Why AI fiction still feels flat: New test shows characters lack mystery and complexity
techxplore.com – Friday July 3, 2026
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that while artificial intelligence can spin increasingly convincing stories, its characters may still lack one of the qualities that make human-written fiction memorable: mystery.
As AI writing tools become more common in publishing and entertainment, Carolina researchers wanted to understand whether the characters created by these systems are as varied and nuanced as those crafted by human authors. Their findings suggest that, despite advances in technology, AI still tends to rely on familiar patterns.
The study examined how characters in stories generated by AI compare with those written by people. Drawing on ideas from literary theory, the researchers analyzed eight different aspects of character portrayal, including whether characters seem realistic or exaggerated, whether they evolve over time, and whether they remain mysterious or fully understood by the end of a story.
To do this, the team developed CASPER, an automated framework that evaluated thousands of stories and measured character traits in ways that had never before been systematically applied to AI-generated fiction.
How to Research for Narrative Storytelling: 5 Takeaways from ‘You Are A Writer’
pen.org – Wednesday June 24, 2026
For emerging writers, the research process can be riddled with questions. Where do you begin? How do you know which facts deserve a place in your story and which should be discarded? And at what point do you simply have to force yourself to put down the books you’re reading, pick up a pen, and start writing?
The first workshop in PEN America’s 2026 You Are A Writer series brought together three accomplished writers — moderator John Manuel Arias (Crocodopolis) and speakers Charmaine Craig (My Nemesis) and Judy Batalion (The Last Woman of Warsaw) — who provided guidance to early career writers on how to conduct research for narrative storytelling. If you missed the session, check out five takeaways below and make sure to register for the upcoming sessions.
1. Consider the variety of forms research can take.
Research often involves digging deep into the archive, but that’s not all it can be. Over the course of Batalion’s career, she’s also conducted plenty of interviews and on-the-ground research. For her nonfiction work The Light of Days, which provides accounts of young, Jewish women who resisted Nazism, she traveled to Będzin — and, upon her arrival, learned that the whole Polish city sat atop a hill.
“No one mentioned that [in books], because that wasn’t an important part of the World War II testimony,” Batalion said. “But when you’re writing descriptively about a place and trying to understand someone’s hiding, or their journey, or their dangerous risk-tasking effort, you need to know that.” She acknowledged that financially or otherwise, traveling to the places you’re writing about isn’t always a possibility, but said her senses aid her greatly when she can put them to use.
Australia is publishing books too quickly – and everyone is losing out
theguardian.com – Monday June 22, 2026
Thanks to rushed deadlines, financial pressure and overworked staff, titles are going to market before they’re ready – and then sliding from view immediately
A Sydney author – I’ll call her Rebecca – vowed never to write another book after the deranging experience of publishing her first. She’s using a pseudonym because one day she might change her mind; the notoriously small Australian publishing industry does not tend to look with favour on authors who complain.
When Rebecca was proofing her debut – a work of nonfiction published by one of the big five – she discovered that a pivotal chapter had been cut. “I thought it was a mistake, that it had somehow been left out of the papers they’d sent,” she says. “Turns out they’d deliberately excised it and thought I wouldn’t notice.”
The proposed cover art for the book, which was set in one country, featured an animal native to another – and when the book went to a copy editor, the questions Rebecca got back were “absolutely out of touch”. References to hunting were queried on the basis they might offend vegetarians. Big mistakes slipped through the first print run and needed to be corrected in the second, including the name of a major character, which changed suddenly halfway through. “I’d assumed the publisher would take care of these things,” Rebecca says. “It felt like they were trying to shove me out the door and get the book out.”
Independent Creative Magazines Are Making a Comeback (And Here’s Why That Matters)
fluxmagazine.com – Monday June 22, 2026
The mid-2000s through the early 2010s saw print titles fold one after another, casualties of a digital transition that nobody had quite figured out how to navigate. The ones that survived did so by chasing clicks, flattening their editorial voice, and optimizing for search engines rather than readers. The result was a decade of arts coverage that felt somehow both everywhere and nowhere, present in volume but absent in perspective.
Something has shifted. Not dramatically, not with any particular announcement, but steadily and in ways that are hard to ignore if you spend time in creative communities online. Independent digital arts publications with genuine editorial identities are finding audiences again. Not massive ones, not in the way that lifestyle content farms measure traffic, but loyal ones. Readers who come back. Readers who share because they actually want to, not because an algorithm served something in front of them.
What Killed the First Wave
The first generation of digital arts publishing made a fundamental mistake: it tried to replicate print on screen. Longer issues, PDF downloads, subscription paywalls that made sense in 1995 and almost none in 2010. The audience wasn’t there for that model and the economics were brutal. It didn’t take long to realize that flipping through a PDF version of an actual magazine is annoying.
A Writer's Guide to Rejection Letters
poetry.arizona.edu – Friday June 19, 2026
The reality of submitting poetry to literary journals is that there are so many incredible poets doing it, and editors only have so much room in their magazines. All of us are inevitably going to face rejection in the writing world, and if we’re equipped to hit it head-on, we won’t be beaten down when we get that first “thanks but no thanks” letter. And bracing ourselves for rejection, or reframing it as proof of effort, makes us better writers in the long run.
Magazines typically accept less than 1% of the submissions they receive. In Submittable (as of March 2026), my rate of acceptance versus rejections is 174/1801, making my acceptance rate about 10%. I find that knowing this motivates me to submit more—for about every 10 pieces I send in, one will probably be accepted.
