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Times
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Six-seven, sigma, unc — what the kids are saying behind your back
What is the meaning of six-seven? This is the question of the hour, asked in countless Google searches by people trying to decipher the sayings of Gen Alpha, the generation born after 2010. I could Google it too, but you can't trust the engine these days. Better to make like an etymological Philip Marlowe and collar a few Alphas to see if they will talk. Then see if you can understand it. There are several in my house. 'What does sixty-seven mean?' I ask them. They have no idea but think it might be rude. I think the same thing. There's a Martin Amis novel where a teenager asks a girl for a sixty-eight. 'You do me and I owe you one,' he says. I guess it's something like that. 'We actually have three Gen Alpha girls here who are happy to help,' says my upstairs neighbour. I take the stairs, bringing the question with me. I feel like the man in the old French beer commercial who sees figures written on his mirror and asks himself: ' Que signifie 1664? ' A six and a seven, I say, between breaths. Does it mean anything to you? The Alphas bolt upright. 'Six-seven!' they shout, waving their arms around. 'Six-seven!' 'It's the song,' says the taller one. I'll call her Mel (I'm changing everyone's name). The song is by the rapper Skrilla, she says. 'Six-seven,' he exclaims, halfway through. 'Then there was this famous basketball player called LaMelo Ball,' says Mel. 'He's six foot seven.' People set video of him to the song. 'Any time you mention six-seven people go crazy,' says Mel. 'I can't even count to ten,' says Dina, her comrade on the sofa. 'It's ruined.' 'Oh!' my children say later. 'Six-seven! Why didn't you say so? You said sixty-seven.' My children have some intel, but not much. They know, for instance, to say 'bet', when they mean absolutely, and 'no cap' when they mean 'no lie'. They all say they are 'cooked' when they mean they are out of luck. When I ask about 'aura' the ten-year-old jumps to his feet and starts pacing the kitchen, talking about how aura means cool and involves a points system of some sort. When I say mewing, they suck their cheeks in and stroke a finger along their chins, for apparently, it means sticking your tongue against the roof of your mouth to emphasise your jawline. But they are not sure about 'huzz' or 'chopped', or 'unc', or 'type shit'. All 12 and under, they are a little young. Mel and Dina are 14. Talking to them after my children is like leaving your dial-up modem and getting on to a 5G network. I've brought some vocabulary I have sourced from Your Teen Magazine and a California high-school newspaper called The Wildcat Tribune: a list of words thought, for sure, to be Gen Alpha. An Alpha-bet. 'Huzz' means girls, says Mel. It can be derogatory, it can mean that they are hot. 'Like, oh there's huzz over there,' she says. There is 'bruzz', for guys. 'Fat kids at my school get called 'fuzz',' says Dina. It is still not a bed of roses, being in middle school. 'Unc' means an old person. 'It's like uncle,' says Dina. 'It's like someone's above the age of 20. Like, OK, I'm an unc now.' 'Like, 'OK boomer' for Millennials,' says Mel's father, a Gen X-er, leaning against the sideboard. 'Like, 'Unc lost so much aura, for real,'' says Mel. 'Aura is like a really weird way to describe cool things you do,' says Dina. She is small and talks fast, machine-gunning us with Alpha vocab. 'People say I'm chalant,' she tells me at one point. It's the opposite of nonchalant. 'If you are walking down a hallway and you trip, that's negative aura,' she says. 'People used to make these TikToks, like, 'Dropping your pencil on the floor, negative 1,000 aura.'' 'Yeah,' says Mel. 'Like, 'The huzz liking you back, plus 1,000 aura.' 'And then aura farming is like, you purposefully do something, you complete tasks to gain aura,' says Dina. 'Some people call it aura harvesting,' says Mel. 'But that's like, elite.' 'Type shit' means 'for real' or 'sure', says Mel. 'Like, you say, 'Do you wanna go on a two-man?' They're like, 'Type shit!'' Hold on. A two-man? 'A double date,' says Mel. 'Not a double date,' says Dina. 'It's just like a hook-up, OK? But people are using two-man and double date now interchangeably. It's like, 'No, you are going to Chipotle.'' She shakes her head, as if she wonders what the world is coming to. • Italian brainrot: Do not read this article if you are over six. You won't get it Some of the words on my list are rather old, they tell me, and more like something a Gen Z person would say. I bring up 'dog water', if you'll pardon the phrasing. It means substandard. 'That's so like, 2019,' says Mel. It's as if I'm speaking Latin. Don't even mention 'mother'. That is older than the hills, apparently. It is used by Millennials talking about their idols, says Mel. 'Yeah,' says Dina, with a slight eye-roll. 'Like, ' Taylor Swift is mother. Beyoncé is mother.'' We discuss 'sigmas'. Mel explains: 'A sigma is like, you're your own thing, you're a lone wolf. Sigma males are like, they respect women but they don't baby women. But beta and omega males, they baby women.' Oh to be a sigma. Philip Marlowe is sigma. So is Mr Darcy. So is my wife, apparently. 'You're so sigma,' a younger colleague told her at work the other day when, during a crisis, she did not freak out. 'You get everyone to do what you want without even saying it.' Dina and Mel say that there are also 'Masons': a name, a profession and apparently, a whole class of teenaged boys. 'It's like, a genre,' says Mel. 'They have fluffy hair and the ice-cream shorts and they say they're obsessed with God but they hate on women all the time.' I run all this past a few other experts. 'Mason is like a stereotypical white boy,' says Mira, an elder stateswoman of the Gen Alphas at 15. 'They talk about God but they also tend to be super-homophobic and transphobic and all that stuff.' Use these words ironically, says Nora, 15, who feels that she is Gen Z. 'I know plenty of people who don't, but you're like, 'OK, you're kind of braindead.'' I call a 12-year-old in France. 'If someone calls you a sigma, it's because you have lots of aura,' she says. 'Sigmas have the big jawline and the aura points and everything.' Wait, this is in France, too? 'Yeah, yeah,' she says. 'They say, 'Points d'aura.'' She throws in a few French ones while she's on the line. ' Wesh for 'yo', grave for yeah, totally, gênance for embarrassing, and if something is really gênance and rubbish you can say éclaté au sol,' she says. 'The translation is 'exploded to the floor'.' Sometimes, for emphasis, she says: éclaté au troisième sous-sol. 'Like, it's exploded to the third underground floor. The one I use the most is, 'It's exploded to the basement of your grandma.''
Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Think you know Gen Z slang? Gen Alpha has a whole new language
W hat is the meaning of six-seven? This is the question of the hour, asked in countless Google searches by people trying to decipher the sayings of Gen Alpha, the generation born after 2010. I could Google it too, but you can't trust the engine these days. Better to make like an etymological Philip Marlowe and collar a few Alphas to see if they will talk. Then see if you can understand it. There are several in my house. 'What does sixty-seven mean?' I ask them. They have no idea but think it might be rude. I think the same thing. There's a Martin Amis novel where a teenager asks a girl for a sixty-eight. 'You do me and I owe you one,' he says. I guess it's something like that.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
Does it matter that Britons are reading less than ever before?
The last time 33-year-old Barney Iley lost himself in a book was in 2017, when he read Middlemarch by George Eliot. 'It blew my brains out,' he says, recalling the 'gratifying' time spent reading what Martin Amis once called the greatest-ever British novel. But that was eight years ago. 'I don't do that now – read books,' he adds. 'Now I put reading on a pedestal. Reading a book would be a magnificent achievement. It used to be that the equivalent of reading a book would be a stroll; now it's a marathon. That's tragic.' What Iley describes is the loss of reading as a leisure pursuit – either as something fun, like watching a film, or something that's good for you, like going to the gym. His reading brain is 'like a muscle that needs exercising', he says, adding that now, 'if it had a body, it would be this incredibly unfit, overweight person'. Iley is far from alone. New research puts him among the 27 million or so adults in the UK who say they do not regularly read by choice; 47 per cent of adults, according to The Reading Agency charity. Here, 'reading' could include anything from online journalism and books, to e-books, audiobooks, graphic novels and social media posts. The charity's latest snapshot of the state of adult reading shows that those aged 16 to 24 years old are the least engaged with reading, with 61 per cent identifying as either lapsed readers or non-readers (those who do not read regularly and never have), which was the highest of any age group. Men are more likely than women to avoid reading, with 15 per cent of male respondents identifying as 'non-readers' compared with 10 per cent of women. Stu Hennigan, an author and senior librarian with Leeds Libraries, says: 'This is a complex issue, but the main practical factors are time and access.' Hennigan has watched library provision wither since the start of austerity in 2010. He continues, 'It's easier to zone out passively consuming entertainment through a screen via binge-watching a series, for example, than actively trying to engage a frazzled brain with a book.' On paper, Iley, an Oxford University English literature graduate, is someone who should be able to manage the odd novel. Indeed, for most of his 20s, reading was something Iley, who lives in London and works in political communications, enjoyed as a 'leisure activity with self-improving overtones'. He adds: 'Reading was something I would do for pleasure.' That qualifier – 'for pleasure' – is the key here. We're not talking about the ability to read and write – any number of apps from Speechify to NaturalReader can help with that – but rather reading to inform and entertain oneself, which is something that barely a quarter of adults are doing daily, according to The Reading Agency. A separate YouGov survey is bleaker still, finding that 40 per cent of Britons haven't read or listened to a single book in the past 12 months. 'Use it or lose it' Nick Burgess is a 50-year-old corporate lawyer who read 'prodigiously' as a child. 'I used to pick up a book, and then someone would tap on my shoulder a few hours later. That is gone. It's as if someone has taken away a basic skill that I had,' he says. While it's easy to blame smartphone scrolling, 'you make time for things that are important,' says Burgess. He continues: 'Previously, books were as important to me as sport, eating and other things I enjoyed. I don't think this is a time-management problem.' Every attempt to kickstart his reading routine – from picking easy, short, universally acclaimed books to old favourites such as James Clavell's Shogun – fails, and he can't explain why. Researching this crisis in reading, I have spent months interviewing dozens of librarians, academics, publishing executives, neuroscientists and futurists. I wanted to know if it even matters if fewer people – at every age, from children to boomers – revel in the written word. After all, stories come in many forms, from video games such as The Legend of Zelda, which give players narrative powers, to bite-sized 'minisodes' featuring the animated dog Bluey. As a professional literary critic, who lives in a house with enough books to start a library, I'll admit I am biased. I know it sounds as if I think I'm better than everyone else because I read. But what if non-readers are missing out on more than just another way to pass the time? 'There is a maxim in neuroscience: use it or lose it,' says Maryanne Wolf, the author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Our brains were not innately programmed to read – reading is a learnt skill, she tells me. 'When you do not employ those processes, they atrophy.' Reading changes neural plasticity in the brain, which in turn helps to build 'cognitive reserve', says Christelle Langley, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. She cites one study from 2011 that found that reading enlarges the hippocampus region, which is important for learning and memory and one of the first to show neuropathological changes caused by Alzheimer's disease. 