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Drawing the wrong lessons

The market for books is weirdly open and weirdly opaque, both at the same time.

It’s open in the sense that you can walk into a bookshop and see which books are being heavily promoted (front of store, price discounted), which books are being merely sold (round the side of the store, spines out), and which books – too often your own – aren’t being sold at all.

You can also pick up any book to get a rough measure as to critical acclaim and any sales records the book may have. On Amazon, you can go one better and get an actual sales rank, brought up to date every hour.

It’s really easy to get captured by these things. “So-and-So’s Book X is doing really well, so I should make mine more like that.” “Famous Author Y always writes along these particular lines, so I should do the same.”

But those conclusions are dangerous and often completely misleading. So, to mention just a few issues:

A book may have pride of place on a bookstore’s sales table, simply because a publisher has paid for it to be there. The book may be selling badly and be actively loss-making and be generating despondent “where did we go wrong?” type meetings at the publisher.
A book may become a bestseller, simply because enough supermarkets have bought and then discounted the title. Those supermarkets have the sales power to create a bestseller – footfall is the single most potent sales tool there is – but the retail buyers making the acquisition probably never read the book before buying it. So, what you’re looking at is not much more than a random effect. (That said, you do probably need to have sold your novel to a Big 5 house, via an agent, even to place a stake at that particular roulette table – so in that sense, it’s very not random.)
Amazon sales rankings are hugely responsive to quite small changes in sales. So, for a book to gain or lose 10,000 places in a day is common. For books with lower sales, a shift of 100,000 places may well signify extremely little in practice.
Critical acclaim can be carefully manufactured by a publisher. That and sales outcomes are two very different things and in most cases publishers will only care about the latter. And critical comments are very carefully culled. An ambivalent piece with a single strikingly positive phrase will be clipped down to that phrase alone. Additionally, by the time a consensus builds, critics are nervous to do their job. So, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro is obviously a terrific novelist… but it’s also obvious that his Dark Ages novel, The Buried Giant, is kinda awful. No one ever dared say so, though.
A US bestseller can flunk in the UK and vice versa. People often try to analyse what it is about US tastes that differ so much from UK tastes – but a big point here is that outcomes in traditional publishing have a large component of pure, random luck. I’d say a really strong title matters. And no book becomes a lasting bestseller unless it has some genuine merit. But plenty of good books flunk. If your title is bought by the US and the UK, then great: you get a seat at both roulette tables. But the spins are separate and outcomes are only weakly correlated.
A book that does amazingly well online may never find any meaningful print sales at all. I can think of a UK crime author whose digital sales (via a digital publisher) ran very quickly into seven figures. A print deal soon followed, and it was assumed at the time of signing that a big print bestseller was the natural outcome. But it wasn’t. The print book did OK, but it was nothing like the runaway success of the digital one.
A famous author doing very well at his/her game may not mean anything at all about whether that particular market is a good one for you. So, let’s say that you notice a new Dan Brown or John Grisham novel making headlines and grabbing sales slots. You might think that producing weirdly written novels about secret codes is a good game to get into – or that the world badly needs another legal thriller. But the point is that DB / JG have now created their own genres: people who like Dan Brown / John Grisham books. The JG reader may well read no other legal thrillers and certainly not be desperate to find new authors in that niche. You essentially can’t tell anything at all from the current sales history of more established authors.

So, what do you do? How are you meant to navigate?

One piece of advice – widely offered – is just to write to please yourself. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s foolish. Yes, you need to please yourself. And yes, you need to find joy and satisfaction and meaning in what you write. But you also need to make sure that there’s a market for what you write. Opaque as the books market is, you do still need to interrogate it for whatever lessons you can learn.

Here are some rules which are, I think, dependable.

Look at recent debuts. The books that are making their debuts today are books that were acquired by publishers (roughly) 12-18 months ago. Without being a literary agent, you can’t know much about more recent market activity, so those debuts are your best bet. Don’t just look at the promotional chatter about those books. Try, if you can, to find any data on whether the books are considered to have sold well. If a publisher bought a book 15 months ago and is making good money from it today, it’ll want another book in the same broad genre.

Know your genre. The best – really, the only – way to understand movements in the market for your genre is to participate fully in that genre, as reader. To consider the whole romantasy genre, for instance – to understand what’s ‘current’ there – means reading widely in the genre. I’m not a big fan of slutty faeries, so my guess as to what to write in that genre would offer absolutely nothing by way of insight. But if you read what others are reading, then the book you want to read next is probably the one you want to write. You’ve effectively turned yourself into the Ideal Reader for your novel.

Don’t just think about your genre. If psych thrillers are doing really well commercially, then your historical espionage novel with an unreliable narrator fits into the same broad cultural trend.

So read widely. Pay particular attention to recent successful debuts. Read in your genre and out of it. Write what you love – and what there’s a market for.

And?

And don’t be seduced by shiny chatter and sales blurbs. Those things deceive as often as they inform – and actually, probably, a lot more often.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The big random thumb

OK, I don’t want to know if you have a shiny opening to your book, or if your battle scene is great. This week we’re going to do the Big Random Thumb. Basically: does your book look strong enough when we just search out a perfectly average passage? Is there something there to convince a reader that you’re worth trusting?

Give me page 42 from your manuscript. If you want to jiggle the start a little bit in order to find a chunk that has some coherence out-of-context, then fine. But not much jiggling – the less, the better. Page 41 or 43, if you don’t want to start at page 42.

250 words total, please. As usual, title, genre, and a line or two of explanation. I’ll pop my own page 42 sample up on Townhouse too, so you can take a look at what the Big Random Thumb finds with me.

When you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Til soon.

Harry

Boy on Ferris wheel

(This is not an opening; this is a parenthesis.

You may skip it, if you wish – you may metaphorically flip the page – you may prefer your cup of cocoa and your comfortable slippers – but,

You skippers, flippers and people in slippers,

You may CRIPPLE your chances of novel-writing GLORY if you don’t grab the LAST CHANCE to take out an annual Premium Membership at a stonking 30% off.

I suggest that you:

take out the membership,
commit to taking at least 3 lessons of any one of our Premium Membership (PM) courses (choose whatever feels most timely to you now), then
Relish in how the membership is worth your investment.

And with that goodly message resounding in your head –

I now declare this parenthesis over.)

Good.

The idea for this email was sparked by the opening to a YA novel that was on Townhouse this last week.

The central image was kind of amazing.

An end of season fairground. A cold day, heading into sunset. A Ferris wheel not turning because of a broken gondola.

And – a boy sent up to climb the wheel, to fix the broken gondola strut.

And – that boy, walking in cheap trainers on the loft of that wheel, for a moment silhouetted against that sunsetting London sky.

Good, huh? I mean, that image is so striking, you could remember it for a long time. It would be hard to put that book down in a bookstore. It’s hard not to think of the boy, on that wheel, with his mallet for thumping gondola struts.

But (to my mind and other people may differ), that scene wasn’t quite flowing right. Now, to be fair, that’s pretty standard and is to be expected. The whole point of Townhouse is to present work that isn’t ready in order to get it ready.

And two points struck me in particular. The first is that we, as writers, have very long to do lists, especially when we’re less experienced, and especially when we’re opening a novel.

So, just from the top of my head, we have to:

Establish location
Establish character
Get some kind of story questions moving
Including (probably) a little bit of razzle-dazzle to convince the prospective reader that they have to stick around.
Write decently
Paint quick descriptions of any other characters who are kicking around. (The scene in question had two.)
Deliver atmosphere
Avoid sloppy language
Delete redundant language
Offer some kind of thematic resonance
And so on.

That’s a lot. And I think that, often and not just with opening pages, writers are so busy trying to deliver This, That and the Other, that they lose sight of the little bit of magic that brought them to this scene in the first place.

And – we have a boy walking the arch of a Ferris wheel against a crimson London sky.

And – that boy is feeling the air move and considering the slipperiness of the wet metal beneath his trainers as he walks that curve.

That’s the magic. Everything else has to bend to that.

So, for example, we do need to know about the colour of the skyline, because that’s part of the drama. We don’t need to know where the fairground will fold itself away for winter.

We do need to know about the fair-owner yelling up at the kid, because he’s clearly part of the scene, but he should be pushed away and (for now) be made secondary. And so on.

Find the magic and prioritise it.

Not just with openings, but everywhere. What’s the magic? Is it central to the scene? If not, make it central.

And on this particular occasion, there was a further difficulty. We have two images and they’re both amazing:

A boy on a Ferris wheel, silhouetted against a crimson London sky
That boy feeling what it’s like to be forty feet off the ground and with the evening air moving around him.

But the first of those images is a distance shot. We’re a long way from the boy’s inner thoughts. The second of those images is the exact opposite: it’s all about the boy’s inner thoughts. The two camera angles are basically incompatible, and we want them both.

The solution here is about starting distance and moving steadily in. From silhouette view, to some closer-range view. (e.g.: “The boy had a rucksack of tools, on his shoulder, but he wore it lightly, as though unconcerned.”) Here, we start to move from general silhouette, to closer-up detail, but still nothing about the boy’s inner world. Then you’d shift to something closer still. (“He wore cheap trainers, one dirty white lace was already starting to come undone.”) Then you can reveal something of his inner world, and then, if you want, the boy can actually take over the narrative himself. (“It was high, and it was dangerous, but it was beautiful and it was lovely.” – that’s now the boy thinking, not the narrator speaking.)

So that’s basically the secret. Move from out to in, but do it gradually, so the shock doesn’t seem abrupt.

If you want one other tip, then give proper time and space to your touch of magic. You don’t need to rush away. Your reader won’t want you to.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Scene

This week, I want a scene where you have a lovely image or moment that you want to make central and memorable.

What I want is:

Title, genre, a line or two of context.
The magic: a line or two explaining where you think the magic lies in this scene
The scene itself: our usual 250 or so words.

You get extra points if the little bit of magic coheres nicely with your themes and elevator pitch. When you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Got that? You got it, I know you do.

Til soon.

Harry

Forget the cat

So –

I was about to hold forth on Purpose –

Which is a very good topic and one that absolutely no one talks about enough including me –

And I was all nicely settled. Trip to the gym: done. Child to piano exam: done. Dog walk: done. Tea to hand: yes. Dog settled: oh yessity-yes. But –

A noise from the kitchen, as of things being tipped over and nuts being stolen –

Which means that Raf the Squizzel has come in through his squizzel flap and is choosing to steal from us over the hard graft of finding nuts in the rain outside. And –

Raf (or Rafe?) is welcome to his nuts of course, but there is a 0% chance –

And I do mean a big fat zero, no “point anythings” to be seen –

That Dibble will be content to lie next to me and lick his paws when there is squizzeling going on in the next room –

And, what is as much to the point, Raf doesn’t just like the nuts, he likes to run up and down on me, infuriating the dog, and happily jumping around on the keyboard as a way to ensure that my attention is on him not on the damn screen, and if I can hear Raf, he can hear me, and will come a-calling very soon –

But –

You thought this was a story of Doom and Despair – a tale of Failure – but it is not. I snuck my way to the kitchen door –

Ninja-like, you say? A human stealth-weapon –?

Well, maybe so, yes, perhaps there was a touch of the ninjas, but no headband. I don’t look cool in a headband –

And I closed the damn door. Dog, tea and laptop on this side. Nut-stealing squizzel on the other.

Phew. Done. Ready.

So: Purpose.

Why do we write? Why do I? Why do you?

Well, yes, we like it. And yes, we hope to make some readers happy. And maybe if we make enough readers happy, we’ll make some money and get those other things – festival appearances and the like – which seem like part of the picture.

But the book. Your story.

What is its purpose, please? I wonder if there is a single good book anywhere that isn’t importantly purpose-driven.

What do I mean? Well, Philip Pullman wrote His Dark Materials trilogy with an explicit anti-church message. (Or at least, an anti-authority message: PP wants a world where people get to think for themselves, make their own decisions.)

That purpose gave the book a heft that just didn’t come from any number of polar bears or cliff ghasts or even daemons wandering through Oxford colleges.

Any really good book has that heft, I think. It can be massively explicit – as with Philip Pullman or (even more so) with To Kill a Mockingbird, or pretty much everything by Toni Morrison.

It can certainly be personal rather than political. You can’t read The Spy who Came In From the Cold without thinking (rightly) that Le Carre had something big to say about love and betrayal in a time of cold war. And in fact you might think that the cold war was really only a backdrop, or even, in effect, a metaphor for something personal. Perhaps Le Carre would have thought the same way about love and betrayal even if he lived in a world full of hippies throwing flowers at each other.

It can also be ambiguous or very deeply hidden. Does Raymond Chandler have big points to make about his world of 1940s Los Angeles? Well, maybe, but if he does, those points are deeply buried. (I think RC wants to talk about what it is to be good, or even noble, in a modern, urban, capitalist world. But, in RC’s view, the modern world doesn’t really admit notions of nobility, so neither RC nor his narrator can openly address the subject – so all the reader gets, or appears to get, is silence.) Plenty of other books have a very strong sense of purpose, but one so tightly suppressed that it’s never really disclosed. Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn would be the poster-child for not talking about its subject.

But what does all this mean for you?

I don’t think you can glue purpose onto a book. You can be authentic, or nothing.

A lot of action-type stories just start with a hero presumed to be good (a Tom Cruise type) and an enemy who’s definitely bad (which you know because they have some facial or verbal peculiarity and because they say scary things to do with bombs.) And that’s it. The machinery of plot just operates without the whole good/bad thing ever getting really investigated any further.

But any plot always throws up complications and loose ends and the like. How do you deal with those? How does your hero or heroine?

In one of the Fiona books, Fiona solves a long-past missing persons case by figuring out that the person – widely presumed to have been murdered – is in fact alive and well and living near Bournemouth. Job done, right?

And yes: her job was done in the sense that she’d arrested all the actual bad guys and cleared up all the mysteries that she started with.

Except, the missing girl had a dad, who missed her profoundly and whose life had run into the sands – or at least, the gloopy Welsh mud equivalent of those sands.

So what does an authentically good police officer do in those circumstances? Well, without much talking about it, over the course of the book, Fiona had coaxed and cajoled the man to clean up his house – and his life. She’s nudged him into becoming the man his daughter would have wanted him to be. And, that done, Fiona gets the dad in a car, drives him down to the south coast, makes him buy some yellow tulips, and plonks him outside the door of the house where his daughter now lives.

That sounds like a good way to establish Fiona’s above-and-beyond sense of morality. It’s not enough, not for her, to crack open a crime ring. She has to do what she can to put together the lives that have been broken.

Forget the cat

There’s a famous (and quite useful) book on screenwriting, Save the Cat. The title comes from an idea that to establish a character’s fundamental decency, you want to have them save a cat from some kind of trouble early in the story.

But I think (at least with novels) this is basically nonsense.

It feels so glued on, so inauthentic.

