Autumn Updates
In which I ramble about November...
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov
Hi everybody,
I’m still getting used to this newsletter thing, so bear with me :) but here’s a few quick updates and random thoughts from this month -
Hopefully I’ll have a few more in-depth and craft-specific posts coming up, but for now, just a quick outline of the month’s progress will have to do!
Craft talk!
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
A lot has been said about this quote, and many people in the SFF world know it because George RR Martin has often said the same thing, but it’s something that’s definitely worth thinking about, and it’s how I see my storytelling too.
It’s an excerpt from the Nobel banquet speech William Faulkner gave in Stockholm, on December 10, 1950, and whatever you think about Faulkner, it’s a quote I’ve always found quite helpful for its focus on why we write fictional characters at all. The more full version of the quote is this:
“…the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”
So here’s the thing.
Words and stories give us things that we take with us into the rest of our lives. And what this gives me with now is the idea that storytelling is, at a fundamental level, about empathy. It is about our shared human experience, with our group, our friends, our lovers, our families.
Because in the end, the moment you start the book, or sit in the theater, when the movie begins, in my eyes, the characters “become” your family. It is not so much a matter of theme—theme for me is largely the answer to why the story deserves to exist in the first place, the dramatic argument of the story (we’ll get into that in a later post). But the truth is, on the experiential, moment-to-moment level, we don’t really experience a theme, no matter how profound—we experience the life of a character or set of characters: we experience a story.
This is why screenwriter Tony Gilroy (who wrote and directed MICHAEL CLAYTON and is the showrunner of ANDOR) advises that you have to start very small, on a deep personal level, for a story to work: Now, he’s talking about Hollywood movies, and as always YMMV, but Gilroy says you can’t start by declaring, “I want to do a movie about class warfare,” or “I want to do a movie about corporate malfeasance.” ... It’s too big. too amorphous. You’d be lost.
Instead, story has to start small, with a person, with an experience, with a feeling. because we can experience the feeling. Every story we experience is exactly that: no different than sitting across the barstool listening to your dearest friend tell you about their difficult day. You are invested because they are you. They are yours, and you are theirs. You belong to each other. They are your people.
And so we care—why? We care, we are invested, precisely because these fictional people become like our family, and we want to know what the experience was like because we are empathic creatures and helping each other helps us. We come into the story wanting to know about the experience of these people that we either already care for, or whom we imagine we may come to care for over the course of the book. That’s why we’re here in the first place. Seeing a movie, or reading a book, or graphic novel, or experiencing a piece of theater—any kind of story—is essentially a function of this.
The characters are our family. I really believe this. What we’re really doing when we experience a story is in many ways akin to taking a long walk with someone we love, or who we are coming to love, and asking about what they’re going through. Asking about their experience. Because we want to hear about it. Because we care about them. Because it reflects us back to ourselves. Characters, I’d argue, help us, in our own lives, our own human conflicts of the heart. We go to stories because we all, in our own ways, need some kind of help. We go to stories because we want to know how it felt, because we feel, and through the fictional lens, maybe, just maybe, we can find our way through.
Book Updates
Just a quick one here, but we’re really in the swing of things.
This month has been a whirlwind of book news, as ARCs of The Book of Fallen Leaves have begun making their way out into the world, and, on that note, I’ve been working my way through signing tip-ins for something that hasn’t been officially announced yet, but I promise, it’s pretty fun ;)
At the risk of sounding like every other author on the planet, it turns out writing is hard. This month has been a tough one as I’ve made it through most of the structural elements for book 2 and now have to really start building the full draft. I always overwrite, so I know it will be long, but that is actually a good thing for me - trimming and refining is where the book starts to really shine.
This morning I made a bit of a breakthrough on a particularly thorny element in the middle of the book, following a character arc that’s pretty important to the emotional core of the story. Structurally, there were certain things I knew I needed to do in this middle section of the book, in order to set up/get the pieces in the right place for the ending, while also juggling the emotional journey this character is in, and yet keep the pace up as we spin into the second half. Every book is its own challenge, as they say, and this one was particularly tough.
I have a version now that almost works, and that means I can now keep moving forward. Revisions and subsequent drafts will then allow me to keep refining and refining until the whole thing is a s good as I can get it, before I send everything off to my editor in the spring.
WHAT I’M READING
I’ve been on a bit of an English history kick recently, which will come as no surprise, but I just finished Dan Jones’ HENRY V — which was such a great insight into one of the most interesting kings of English history — and am working my way through Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV.
On the fiction front, this month I read James Islington’s The Strength of the Few, the second book in his Hierarchy series after The Will of The Many.
I actually reread Will leading up to the release of the second book, and liked it even more than I did the first time!
I’m also reading The Sacred Space Between by Kalie Reid. I had the good fortune of being in a writing workshop with Kalie a few years ago, while we were both working on our manuscripts, and we were both in the process of obtaining agents at the time, and we sold our books within a few months of each other, so it’s been fun to see her book finally come out!
I’m not usually a romantasy guy, but I am loving the moody vibes and yearning in this book as the two characters come into conflict and start to eventually become something more.
It’s about an exiled saint and the iconographer who has been sent to paint him, but soon they realize there is a darker magic controlled by the abbey that has given her this task…
I’ve been really liking it so far.
WHAT I’M WATCHING
Well. I am in desperate need of a new show!
A lot of writers say they can’t read or watch much while in the throes of writing a draft, but I’ve always found it to be the opposite: I often write better when I have other forms of narrative to swim in at the same time. It triggers some kind of creative part of my brain that i actually find quite valuable.
I recently rewatched Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai over the weekend, which i’ve seen approximately five zillion times, but it remains one of the best films ever made. No surprise there. And I’m keen to start Last Samurai Standing on Netflix — the initial trailers didn’t really pull me in, to be honest, but seeing the positive response and reading more of what the show’s about has piqued my interest.
Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading/watching this month:
NOVEMBER 2025
A Storm of Swords, George RR Martin
HOUSE OF GUINNESS
HENRY V, Dan Jones
Powers and Thrones, Dan Jones, first chapters
GACHIAKUTA ep 1
The Sacred Space Between, Kalie Reid
FRANKENSTEIN (2025)
The Second Death of Locke, VL Bovalino
SEVEN SAMURAI
The Strength of the Few, James Islington
THE ALIENIST season 1, ep. 1-2
The Eagle and the Hart, Helen Castor
Tiamat’s Wrath, James SA Corey
That’s enough for now, friends. Til next time—
A