'It is possible that by not reading we are more susceptible to the changes of decline in ageing,' she warns. You might argue that functional, digital reading – emails and social media posts – still counts. One study in the US found the average person consumes about 34 gigabytes across varied devices each day, or up to 100,000 words a day. But this just isn't the same. Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, says: 'The data suggest if you stop reading complex books [of more than 100 pages], you also lose out on digital literacy. 'That's the interesting part of the story. If your literacy declines, you become a more passive consumer of whatever [something like] ChatGPT tells you. You're not reflecting on it. You're not looking at different aspects of the narrative. That's the bigger risk,' he adds. Wolf goes farther, arguing that the decline in reading has societal implications. 'We will no longer have the beauty of what reading can give us: the empathy of understanding others in a way that is unique to reading. This will [affect] how we view others in society. It will make us close down to being critically analytic, which has ramifications for our democracy.' She distinguishes between non-fiction and fiction, with the latter appearing to increase our capacity for fellow feeling. 'Books are engines for empathy, they build imagination, and they provide respite from a busy world for young minds and adult minds,' says Joanna Prior, the chief executive of Pan Macmillan, Britain's fourth-biggest publisher – as well she might, but her argument is convincing. 'You're not being told what to think, not being given the image fully formed,' she continues. 'You have an active part to play in absorbing the information and telling the story. That is, I think, a very precious part of your development as a human being. I don't think any other art form quite delivers that.' 'Boys don't get fiction after a certain age' I'd never thought about reading this way. It was something I grew up doing to fill time – it was the 1980s, after all. Even now I still find reading at night the best way to fall asleep, a habit I've passed on to my children. Anthony Horowitz, who has spent nearly five decades writing novels for almost every age group, understands my somnolent passion. 'Reading a book is an act of enormous creativity, very much on a par with writing itself,' he says, 'When reading, you are doing something quite miraculous: you are taking hieroglyphics, squiggles on a page, turning them into words, words into sentences. You are seeing worlds and peopling those worlds with characters and listening to them speak.' Horowitz's Alex Rider teenage spy series got children such as my friend's son, Billy, churning through novels in primary school, only for him to abandon the habit as adolescence took hold. 'I haven't got time,' is Billy's succinct explanation. His mother responds: 'What that translates to is 'I don't make the time' in between school, Xbox, sport and, let's face it, the mobile phone, with Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube and sports coverage.' Billy is far from alone. Another mother tells me: 'I have three teenage sons and have not seen them pick up a book since the age of 12. One even got a 7 in GCSE English Literature, despite not reading any of the set texts. Boys don't seem to 'get' fiction after a certain age. Is the link just b----y phones?' New figures from the National Literacy Trust released in June reveal that fewer children enjoy reading in their free time than at any time since the charity started collecting data in 2005. Just one in three children and young people aged eight to 18 reported enjoying reading 'very much' or 'quite a lot' in 2025, which at 32.7 per cent is almost 2 percentage points lower than the previous year. Compared with 2005, the drop is far sharper, with 36 per cent fewer children and young people now saying they enjoy reading in their free time. Meanwhile, the number of eight to 18-year-olds who report reading something in their free time every day has halved in the past two decades, from 38.1 per cent to 18.7 per cent. This applies even to some English A-level students. 'They do not seem to like reading, and I often get the impression they haven't read the texts fully,' one secondary school English teacher tells me. 'The first thing they look at is how many pages a novel has, coupled with a groan.' The situation continues for university-age students. One recent English literature graduate from Newcastle University admits to resorting to AI overviews to cope with her two Victorian modules. 'It's nuts,' she says, 'I'd be sitting in seminars and no one wanted to start speaking – because no one had read the book.' The worry is that teenagers who don't like books are more likely to become adults who don't like books. I would argue they simply haven't found the right title, but not everyone wants to hear that. Often, I can't even tell my own daughter what I think she might enjoy next (Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, for the record). 'Some people just don't understand that reading is for them, I think,' Ann Cleeves, the Whitley Bay-based author behind the popular ITV drama Vera, tells me. 'It's a class thing. If you've been to school, and you've been put off school because you haven't enjoyed it, you leave and might find libraries intimidating.' A charity Cleeves has founded locally, Reading for Wellbeing, is attempting to change that via 'lots and lots' of book groups in the North East. It doesn't judge its readers' tastes, whether that's erotic fiction because someone enjoyed EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey or Toshikazu Kawaguchi's popular Before the Coffee Gets Cold series. 