The thing about Fiona and her farmer and the yellow tulips is that, by this point in the book, we feel that this is absolutely something she would do. Not just that: but the whole business of getting the old guy down to the south coast isn’t something we rush past in the opening pages of the book: it takes up precious page space at the very end. Because those pages are the book’s finale, they have an aura that none of the others do. So Fiona commits, and the reader feels that the author has committed, and the little bit of purpose – some statement about what it is to be noble in our world – feels authentic.

And that’s it: the message for the day. Does your book have authentic purpose? It’s fine (and probably good, in fact) if you can’t precisely define what that purpose is. But can you feel it? Is it there? It probably should be. Your book will be better if it is.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Purpose

Purpose – that’s something very tricky to show in a 250-word passage, but let’s give it a go. Feel free to edit a longer passage to get it down to the right kind of length. Give us enough explanation to understand the context. And just show us something that hints at the point of your writing. This could be really subtle. It doesn’t have to show your character being good. It could be (say) about the difficulty of belonging to two worlds (the themes of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn.) Just show us something to suggest why you’ve written the book. When you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

250 words or so. Title & context. Go for it. I’ve put a chunk of that Fiona ‘n’ tulip stuff below, so you know what I mean.

Til soon.

Harry

Is it OK to annoy marine engineers?

I said last week that:

“If you’re writing realistic, adult novels, you can’t just wave your hands at all [the technicalities]. You need some measure of accuracy. That’s not really because your readership is going to know all about sub-sea cable repair. It’s more that your writing won’t smell authentic unless it’s deeply rooted in reality. The more you discover about the reality, the more you’ll find details which seem utterly compelling.”

Every now and then I say things like that, thinking that they feel roughly true – then wonder afterwards, is that really true, though?

I did, in fact, spend significant time trying to figure out the whole business of cable repair and the like. I think that if a proper expert read my text, they wouldn’t have huge problems with it. (I once wrote a book about the early oil industry and the head of BP, who had a deep knowledge of early oil-drilling technology, wrote to tell me that I’d done a pretty good job. Phew!)

But could I have just skipped the research? Could I have made stuff up and written just as good a book? I mean: I’d risk annoying a handful of cable-repair engineers, but that’s a pretty small sub-group of readers. For everyone else: does the accuracy really matter?

Well, let’s take a look.

Establishing trust

The first real block of text that feels research-y is this one – a quotation from a (fictional) expert report on a suspect vessel:

Gantry

The gantry is of sufficient height and width to launch/retrieve a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) but, as originally configured, the gantry’s positioning would have risked collisions between any ROV and the existing stern ramp, thereby potentially damaging ROV. Gantry has been visibly adapted to locate suitable handling equipment further aft, including an A-frame style pulley system which is not required for ordinary fishing purposes. Note also cabling to stern winch mounting, implying possible existence of a tether management system (TMS) …

Now that’s boring. It’s kind of meant to be boring – the author is a marine consultant and the text needs to sound appropriate.

But notice the nouns: gantry, ROV, stern ramp, handling equipment, A-frame pulley system, cabling, stern winch. Those nouns say to the reader, “We’re in technical territory here. This stuff is firmly rooted in engineering reality.”

What’s more, the nouns convey that message even if the reader slightly glazes over at the details. “Blah blah gantry … blah blah, stern ramp … blah blah, cabling – yes, OK, I believe that you know what you’re talking about.”

I honestly doubt that I could have generated that list of nouns through my own invention. In my case, at least, I needed to spend time poking around on shipping websites and the like. But the result of that research? Getting the reader’s buy-in for my project. That’s still rather emotionless, of course – this is dry, abstract material – but I’m carrying the reader with me. They trust me on the topic of fishing vessels and Remote Operated Vehicles. For now, that’s all I need.

Establishing character-in-setting

As the novel proceeds, I get my character on board ship. She’s taken a job as a ship’s cook, pretending to have had experience, when in fact she has none. She’s also a terrible cook. Here’s her welcome on board:

So Honnold nods. Holds out a lean hand. Says, ‘Welcome aboard,’ and shows me brusquely to my tiny berth below decks.

I stow my bag. Take my pots and pans to the galley. Get used to the clamps that hold the cooking equipment stable. Go down to the holds. The giant freezers which will store the catch as it comes in. The ice-maker, which will make as much ice as those fish, and those freezers, need. The room-sized freezer compartment which holds food for the voyage. Boxloads of it, mostly heat and serve.

This has more flavour, because it’s in Fiona’s voice and Fiona herself is navigating the world being described. The nouns are still really significant in establishing place: berth, galley, clamps [for holding pots and pans steady in high seas], freezers, ice-maker.

That phrase ‘room-sized freezer compartment’ draws the reader’s attention to the fact that this is a real ship! Catching real fish! And the volumes they expect are so large that they need a freezer as big as a room! Now, OK, maybe that’s too many exclamation marks, but the point is real. The research gives me the nouns; the nouns convey a depth of authenticity; that authenticity then starts generating mood and atmosphere and (still at a low-level here) excitement.

I don’t want to suggest that the research and the technical-type nouns are all that you need. They’re not. You also want stuff like this:

A rattle of anchor chain and the deep bass of the ship’s diesel. Honnold on the bridge and navigation lamps showing.

Blue water to port and starboard.

Water, and two huge oil refineries. Towers, pipes, tanks. Brightening silver in the dull light.

Dyfed-Powys can’t see me now and I stand on deck, watching the land slide past.

Or this:

The land has vanished. We are travelling on sea the colour of wet rock. Of light falling on slate. Waves trouble the surface and a steady breeze rakes ripples into the broader swell. Our trail is marked out in a white that vanishes as you watch.

My gaze keeps reaching for the world’s rim. Looking for a glimpse of land, an anchor.

Nothing technical there, but we’re feeling properly out at sea now. We have confidence in a world with gentries and stern-ramps and clamps for the cooking. But we also have just that beginner’s sense of the ocean being a big, wide, empty place.

Ramping up the atmosphere

Fiona’s on board a real fishing trawler which is about to be put to a nefarious purpose. A storm comes in. Fiona is still in her role as cook / cleaner / dogsbody. Here’s the feel of the trawler now:

Buys says nothing, not right away. Just pulls a bit of liver from a badly gutted skate. Throws the fish down in an ice-nestled plastic box. Stares at Pearson. Stares at me.

Then, ‘You need to check the bathroom. Wee Philly’s been redecorating.’

I do my job. Clean up in the bathroom, which is indeed disgusting. Wear my oilskins and rubber boots to do it because, as the ship is moving so violently, I can’t help but be tumbled against the walls as I work.

That done, I go up to the darkening deck. Let the rain and sea spray clean me off. Caff comes in from the bow, harness clinking at his waist. Shouts, ‘This is whit his ahll aboot, is it no? A grand peedie tirl.’

A grand peedie tirl, indeed.

There are lamps at the stern. The ROV’s yellow tanks shine luridly under their glare, but the rest is emptiness. A waste of wind-torn water, nothing else.

The nouns are still doing their bit here. (Skate liver, oilskins, harness, the yellow tanks on an ROV.) But that’s all mixed up with more general atmospherics: vomiting landlubbers, a violently moving vessel, a sailor from the Orkney Isles speaking a dialect that’s all but incomprehensible.

I’m not sure I really had to research anything much here, but I had the confidence that came with research. The combination of wind + oilskins + harnesses (to stop yourself being washed into the sea) is powerfully suggestive of extreme conditions and danger. I think it’s hard to get to that kind of detail without having read and researched enough to have those ideas lying close at hand.

Climax

My climax arrives with technical detail, yes, but also just merrily over-the-top atmospherics too. So here’s the weather conditions:

The sea is all but impossible now.

The noise is the worst thing, I think. An indescribable howling. A noise that makes you realise that, every second of every minute, the boat is being assaulted by thousands of tons of water. A furious energy hurtling against the hull. And beyond that hull, only a green-black emptiness, a chilling cold.

Death’s howling army. An underworld populated by sea-monsters.

Coxsey, briefly swapping his duties on the bridge with Caff, so he can get a hot drink and a bathroom visit, pops into the galley to give me a status report. Winds of sixty miles an hour, and gusting higher. Waves well over thirty feet. Probably nearer forty. A ‘proper storm’. Force ten, a full gale.

The ‘death’s howling army’ language is obviously not the product of research. But those details about the wave heights are precisely correct given the gale force. In fact, as the storm builds, I was careful to check on the Beaufort scale precisely what Fiona would be seeing at each new point in the storm. I think that delivers some extra authenticity to the reader. It certainly gave me the confidence to write with freedom about something I’d never experienced. So it’s not just about the nouns; it’s about hard facts as well.

And then:

I go downstairs.

The fish processing room. A big bucket of fish guts still there. Scales, fins, heads, livers, guts, eyes, anything. The last person on processing duty should have shoved the lot down the discards chute, but they didn’t. Unless it was meant to be my job, perhaps.

Anyway. I take the bucket.

Go down to the engine room.

Engine. Auxiliary engine.

Pumps. Boiler. Cooling system. Whatever.

I find the cap that lets you refill the cooling system. Wrestle it off. It’s hard to do, and I gash my left hand, but I get it done. My hand looks nasty, but it’s only a cut.

Shove the fish guts into the cooling system. Not all of them, but most of them.

Go over to the auxiliary engine.

Do the same there, using all the fish guts that remain.

Nothing happens. Nothing good, nothing bad, just the engines hammering away exactly the way they did before.

I wish I knew more about engines.

But of course: Fiona knows plenty about engines. The book opens with her getting detailed instruction in how diesel engines operate. The fish guts are enough to destroy the cooling system. The engine overheats. The ship becomes uncontrollable and the crew abandons it to the waves.

I don’t think you could have the confidence to deliver that kind of climax unless you knew enough about engines to feel the whole thing was plausible (in a good-enough way; I don’t mean you need to pass an exam).

You’ll notice the nouns still play a big part in delivering that plausibility.

Summing up?

So yes, I think what I said last week is right. You’re going to struggle to deliver a real sense of authenticity without actual research. I think nouns matter. I think facts matter. I think that before you can do your Big Atmosphere work (death’s howling army and all that) you need to persuade the reader of your right to talk about this stuff at all.

If you can do all that without researching things, then that’s fine with me. But I don’t think I could do it – and I doubt if you could either.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Your research

Go on then. Show me a passage which shows off (a) what a busy bee you’ve been in terms of researching stuff and (b) what fancy nouns you’ve collected on the way.

250 words, please. Add any comments that you think would be of interest.

Got that? Rubber boots on? Oilskins? Harness? Bucket of fish innards?

Good. Then go! When you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Til soon.

Harry

Miss Jones, Mr Ryan and Mr Holmes

As you know, this week, as with the past three weeks, we are trit-trotting in step with the FEAST of FABULOUSNESS that is our Build Your Book Month.

And I wanted to pick up on something that my colleague (and fellow author) Laura Starkey said yesterday:

A story isn’t about what happens; it’s about how what happens changes the people in the story.

Now that feels like a worthy truth. Elizabeth Bennett is a quick-witted, high-spirited and confident lass. But she’s also young. She’s a bit naïve. She’s a bit quick to make judgements and over-confident in the judgements she makes. Stuff happens (Darcy! Wickham! Dreadful vicars! Stupid sisters and elopements!) And – she grows up. She matures. She gets her man.

Yes, on the one hand the story has to do with who hitches with whom, but the reason why that particular story did so well is that we felt the characters change – Lizzy changes (and matures), but so does Darcy. So does her dad. Wickham doesn’t change, but that’s his moral failure, the reason why he can’t exit the novel a winner.

And, OK, Jane Austen is widely thought to be Quite A Good Writer, but countless other authors play by the same rules. Bridget Jones’s Diary uses the same basic story … and Bridget matures. So does her version of Darcy. (But not the can’t-change Hugh Grant.)

You can’t really find a decent romance, or even a half-decent one, where Laura’s Rule doesn’t apply.

And it’s not just romances. It’s true of plenty of spy novels (think Spy Who Came In From The Cold). It’s true of literary novels (think Handmaid’s Tale.) It’s true of plenty of kids’ books and fantasy novels and, in fact, most novels you ever pick up.

But …

Well, I think Laura’s Rule isn’t universal, or at least not quite.

In big geo-political thrillers, it seems slightly flippant to care about whether Jack Ryan does or doesn’t change. Surely what’s important is, ‘Does the world get blown to bits, yes or no?’ I mean, it’s likely that Jack Ryan has some feelings about that. He’s generally an ‘ideally, don’t destroy the world’ kind of guy. But his feelings are surely very secondary, even to the reader.

Then there are book series to consider.

Most romances don’t beget sequels. Happy Ever After endings are slightly let down by an ongoing series. (No one wants “Lizzy Bennet: the Divorce” or “Lizzy Bennet and the Raunchy Footman”.)

But crime novels often, often, often have sequels. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Philip Marlowe, Jack Reacher. These books have a basically stable central character. The stories are about those people doing what is effectively their day job. You don’t expect Holmes or Marple or Reacher to end the novel much changed by what’s happened. On the contrary: you expect them to do the exact same things in the next book and the next and the next.

But Laura’s Rule contains a basic truth and it’s one that can be weirdly overlooked.

Here’s an extract from Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell – a much-praised kids’ book:

The kraken [a sea monster] gave a shriek of rage like a cat on fire. Then it seized the boat, and the entire structure was flung up into the air, cracking and splintering as it landed again on the waves. Ratwin was hurled into the water; Mal and Christopher were thrown sideways, to left and right. He hit the cabin wall, and she struck her head as she landed on the deck, and lay unconscious.

The kraken twisted its great head to look: for one beat, it hung there in the water, blinking its huge grey eyes. And then the kraken reached out, and plucked Mal bodily from the boat. Nighthand lunged after her, knife in hand.

‘No!’ he roared.

‘Mal!’, Christopher yelled.

The kraken laid her on a piece of driftwood, as carefully as a child laying down a doll. And then, before Christopher could understand what had happened, its ten tentacles fired towards them and the whole boat was crushed and pulled beneath the surface. The suction dragged Christopher down into black whirling chaos.

For what felt like minutes he spun, over and over in the churning sea. He fought, his lungs shrieking back to the surface. A piece of wood, part of a table rocked on the waves; he hauled himself on to it. There was sea-foam everywhere, he could see nothing; but there, suddenly, was Mal. As he watched the driftwood bucked and she slipped from it eyes were closed, and she was falling.

So in fewer than 250 words, we have a boat being destroyed, a girl (Mal) being seized by the kraken, an attempted rescue (by Nighthand), some weird thing with Mal being laid down on some floating driftwood, the whole boat and Christopher being pulled down onto the depths, a fight back up to the surface, climbing onto a tabletop – then seeing Mal, but losing her again.

That’s a LOT of action (and, surprisingly, no fewer than three semi-colons. My entire Fiona Griffiths series contains one semi-colon, and that came via a quotation from Wikipedia.)

But is that action more exciting or confusing?

To me, it’s basically confusing.

In part, that’s because so much happens so damn fast. For example, a big burly warrior (Nighthand) charges after the kraken with a knife. Well? What happens? We have no idea. Does Nighthand make contact? Did he inflict any damage? Does the kraken even notice? Is Nighthand dead? Lost underwater? We have no idea. The questions aren’t even addressed.

