Fiction is for Humans

A brief note from your editor

The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania — Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1849) Public Domain.

I was 7 years old when the The Fellowship of the Ring was released to cinema. My Dad took me to see it.

After the credits rolled and I sat in stricken rapture at the immensity of what I’d just witnessed, I asked my father when we could see the next one. A year; an incomprehensible amount of time to me at that age. It might as well have been forever.

But, as I was to learn, time has a funny way of catching up with you; even when you’re 7-going-on-8. The date rolled around all the quicker for having forgotten I was even waiting for it, and soon my father and I were back in our seats, waiting for The Two Towers to begin.

Though I was too young to comprehend the concept of a year, and almost certainly too young to get to grips with the full complexity of Tolkien’s plot, my child-self was still old enough to realise something important had happened when Samwise Gamgee gave his speech.

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you.”

Now that I’m older, it strikes me as no coincidence that the best articulation of the power of stories I’ve ever heard should come from a character within one.

This is why it’s been such a privilege to host this community of story-lovers, both readers and writers alike. Every week for the last 30 weeks, we’ve hosted a different writer, each reflecting on a book that helped shape who they are today.

We’ve featured everyone from published authors to first-time essayists, from the Substack-checkmarked to those just starting out. Whether they wrote of canonical works or academic textbooks, volumes of poetry or children’s fairytales, each writer, in sharing their own story of literature’s power, has shared a part of their innermost selves. I thank them for that.

What’s more, it’s been doubly pleasing to hear that the guest features have resulted in subscriber growth for every single writer who has been kind enough to share that information with me. Tom Fish reported a boost of nearly 50 new subscribers to his substack in just a few hours of his guest post going live.

This ability to cast a light on the excellent writing of other indie substacks, particularly those just starting to build out their audiences, has been an incredibly heartening and unexpected pleasure of this project. We’ve since begun offering more ways to get the community writing in front of our audience of nearly 2,500 readers: the monthly roundups; the weekly recommendation rotations; the community chat; and, my favourite of them all, the weekly features of short story fiction.

We’ve now hosted 15 short stories, all written by our talented BTMU subscribers. However, we have since exhausted our initial tranche of submissions — we’re looking for more! Whether you’ve submitted a story here before, or will do so for the first time, I’d love to read your submission. You can submit at the bottom of this link. There is no limit on the number of fiction pieces you can submit.

While the opportunity for the ordinary BTMU guest features are and will always remain open to everyone—regardless of whether you’re a free subscriber, paid subscriber, or not even a subscriber at all—the other four opportunities to get your writing in front of our readers are for paying subscribers only.

And I have good news for those tempted to join the ranks of paying subscribers! It occurred to me the other day that we’ve never had a sale on BTMU subscriptions, which seems an oversight we should rectify. With that in mind, paid subscriptions to BTMU will be 20% off for the next 30 days.

So, if you’d like your writing to feature in our monthly Subscriber Writing Roundup, to share your short-story fiction with our audience, to be Recommended by The Books That Made Us, and to join our community chat, then I invite you to become a paying subscriber today.