'Our philosophy is if you're having a good time with a book, then it's a good book,' says Cleeves. It is advice that more schools ought to follow, I realise after talking to Sam Smith, a secondary school librarian at St Mary's Catholic School in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. Changing the perception of reading from 'being a chore to being fun' is key, he says. In his library, anything goes, from romance and dark fantasy ('not necessarily a problem as long as it's for their age range') to plenty of football-related material, including unsold Premier League programmes, his top tip for reluctant readers. Making something fun is often as easy as doing it with fun people, which is why book clubs remain a phenomenon. Data from event listing companies such as Meetup and Eventbrite point to a boom in book-based gatherings. I can vouch for loving the regular evenings I spend with three friends talking about what we've read – although we call it 'friends with books' rather than a book club. Lucas Oakeley, a debut novelist from south London, runs a monthly men-only gathering, which meets in the foyer of London's National Theatre. 'Book clubs tend to be majority women. We've found fiction is a great way to talk about the world; people open up a lot,' he says. John Boyne's Earth, about a sexual assault case in the football world, was the last pick; other choices have ranged from Percival Everett's The Trees to Jilly Cooper's Imogen. 'Half the people come because they want to get back into reading. Life is hard, life is fast: a book club gives you a reason to set aside the time,' he adds. The shift to audio The demise of reading, however, is a greater cultural shift than any number of ad-hoc meet-ups can fix. 'There is an intergenerational challenge which seems to be growing all the time,' says Teresa Cremin, a professor of education at The Open University. 'We are not just talking about a decline with kids but with adults, too. That's serious, because it means we are shifting as humans,' says Cremin, citing figures from the 2024 Reading Agency report that showed nearly one quarter of people aged 16 to 24 have never seen themselves as readers. 'We are the reading role models for our young. If a quarter of potential parents don't have that sense of identity as a reader, that will create problems for their children,' she adds. Audiobooks are one obvious solution; according to the Publishers Association, UK downloads increased by 17 per cent between 2022 and 2023. 'The shift to audio is huge. Listening, reading, we are happy with either,' says Prior, pointing out that growth isn't coming at the expense of the overall book market. 'We are getting new people coming to books who weren't reading previously. That is exciting.' Technology, clearly, isn't all bad news. 'We can't think of ourselves in opposition to the phone,' adds Prior, citing the reading communities that exist on TikTok as one screen-based positive. Surprisingly AI might even offer another way back into the book habit. Many people already use Blinkist, a Berlin-based company that has provided 15-minute summaries of hundreds of fiction and non-fiction books, in both text and audio format, since 2021. Just think, you could knock off Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and Charles Dickens's Bleak House while walking the dog. Then again, is this even new? Reader's Digest, the magazine that started as a collection of condensed articles, closed down its UK print edition last year but still offers bite-sized Fiction Favourites. Rohit Talwar is a futurist who advises blue-chip companies. New ways to consume content, possibly via brain implants, are on the way, he says. 'People will have implants, or some other mechanism, digitally downloading information to their brains, including digital forms of stories. If that information is a novel, does that still count as reading if you haven't consumed it with your eyes?' He adds: 'The nature of us reading and engaging with content will change quite significantly again over the next five to 10 years. Virtual and augmented reality will put us in stories in a more immersive way, such as being a character. We will be able to follow the [narrative] from the perspective of different characters, almost as if you are in a live performance.' Regaining the ability to read What we won't get from AI summaries or plot narratives zapped into our hippocampus, says Horowitz, is the 'intellectual growth' that comes from working through passages of text. Young people using digital shortcuts 'are missing out on something which I have always found to be wonderful: intellectual curiosity,' he adds. Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and the author of The Reading Mind, is blunt about cutting corners. 'It's analogous to 'You get what you pay for'. The amount of time you spend thinking about ideas is very important to the duration those ideas will stick in your memory.' Vicki Perrin is the chief executive of The Queen's Reading Room, a charity-cum-book club. She would like to find a reading equivalent of 10,000 steps or eating your five-a-day of fruit and vegetables. 'Why not start with reading a book for five minutes a day?' she suggests. Eight years ago, John Hayes, a 56-year-old employment lawyer, tried something similar to revive his lost reading mojo. 'I felt I was missing out,' he says. 'I wanted greater stillness, away from a screen, so I forced myself to read 10 pages per day – about an average book length per month. 'Now, reading is one of the most enjoyable things I do; an interior, private world away from the maelstrom of family and law. Away from demands. And now, I must get back to my biography of Thomas More, the new one by Joanne Paul…'
Irish Times
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Using ChatGPT to write an essay is a bit like using a forklift to lift weights