But also, there’s not a moment’s pause for emotional reaction.

Some little bits we can surmise.

So when Nighthand roars, ‘No!’ and charges around with a knife, we can tell he’s upset at the kraken taking Mal. The same goes for Christopher’s exclamation.

But then the kraken destroys the boat completely. What’s Christopher’s reaction? We don’t know. How does he feel about this? We don’t know.

He’s then sucked down into the abyss. We know his lungs shriek. (Duh, he’s underwater, course they do.) But we don’t know what he’s thinking or feeling. Is he thinking, ‘Oh crap, this is it.’ Or, ‘I must swim upwards and find Mal.’ Or, ‘I wonder what’s for supper?’ We have no idea, except that the last possibility seems improbable given the circs.

And then he gets to the surface (no moment of phew!), and clambers onto something floating (no moment of double-phew!), and then he sees Mal, apparently in one piece (no triple, super-big phew!) – and then she’s gone again.

What does all this tell us? Well, it doesn’t tell us that Katherine R is a bad writer – she isn’t – just that this passage needed a more switched-on editor.

But it does tell us that action is only explicable via emotion. Without the ‘reaction shots’ to guide us, it’s hard to know what we should be feeling when. And even a vast amount of on-page drama can feel flat without constant emotional reflection.

Laura’s Rule, remember, says:

A story is about how what happens changes the people in the story.

And the trouble with this Rundell passage is that the people didn’t seem changed, even as all that chaos was happening around them. We saw and felt no emotional impact, with the result that the scene, which should have been amazing, felt flat.

So in my Fiona books, I don’t expect Fiona to be hugely changed overall by the events of the story. She’s a series character, so she moves from one book to the next largely the same, except for some general growing up, getting more senior, acquiring and losing boyfriends and so on.

But as things happen, she reacts. “A kraken has destroyed my boat: I feel scared.” “I’ve swum to the surface and found a tabletop: oh good, I feel relieved.” That sort of thing, but without the krakens.

All this also means that as you plot the events of your book, you’re effectively plotting an emotional sequence at the same time. The two things need to work in parallel, always.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Action & Reaction

Nice easy one today.

Find a kraken in your story. Have it pull a boat underwater. Show your characters’ reactions.

If you lack a kraken, or your kraken has a crack in, find any other action moment in your story and give us that, 250 words or so please. We’re focusing less on the action itself and more on how it feels to the characters experiencing it. When you're ready post in Townhouse.

Got that? Then get crackin’.

Til soon.

Harry

Glancing sideways, looking straight

This month, as you know, we’re Build-A-Booking: considering everything to do with plot and aiming to get our novel outlines in p-p-perfect shape before November.

And? For a lot of writers, there’s a log that lies across the path to a perfect plot. The name of that log is World Building.

Now yes, a large proportion of you will be thinking, “Ah,hey ho, this email doesn’t apply to me, because my book is perfectly grounded in the Real World. My dragon count is zero. There are no badass fairies having raunchy sex with were-creatures. I also have no star-fleets in battle, no wormholes in space, no complicated explanations about the gaseous mix in my atmosphere.”

But we all have to world build.

Yes, your world may operate according to normal rules of physics and technology, but you may still need to explain to the reader:

Your character’s world of work: a hospital, a spy agency, a marketing firm, a special forces unit
Your character’s key relationships: mother, father, brother, sister, kids, best friends
Important bits of backstory, not just for your main character but for (say) a best friend, who will end up betraying your character in Chapter xx because of the thing that happened when she and your character were both at university.
The central setting for your book. Even if that’s somewhere as recognisable as Manhattan, there’ll still be a lot to explain if your book involves chases through the subway system, the currency trading system on Wall Street, or how an escort agency operates from the inside.

And all authors have a tendency to think like this:

“Well, gosh, I do need to explain the intricacies of the subway system and Rosa’s betrayal in Chapter xx is going to make no sense unless I reveal the Affair of the Stolen Clock in her university days, so what I’ll do is just set my story down for a moment, while I do my spadework on those important topics. Then, when we get going again, Readers Will Rejoice, because my subway chase is cool and Rosa’s betrayal will be surprising but also kinda logical at the same time.”

So the story gets set down for a page or four. Yet, strange to say, when the author picks it up again, it’s holding many fewer readers than it was before.

That’s the World-Building Paradox, my friend. Readers buy your book because of the cool new world you offer them. They want to know about the rules of that new world (magic, or spaceships, or just subway tunnels & stolen clocks.) But if you spend time doing what the reader has pretty much asked you to do, the reader flounces off, skirts swishing in disapproval.

The solution?

The solution is just what you think it is: you don’t set down your story. But you do create the world the reader wants to inhabit.

So let’s say your character is living on a planet, where the atmosphere has large amounts of methane and can easily kill his poor little humanoid self. Here are two options for addressing that fact:

Long essay on origin, chemical structure and medical effects of methane, followed by story.
Your character really wants to itch his nose, but can’t do so without removing his helmet.

It’s pretty obvious that the second option is the way to go. You will talk less about methane that way, but you’ll tell the reader what they need and want to know. And if the reader cares about your character, then, weirdly enough, they also care about that itchy nose. The fact that the character has a thwarted want, no matter how tiny, is enough to motivate the reader.

So: lead with character – that’s rule #1. (And by the way, that’s why this email is called ‘Glancing sideways, looking straight’. You focus always on character – that’s the straight ahead bit, the narrow path of story proper. But as you’re ploughing forwards, you can glance to the side now and again. That’s the world-building essential to your task - but you never drop the forward motion.)

Rule #2 chases along right behind the first, and it’s this: do less than you think is necessary. The reader won’t care.”

Sometimes the info-dumping can be brief in the extreme. For example, in one of my books, there was an important sequence involving a south Wales cave. I didn’t want readers to feel that I was just springing something on them unannounced – that feels a bit cheaty. Nor could I just assume that readers just knew enough about the geology of Wales to know there were caves. So, many chapters earlier, I had a secondary character say, ‘Those monks. The ones with a brewing licence. They’re up in the Beacons somewhere. Up the valley from that caving place.’

That’s it. Caving established. World built enough for now.

Do you want one more rule? Or maybe just a teeny-weeny guideline? OK:

Rule #3, that’s maybe more of a Guideline: “Deliver information after the reader cries out for it.”

So take that caving issue again. Fiona (who has already figured things out) locates the entrance to a previously unknown cave system. That cave system probably holds the answer to a missing persons case from years before. Fiona has already clocked that, too. Finally, she shows the cave entrance to her superior officer. They sit on a rock and chat:

[Fiona says,] ‘The main cave there is called Dan-yr-Ogof. You want to guess how far it extends underground?’

Burnett shakes his head. ‘I expect you’re about to tell me.’

‘Seventeen kilometres. Eleven miles. One of the main explorers of that system reckons the whole thing will run ninety miles once it’s fully mapped.’

‘You’re saying this . . . this . . . tunnel here connects with Dan-yr-Ogof?’

I shake my head. ‘Maybe, I’ve no idea. But this whole area is hollow with caves. Ogof Draenen measures seventy undergound kilometres. Ogof Ffynnon Ddu runs to almost sixty. Agen Allwedd runs to over thirty. And there are dozens more as well, a whole sweep of them. The whole southern edge of the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountains. The chain runs all the way to Abergavenny. Fifty or sixty caves easily and that’s only the ones we know about.’

Burnett joins me on the scree. Says, ‘Fuck.’

Says, ‘Times like this, I’d kill for a cigarette.’

I tell him he doesn’t have to kill anyone. Also—and this is really Murder Planning 1.01—he shouldn’t announce his intentions beforehand, particularly to a detective sergeant whose specialism is in major crime.

All this information is delivered after they’ve found the cave, after Burnett orders Fiona to explore the first few yards of it, after she’s crawled into the tunnel, banged her head and been shocked by the deep darkness of this new world.

The information is also delivered after Fiona has connected the cave’s existence to the missing persons case. So we’ve had some real action, a real (physical, visceral) entrance into this new world, and a sense that this place is strongly connected to a core story thread in the book.

By this point, the reader is totally sold. “Yes, jeepers, caves are important! I want to know more about caves, I can see they’re going to play a huge role in what follows.” So then Fiona tells the reader, in effect, “There are lots of caves in south Wales and some of them are really, really big.”

That settles the reader for now. It gives a sense of the scale of what might lie ahead – and also confirms that the author isn’t tricking. Caves are a perfectly legitimate element in a mystery story set in that particular part of the world.

Notice that there’s still a lot that I haven’t said. What does a cave look like inside? How are they formed? Can you get large bodies of water inside a cave? All that will matter a bit further on into the story, but those bits of information are delivered later, when they’re needed.

And that’s it.

Log cleared.

Lead with character. Do less than you think is necessary. Bring information to the reader only once the reader is thirsting for it.

That’s true for books about Manhattan or Welsh caves or busy hospitals. It’s also true for books about raunchy fairies, star-fleet battles or grumpy dragons.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Info Dumps

OK, I want you to find a place in your book where you have an info dump – much like my material on caving above. My extract above was about 200 words, but only about 150 words had to do with caves, rather than murder planning. So look for an extract of about 200-250 words, but also give us plenty of context that introduces your passage. In that little caving scene, it really mattered that the info came after Fiona had physically been inside the cave (albeit only a very short way.) So give us enough to understand how the information you’re giving us connects to the broader story.

You got that? You got it. Ready – GO. Log in and share your work on Townhouse when you're ready.

Til soon.

Harry

The doomed second series

In those far off and stony days, in that friendless and furless Time Before Rafael, my wife and I watched Bad Sisters, an Apple TV show.

(Now that we have Rafael the Squirrel in our home, we still watch TV, but he’s a menace. Until he decides it’s his bedtime, he jumps around the room, annoying the dog and throwing food everywhere. His favourite snack is crisps, the only thing he doesn’t eat messily. When he does decide it’s bedtime, he goes down either my jumper or my wife’s jumper, rolls onto his back and snuffles and snorts with happiness. We reckon we have about 2-3 weeks more of R the S before he’s ready for the Great Outdoors. He still can’t quite crack a nut without help. But watching dramas broken into 50-minute episodes becomes quite an undertaking if you keep having to break to remove a squirrel from the missus’s hair or trying to get him out of a crisp packet.)

Anyway: Bad Sisters.

The show involves five sisters, one of whom is married to an unpleasant and controlling man, JP. We start the season knowing that JP has recently died and knowing that he was unbeloved of those he left behind. But was he murdered or not? A life insurance investigator wants to prove that he was murdered, and by the team of sisters, and thereby save his ailing insurance business. The cast is very strong. The sense of family and layered histories and relationships and Irish coastal settings are all strong. The comedy? Well, it’s funny but not uproarious. The drama? Well, it’s involving but not edge of the seat. But the whole concoction just works. It’s warm and funny and dark and just about credible enough and dramatic and new and unexpected.

Most of all, though, the basic concept is armour-plated.

Did the sisters kill JP? Well, I won’t tell you that, but I will say that they give it a go … and you won’t know what actually happened till right at the end. The show has a kind of And Then There Were None beauty and necessity to it.

If no one had ever written And Then There Were None (or, for that matter, Murder on the Orient Express), it would be essential for someone to do so. Those concepts have an urgency – a kind of necessity – like an uncompleted mathematical proof that nags at you until it’s done.

Sure enough, the show got a 100% positive review rating on Rotten Tomatoes and went on to secure multiple wins and nominations at various TV awards ceremonies. A great concept, well-executed: that’s the result.

But TV is TV.

If you get a series that everyone loves, you have to have another. In the land of the novel, it’s a bit like that, but not really. In novel-land, the author is the brand, so if you churn out a masterpiece (Pride & Prejudice, say), it’s fine for you to follow up with Emma. You don’t have to write Lizzie and Darcy Have Kids, Lizzie and Darcy Go Travelling, Lizzie and Darcy Sort Out Their Pensions and Go for an Amusing Escapade in France.

But – in TV-land, the brand isn’t the author, or the actor, it’s the show itself. So, yes, you have to force these things into a second series.

But what? Bad Sisters was about killing (or not killing?) JP. Once he’s dead, he’s dead. You can’t really have the sisters try to bump off anyone else: that’s just ludicrous. The story arc has been beautifully completed. Anything else is just artificial and not needed. So yes, another season was commissioned and filmed. But, as Rotten Tomatoes said in its summary of reviews, “The return of Bad Sisters can't help but feel like too much of a good thing, but the lived-in dynamic between these outstanding performers continues to pay highly watchable dividends.”

Basically: the show is pointless, but the actors and characters are great, so … yeah. It’s OK. My wife watched some of it, but lost interest. I’ve not watched a minute of it.

Now, I’m going to guess that many of you will not have a TV show in production with Apple. But all these thoughts still apply to you.

This month is Build Your Book Month. The aim, as you jolly well ought to know, is to give you the tools to plot your book out over the course of a month – in a way that’s structured enough to be disciplined and loose enough to give you creative freedom.

And today is 3 October: the very start of that month. And the purpose of this email is to say: Be More Bad Sisters, Season 1.

You need that level of necessity. You want a reader to think, ‘Wow, why has no one written a book about X, Y, Z before? Good job that someone has finally done so, because that I have to read.’

And that level of necessity has to extend to plot, not just idea. So, for example, “I’d love to write a time-slip novel about three generations of women who have lived in the same house in X.”

And, OK, yeah, fine. But what about those women? What’s the story? What have they been up to? Why do we have to read that tale?

Your job is not to satisfy your own wants as a writer. Your job is to deliver a concept so sharp, it could cut through floating silk.

Don’t try to take a mediocre concept and plot your way to excellence. That’s desperately hard and you can never get to more than 75% success anyway. Start with a terrific concept and then let your plotting become the natural, inevitable playing out of your idea. That works. It always will. And – it’s harder to start, but it’s much easier in the end.

If you want help with getting your concept straight, then:

Read 11 boxes, 2 imps and 1 owl, a newsletter which involves 11 boxes, 2 imps 1 owl, and also some ideas about elevator pitches.
Take the first lesson in our Good to Great Video Course. If you’re a Premium Member, you already have access! Please remember to log in first. If you’re not, you can get a free taster lesson here.

I’ll see lots of you 9 October for a bit of Build-Your-Bookery. (I’ll be talking about scene construction, a job which sounds like it should involve some 2x2s and plenty of paint.) My workshop details can be found here.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / From Spark To Story

This week is a little different, it's a takeover from Becca Day.

Becca wants you to take your spark of an idea and share your novel’s premise in Townhouse. If you didn't catch the first Build Your Book Month workshop, then watch the replay of From Spark to Story with Becca Day. The first workshop is free for everyone to catch up on.

Til soon.

Harry

The short but glorious history of Grabbit and Go Books…

The world's most successful bookstore.

As you know, I’ve got a lot of kids. (How many? Not sure. I haven’t counted recently.)

