands of years as the starting point: Plato, Homer, Aesop, others. Frankly, I don’t enjoy Homer’s writing as much as others, but those adventures, characters, and conflicts underpin our literature. To expand my enjoyment of the stories, I read/listen to modern variants such as “Circe” by Madeline Miller.
One, or more, of the agents suggested that aspirants provide lists of authors that have guided the author’s art. In saying this, these folks also suggested that this list focus on works of the recent three to five years. They also suggested that this list reflect works within the genre corresponding to the novel. Ugh. As if Homer isn’t a foundational work for Tolkien, etc, ad nauseam.
Stepping back to R.W. Emerson, my old friend and former neighbor (I grew up in an adjoining town), this approach may result in myopia reflecting his criticism of the “bookworm”.
“Hence, the book learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul….
“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect?”
-Emerson “The American Scholar”
Risks exist when narrowing one’s input criteria within a set of parameters say: a decade and a genre. The aspiring writer will learn the language, tropes, characterizations, and techniques with the same voracity of a A.I. engine spinning through their ill-gotten trove of stolen & copyrighted material. The aspirant will likely fall into the same trap that A.I has already fallen through. You need more and better source material. You need/we need material that spans centuries, genres, authorship, and even languages. We stand on the moment when A.I. can not distinguish A.I. generated text from the artistic efforts of carbon-based life forms (CBLF). Generative A.I. now treats A.I. generated novels with the same (dis)regard it has for actual art. The result is that A.I. reads its own slop only to replicate it further. The challenge for the CBLF artist is to break free of the replicant’s mold. Emerson wrote: “We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.” Figs begat figs. I likes me some figs, but not figgin’ slop.
To the aspirant, I suggest that we read well, read variety, and take lessons where you find them: music, movies, serial television, nature and city streets. Discover how writing and music relate. Go explore how Fredrik Backman takes a fictional painting then create a flowing story spanning decades of friendship, loss, and love in the May 2025 novel “My Friends.”
Aside: Backman’s work is both literary fiction and selling well.
I do wish “sophisticated” were a search term for books (derived from Latin for “wise”). It isn’t. Neither is “well written.” As a reader, I don’t give a fig about genre. I want well crafted, lyrical prose that makes me feel something emotional and tells me a mother-lovin’ story I care about (even if men turn to pigs). When I search “literary fiction”, the results display primarily genre, serial, or commercial fiction. While “literary fiction” often contrasts with “commercial fiction”, the on-line search tools for books appears to ignore that element that makes a book “literary” pushing readers towards the more commercial segment of the market. The search category for “literary” hints as “sells well.”
The rumor is that “genre fiction” sells better than “literary fiction.” Therefore, that “literary fiction” doesn’t sell. Therefore to be paid well as a writer, one ought to embed within a genre. Conversely, if one’s genre fiction sells well, the novels magically appear in the literary category. Odd?
I sure have been suckered into authors found under the search term “literary” that I abandoned after a chapter or five because (1) the writing was flat (2) the formula obvious (3) I couldn’t differentiate the characters, then recognized, I didn’t even care to try harder. DNF baby, DNF.
Bad Coaching
Write well.
Tell great stories with robust, interesting characters.
Fuck genre.
We’re at an infection point in publishing, again. The publishing industry I knew as a kid, the one that fed my family and paid for my education, ended a three decades ago.
We’re down to five publishing houses that treat long time, profitable authors like fecal matter. I have a childhood friend with lots o’ books to his name, a beloved movie, TV shows, etc. His long-time publisher, consolidated his last three books into one, informed him (in his 7th decade) to now pay for his own publicist, and lump it. They effectively cut potential revenue by 66%. They’ve made millions off of his creativity. His thanks: a one-finger wave. Meanwhile, we now (March 2026) have an established “traditional” publisher that decided to capitalize on a self-published book that walked through their internal editorial review, printing, and release before recognizing that the work (or portions of the work) has been generated by silicon-based tools instead of the sweat and effort of a CBLF. A publisher invested and promoted an AI book.