A couple of weeks back, I did a public event in a bookshop, for which I and two other writers were each required to pick three beloved books, and to talk about each of them for five minutes or so. Choosing the books I wanted to talk about proved an interesting challenge, because although I can easily think of any number of books I have read and loved, it is considerably less easy to think of books I have not only read and loved but can also remember well enough to talk to an audience about for five minutes. A major criterion for the books I chose, I have to admit, was that I knew them well enough to not have to re-read them for the event. I felt that I had in some sense internalised these books, in a way that could not be said for very many others I had read. In the few days afterwards, I began to wonder why it was that I remembered certain books so well, and others barely at all. It is not uncommon for me to read and greatly enjoy a book and then, within a year or two, remember next to nothing about it other than, perhaps, that I once read and greatly enjoyed it. But there are books that, many years after reading them, have remained a presence in my life. And these books – the ones that seem to belong to some small and select psychic library, whose volumes collectively account for my basic sense of myself as a literate person – are, I realised, the books that I have written about. The Information, Martin Amis 's comedy of thwarted literary ambition and writerly jealousy, features a protagonist whose career as a novelist has devolved into ceaseless book reviewing – a job in which he takes no real pride, but which he nonetheless does very well. 'When he reviewed a book,' writes Amis, 'it stayed reviewed.' It's a line that comes to mind when I think about this subject. It is, for me, the act of writing about a book that causes it to stay read. And a disproportionate number of the books that have stayed read for me are ones that I wrote about at university. I read Ulysses and wrote an essay about it; the essay, I can assure you, was not very good, but the book stayed more or less read. I read and wrote about the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, and those stories stayed read. I read and wrote about Edgar Allen Poe, and Poe has stayed read. The writing of those essays was in some sense inseparable from the depth and durability of the reading. READ MORE [ Zuckerberg saying AI will cure loneliness is like big tobacco suggesting cigarettes can treat cancer Opens in new window ] I am saying all of this now because of two facts that seem fairly self-evident: the fact that the writing of essays is a central aspect of an education in the humanities, and the fact that this centrality is increasingly threatened as a result of the widespread use of ChatGPT and other LLM (large language model) technologies. The general feeling among university administrators, if not necessarily among academics as a whole, seems to be that it would be futile to try to stop students using AI in their work. The technology exists, and in the narrow sense of producing a functional piece of writing on a given topic, it's an effective tool, and it's not going anywhere. I've spoken to a few academics in the humanities recently who seem resigned to (though by no means at peace with) the idea that assessing students through essays may no longer be a viable pedagogical approach. No one seems quite sure what will replace essay writing, but it seems likely that something – a greater emphasis on written exams, perhaps, or some form of oral assessment – will have to. I wasn't a particularly industrious student as an undergraduate. I half-assed a lot of my courses, and often didn't do nearly enough reading of supplementary material – works of academic literary criticism and other secondary sources – to give my essays a plausible veneer of academic credibility and rigour. The essays I wrote were not especially good, even by the standards of undergraduate essays. But I realise now that their being good or bad was of secondary importance to the writing of them. The writing of essays seems to me to have two main uses as an educational tool. It is useful as a means of assessing a student – how much they know, how widely and deeply they have read in a subject, and how rigorous and original their thinking on that subject is. The other is both less measurable and more significant: in writing an essay, you find out what you think about a subject; you learn, in some sense, how to think about it. [ AI is already a focus of endless delusion, magical thinking and plain old foolishness ] In a recent study conducted by MIT's Media Lab, three groups of participants, aged 18-39, were asked to write essays using, respectively, ChatGPT, Google's search engine and no technology at all. The brain activity of the participants was measured using EEG. Of the three groups, the ChatGPT users consistently had the lowest level of brain engagement, and 'consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels'. As the study progressed, the group using ChatGPT got steadily lazier with each subsequent essay, often simply copying and pasting the text produced by the LLM, rather than using it as a source for their own work. One way of thinking about this, from an educational perspective, is that writing an essay is to one's intellect as lifting weights is to one's muscles. The point of going to the gym is not to get good at lifting weights; it's to train your body to become stronger. Using ChatGPT to write an essay is a bit like using a forklift to lift weights. The forklift might do a perfectly good job of moving around some heavy iron plates, but you'd be wasting your time. (You would also be causing a serious disruption, and would probably have your gym membership cancelled – and rightly so.) Just as you can't get someone, or something, to work out for you, there is nobody and nothing that can think on your behalf. As with so many of the supposed benefits of so-called artificial intelligence, it's not clear what we're actually gaining. What we stand to lose is so large, and so fundamental, as to be incalculable.