And – kids grow up. They read books, then move on. And in that wake lie scattered books about football, books about horses, books about fantasy realms, books about dragon taming, books about wizardry, books about witches, books about cats who fight, books about mischief-causing cats, books about entertaining cows, books about rabbits, books about fighting, and a whole mountain more.

We wanted to get rid of this scatter, to make more space on the shelves. We could have taken them to the dump, or to a charity store, but I hit on the idea of giving them away in the school playground. My bookstore was called:

GRABBIT & GO BOOKS

Its slogan was going to be ‘The world’s finest bookstore’ but, on reflection, we thought there was some room for argument, so we struck out the word ‘finest’ and replaced it with ‘cheapest’. The price of every book was £0.00, unless you were paying in dollars in which case we charged $0.00.

Our one real condition was that we didn’t want kids wandering off with just one book. We wanted to get rid of the things, so if a boy picked up a book about football, I shoved a stack of other football books at him, and he wandered away with ten.

(And by the way, if you are ever struggling with writer’s block, may I suggest you write the biography of a famous footballer? I’ll start you off:

Omar was sure that Mo would never be able to compete with these highly trained 18-year-olds. “Mo, you will never be able to compete with these highly trained 18-year-olds,” he said. “They are much bigger and stronger than you are.” But Mo simply grinned and juggled the ball. “You just watch, boss,” he laughed. He felt nervous at first, but then the game started. The skinny ten-year-old dribbled the ball round all 11 players on the opposition team and then dribbled around his own players too, a goat, and a Toyota pickup. He let fly a volley from the edge of the box. His kick was so strong, the ball tore through the net and was last seen overflying the Zambezi. Mo’s team ended up winning 109-0. At the end of the game, Omar chuckled and said, “With a little more training, you might be quite good one day.”

Write that same story, again and again, throw in something about a Champions League final, and make sure when somebody exclaims “Goal!”, they use at least 20 characters, including a great many exclamation marks.)

Picking books for kids is quite easy.

Boy with short hair? Football.

Older boy with shorter hair? Book about fighting.

Boy not interested in books on either topic? Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Very young girl? Book about unicorns.

Young girl? Book about cats, horses or rabbits.

Older girl? Same thing, except make sure the cats are fighting.

Pre-teen girl? Book about teen girls committing / solving murder in a boarding school.

And zoom. The books went. I started with a fold-out picnic table so heavy with stacks of books that I didn’t have room for them all. I ended up with one carrier bag of discards which will probably, in time, find their way to a charity shop.

Reflections?

Well, first there was real excitement in the playground. Obviously, if I’d been giving away cakes, the cakes would have gone just as fast, but there’d have been less glee. A cake is only ever a cake. A book is a portal to – well, adventure. The unknown. It's a ship setting sail from a sparkling harbour. Giving books to kids was honestly one of my most joyous moments of the year.

Second: free works.

It just works. There’s joy in the giveaway. It’s not a tool that traditional publishers use very much, but it’s an indie author staple. Genre readers are – often, often, often – like kids. They want to find a new author that they can make theirs. Free is a way to shove your Book #1 novel to the top of their reading pile. And once it’s there, and once they’ve read it, there’s every chance they go on to buy everything else, full price, and happily. (And, uh, if you’re interested in self-publishing, I think we’ve got only two or three places left on the upcoming course. So, if you’re keen, pull your boots on.)

And third, lordy lord, all this loveliness does seem a little under threat.

Headline sales of print books remain basically static – up a bit in one year, down a bit in another – but since those headlines always exclude self-pub books, and since self-pub collectively is at least the size of Penguin Random House, it’s probable that overall sales today are close to all-time records.

So, yes, books sell and there’s not much sign of them not doing so.

But the cracks in the palace are big and getting bigger. Here’s a recent gloomy view from The Economist:

Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them. In other words: some students reading English literature were asked to read some English literature from the mid-19th century. How hard could it be?

Very, it turns out. The students were flummoxed by legal language and baffled by metaphor. A Dickensian description of fog left them totally fogged. They could not grasp basic vocabulary: one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?” The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate.

Reading is in trouble. Multiple studies in multiple places seem to be showing the same thing. Adults are reading less. Children are reading less. Teenagers are reading a lot less. Very small children are being read to less; many are not being read to at all. Reading rates are lower among poorer children … but reading is down for everyone, everywhere.

The books that I gave away in the playground reflected that.

Those football books are, I’m sure, better for kids than video games, but they are a damn sight less enriching than (say) Susan Cooper, or Watership Down, or Lemony Snicket.

Books about conflict can be terrific, but they can also just be ugly. At one stage, my kids adored the Beast Quest series. (Adored them so much that I found them playing in the garden using six-foot wooden fenceposts as swords. I removed the posts and bought some plastic swords on Amazon, relieved to have escaped a trip to the emergency room.) But the series was ugly, ugly, ugly. It had no moral tuition in it. It was just slaughter. I didn’t give those books away; I destroyed them.

And behind those ugly books: an ugly publishing model. The books name ‘Adam Blade’ as an author, but multiple authors have written the series on (I would guess) a flat-fee basis. If I were one of those authors, I’d churn out the book as fast as I could. I’d deliver the book, get paid, move on. The purpose of that publishing model is almost literally to extinguish the author. I can’t really think why you’d hire authors these days, when you could simply AI the whole thing.

There are more wholesome approaches too. I don’t love the Wimpy Kid books, but they’re healthy enough and they get non-reading kids to read. So that’s a win. But the books are still responding to a basic sense of threat. They offer less, because they are aware that more will not be palatable.

The same things are true all the way across the scale. Some of the books my 12-year-old daughter reads have a level of worldliness and violence that I did not encounter in books until much later. But – today’s authors are fighting Netflix and phones and social media and video games. And, in a war, you have to fight. You can’t be picky about how you fight.

As for me? Well, my readers are predominantly women in the second half of life. That’s a literate, thoughtful demographic that it’s a pleasure to write for.

But the future me? The author writing this email in the Year of Our Lord 2075? I’m not too sure, but I’d bet that my present readers are better than his.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Fight scene

OK, let’s have a fight scene. If you don’t have any physical conflict, then whatever comes closest. 250-300 words, plus title, genre, and any context you think we need. When you're ready, post your offering in Townhouse.

If you write like Philip Pullman, you get 100 points. If you write like Beast Quest, you are probably a robot.

Til soon.

Harry

Barking at readers in a muddy field

Last week’s Feedback Friday asked for opening pages and (I’ve counted) about a quadzillion of you presented your openings.

And, as ever, there were good and bad and brilliant and baffling submissions across every genre and every possible topic. Also, as ever, a few themes came up for me as I ran my hands through this abundance.

One theme was: too fast, too fast, too fast, too fast!

Another was: too little, too little, too little!

I’ll get to what I mean in a moment, but first let’s remember what we want from that opening page.

We’re asking a busy person with 10,000 things in their head to leave the Real Actual World they live in and start to think about a person who never existed in a situation that never was. That’s a pretty loopy thing for anyone to want to do and they’re only going to want to do it if they care a bit about the character you’re presenting them with.

And yes, for the reader to care, they’ll need to know the story situation. (Aerobatic pilot engaged in a complex manouevre? Roman boy-king on the run for his life? Escaped witch hunted in a forest? Or whatever else.)

But before the story situation even matters, you have to do something else. You have to get the reader to believe that your person is real and that the world on which they tread is real. You have to start to grey out the reader’s Real Actual World and create one that is – or feels – more real.

So, creating a bond between reader and character: that’s the first thing.

The second has to do with establishing story, yes … but, right now, your entire project is a wee, fragile thing. You’re planting out your sweet-peas in early- or mid-May, a touch early, and the risk of frost (or a reader putting your book back on its pile in the bookstore) is still acute. So your story moves at this stage are careful, not huge. A foal can’t carry the load of a five-year-old hunter.

The typical story move for your opening section is therefore pretty small, pretty careful. Your main job here, lighting this candle, is simply to watch that the flame takes. The win here isn’t that you have a raging bonfire at the end of page one. The win is that the wick takes the flame and the flame establishes. Once it’s done so, you can make bigger, bolder moves in the confidence that the reader moves with you.

But that’s not quite all we ask from our openings.

The first-page reader is a sacred beast. The page-two-hundred reader? Pah! You can treat her like a fatted calf, to be pushed, prodded and barked around a muddy field. You can play rough games with that reader. She won’t mind.

But the first-page reader? Ah, this person is sacred, because they hold a bank card in their hand and they are trembling on the knife edge of desire. Will they buy or will they decline? They need to feel, somehow, from this opening page or two, that the story will deliver all that they want from it. And yes: this reader already has several sources of information. The way you’ve been shelved in a bookshop or on Amazon. The cover design. The title. The blurb.

So yes, those things help support a buy decision, but the opening page is the thing you ask to clinch it. So we need (A) the promise of a story big enough and moving enough to get the reader to part with some cash but (B) no moves so big that they break the developing relationship between reader and character.

Now that sounds like a contradiction, except that the reader is a skilled and subtle beast. They divine Big Story from tiny clues. And your third task with your opening page or two is: foreshadow the story that is to come.

The foreshadowing can certainly be oblique. It can reside in a mood, a sentence or two, a trivial incident, a handful of words. But (done right) you’ve passed a token from writer to reader: ‘I, the author, promise you that I will deliver on the story that you intuit (in some semi-conscious, hard-to-define) way. You can trust my future story, because my moves right now are so confident, so fully in control, you know I’m not going to mess up down the road.’

One very nice piece from Feedback Friday had a woman see a car that she recognised. The woman enters a pub to find its owner, but walks out again having not found him. That’s the very tiny (very newborn-foal-friendly) movement we start the novel with. But that tiny non-encounter nudges the character to remember her old tutor lying back in his seat and listening to the blues. The passage ended “I’d seen those eyes shut a few other times. I retract that he didn’t teach much; he taught me a thing or two.”

And poof! Even the dullest reader, even a clod with a headful of pudding, will intuit that there’s a love story here. And not too chaste either: we have blues music and sex and long afternoons with tumbled sheets all here … just barely mentioned.

That’s perfect.

So the too fast, too fast observation I started with comes down to writers hurrying to get their Big Story down on the page before the reader is really ready – before the reader has fully bonded with the character. The trouble with that hurrying speed is that the Big Story tends to crush the reader-character bond under its wheels. And the reader-character bond has to come first. Without that, nothing else exists or matters.

As for the too little, too little observation: there I want to say that some openings don’t do enough to gesture at the story that’s to come. They offer a Dramatic Incident, yes, but that Dramatic Incident doesn’t really do enough to guide me as to the shape of what’s to come.

And all this sounds complex, but it’s easy enough to do. Here, for not much reason except that the novel was to hand, is the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.

As the prologue continues, we learn that the narrator is a captain in the British Army of the Second World War. He’s about to move out of a Scottish training camp with his men.

That’s the bare situation and, yes, it’s interesting enough to sustain us and, yes, small enough that we don’t feel overcrowded by too much story too soon.

But look at those underlinings.

“Paused and looked back”: this whole book is a looking back, a reminiscence. Any novel written in the past tense is, technically, a reminiscence, but BR revels in its nostalgic gaze – makes a feature of it. (The time-of-war narrator looking back at his time-of-peace past emphasises the change in the world between Then and Now.)

“No single happy memory … loved had died”: this tells us that there’s a love story here, but an unhappy one, a failure.

That sounds rather bleak: why would you fork out for a book that’s all set to depress you? Except that I think there’s one more bit of (really lovely) foreshadowing which complicates that simple story. Because Waugh also says, “three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding.” That’s not a movement from happy to bleak; it’s the exact opposite.

So Waugh has given us two contradictory messages here. The most overt one is, “This is going to be a very bleak love story, with plenty of reminiscence.” But the secondary, almost hidden one is, “this is a story of growth, and bloom, and hope, and life.”

And, darn it, but that’s exactly what this book is: a sad love story (Ryder + Sebastian, and also Ryder + Julia) but also a very hopeful one (Ryder + God.)

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that writing a sad love story about God is a brilliant way to make sales in the 21^st century, but your story is what it is. Foreshadow that. Do it with wit. Do it obliquely. Do it with a sentence. Do it with an image. But do it gently. Don’t break the plant that hasn’t yet put down roots.

Got that? Good. Now execute.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Opening page

Same exercise as last week.

If my yipper-yapper in this email has struck a chord, then revise that opening page. Upload that first 250-300 words (with title + genre) and write a line or two about what you’ve changed and why.

And you know what? Even if you’re dead happy with your opening, go ahead and edit that. Post in Townhouse here.

And remember:

Create the bond between reader & character
Move gently
Foreshadow the Big Story.

That’s enough of my yipper-yapper. Now up and at em.

Til soon.

Harry

The laziest author in the world

My (kindly) 12-year-old daughter’s two favourite insults for me at the moment are:

“You’re lucky! You remember the dinosaurs.”

“You’re famous! You’re the before photo in a men’s fitness magazine.”

On the latter – hmph. I’m a man of steel, and have the blood results to prove it. On the former? Well, yes, I’ve kicked around a lot longer than my 12-year-old know-it-all, and it IS true that back in the day, getting published involved this:

Step 1 Write an excellent book

Step 2 Buy a physical (!) directory of agents. Pick some names at random.

Step 3 Send a submission pack out. Wait. Then either win or lose

There was not meaningfully a self-pub option. There was no meaningful self-pub option.” Absolutely no one thought I should have a Twitter profile or a website or anything of the sort. My job description was: Write good books and (a long, long way short of that requirement) Be available for 2 weeks of publicity around launch, though even then most books got no publicity at all, so for a lot of authors, that requirement was rather easily met.

And these days?

Well, the list of requirements can seem endless.

Twitter. Insta. Facebook. BookTok.

Mailing lists, reader magnets, Bookfunnel, autoresponders.

Marketing plans.

If you’re self-pubbing, then the list gets more extensive yet. Facebook ads. Amazon ads. Amazon attribution. Canva. Dashboards. Image libraries. Promo sites. Newsletter swaps.

I’ve not even touched the edge of what people are told they ought to do.

So – and here roareth the dinosaur – what’s actually the least you can get away with? How much of this stuff is really necessary and how much is just a breathless Internet trying to eat your life?

The answer depends, of course, on whether you’re trad or self-pub, the requirements for the latter being significantly greater.

The lazy trad author

You need to write a really excellent book. No shortcuts there. Not with book #1 and never afterwards.

When you’re starting out, you are likely to want / need a course to build your skills and a manuscript assessment to develop your manuscript itself (and also for a basic reality check in terms of quality.)

Obviously, we sell those good things, so I’m hardly unbiased, but I think it’s a rare author who engages seriously with a good course or manuscript feedback who doesn’t come out much improved as a result. I’m not saying that these things are essential – just that most of you will find them very useful.

You also need a competent submission pack: a query letter to 10-12 well-chosen literary agents, a good synopsis, 10,000 (ish) words of good opening chapter.

Because the knowledge of how to do these things competently is much more widely disseminated now, I’d say the basic quality standard has certainly risen. It’s harder, these days, to get an agent with a lousy query than it was. Even so: what matters is the book. The rest of it is still not crucial.

