Books that saved my writing: Five under-the-radar titles every writer should read

Not every book that changes your writing shouts about it. Some sneak in sideways, books that don’t always appear on must-read lists but lodge themselves somewhere deep in your process. These aren’t craft manuals. They’re stranger, quieter, more potent than that.

When writers talk about the books that shaped them, it’s usually the big names: Bird by Bird, On Writing, maybe a bit of Joan Didion or George Orwell. But some of the most essential books in a writer’s life aren’t the ones offering advice.

How long before AI writes a Bestseller? A Literary Thought Experiment

How long before AI writes a New York Times bestseller?

It’s a question that lingers like a subplot, unresolved, faintly unsettling, impossible to ignore. Earlier this year, a publishing data analyst sparked headlines by predicting that an AI-written book could top bestseller charts by 2030. 

Emily Henry and the craft of commercial fiction

It’s not just that Emily Henry writes bestsellers. It’s that she writes the kind of commercial fiction people want to reread, smart, emotionally layered romantic comedies that balance character, structure and warmth in just the right proportions. 

As a reader and a fan, I’ve marvelled at how her novels manage to feel both comfortably familiar and quietly profound.

Writing with machines, owning your voice, and where the ethical lines are drawn

We’ve crossed a threshold. What used to be the stuff of speculative fiction is now a line item in the writing process: AI is here, and it’s shaping how we write, revise and even brainstorm.

But with the rise of tools like ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Claude, a wave of questions has followed. If a machine helped shape a chapter, is it still your voice? If it tightened your prose or fed you metaphors, do you owe your reader an explanation? And most fundamentally—how much help is too much?

Joan Didion and the art of emotional precision: What writers can learn from her style

Joan Didion never wasted a word. Her prose was as spare as it was surgical. It was a style that she forged as a journalist and later honed in her essays and fiction that cut to the heart of American life. For writers and readers alike, there's so much to learn from her technique, especially in a cultural moment saturated with overstatement and noise. If there was one takeaway from Didion’s writing, it’s that less is more.