The Advertiser
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
'If I wanted to murder someone, this is what I'd do'
Novels, so I'm told, don't arrive to their authors fully formed, with plots or stories presenting themselves, ready to be jotted down on a whiteboard. A novel arrives to a novelist as an idea, often very simple, but at the same time distinct: the idea will have a certain heft and feel to it. Nabokov described it as a throb. I didn't know any of this, until I read the late novelist Martin Amis writing about how to write fiction. I read this soon after I'd left my job as a journalist after 20 years, and Amis describing Nabokov's throb gave me an idea: I could write my own novel - because I had an idea at least. My idea was simple. A crime had been committed at a big, old boy's boarding school, and a journalist who had grown up at the school 30 years ago, the son of teachers who had lived on the grounds, was sent out to report on the police investigation. That was it. I didn't even know what the crime was. But the idea became my debut novel Black River, published in 2022 by Allen & Unwin. Following Black River, I planned to write another novel, with the same main characters. So a police procedural, based around a NSW Homicide Detective Sergeant and a newspaper journalist. No sweat. Fine. The two characters, who first met in Black River, have now known each other for two years, have formed a bond, and, well, off we go. Except, what I had given myself was running orders - write a police procedural with your cop and your journo - rather than an idea. What to do? I wasn't sure. I rang a forensic pathologist who had been very kind, and very helpful, and very generous with his time and knowledge when I was writing Black River. "I'm writing another book," I said to the pathologist. "What are we going to do?" "I dunno. You're the f---ing novelist," he said. Mmmm. This was unhelpfully true. Then, immediately, he said, and I paraphrase, "Oh, if I wanted to murder someone, and have someone like me not know that I'd done it, this is what I'd do." On the phone, I think I probably sat up a little straighter. Talk about all ears. And he told me what he'd do, to commit a murder, that would stymie a forensic pathologist examining the corpse post-mortem. And that became "my" idea, the bedrock for my second novel Broke Road. (No spoilers, but it involves binding, gagging, the way certain materials might interact with skin.) And it's strange how it worked. How having a bare-bones idea gave me the confidence to start writing the novel, and how everything fanned out from it: place, character, plot, the burgeoning relationship between the cop and the journo. MORE GREAT READS: Because the basic idea of how to kill someone didn't tell me anything else: it didn't tell me who died, or who killed them, or where, or why, or whether anyone else may have been killed in the same manner. That all came later, flowing out from the first throb. Broke Road skits around, geographically, from Canberra to Murrumbateman to Adelaide to Sydney. But its heart lies north of Cessnock, in the lower Hunter Valley, at a fictional flyspeck called Red Creek, in the wine country around Pokolbin. The Hunter had always interested me, starting with its geology: the Triassic cliffs of the ranges, the coal measures laid down, the patches of weathered, volcanic soil that attracted our nation's first vignerons. Coal and wine, both industries the result of what lies beneath - in this case - a Permian swamp. All of which led to the mining town of Cessnock, and the wine district just to its north. What interested me here, was how these two worlds remain so distinct, how Cessnock has stood aloof and refused to re-fashion itself as a centre for the wine tourists. That's where Broke Road is set, between these two communities, neighbours standing apart. With my first novel, I was in my comfort zone, geographically. I was writing about my childhood home - the big old boarding school in the book is a real place, The King's School at North Parramatta, and it's where I grew up, the son of teachers. With Broke Road and the Hunter, I was well out of my depth, and certainly stretching myself. Which is good as a writer, I think (I hope). I fell back on my journalism, and did some research. I twice travelled the Hunter with a journalist friend who knows the region well. We sampled some wares, and he introduced me around. I went back several times on my own. I spoke to locals in Cessnock, winemakers in Pokolbin (and another in Murrumbateman), a forensic investigator and a forensic pathologist in Newcastle, a former homicide detective, a geologist in Maitland, a property developer, a local council manager, a politician, a builder, a ceramics teacher, a urologist, a pilot. The pilot character got cut, but the rest is all in there, threaded through Broke Road's plots and people and sense of place. I hope I've done it all justice, so that, most important of all, readers can enjoy. Novels, so I'm told, don't arrive to their authors fully formed, with plots or stories presenting themselves, ready to be jotted down on a whiteboard. A novel arrives to a novelist as an idea, often very simple, but at the same time distinct: the idea will have a certain heft and feel to it. Nabokov described it as a throb. I didn't know any of this, until I read the late novelist Martin Amis writing about how to write fiction. I read this soon after I'd left my job as a journalist after 20 years, and Amis describing Nabokov's throb gave me an idea: I could write my own novel - because I had an idea at least. My idea was simple. A crime had been committed at a big, old boy's boarding school, and a journalist who had grown up at the school 30 years ago, the son of teachers who had lived on the grounds, was sent out to report on the police investigation. That was it. I didn't even know what the crime was. But the idea became my debut novel Black River, published in 2022 by Allen & Unwin. Following Black River, I planned to write another novel, with the same main characters. So a police procedural, based around a NSW Homicide Detective Sergeant and a newspaper journalist. No sweat. Fine. The two characters, who first met in Black River, have now known each other for two years, have formed a bond, and, well, off we go. Except, what I had given myself was running orders - write a police procedural with your cop and your journo - rather than an idea. What to do? I wasn't sure. I rang a forensic pathologist who had been very