And …?

And nothing. No Twitter account? I don’t care. No FB, no Insta, no stupid TikTok? Fine, I don’t care. Agents won’t either.

No mailing list? Well, I’d advise you to have one, but you can always do that later and it’s a good-to-have. It’s not essential. It’s certainly not something you need

Website? Well, yes, you should probably have one, but I don’t care if it’s one page long and not very informative. If you spend one afternoon on Squarespace, you’ll do fine.

Yes, publishers would love you to have a YouTube channel with 1,000,000+ views in the last year, but who cares? What matters is the book, the book, the book, the book. It’s not really a secret that lots of authors are introverts who love marketing as much as they love pushing plastic picnic forks into their toes, and publishers are happy to work with said introverts. It’s the book that matters.

These days, honestly, the chores facing the Modern Lazy Author (Trad variety) are not really more onerous than they were 20+ years ago.

The Somewhat Lazy Indie Author

You can’t actually be a lazy indie author – or, rather, you can: you’ll just be one with rather modest book sales.

So the things you need to look after are:

A splendid book. You can’t sell rubbish. The book still matters most, most, most.

A copy edit. I don’t mind if you seek out low budget options (a very picky friend, for example), but you can’t sell a badly edited book these days. I do honestly think that a manuscript assessment will help almost any first time indie author, simply because quality is the overwhelming objective here

A book cover: hire a pro. Spend what you need. Fuss over this. Get it right.

A website: keying off that book cover in terms of look and with a really good, functional newsletter signup page. Again, half a day on a popular website builder is plenty.

A mailing list. You can’t not do this. You need a reader magnet, a mailing list provider (I suggest MailerLite) and a delivery service (Bookfunnel; there’s no real contest here.)

Use of book promo sites around launch. This is simple. An hour or two is all you need.

A Facebook author page. I don’t mind much how inert it is. Busy and popular is better, of course, but I don’t bother and I do fine.

Facebook ads that work. Setting your system up takes time, but after that simply monitoring those ads should take only about an hour a week. Less is actually more here: too much tinkering will impair, not improve, performance.

Amazon ads are, in my view, kinda optional – and they only really work when everything else is humming. So for the Lazy Author scoping out what lies immediately ahead, I’d say that AA isn’t something to worry about for now.

That feels like a long and arduous list, but you note that I don’t ask you to engage with social media at all (except via ads.) And most of that list involves set-up chores, not maintenance chores. If you want to maintain that lot with 1 hour a week (Facebook) + 3 hours a month (mailing list) + 2 weeks of work around launch, then that’s genuinely plenty. Write a great book, then write another and another and another. Keep the marketing stuff low demand. That’s a plan that works just fine.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Opening page

OK, an oldie but a goodie.

First 250-300 words of your book please. Minimal intro about what we’re about to read. (Give us a title and a genre, but nothing else.) When we read this opening, I want feedbackers to put themselves in the place of an agent. Your questions are: “Would I read more of this? Am I excited? Do I feel this writer has authority, that I trust them to tell this story?”

That’s the mission. Any questions? No? Then go for it. Post in Townhouse here.

Til soon.

Harry

Ee by gum, eet eez orrible, innit?

I’ve had a couple of emails recently that I think have deserved a wider response. Here’s one:

“Please could you possibly say a little more about why the first example is ‘orrible and the second is OK. When does dialect become patronising? It’s a tricky thing to get right.”

And good: this is a good question, not least because these issues have become excessively fraught.

So here is an example of transcribing a character’s voice in a patronising way:

“Eet eez ’orrible to ’ear ze proud Frensh race beleettled in zis stooped manner.”

But what the character involved has actually said here is:

“It is horrible to hear the proud French race belittled in this stupid manner.”

The first sentence, by transcribing its pronunciations in a very literal way, makes the speaker come across as ludicrous – cartoony, a circus clown with a striped jumper, a string of onions and a comical moustache. But what’s actually comical? The sentence itself displays perfect command of English, and what’s being apparently laughed at here is an accent, over which the speaker has very little control.

And, golly gosh, that’s a slippery slope.

Most people writing a non-English character in this way will (if English) speak roughly RP, or Received Pronunciation – in effect, roughly what a BBC newsreader used to sound like. In the US, it’s much the same thing, except that the reference dialect is Standard American English.

(And, please note, in RP English, we say “She placed the glahss on the grahss next to her great big – handbag.” But we wouldn’t even conceive of inserting the letter H into the two italicised words to mark the weird pronunciation. Nor do we adjust the spelling to take care of the flat “a” sound in American and North-British versions of those words. So when it comes to our weird pronunciations, we don’t even think of trying to reflect them in spelling.)

And of course, as soon as you start to accord any kind of typographic privilege to a particular accent – whether RP or SAE – you get into all sorts of bother.

It’s one thing to have a comical Frenchman – France is a nuclear power and can look after itself – but do you really want to apply the same diminishing treatment to, say, a black resident of Harlem? Or a Scouser? Or a northern woman of Pakistani heritage? Or a Mexican immigrant?

The answer, if you haven’t already figured it out is, No, certainly not. Don’t go there. Step away from the quirky spellings.

That’s partly because of a perfectly legitimate anxiety about racism.

But it’s also just a recognition of modern linguistics. The RP / SAE dialects are simply two dialects amongst many, many others. They don’t come with a halo over them that says, “the king/President speaks this way, so this version is right and everything else is wrong.” The fact is that we all speak the dialect of our culture and each dialect has no more or less validity than the next.

That’s not just true of pronunciation. It’s true of grammar too. Any significant dialect has its own grammar, which may differ from SAE / RP grammar (which, by the way, each differ from each other.) So African-American Vernacular English has its own strict rules of grammar, that are just different from SAE – and not just different, but with subtleties that SAE struggles to cope with. SAE has four basic past tenses: I did buy it, I have bought it, I bought it, I had bought it. AAVE has five, but differently structured: I been bought it, I bought it, I done bought it, I did buy it, I do buy it.

What does all this tell us?

It tells us (duh!) that other people may speak differently from us.

It tells us (duh!) that it’s not respectful or, in fact, linguistically accurate, to privilege one set of accents or grammars over another.

And that means that the solution for a novelist is quite easy:

Don’t try to capture nuances of accent in the way you transcribe speech. We don’t write “grahss” if we try to capture how the king of England speaks. We don’t write “eet eez ’orrible” if we try to capture how President Macron expresses himself.
Do use the actual words that your character uses. President Macron is probably more likely than the rest of us to use the word voila even when speaking English. And if he says it, that’s what you write. Likewise, if a Black American character says finna (a contraction of fixing to or going to) then that’s the word you write down. It IS a word; it just isn’t an SAE / RP word. Don’t patronise your characters by editing their speech.
Do use the grammar that your character adopts. So if your character is African-American, she might say ‘I done bought it’, in which case you write, ‘I done bought it.’
For that matter, most of us are perfectly adept at code-shifting, so that same character might speak using AAVE when at home with her mother, but might use SAE when (say) running for President of the United States. And if your character code-shifts, you code-shift right along with her.
The same goes for English spoken as a second language. Let’s say your novel features a top French footballer, who possibly now plays for Real Madrid. Perhaps that footballer says, “I do not chase after the records.” No native English speaker would naturally put the word “the” into that sentence, and nearly all English footballers would say “don’t” rather than “do not.” So you don’t need to do anything as condescending as write “Eet ees ’orrible” in order to hear the Frenchness in the speaker. You just have a careful ear for those non-native uses and let the reader intuit the rest. They definitely will.

I think the only time this is liable to get complicated is in relation to languages that are highly related to English, but aren’t actually English.

A lot of you will have encountered the broad Yorkshire speech of Wuthering Heights. This for example:

'What are ye for?' he shouted. 'T' maister's down i' t' fowld. Go round by th' end o' t' laith, if ye went to spake to him.’

Would that be better with “the master’s down in the fold”? And well – I don’t know. You can call it both ways. The modern tendency would be to eliminate some of the non-standard spelling, but in Bronte’s day, the fact was that broad Yorkshire dialect (“Tyke”) was pretty much a language to itself, related to English in much the same way as Robert Burns’ Scots is. In which case – honour the language. Give it leg room. That’s what I chose to do with my Orcadian sailor, Caff, and deliberately wrote a version of Orcadian that was damn close to impenetrable to an ordinary reader.

And if you want to do that then, (a) have fun! It’s really entertaining. And (b) get it right. I don’t speak Orcadian, I’m not Scottish, and I’ve never been to the Orkneys. So I did the best that I could with books and online resources … then wrote to the editor of an Orkney newspaper and asked for her help. She was very happy to give that to me, and I was very happy to receive it, and my readers have the joy of having a little bit more Orcadian in their lives: something we all need.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Non-standard speech

Before the task, I need to say that, in recent weeks I’ve been more remote from lovely Feedback Friday (FF) than I’d like to have been. That’s because of some tedious but time-consuming life nonsense that – I trow and I trust – is now mostly behind me. So, I’ll be getting back to FF with more vigour in the coming weeks.

And this week? Let’s just take a look at any chunk of text where you have a character speaking in a non-RP/SAE way. So that could be a regional or other dialect. Or it could be a non-native speaker. Or someone with cognitive difficulties. Or a talking animal. Or a professor in a kids book gabbling at a mile-a-minute. When you're ready, log in to our shiny new Townhouse and post yours here.

Dig out your chunks, and let’s have a look, innit?

Til soon.

Harry

Honeysuckle friable acolyte steeple

We just spent a couple of weeks with Kurt Vonnegut and an irascible Elmore Leonard. I was going to keep the series going with lists of rules from other writers, but I couldn't quite find a list that had enough grit to feel substantial.

So instead of a one-author list, here are some suggested rules or bits of advice from a Hotch-Potch of Writing Genius.

Before that:

DON'T FORGET!

The deadline for applications to the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme / Novel Writing Course is 7 September. If you have even a part-interest in doing one of these courses, then get your application in now and book a call so you can chat to one of our team about your writing and whether it's the right next step for you. We won’t pressure you to buy anything. That call is just an opportunity to de-mystify the course and figure out if it will work for you. Getting your application in before the deadline means you won't miss out, if it is your best option.

Raymond Chandler: "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."

I admire RC hugely: I think he’s one of the great American writers who (as I like to point out) was also a great English one – he was educated at the same public school as PG Wodehouse.

Now, on the one hand, Chandler wasn’t being serious. He was talking about the pulp fiction industry in America, where he cut his teeth, and which did not greatly concern itself with seriousness of purpose.

That said, action matters. Decisive plot twists matter. They propel a story. That’s obviously true of genre, but it’s true of decent literary fiction, too (though a plot twist here may be less obviously material than a man with a gun.) And if a story is stalling, then throwing in a major plot development? Good advice, always.

Michael Moorcock: "My first rule was given to me by T.H. White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies, and was: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else, from Bunyan to Byatt."

I think this is really good advice. I do think that authors need to know the terrain of their genre pretty well, but I think that limiting yourself to that genre is a mistake. The more widely you read – across genres, across time and across nations – the more your head will fill with possibility.

That also says that it’s more important to read lots of authors than it is to read lots of books. If you read one Patricia Cornwell novel, you’ll probably learn almost as much from it as if you read 20. Read twenty different authors instead, and make sure that one is French, and one Japanese, and one Egyptian, and one has been dead for 200 years, and so on.

P.D. James: "Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary, the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it."

That sounds like a good wholemeal-loaf type rule. Not exciting, but you know it’s good for you. But – I don’t really agree with it. I think you know enough words. But do you use them?

When did you last use any of the following words in your writing?

You know all of those words. But it’s easy when talking about lovely summer scented flowers to say just “lovely summer scented flowers”, or perhaps to get as far as thinking about roses and lavender. It’s easy when thinking about something with a flat spiral structure to use the term “a flat spiral”. But wouldn’t those thoughts be better extended by using the terms honeysuckle and ammonite? Not every time, of course, but sometimes?

So: you don’t need to add to your word hoard. Just use the damn hoard.

Zadie Smith: "Don't romanticise your 'vocation'. You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle'. All that matters is what you leave on the page."

Damn right. Don’t be precious.

You don’t need to write with a fountain pen in a notebook covered in black silk. You don’t need to wear a kimono. It doesn’t matter if your upstairs neighbour plays horrible music. I don’t care if you don’t have the table you wanted in your local coffee shop.

Write.

Put down sentences, as mediocre as you like, then shape them up so they work. Then move on to the next one. Make sure your book holds the reader’s interest. Then go again.

Billy Wilder (screenwriter): "A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever." And another rule: "In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they're seeing."

Yes! Let the audience do the work. If you do summarise something, do so after the reader has already figured it out, so you’re consolidating an understanding, not creating it.

And obviously, we don’t have voice-overs exactly in novels, but we do sort of, when an interior monologue comments on the action just described. So be additive always.

The real point here is that nothing engages the reader as much as the detective work of figuring out implication from sub-text. Why would so and so say that to thingamajig? Why use that word? Why actually did that coffee cup get broken? It’s those tiny questions that keep a reader glued to your book. Character and plot and setting and dialogue are all just tools to create a really strong adhesion.

Feedback Friday / Your rules

Go on then: your rules of writing. Maximum of ten. And fewer than three? Bah, you aren’t trying. What works for you? What have you learned? You’re welcome to include rules that apply to editing, agents, publishing and all that. When you're ready, log in to our shiny new Townhouse and post yours here.

Til soon.

Harry

Rain, full stop, new paragraph

Last week, we sat down with Kurt Vonnegut and talked rules for writing. He smoked a lot and cracked pistachios, and there was a little green pistachio chip stuck in his moustache during our discussion of rules 4-7, but we had a good time. My hangover the next day … not so good.

Today, I report on my chat with Elmore Leonard who, to my surprise, spent much of our dialogue wandering around in the costume of an 1812-era naval commander and roaring things like, “Make it so, Mr Webb” and growling about an ill-set mainsail. I had no hangover after that, but my hands did smell of burned gunpowder for some days after.

El’s rules of writing are:

1. Never open a book with weather

Phooey. That’s silly. Open a book with weather if you want to. I did once, just to annoy him. Take a look at the email subject line if you want to guess what I wrote.

But – purposeful. Writing about weather can’t be just a way to write yourself into the book. There has to be purpose to it. Purpose to everything always.

2. Avoid prologues

Well, yes–ish.

I think there are roughly two kinds of prologue. One is just an apology for a boring opening. So you have a battle scene by way of prologue that basically says to the reader, “Please stick with me over the next 50 pages, because there will be something exciting to follow, I promise.” I have once written a prologue rather like this and for roughly that reason. Big El thundered at me for that one, and promised a ‘carronade of grapeshot’ if I should do it again.

But the other sort of prologue is one that changes the meaning of the text the reader is about to read. A classic example here is from Donna Tartt’s A Secret History, where the narrator reveals a murder that hasn’t yet taken place. That means the next 100-odd pages are spent thinking, ‘How does this group of friends collapse to the point at which it murders one of its number?” The book became a Whydunnit, not a Whodunnit.