Editors are looking at thousands of submissions and can’t always provide feedback or respond personally to submissions. You’ll often see editors acknowledge this in a rejection letter. But if you volunteer to work on a literary magazine (which I highly recommend), you’ll quickly come to understand their perspective. I have read for a few magazines and contests, and when I have, I notice how quickly overwhelmed I can become. It doesn't take long for me to engage or disengage with a poem. Patterns begin to appear:
- Careless errors
- Misnaming the editor or reader
- Not following the submission guidelines
- Stylistic or aesthetic differences (readers are subjective with subjective tastes! And that's OK, but this is why magazines tell you to read before you submit; you may quickly realize just how much they vary in aesthetic interests.)
Understanding these patterns can help improve the likelihood of your work not being rejected.
Words, words, words
aeon.co – Thursday June 18, 2026
Strong resistance to AI among writers is understandable. But it obscures what we share with the machines: language itself
Since artificial intelligence went mainstream a few years ago, it has done double duty as a political personality test: tell me what you think about AI, and I’ll tell you who you are. Those worried about climate change focus on energy consumption. Those who denounce late capitalism see it as the ultimate example of corporate monopoly. Those concerned about racism have warned about AI biases. Those studying the effects of colonialism see it as yet another form of exploitation. And those tending toward doom have seen ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok as the four riders of the apocalypse.
People in the arts and culture have felt particularly threatened by AI because the technology seems to be coming for the things they cherish the most: the creative use of images, words, and ideas. The latter two, words and ideas, have been in the centre of the storm because generative AI is based on language and because ideas are closely associated with the words in which they are expressed. In response, writers have largely opted for resistance, defending the genuine creativity of humans against the machines. My social media feeds have been flooded with AI-slop gleefully produced and circulated by colleagues hoping to prove that AI can’t be creative. Let’s call this the Creative Resistance.
How to Write a Novel in 33 Days
lithub.com – Thursday June 18, 2026
There’s a popular idea, fueled by countless Hollywood movies, of how writing a novel works. It goes something like this. Author is struck by inspiration. Author sits down and types in a frenzied montage, words flowing directly from the ether onto the page. Within a few hours/days/weeks, a book appears.
I used to think this was (charitably) an exaggeration, or (uncharitably) bullshit. My experience of the writing process always involved much more conscious effort, and much more uncertainty. I spent my time stumbling through first drafts, doubling back, second-guessing everything I wrote. I had accepted that even if the pure-inspiration model was real, it wasn’t something I would ever experience.
But then an image came to me: a young woman in the back seat of a car, returning to the burnt-out ruin of the house where she once lived as a member of a cult. Within a few days, the rest of the story coalesced around her: the charismatic leader she was going back to find; the power he had offered her, to control and manipulate what others perceive as reality; and the community she had lost.
You Have Permission: Elizabeth-Jane Burnett on Creating Space for Experimental Writing
womensprize.com – Thursday June 18, 2026
Through my career of teaching and sharing writing, the response I have heard most is “I didn’t know you could do that.” Too often, even without realising it, we restrict ourselves into categories, genres, forms, sometimes even thoughts, that were not of our own making. We have shrunk our writing even before picking up a pen or starting to type.
It’s an internal shrinkage that’s somewhat different to imposter syndrome, where we may know what we’re striving for but aren’t sure we have the right tools or accomplishments to achieve it. It is a diminishing that comes from not realising that alternative options even exist. If imposter syndrome is a hesitation to move forwards, then permission-giving is someone taking off the blinkers so that we can see, and move, in all directions.
One of my biggest early permission-givers was a literary scene rather than a person – in the transatlantic US and UK experimental poetry communities of the 1960s, I found a freedom in form and in the means of production that gave me a pathway – and permission – for expression that felt more fluid than more mainstream modes of writing. In the UK, a wide range of styles, including visual and sound poetries, were involved in what US poet Eric Mottram called the British Poetry Revival. A lot of this writing was distributed by way of the “mimeo revolution” that saw poets taking control of their own publishing.
How to write like a Booker-nominated author
thebookerprizes.com – Tuesday June 16, 2026
Behind every Booker Prize novel are routines and rituals that define the work. Here, 12 authors and translators reveal how they shape a story from beginning to end
‘A good writer needs a good rubbish bin,’ said Richard Flanagan, speaking backstage at London’s Guildhall after winning the Booker Prize in 2014. ‘I don’t think I’m much of a writer, but I’m a better re-writer,’ he added wryly.
Jokes aside, Flanagan’s sentiment captures something essential about writing life: it is rarely straightforward, but shaped by habit and a constant urge to improve.
Perhaps you are working on your own book and looking for inspiration, or simply curious about how real writers get words on the page. So, if you’ve ever wanted to get inside the mind of a Booker or International Booker Prize-nominated author, you’re in the right place. From silence and structure to cats, coffee, and carefully built routines, we’ve gathered 12 pieces of advice from fiction’s most acclaimed writers.
In Conversation With Literary Agent Renée Zuckerbrot: An Insider’s Perspective on the Industry
pen.org – Wednesday June 10, 2026
The Pulitzer Prize. The Booker Prize. The National Book Award. The MacArthur Fellowship. The Dublin Literary Award. The PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. The New York Public Library Young Lions Award. The Thurber Prize for American Humor. The Shirley Jackson Award. These are just some of the awards that authors represented by Renée Zuckerbrot, an agent at Massie McQuilkin & Altman, have been nominated for or won.
But literary prowess aside, the authors have little in common: Zuckerbrot represents writers at all stages of their careers, from debut to well-established, as well as those working in a wide array of genres, including commercial and literary fiction as well as nonfiction.
In conversation with Abhigna Mooraka, coordinator for membership and national engagement, for this Member Spotlight, Zuckerbrot discusses what draws her to a manuscript, the effects of the industry’s financial challenges on agents and editors today, and the joy of literary community.
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