kind, and very helpful, and very generous with his time and knowledge when I was writing Black River. "I'm writing another book," I said to the pathologist. "What are we going to do?" "I dunno. You're the f---ing novelist," he said. Mmmm. This was unhelpfully true. Then, immediately, he said, and I paraphrase, "Oh, if I wanted to murder someone, and have someone like me not know that I'd done it, this is what I'd do." On the phone, I think I probably sat up a little straighter. Talk about all ears. And he told me what he'd do, to commit a murder, that would stymie a forensic pathologist examining the corpse post-mortem. And that became "my" idea, the bedrock for my second novel Broke Road. (No spoilers, but it involves binding, gagging, the way certain materials might interact with skin.) And it's strange how it worked. How having a bare-bones idea gave me the confidence to start writing the novel, and how everything fanned out from it: place, character, plot, the burgeoning relationship between the cop and the journo. MORE GREAT READS: Because the basic idea of how to kill someone didn't tell me anything else: it didn't tell me who died, or who killed them, or where, or why, or whether anyone else may have been killed in the same manner. That all came later, flowing out from the first throb. Broke Road skits around, geographically, from Canberra to Murrumbateman to Adelaide to Sydney. But its heart lies north of Cessnock, in the lower Hunter Valley, at a fictional flyspeck called Red Creek, in the wine country around Pokolbin. The Hunter had always interested me, starting with its geology: the Triassic cliffs of the ranges, the coal measures laid down, the patches of weathered, volcanic soil that attracted our nation's first vignerons. Coal and wine, both industries the result of what lies beneath - in this case - a Permian swamp. All of which led to the mining town of Cessnock, and the wine district just to its north. What interested me here, was how these two worlds remain so distinct, how Cessnock has stood aloof and refused to re-fashion itself as a centre for the wine tourists. That's where Broke Road is set, between these two communities, neighbours standing apart. With my first novel, I was in my comfort zone, geographically. I was writing about my childhood home - the big old boarding school in the book is a real place, The King's School at North Parramatta, and it's where I grew up, the son of teachers. With Broke Road and the Hunter, I was well out of my depth, and certainly stretching myself. Which is good as a writer, I think (I hope). I fell back on my journalism, and did some research. I twice travelled the Hunter with a journalist friend who knows the region well. We sampled some wares, and he introduced me around. I went back several times on my own. I spoke to locals in Cessnock, winemakers in Pokolbin (and another in Murrumbateman), a forensic investigator and a forensic pathologist in Newcastle, a former homicide detective, a geologist in Maitland, a property developer, a local council manager, a politician, a builder, a ceramics teacher, a urologist, a pilot. The pilot character got cut, but the rest is all in there, threaded through Broke Road's plots and people and sense of place. I hope I've done it all justice, so that, most important of all, readers can enjoy. Novels, so I'm told, don't arrive to their authors fully formed, with plots or stories presenting themselves, ready to be jotted down on a whiteboard. A novel arrives to a novelist as an idea, often very simple, but at the same time distinct: the idea will have a certain heft and feel to it. Nabokov described it as a throb. I didn't know any of this, until I read the late novelist Martin Amis writing about how to write fiction. I read this soon after I'd left my job as a journalist after 20 years, and Amis describing Nabokov's throb gave me an idea: I could write my own novel - because I had an idea at least. My idea was simple. A crime had been committed at a big, old boy's boarding school, and a journalist who had grown up at the school 30 years ago, the son of teachers who had lived on the grounds, was sent out to report on the police investigation. That was it. I didn't even know what the crime was. But the idea became my debut novel Black River, published in 2022 by Allen & Unwin. Following Black River, I planned to write another novel, with the same main characters. So a police procedural, based around a NSW Homicide Detective Sergeant and a newspaper journalist. No sweat. Fine. The two characters, who first met in Black River, have now known each other for two years, have formed a bond, and, well, off we go. Except, what I had given myself was running orders - write a police procedural with your cop and your journo - rather than an idea. What to do? I wasn't sure. I rang a forensic pathologist who had been very kind, and very helpful, and very generous with his time and knowledge when I was writing Black River. "I'm writing another book," I said to the pathologist. "What are we going to do?" "I dunno. You're the f---ing novelist," he said. Mmmm. This was unhelpfully true. Then, immediately, he said, and I paraphrase, "Oh, if I wanted to murder someone, and have someone like me not know that I'd done it, this is what I'd do." On the phone, I think I probably sat up a little straighter. Talk about all ears. And he told me what he'd do, to commit a murder, that would stymie a forensic pathologist examining the corpse post-mortem. And that became "my" idea, the bedrock for my second novel Broke Road. (No spoilers, but it involves binding, gagging, the way certain materials might interact with skin.) And it's strange how it worked. How having a bare-bones idea gave me the confidence to start writing the novel, and how everything fanned out from it: place, character, plot, the burgeoning relationship between the cop and the journo. MORE GREAT READS: Because the basic idea of how to kill someone didn't tell me anything else: it didn't tell me who died, or who killed them, or where, or why, or whether anyone else may have been killed in the same manner. That all came later, flowing out from the first throb. Broke Road skits around, geographically, from Canberra to Murrumbateman to Adelaide to Sydney. But its heart lies north of Cessnock, in the lower Hunter Valley, at a fictional flyspeck called Red Creek, in the wine country around Pokolbin. The Hunter had always interested me, starting with its geology: the Triassic cliffs of the ranges, the coal measures laid