Even Big El let that one go without a threat of being fired on.

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue

El, honestly? I mean, yes, mostly use ‘said’, I agree. But ‘never’? That’s absurd. So, here’s a bit of Fiona dialogue where I twice use words other than say:

‘Tea for two,’ I tell the waitress.

She asks if we want anything to eat.

‘What do you want, sweetheart?’ I ask my companion, but don’t expect, or get, an answer. ‘A bacon roll, maybe,’ I say to the waitress. ‘That’d be good.’

It’s ridiculous to suggest either of those verbs feels wrong or wordy or out of place.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.

And OK, now this is silly. I just checked one of my books and – well, I hardly ever use an adverb, but I did find this:

Aaron removes my hotel from Caernarfon. ‘You can’t put a hotel there,’ he says, with an edge of impatience. ‘You’ve got to get the property first.’

And this:

Coad’s face undergoes another change or two. Shadows chasing over ocean.

He says softly, ‘Because they’re not crazy. And I am. You want to know what I think.’

Now, to be fair, I searched the word “says”, and I started at the beginning, and these were the first examples I found, and the second of them (the first true breach of EL’s rule) was 44,000 words in.

So do I breach that rule often? No. Is it fine to breach it occasionally? Of course.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose

Ha! I thought I was going to agree with that one, but I don’t, or not quite the way Elmore’s telling it here.

In the same 109,000 word novel I’ve been checking, I found 15 exclamation points. All of those were in dialogue – things like “Duh!” or “Fuck’s sake!” Those things would I think have been just plain mispunctuated without an exclamation point. But outside dialogue? I essentially never use an exclamation point. Two or three per 100K words sounds excessive to me. But inside dialogue? And if the punctuation is there simply to note a manner of speaking rather than as a way to ‘create’ drama? Well, just use them. No one dies.

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."

I have definitely never used the phrase ‘all hell broke’ loose in one of my books. I don’t need to check them to know that.

But suddenly? Poor old suddenly? What’s wrong with it. Here’s an example from the same book that involves (sorry) Crime Scene Investigators trying to get an internal body temperature from a heavily frozen corpse:

In the end, the CSIs got a power-drill with a 10-mil bit and drove it through Rheon’s frozen back. By the look of it, they had to push through about an inch of frozen crust before getting to the tissue below. When the bit suddenly slid into the soft viscera, a splatter of blood and bowel contents spurted out, hitting the CSI across goggles and paper suit. He swore. I laughed. Watkins looked angry and impatient, which is probably just her way of laughing.

Now that’s not a way to add fake drama to a scene. It’s just a way to explain the movement of a drill bit that moved first slow, then fast. The word is perfectly OK.

That’s now four rules which are basically silly and the two before that were dubious. What does that teach us? Well, that a genuinely great writer may end up saying some slightly silly things when paid to write a column for the New York Times. That doesn’t make him less of a writer, though.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

This is true. There’s a modern tact here, which works well. Accents shouldn’t be denoted phonetically (So “Eet ees ’orrible, no?” sounds, today, like an incredibly patronising and diminishing way to write French-accented speech, for example.) But that’s about the phonetic transcription of an accent.

But if you have a character who uses regional dialect – then what is that character meant to speak other than that dialect? I had a character, Caff, a sailor who was born and bred on the Orkney Isles. I had him speak Orcadian, which is like a deep Scottish mixed with Viking and left to simmer for 1000 years. So we had chunks of speech like this:

That [turning the ship] sounds straightforward enough but Caff, who explains all this, is clearly anxious about the manoeuvre. ‘Thoo dohnt wahnt tae be skelp while turning,’ he says, as his hands show a big wave hitting the ship side-on as it turns. ‘If tha’ happens, we’ll hae oor bahookie in th’ sky in twa shakes o’ a hoor’s fud.’

I’m not going to translate that because there’s language there to make a matron’s ears blush rosy pink, but if you want a regional dialect, then use a damn regional dialect. Just honour it, and don’t patronise it.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters

Hmm. Well, I think that’s a little evasive, isn’t it? Any worthwhile description of anything finds its substance in the detail. So if I say, “She was five foot six, with dark shoulder length hair, and looked to be in her thirties,” I’ve given you three data points that amount to almost nothing.

But if I mention her “whatever-you-want smile” and say nothing about height or hair colour, you already have something – because of the detail. So maybe Leonard is saying, “Don’t just yammer on forever about how someone looks”, and OK, that’s true – but you shouldn’t yammer on forever about anything.

Here’s a wee passage with two ultra-brief character descriptions that do use details but don’t yammer on. Both micro-descriptions are just fine:

[Julie-Ann says,] “Then, I wasn’t sure, did you want to see Mr Coad?’

Mr Coad.

War hero. Nutjob. Prisoner.

No, I do not want to see Mr Coad. I want to get the fuck out of here and to never come back.

I don’t say anything.

Julie-Ann hovers, a whatever-you-want smile fixed in place.

I don’t even know how people like that maintain those smiles, those attitudes. I mean, I’m perfectly able to make nice with people, but if I offer them something – coffee or tea? do you want to see Jared Coad, yes or no? – I sort of expect them to make up their minds. I won’t just offer that wide, bland, take-as-long-as-you-want smile and keep it there.

I stare. Keep staring. And, when even J-A’s confidence starts to wobble, say, ‘Yes. Please. Jared Coad. Great.’

Julie-Ann shows me a place to make tea. Takes me down to the hospital kitchen, where a youth, late teens or very early twenties, finds me a sachet of porridge. The guy has a chest broad enough to fit a Lowland ox and the sachet is tiny in his hands.

When I presented that passage to Elmore Leonard, he read intently, then looked away, then roared at a Captain of Marines to attend to his station.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

Well, c’mon, El! We’ve basically just had that rule and we didn’t think a lot of it. Just don’t yammer on. Yes, OK. We’ve got the point. Move on.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

This is the one rule that people tend to remember, as much for how it’s phrased as for what it says. And it’s a good one. But how that rule applies will vary vastly from author to author. A Sally Rooney book looks very not like an Elmore Leonard book and neither of them looks anything like a Gillian Flynn book or, come to that, like one of mine. So yes, write in a way that holds the reader, your alpha and omega, the same for El as it was for Kurt, and as it is for me, and as it is – I’m sure – for you.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Rain, full stop, new paragraph

OK – I want any passage that you like which breaks at least one of Elmore’s rules. The more you break, the more points you get. But, if Elmore is right and the passage would be better with the rule unbroken, then you lose. You LOSE, d’you hear me? Mr Leonard will give you a full broadside, with marines shooting at you from the rigging. Please post in this Townhouse forum.

Til soon.

Harry

A seriously out-of-place air stewardess

Last week, someone suggested an email commenting on Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for writing. That seemed like a Bloody Good Idea to me, so here goes.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

That rule, I think, is bomb-proof. And, in fact, I’d make it a little stricter. I think that even high-end literary fiction has to entertain. It can’t be enough that I have a sense of having done my duty by the Gods of Literature. I need to have had fun – or have been moved – or basically just liked my experience with the book. I think entertainment is core. I’ve never knowingly broken that rule, not even writing non-fiction.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

I’ve never broken that rule either, but I think it’s probably possible to break it effectively. American Psycho is a yukky book, but it’s a work of proper genius … and its genius isn’t because its protagonist likes home-baking, cat rescue and volunteering at church-run soup kitchens. That said, it’s not even 1% of books that can break that rule effectively. So as a general guide, I’m with you, Kurt.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every character? I don’t know. If your protagonist has a momentary interaction with a receptionist, say, then does the receptionist need obvious motivation? On the one hand, no: truly minor characters can simply fall off the table of things you have to think about. On the other hand, here’s a snippet where Fiona does in fact interact extremely briefly with a receptionist – at a modern, ultra-secure, psychiatric institution for very violent, very dangerous offenders.

The driver takes us in. Hands us over to a neat, blue-suited receptionist – Alys, to go by her fabric badge. She is almost blushingly young, a late teenager at a guess. She wears a tri-coloured scarf, like a seriously out-of-place air stewardess.

‘Inspector Rogers? Miss Griffiths? Etta is expecting you.’

The ‘Etta’ in question is, I assume Dr. Etta Gulleford, the hospital director, and the woman we’re here to see.

No badges, I think because the metal clips could make a weapon. Instead, plastic cards, like the key-cards they use in hotels.

‘Upstairs. Right on to the end. Julie-Ann will find you there.’

She does a crinkle-eyed smile at us, the sort you’d get at an upmarket spa.

There’s no obvious sense of desire there, of wanting something … but on the other hand, I think there probably IS something. She’s blushingly young. She wears a scarf like an out-of-place stewardess. And she offers Fiona a spa-quality, crinkle-eyed smile.

What does all that amount to? I think it amounts to the Alys very much wanting Fiona not to make a fuss. Not to do something that breaks the spell. And the spell is, effectively, that this place can be considered like a nice, posh, modern spa rather than a quasi-prison full of extremely dangerous men. It’s like Alys is saying – pleading – don’t call this out for what it really is.

So, OK, I’m going to go with Vonnegut on this one. Even extremely minor characters should have some kind of want, even if it’s undeclared, even if it’s trivial.

Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

That’s probably mostly true, but it can’t be quite literally true. I think that, in the passage I just quoted, every sentence does do one of those two things. But what about this:

We watch for a while. The gulls. The waves. The rolling print of the wind on the water. Stippling squalls that turn the sea’s smooth watercolour into something jumpy and agitated, like the surface has been rubbed with gorse.

That’s not really advancing any action and it doesn’t really tell us much about Fiona, except I suppose glancingly, in the sense that the way she expresses what she sees would be different from yours or mine. But really, the point about those lines is that they describe something – they reveal the character of a place, not a person. That’s fine with me. I expect Kurt wouldn’t have a fight with me over lines like that. I like description. It’s fine.

Start as close to the end as possible.

Vonnegut thought a lot about short stories and I think this rule applies both to short stories and to scenes. Enter late. It’s really easy to write 200 words of intro before you get to the meat of a scene. It’s often better to start with the meat, then use just 20-30 words a few paragraphs in to explain to the reader how they got to where they now are.

But does this rule make sense for novels? Don’t think so – or at least, I don’t think that it’s especially useful. Most of my Fiona novels start with a corpse discovery. Yes, that’s as close to the end “as possible”, but really: it’s right at the start. So: useful rule for scenes. Silly rule for books.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Oh yes. Definitely. No quibbles here.

Here at Jericho, we occasionally get books that tell a story such as: middle aged woman divorces cheating husband, feels a lack of purpose, gets diagnosed with cancer, takes up pottery, makes great ceramics, meets dashing ceramicist, gets the cancer all clear.

And, yeah, OK. I mean: in an actual person’s life, that’s all bad (to start with) then heartwarming (to end with.) But we all know people with stories like that. And – readers don’t care. They want really bad stuff to happen to characters. They’re sadists. So you have to be too. That’s just how it is.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Yes. I agree with that. (It’s also, by the way, an exceptionally good rule for marketing books too. Sell hard to your ideal reader. Bore the rest. Ignore the rest.)

But I think it’s not clear enough. Who is that person? In the end, there’s only one person who matters and that’s you. Every line you write, every word choice you make, you’re just asking the question: do I like this? Or that? Which pleases me more?

So your task as a writer is to develop your tastes as far and as finely as possible. You can’t do that in isolation from the broad sweep of contemporary writing. You have to develop your own taste with reference to what others read. But still – write to please just one person. And make it you.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Uh, Kurt? This is just BS, and he surely knew it.

I mean the cockroaches / pages thing: OK, yes, at that point, I think there is often a kind of solid inevitability in play … but not always. In one of my Fiona books, Fiona ends up clapping handcuffs on the dastardly people who tried to imprison her (in a very weird way.) That part plays out as the reader should by then expect.

But then, a Ukrainian millionaire tries to bribe her … and she (in a Fiona-y way) semi-accepts the offer.

And a girl who went missing needs to be reunited with her father, and Fiona does just that.

Both of those things make sense from what went before, but I don’t think any reader could plausibly have mapped out either scene. So, sorry, Kurt, no way. I think you were having a laugh.

Vonnegut, also said:

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

And yes, that’s true too. If you grip the reader and entertain the reader, all the other guidance is just a means to that end.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / a tri-colour scarf

I think Kurt has given us the theme for this week. What I want is an interaction between your protagonist and a really minor character – someone who has maybe a line or two of dialogue in the entire book. Let’s take a look at whether that minor character expresses some kind of want – not directly, necessarily, but in some way.

My snippet above was about 100 words in total. You can either give me a 200-ish snippet or 2x 100-worders. The ideal response will have one or two ultra short snippets, each involving a really minor character, and we'll feel some pressure of desire from that minor character, even if they say nothing about it. Please post in this Townhouse forum.

Til soon.

Harry

The friends you don’t yet know

Last week, I wrote an email on the approximate topic of Be Proper English. I’m sure there was a writing-related theme in there somewhere, but I remember encouraging you to play football with a fractured tibia and smash home some penalties at near enough the speed of light.

If there was a lesson in there about writing (there must have been, no?), it had to do with resilience – the single most necessary characteristic to have in an industry that is brutally hard on the people who underpin it.

By most authorial standards, I’ve had a successful career. I’ve written bestsellers, signed movie option deals, seen a book televised, been on some significant prize shortlists, had some great reviews, sold books to a lot of countries and in a lot of languages – and given a lot of readers pleasure. But? Well, I’ve seen books fail. I’ve had to switch genres. I’ve had to wrestle with publishers. I’ve seen really promising starts collapse for reasons that essentially had nothing to do with me.

So, resilience? Yes. It’s lesson one. (Closely allied: mastering some self-pub ju-jitsu, a great fallback if a trad career swerves off-track, as mine did in the US.)

But also: friends.

People always say that writing is a lonely profession, and it is / isn’t.

It is, yes, because you don’t write in company – and you don’t want to – and that isn’t being lonely, it’s having precious creative time to yourself.

But no, it isn’t. It’s the opposite. Authors – writers – are the most joyfully supportive bunch of humans on the planet.

Part of the joy of writering is that sense of fellowship. I’ve been at literary festivals where my job was theoretically to mix with readers and promote my books. I used to try to do that too, except then I realised it was way more fun just to hang with authors: those I knew and those I didn’t yet know. Those weekends were always joyful.

And online groups too. Talk to any vaguely engaged contemporary author and they’ll be part of a community that vastly matters to them. For wisdom, for laughter, for support, for advice, for just sharing moments of pain. Honestly? I love ‘n’ adore my wife, of course I do, but for that particular kind of support, those online groups have a kind of magic that nothing else can replace.

All this because we – Jericho – haven’t done enough in the past to create a community for you. The will has been there, and the intention, but the software we were using to deliver has just not been good enough.

All that changes, this week.

Our community site is now fast, friendly, un-glitchy and easy to navigate. It’s a place to make friends and find beta readers, get feedback and seek advice.

There’s a ton of free resources from us, too - no extra sign up needed. If you’re part of the community, you get all that automatically.