Add to this, an odd diversion publishing took with some odd “justice” ideas. We’re coming through a period of time where publishers told agents and authors that they (publishers) wish to amplify the voices of the unheard and the historically underrepresented. By deploying non-literary criteria for segmenting authors based on absurdist and ill-defined criteria. A practice that with a distant gaze seems just as unjust as past practices.
I judge this to be the industry reducing their influence, not growing it.
In the 1990s and the 2000s, publishing had to respond to internet technology. What we see as publishing today retooled less than 30 years ago in response to the internet. Today’s publishing industry, its practices, trends, and such is a 21st Century industry. It’s connection to its own 20th Century heritage remains only in trademarks, logos, and past titles they still sell. The rest: gone.
Publishing as we knew it in the 20th Century started only in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The publishing industry known to my father survived a scant century.
19th Century publishing was as chaotic as today’s mess. For example, many of the recognized historical novels came out as serial publications in newspapers and magazines. Many novels were published by authors funding the process themselves. Bookstores published books.
The publishing industry has no understanding of how to adapt and survive in this century. They are clueless. Thus, they promote the few trends that worked last year to generate revenue this year: genre fiction, commercial fiction, and works that will rapidly be picked up by streaming services hungry for paying subscribers. They drive the highway at top speed using their rear view mirrors to guide them forward. What could possibly go wrong?
What is the constant for the last two millennia? The artist with red blood pumping through arteries and jelly-like brains inside a mildly spherical box balanced upon our axis. Writers write. Painters paint. Musicians music(??). Publishers, retail galleries, and streaming services exists not to promote art but to make profit from our work.
Contemporary artists should recognize that the publishing industry reacts to pressures it barely understands while not looking at emerging trends such as the young author I met this weekend with a typewriter image on her purse. Why does a woman decades younger than I announce her affinity to the typewriter?
We should ask her what publishing look like 50 years from now?
Here’s a set of related rules:
Readers will read.
Listeners will listen.
Stories shall be told when people gather.
Whilst I would prefer to be paid for my creative works, I’ve also recognized that I cannot avoid writing. I cannot avoid consuming stories. And yet, there are books on my mobile that I’ve paid for that I am now prohibited from accessing due to a small lock icon. My effort to expand my library now thwarted by commercial vendors engaged in the pipeline between author and consumer. That’s a fail.
I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born in, ⎯ is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state.
-Emerson “The American Scholar”
During the workshop at the weekend, a speaker observed that zero people care about the publisher of a book. We don’t celebrate the publisher nor the agent. We fete the author. Who was Emerson’s publisher? Who published the Bronte sisters? Who represented Mark Twain? Instead we discuss novels by title, author, and influence within a particular context. We quote novels. We sing songs.
Here’s my very bad advice:
Do your thing.
Step out and lead if you must.
Write your story.
The syllogism I now see:
Publisher’s use yesterday’s rules to generate today’s revenue;
Agents, in selling to publishers, must follow those same rules;
Therefore, aspirant writers must then follow the rules established by both publishers and agents.
Riddle me this… Who is leading? Who is innovating? Where shall the next great novel come from? Where is the vision for the future?
The rear-view mirror is the wrong place to look, I should think. In a hall of mirrors, the future will look a lot like last week plus more A.I. slop and reflective artifact.
Reminder from my friend Emerson: “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.” Yet, it yield but figs. Figs all the way down.
One of my tests for a good book is the frequency with which I return to that writing, that author, and that self-same book. Because every time I explore the writing I get something new.
I.M. Aiken
Author & narrator
“The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County” (2024)
“Stolen Mountain” (2025)
“Trowbridge Dispatch” - fictional short stories/podcast
“Captain Henry: 2½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1¼ Centuries, and a story of Love” (2026)
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