down, the patches of weathered, volcanic soil that attracted our nation's first vignerons. Coal and wine, both industries the result of what lies beneath - in this case - a Permian swamp. All of which led to the mining town of Cessnock, and the wine district just to its north. What interested me here, was how these two worlds remain so distinct, how Cessnock has stood aloof and refused to re-fashion itself as a centre for the wine tourists. That's where Broke Road is set, between these two communities, neighbours standing apart. With my first novel, I was in my comfort zone, geographically. I was writing about my childhood home - the big old boarding school in the book is a real place, The King's School at North Parramatta, and it's where I grew up, the son of teachers. With Broke Road and the Hunter, I was well out of my depth, and certainly stretching myself. Which is good as a writer, I think (I hope). I fell back on my journalism, and did some research. I twice travelled the Hunter with a journalist friend who knows the region well. We sampled some wares, and he introduced me around. I went back several times on my own. I spoke to locals in Cessnock, winemakers in Pokolbin (and another in Murrumbateman), a forensic investigator and a forensic pathologist in Newcastle, a former homicide detective, a geologist in Maitland, a property developer, a local council manager, a politician, a builder, a ceramics teacher, a urologist, a pilot. The pilot character got cut, but the rest is all in there, threaded through Broke Road's plots and people and sense of place. I hope I've done it all justice, so that, most important of all, readers can enjoy. Novels, so I'm told, don't arrive to their authors fully formed, with plots or stories presenting themselves, ready to be jotted down on a whiteboard. A novel arrives to a novelist as an idea, often very simple, but at the same time distinct: the idea will have a certain heft and feel to it. Nabokov described it as a throb. I didn't know any of this, until I read the late novelist Martin Amis writing about how to write fiction. I read this soon after I'd left my job as a journalist after 20 years, and Amis describing Nabokov's throb gave me an idea: I could write my own novel - because I had an idea at least. My idea was simple. A crime had been committed at a big, old boy's boarding school, and a journalist who had grown up at the school 30 years ago, the son of teachers who had lived on the grounds, was sent out to report on the police investigation. That was it. I didn't even know what the crime was. But the idea became my debut novel Black River, published in 2022 by Allen & Unwin. Following Black River, I planned to write another novel, with the same main characters. So a police procedural, based around a NSW Homicide Detective Sergeant and a newspaper journalist. No sweat. Fine. The two characters, who first met in Black River, have now known each other for two years, have formed a bond, and, well, off we go. Except, what I had given myself was running orders - write a police procedural with your cop and your journo - rather than an idea. What to do? I wasn't sure. I rang a forensic pathologist who had been very kind, and very helpful, and very generous with his time and knowledge when I was writing Black River. "I'm writing another book," I said to the pathologist. "What are we going to do?" "I dunno. You're the f---ing novelist," he said. Mmmm. This was unhelpfully true. Then, immediately, he said, and I paraphrase, "Oh, if I wanted to murder someone, and have someone like me not know that I'd done it, this is what I'd do." On the phone, I think I probably sat up a little straighter. Talk about all ears. And he told me what he'd do, to commit a murder, that would stymie a forensic pathologist examining the corpse post-mortem. And that became "my" idea, the bedrock for my second novel Broke Road. (No spoilers, but it involves binding, gagging, the way certain materials might interact with skin.) And it's strange how it worked. How having a bare-bones idea gave me the confidence to start writing the novel, and how everything fanned out from it: place, character, plot, the burgeoning relationship between the cop and the journo. MORE GREAT READS: Because the basic idea of how to kill someone didn't tell me anything else: it didn't tell me who died, or who killed them, or where, or why, or whether anyone else may have been killed in the same manner. That all came later, flowing out from the first throb. Broke Road skits around, geographically, from Canberra to Murrumbateman to Adelaide to Sydney. But its heart lies north of Cessnock, in the lower Hunter Valley, at a fictional flyspeck called Red Creek, in the wine country around Pokolbin. The Hunter had always interested me, starting with its geology: the Triassic cliffs of the ranges, the coal measures laid down, the patches of weathered, volcanic soil that attracted our nation's first vignerons. Coal and wine, both industries the result of what lies beneath - in this case - a Permian swamp. All of which led to the mining town of Cessnock, and the wine district just to its north. What interested me here, was how these two worlds remain so distinct, how Cessnock has stood aloof and refused to re-fashion itself as a centre for the wine tourists. That's where Broke Road is set, between these two communities, neighbours standing apart. With my first novel, I was in my comfort zone, geographically. I was writing about my childhood home - the big old boarding school in the book is a real place, The King's School at North Parramatta, and it's where I grew up, the son of teachers. With Broke Road and the Hunter, I was well out of my depth, and certainly stretching myself. Which is good as a writer, I think (I hope). I fell back on my journalism, and did some research. I twice travelled the Hunter with a journalist friend who knows the region well. We sampled some wares, and he introduced me around. I went back several times on my own. I spoke to locals in Cessnock, winemakers in Pokolbin (and another in Murrumbateman), a forensic investigator and a forensic pathologist in Newcastle, a former homicide detective, a geologist in Maitland, a property developer, a local council manager, a politician, a builder, a ceramics teacher, a urologist, a pilot. The pilot character got cut, but the rest is all in there, threaded through Broke Road's plots and people and sense of place. I hope I've done it all justice, so that, most important of all, readers can enjoy.