If you are already signed up, then explore, explore, explore. This refreshed community could easily be one of the most important parts of your writing life. I’ve known writers for whom communities of this sort have been absolutely central to their development as writers.

And if you’re not yet signed up? Well, duh, it’s free? What’s the worst that could happen? Probably that you get annoyed because you have to think of a password. (But you’re a writer, yes? You can think of three words, no? Egg-noose-possum. There you go. Maybe change the words, though, we can’t have everyone with possum-based passwords.)

And what’s the best? The best is that you find one of the most joyous and most supportive groups that you’ll ever have in your life. The whole damn thing is free, y’know.

That’s it from me.

Feedback Friday is a celebration of you and the things you love. Come one, come all. Let’s make it a big one.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Your darlings

Give me your darlings: 200-300 words from your work in progress that you just love.

Give us the title / genre / and a 1-2 line intro to your piece. Then just show us your joy. On a beautiful new community site.

Til soon.

Harry

Proper English.

Which football player (soccer player to those of you currently wearing Stetsons and/or a shoestring necktie) has never started an international knockout match but has twice scored the decisive goal in the finals?

If you’re Welsh or Scottish, you probably know the answer and wished you didn’t.

If you’re English – well, it’s Chloe Kelly, isn’t it? She didn’t just score the decisive penalty against Spain in this year’s Euros, she also scored the decisive goal against Germany in the 2021/22 edition. She also set up Russo’s equaliser in last weekend’s final, scored a 119^th minute equaliser against Italy, set up both goals against Sweden … and yes, scored a penalty there too.

That’s a never-say-die record to put it mildly, but Chloe Kelly doesn’t even take the record for most never-say-die in the English team.

That accolade surely has to go to Lucy Bronze who played a full part in every game in the tournament – which is a FOOTBALL tournament, which involves a game that requires people to (a) run and (b) kick and also, if we’re honest, (c) be kicked – and Bronze did so while having a fractured tibia. Now yes, the fracture was a stress-fracture, so it’s not like the bottom part of her leg was just flopping around like a broken chair leg. But stress fractures are very painful and the recommended treatment does not involve playing constant high-level football.

The unofficial motto of the team has come to be Proper England, or Proper English.

What does that mean? Well, it means be more Kelly. It means, be more Bronze.

By most football metrics, Spain had the better of Sunday’s final.

They had more of the ball. Had silkier players. Connected more passes. Showed those little dabs of skill.

But resistance is a skill too. If Spain were masters of control, England were masters of chaos – and sheer bloody-mindedness. Was there somewhere in the multiverse, some spinning galaxy somewhere in which Chloe Kelly did not set up that equalising goal? Did not lash that final ball through the net and into the stands beyond? I doubt it.

And all this is a homily about writing.

Writing is a Really Hard Job.

It’s hard to write a book.

It’s hard to get an agent.

It’s uncertain, having once got an agent, that you get a publisher.

And when you get a publisher – well, guess what? Most books fail and publishers are absolutely experts at brushing you ever so politely and ever so decisively out of their lives.

So, OK, damn publishers. Why not self-publish? Well, sure thing. Except now you need to write a lot of books. And they need to be good books. And the covers need to be as good as books commercially published by billion-dollar corporations, because they’re competing nose to nose against those books. And you’re going to have set up mailing lists. And Facebook ads. And probably Amazon ads. And you’re going to have to layer those things up and be as professional about those things as you are about everything else. And all that, honestly, won’t work unless your books compel the reader, which, as we know, ain’t the simplest.

So?

Either give up, which is a perfectly sensible solution. Accountancy is easier and it’s definitely better paid.

Or – be Proper English. (Or, proper Welsh / Scottish / Irish / American or whatever descriptor pleases you.)

Just refuse to be beaten.

In the Italian semi-final, England scored the equalising goal in the fifth minute of second-half injury time. They scored the winning goal in the penultimate minute of extra time.

Book’s rejected by agents? Write it better.

Still rejected? Write a new book. Use all the learnings from the last one.

Taken one course? Take another.

Tried five agents? Try five more.

Your rom-coms didn’t work? Write crime.

Trad publishing stopped feeling right? Self-publish.

Unsure about Facebook ads? Learn about Facebook ads.

There definitely are authors whose first book just bounces to the upper reaches of the bestseller charts, there to establish a nesting place for all its future sisters, but those authors are desperately rare: exceptions among exceptions.

One of my favourite keynote talks at our Festival of Writing was given by a bestselling author, who was also a senior commissioning editor at a Big 5 publishing house. She knew everybody. She was crazily well-connected. Her first book became a #1 bestseller. And (I was worried) that our audience just wouldn’t relate. Just like it wouldn’t relate to Jeff Bezos moaning about the price of fuel for his yacht.

But the speaker turned it around.

She corrected me. “Harry, when you introduced me just now, you said that my first novel went straight to the top of the charts. And it didn’t. What you meant was, my first published novel …”

And this glittering writer, this gifted person who sat at the heart of London’s publishing industry, had written an earlier book. Which she spent ages on. Which was never published. Which an agent-friend/colleague told her was too bad even to market.

Every the glitterati have tough times. This is a tough game.

Get back on that fractured tibia – and be more Bronze. Be more Kelly. The game ain’t over till it’s over.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Explanations

No Feedback Friday this week, because Townhouse is on holiday. (Or actually, so hungover after its personal Euros celebrations that it has a headache that stretches from here to Paris. It also has straw in its hair, sand on its bum, what seems to be a Russian sailor in the bedroom, and a quite extraordinary new tattoo. Townhouse promises to sober up – and get rid of the sailor – in time for next week.)

Til soon.

Harry

The pitch in a blink

Last week, I wrote about elevator pitch (yet again). I said (again) that your One True Pitch has a hundred daughters, and some of those daughters are visual.

Your book cover is the most obvious example, but Facebook ads would be another one. And whereas you only get one book cover, you can have a zillion FB ads if you want to (and, erm, if you’re self-publishing. FB ads are a niche that only work for indie authors.) What’s more, those FB ads give you hard numerical data on what works and what doesn’t – and part of my email last week suggested that if the elevator pitch isn’t properly expressed in the image, then it won’t ultimately succeed in terms of sales.

I’d say that, on the whole, my data bears that out. (And some books have a much simpler way to express their elevator pitch in visual terms. Those books are easiest to advertise.)

Now, that’s all jolly interesting but:

Lots of books won’t get FB ads (because they may be trad published by publishers who focus on print sales).

The success of a book is more heavily determined by a cover than by the ads: if you have a lousy cover, no marketing in the world will save the book.

And the book cover is the older, more senior daughter. The look of the cover has to determine the look of any advertising campaign (and, in fact, any visual materials produced in any context), because all those visual materials have to set up the right expectations: “This is the thing we want you to buy.”

So what works for a book cover? Well, a strong pitch, visually expressed.

As I said last week, you can’t necessarily get the entire pitch into a visual and you don’t have to. You just have to make sure that the pitch and the image are extremely consistent. You need to feel the pitch at least partially expressed in the cover.

And, because the most arresting element of any cover is the title, then you really want to think of the cover as being the sum of Image and Title with those two things working harmoniously with one another.

Here’s an example of all that working p-p-p-perfectly:

The book is a big bestseller by my colleague, Becca, who's Head of Marketing and Membership at JW Towers.

I don’t know exactly how she would frame the elevator pitch, but it’s something like:

Woman + creepy guy + remote cabin + letters from a previous wife.

That’s a pretty damn solid elevator pitch, and it’s right there on the cover.

Woman? Yes, in massive text.

Remote cabin? Yes, in massive text and as the lead element of the visual. As a matter of fact, the text ‘cabin’ could mean some kind of beach-side cabin that’s part of a group of 100 or more. This artwork makes it damn clear: this cabin is remote. It’s alone. It’s isolated.

Creepy guy? Well, no… but also kind of yes. The man doesn’t feature in the title or in the image, but you sort of feel him there. The blue and yellow colour tones in the cover have become a kind of uniform for psychological thriller books. The creative part of me never loves a uniform… but they’re definitely a sweet and lovely guide to genre. They’re another way to convey information. And here, the blue and yellow (and the twilight), all say, “creepy domestic drama.” So yes, there’s a creepy man around here. You’d feel kind of baffled if you picked the book up and he wasn’t there in the blurb.

Letters from the wife before? OK, this is not in big text and it’s not an element in the image. (Nor should it be: it would just look awful if there was some handwritten letters layered onto the image somehow.) But – well, you have your shoutline to play with, a subtitle, in effect. And that doesn’t mention letters, but it does strongly hint in that direction: “You’re not the first. Will you be the last?” Nine words that complete delivery of the pitch.

The cover + image delivers the whole damn pitch, perfectly.

Books almost never sell at real scale unless they deliver a great reader experience, so I don’t want to pull any praise away from Becca’s actual writing. (I’ve just started the book: I’m 50 pages in and loving it.)

But Becca tells me that the publisher of this book at one stage contemplated changing the title and the cover design. The title was going to be “The Woman Before” and the image was going to be of someone washing up.

You can kind of feel the thinking going on there. This is a domestic drama. Maybe lean on the last part of the elevator pitch more heavily, the idea that this current wife is successor to an unknown previous one?

But Becca pushed back, and she was right to do it. The remoteness of the location was absolutely central to the pitch. If you had to trim the pitch down to three elements, not four, it would be:

Woman + creepy guy + remote cabin.

The book sells because of teasing the reader: what would it be like to be a woman, alone in some remote place, with a guy whom you now find creepy? The previous wife just gives you a steer on the particular kind of creepiness involved, but that’s kind of secondary. Woman + creepy guy + cabin: that’s the bit that really matters.

Oh yes: I will also say that a good book cover should stand at an oblique angle to the title. It should offer a different take, or it’s not really intriguing.

The most obvious cover here would have been “picture of cabin with woman in window.” But then the reader learns nothing from the cover than they have from the title. Those very literal covers nearly always fall flat.

When books of mine have failed, the cover has always been at the heart of the failure.

Here’s the American hardcover of my first Fiona Griffiths book:

That sort of expresses “woman uncertain of her identity”, but it doesn’t say “this is a crime novel”. It doesn’t reference murder and crime investigation and being a detective.

If you were told this was an existential novel by a French feminist philosopher, you’d probably think: (a) yep, perfect cover, and (b) I won’t buy that until the Ice Age after next.

Sure enough, that book had stellar reviews… and terrible sales.

Because sales had been disappointing, the publishers decided on a complete rebrand for the paperback edition. They went with this:

(That’s a weird second-hand image, because – thank the Lord – my self-published books have now driven these original versions off the market so completely that they’ve become hard to find.)

And that image still fails. There’s some sense of communication with the dead, yes, but in a séance-type way, not a weird-detective way.

As a matter of fact, those cutesy suede ankle-boots suggest that what you’re looking at is some sort of women’s fiction based around séances. I mean: there probably IS a niche there, because there’s a niche for almost everything, but if you were a girly-séance sort of reader, you’d be totally put off when you found what kind of book was actually on offer.

That book sold all across the United States and Canada… and sold fewer than a thousand copies: a figure so low I still find it staggering.

Just because your eyes are probably hurting from the badness of those covers, here’s the self-pub version of the cover that replaced those two evildoers:

That cover says: dark crime novel, with a theme to do with the borderline between life and death. That’s good enough: there just isn’t a visually one-stop way to express “murder story involving a detective who used to think she was dead.”

The cover isn’t the pitch, remember: it’s the daughter of the pitch. You just need to see a strong family resemblance.

That’s it from me.

In Delightful Child News, I will just tell you that my elder daughter has created the most excellent word, confuzzling, for anything that is confusing and puzzling. It’s kind of a genius word, and I heartily recommend its adoption.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY is going on holiday...

As you probably know, we'll be doing some serious tinkering with Townhouse over the next couple of weeks. Our aim is to improve it for our members, both Premium and free - but that means it'll be going offline on Monday 28 July.

Feedback Friday is glad you folks will be getting a shiny new space to connect in, not least because it means she can have a well-deserved rest.

She'll be back on 8 August, slightly sunburnt, in her snazzy new home.

Til soon.

Harry

The visual pitch

Something a little different this week.

I’ve jabbered a lot in the past about the importance of nailing your elevator pitch: making sure that your basic novel concept is one that people feel the need to pick up and explore.

I think that’s not just commercially important. I think it’s artistically important too. It’s key to any genuinely great book.

I’ve also always said that the elevator pitch – that basic concept – is FOR YOU. It’s a mother with 100 daughters. The daughters arise anywhere your book concept touches the world. So, for example:

Your query letter
Your book blurb
A two-line pitch on social media
A conversation with an agent at our London Festival of Writing.

But also, for example:

Your text itself
Your opening page (and what it hints at in terms of the future)
Choices you make about what and what not to include.

But also:

Your book cover
Your website
Your Twitter profile (I’m not going to call that company by a stupid name just to please an erratic billionaire)
Your Facebook ads (ditto).

Today, I thought it would be interesting to pick up the very last of those. Here, for example, is a Facebook ad for one of the Fiona books.

What’s the elevator pitch for that book? Well, all my pitches have two layers, I guess. There’s the series pitch (“Detective who used to think she was dead”). And there’s the individual book pitch, which in this case is something like “Dark religion + kidnap + remote Wales village”. That’s the pitch if you pick out the central ingredients. If you want a more conventional pitch, then “Woman, wearing bridal white, found dead in a country churchyard. Who is she? And why is she here?”

I hope you feel that the image above connects adequately with the pitch. It’s not that they say the exact same thing, but they live happily together – like lemon and mint.

Nearly all my ads use the same colour set – yellow and white text, dark monochrome image – because that basic mixture says noirish crime, with strong hints of seriousness. (Yellow and black together convey danger – it’s one of the standard colour sets of warning signs and crime tape.) Also, of course, the more consistency in the ads, the more casual users start to notice the brand on repeat viewings.

Here’s another ad for the same book:

That’s a more direct expression of the elevator pitch, but they’re both playing on the same basic turf. At the moment, both ads have roughly the same link click-through rate, so I can’t yet say which one will come out on top.

Or take another example, this time for the ($0.99) series opener.

Here, the elevator pitch is all about my damaged detective – who’s kinda nuts and used to think she was dead. The ad that’s worked best so far is this one:

The actual image there is pretty much bog-standard: tough, crimey woman + moody landscape. But the ad text tells you who that woman is: “Brilliant, quirky, damaged, fascinating.”

Again, that’s not a direct statement of the pitch, but it’s certainly a very clear echo. It makes you want to know more… and when you get to the actual book sales page, the basic offer expands from that exact starting point. The journey from ad to book page, to “look inside”, to purchase, should all be very clear, very consistent.

Another ad that has done well is this one:

That ad offers a landscape – a somewhat foreboding, Welsh-looking one. That establishes genre (moody, Celtic noir, crime), but it doesn’t say much directly about the pitch. But again, “Wales’ strangest detective” slaps the elevator pitch right there, up top.

Both those ads have done better than one that uses a really positive review as its central element. Take this ad, for example:

That ad has done OK… but it’s not been any kind of star performer. And I think that’s because its relationship with the elevator pitch is just too murky. OK, so Fiona Griffiths stars in some crime books. We’ve never met anyone like her. But… what? She’s super-girly? She’s a klutz? She’s half-robot? She speaks Ukrainian? She mostly works as a part-time hairdresser?

In terms of ads that really deliver readers – that is, ads that command the user’s attention from first sight through to completion of purchase – it’s been my experience that the pitch matters. That’s why your original concept matters so much, even before you’ve started to write a word. It’s why that concept matters so much when you’re selling, not just with the text you deploy, but the image composition too.

That’s it from me, my furry companion. May the grass lie softly for you and the air taste sweet.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY - Explanations

Do you have any visual material for your book? If so, let’s hear your pitch and see your visuals. That’ll be fun!

If you don’t have anything available yet (and you really don’t need to), then just give us your pitch and sketch out for us what a book cover or Facebook ad might look like.

When you're ready, log in and post yours here.

Til soon.

Harry

Characters through character

Last week, we looked at a couple of solo flights – characters brought to life only from their dialogue or only from their interior reflection.

But that’s not mostly how stories go. Mostly, we have a point of view character through whom we meet others. So what we get is character-through-character. The reader interprets the third party character from what the point-of-view character is reporting – but that interpretation always takes into account who’s telling the story.

That all sounds slightly academic, but it’s not really – it’s normal human. Suppose I find there is chocolate cake mess all over my kitchen, and some story about a dog jumping up and scoffing it. Well, fine – but my understanding of what’s happened will depend rather a lot on whether my wife is telling the story … or a very chocolatey 6-year-old.

So here’s a chunk of action – narrated by dear old Fiona – in which she interacts with a woman named Anna Quintrell.

The scene is set in a two-custody cell in a modern custody suite. Quintrell is an accountant who’d been busted for something bad. Fiona has been working undercover, but Quintrell doesn’t know that and still thinks Fiona was part of her gang. Fiona has a visible face injury which she acquired on purpose – she wanted to look the part. She’s asked that the custody cell be made as cold as possible.

Here’s the scene, a complete (but very short) chapter:

Quintrell is brought to the cell when the light is dying.

She looks rough. Not injured and knocked about, like me, but exhausted. Defeated. She’s still in her cutesy little summer dress, but someone has given her a grey fleece to wear over the top.

We stare at each other.

She sits on her bed. There are four blankets in the room and I’ve got them all.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Resisting arrest,’ I say. ‘Except some of it happened after arrest.’

She draws her legs up on the bed. ‘Can I have my blankets?’

I give her one.

‘And another?’

I tell her to fuck off. Say I’m cold.

‘So am I.’

I shrug. Not interested.

There’s a pause. A pause sealed off by steel doors and concrete walls.

‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

I shrug.

Light dies in the ceiling.

She tries to make herself comfortable. Twitches the fleece and blanket, trying to get warm. A losing game.

There’s a call button by the door which allows prisoners to ask for help from staff. She presses it, asks for more bedclothes. Someone laughs at her and tells her to go to sleep.

She stands by my bed and says plaintively. ‘You’ve got my blanket.’

I tell her again to fuck off. She’s bigger than me, but I’m scarier. She goes back to her bed.

The light fades some more. I try to sleep. The aspirin has worn off and my head hurts. Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered. Down the corridor, we can hear more suspects being brought in and processed. Doors slam through the night: church bells calling the hour.

I sleep.

And that’s it. The scene is so simple that, in a way, there’s not much to say about it.

The central element here is the establishment of a power hierarchy. When they were both in the criminal gang, Quintrell was Fiona’s boss. She was taller, richer, more educated (she thought), more powerful. In here, though, that’s all inverted.

A cutsie summer dress is replaced by a grey fleece. The resources people fight over aren’t elegant homes (a contest where Quintrell won, but prison-issue blankets (a contest where Fiona wins 3-1.)

There are only two scraps of non-blanket related dialogue. The first is the bit about Fiona’s injury.

She tells Quintrell she was hurt once ‘resisting arrest’ – that is, she claims she fought the police who tried to arrest her. And part of the injury was after arrest, meaning that she was beaten up during interrogation. That’s not true – Fiona and the reader know it’s not true – but

It makes Quintrell even more scared about her situation and
It makes Fiona look even scarier to Quintrell, because she gets beaten up by cops and doesn’t even seem that perturbed by it.

The other non-blanket related moment is Quintrell saying, ‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

That’s Quintrell looking at total defeat – a prison sentence stretching ahead of her. But it’s also a frightened woman reaching out to someone who might be a friend. It’s a request for sympathy.

That request gets yet another shrug. So far Quintrell has received from Fiona:

A stare
A blanket
A ‘fuck off’
Two shrugs.

That’s not really much of a basis for friendship, so Quintrell who is imprisoned and cold and facing jail is now also friendless.

Nothing at all has happened in this scene, except that: ‘Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered.’

That moment of crying is the bit Fiona has been working to achieve. In the morning, when they wake, Fiona shows a tiny bit of openness to friendship. Here’s a tiny snippet from the chapter that follows:

Quintrell trusts my legend [=undercover identity] completely now. Perhaps she did before, I don’t know, but my injuries and my presence here have washed away any last trace of suspicion.

I cover up with blankets again. Then relent and throw one over to Quintrell.

‘Thanks.’

She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and arranges it over her front. She looks like a disaster relief victim, or would do if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses with matching loafers.

‘I like your dress.’

‘Thanks.’

Silence fills the cell.

Fiona gives Quintrell a blanket and says something nice about her dress. That’s the nudge that Quintrell needs to turn all confessional. She starts spilling her heart out to Fiona … unaware that the whole thing is being recorded. She ends up incriminating herself and most of her fellow gang-members.

And throughout all this, we always learn more about Quintrell, but always through a Fiona-ish lens. A Jack Reacher type character might have noted the dress – roughly: “she wore a blue and white summer dress” – but wouldn’t have got involved with it.

A more feminine type character might have started to characterise the dress a bit more. (“A summer dress, but smart, almost nautical. A dress that wanted to hold a glass of cold white wine overlooking some sunny beachfront in the Hamptons.”)

Fiona is feminine enough to circle back to Quintrell’s clothes, but in a Fiona-ish way – ‘if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses …’

So every time we learn something about Quintrell, we also learn something about Fiona. And in fact, because Fiona’s undercover, we understand Fiona herself at two levels: the Fiona she’s pretending to be, and the Fiona she really is.

Last week, I said that our two masters of fiction worked via (i) putting some real unpredictability into their characters and (ii) letting us, the reader, figure out what’s going on.

The scene we’ve looked at today involves two people not one, so the focus is always shared.

But the same basic rule applies.

Keep the scene unpredictable. Here, the scene gets its tension in part because we know that Fiona isn’t actually a horrible cow. She’s someone who normally would share her blankets or comfort a woman in distress. So we keep sort of expecting her to do just that. But she doesn’t. She keeps the blankets and tells woman-in-distress to fuck off.

Fiona’s a joy to write in part because she brings her own built-in unpredictability. You have to pay close attention to the scene, because (this is Fiona) you just aren’t sure what’ happening next.

And: don’t explain.

There’s basically no explanation for the reader at all in the parts I’ve just quoted. A little further on, though, we get this:

I say, ‘Anna, how did you get into all this? Why did you get started?’

And she tells me.

Almost without further prompting. Without thought for where she is or who could be listening. It’s a beautiful illustration of the interrogator’s oldest maxim: that people want to confess. An urge as deep as breathing. The beautiful relief of sharing secrets.

That last paragraph is the first time that Fiona explains anything to the reader. But (and I think this is a pretty good rule in fiction) that the explanation is only given, once the reader already (kind of) knows it. (If you’re explaining how custody suites work or rules around covert recording, that’s different. I’m talking here about character/emotional type explanations.)

In effect, what Fiona is doing here is simply voicing something that the reader has already figured out.

So the reader brain is doing something like this: “Wow, Fiona is being a real cow. And blimey, Quintrell looks defeated. Oh, she’s crying now. And what’s this? Fiona’s being a little bit nice this morning. Bet Quintrell needs that. And – aha! – Fiona’s now basically inviting Quintrell to confess to everything. She really shouldn’t do that, but I can see she’s absolutely going to.”

All that Fiona is doing with her ‘urge to confess’ paragraph is wrapping that already-existing understanding up into a nice little package, so the reader-brain can dock that bit of knowledge and move on.

Always with these emails, I learn what I think by writing the email.

So, honestly, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to find today, but I think this last lesson is the big one. It’s OK to explain something character-related to the reader … but you need to only do that once the reader already basically knows. You’re drawing a line under something so you can move on, but the reader needs to have done the work for themselves first.

Here endeth the lesson.

And if you find yourself in a cell with Fiona, then keep your mouth shut – and your blankets close.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Explanations

Interesting one today. I want you to find a place in your text where you explain something about character X. Does the reader already kind of know what you’re saying, or not? Why is the explanation here. Find a 300 word chunk and tell us your thoughts.

When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry

Characters in a flick of paint

You know how gifted artists can suggest a face – and a mood, a character, a personality – in just a few swift lines?

Well, writers can do the same. So today’s email is just a “stand and admire” type affair. Two writers. Two vastly different techniques. But some surprising commonalities in the way they work…

Dialogue with Big El

How about this from Elmore Leonard:

'Man, all the photographers, TV cameras. This shit is big news, has everybody over here to see it. Otherwise, Sunday, what you have mostly are rich ladies come out with their little doggies to make wee-wee. I mean the doggies, not the ladies.' A girl in front of them smiled over her shoulder and Ordell said, 'How you doing, baby? You making it all right?' He looked past her now, glanced at Louis to say, 'I think I see him,' and pushed through the crowd to get closer to the street. 'Yeah, there he is. Black shirt and tie? A grown-up skinhead Nazi. I call him Big Guy. He likes that.'

'It's Richard,' Louis said. 'Jesus.'

The speaker is a guy called Ordell. This is the second page of Rum Punch, so the reader has no prior knowledge of the character. But that little paragraph? It says so much. It says:

He talks a kind of cool, urban tough guy English – which is just about right. He’s a ruthless blackmarket operator in LA.
At the same time, “with their little doggies to make wee-wee”? Huh? What? This is such an unexpected turn of phrase, we don’t quite know what to do with it. I think, for me, this is sign of a kind of unpredictability. If the guy was angry with you and happened to have a gun in his hand, you’d have no idea which way he was about to leap.
And sure enough, it’s straight from that highly unexpected phrase to a very standard pick-up type line (“How you doing, baby?”). From a white power march to doggies making wee to a very basic pick-up line. Our heads are spinning.
And then, we get to the point of the scene: “There he is. Black shirt and tie. A grown-up skinhead Nazi.” And oh, OK, we readjust again. Forget the pretty girls. Forget the doggie wee-wees. We’re hunting Nazis. And Nazis are bad, right? No one loves a Nazi. Plus, we assume correctly that Ordell is Black, and so he surely really really doesn’t like Nazis.
Only then, yet another switcheroo: “I call him Big Guy. He likes that.” And again: huh? Why are we making nice with skinhead Nazis? Why is Ordell, of all people doing so?

The whole paragraph is barely 100 words, but it’s told us so much already about Ordell – and already locked us into the story, because we know that anything involving Ordell and Nazi Big Guy is going to involve violence and a lot of unpredictability and fireworks.

Big El’s tips for humans:

Throw unpredictability into your dialogue. Steer one way, then abruptly somewhere different.
Let the dialogue do character description for you. Leonard doesn’t need to tell us that Ordell is highly sexed and ready to try it on with pretty much anyone. He just writes 9 words of dialogue and leaves us to figure it out.

Interior Monologue, with Mrs Robinson

Here is a completely opposite technique from Marilynne Robinson – a technique so opposite, that Elmore Leonard would never use it:

I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little.

No dialogue here. It’s all interior reflection. And John Ames, the narrator here, is about as far from Ordell as you could possibly imagine.

But we have the same themes at play here:

Real unpredictability. Here, the narrator surprises us by telling us that people are asking him (a person who’s alive) what it’s like to be dead. Then he surprises us further, by telling us that elderly people would ask him that even when he was young. Then he comes up with what is maybe a somewhat expected line about going home… but then thwarts that by saying we have no home in the world… before going on to talk about what might actually be the homiest thing in the world, namely a fried egg sandwich and coffee and radio.
Let the interior monologue do the character work for you. In just the same way as regular dialogue for Elmore Leonard, Marilynne Robinson doesn’t bother to tell us much about her character. She just lets him narrate and forces the reader to draw inferences.

I was originally going to pick a third novelist to compare as well, but I’m intrigued enough by the basis similarity in approach here – unpredictability plus a lot of reliance on the reader figuring things out for themselves – that I wanted to see how I approach the same issues.

And – well, it’s complicated. I write first person as Fiona and, yes, Fiona is notably unnpredictable right from her actions through to her word choices. She doesn’t explain herself much. She just is, and lets the reader draw their own conclusions. So in terms of my approach with Fiona, I guess I operate on largely the same lines as the two models here.

But when it comes to Fiona encountering other characters, something a bit more complicated is going on. We’ll look at that next week.

In the meantime, it’s time for…

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Give me any chunk (100-200 words max; we want short) that shows deep characterisation in a few swift lines. Look for unpredictability and a reliance on the reader’s own intelligence. It’s going to be interesting to see what you come up with.

When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry

The long game, the ragged edge

We all know about Chekhov’s gun. The playwright wrote to a young dramatist saying: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.”

And quite right too. Bang, bang, do svidanya, tovarishch, and all that.

But? Oh hang it:

He was Russian, and Russians drink black tea with jam, and how far can you trust anyone who does that?
He was a dramatist and we write novels, and those two things are obviously related but they’re also obviously not the same.
He was clearly rather prone to giving that advice, since he’s recorded as giving it at least three times, and at a certain point, you do wonder if he wasn’t simply enjoying the aphorism as much as truly believing it.

The biggest difference between the novel and the play is simply that of length.

Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard runs to about 18,000 words. Macbeth runs to 17,000. King Lear, 26,000.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my character’s barely pulled on her jeans and pistol-whipped her first victim by that point in a book. She’s barely done brushing her teeth. If your chosen art form is (by our lofty standards) rather short, then damn right you can’t fool around with guns that don’t fire.

Novels, I think, can be messier. They are built to resemble life, and life is messy, so I don’t really see why novels can’t be messy.

Now there are strict limits here, of course. Your plot needs to be plotty. Your resolution needs to feel like it’s summarising and concluding some important thing that has occupied the reader for the past 350 pages.

The ragged edge

But a ragged edge? Some questions answered only with a shrug? For me, that’s fine. Here’s an example from one of my books. The question is how Parry (a kidnapper) ended teaming up with a bunch of monks. Here’s all I say about it:

Parry’s living in this valley. Maybe starts going to one or two services in the monastery just for the hell of it. Or because he had a guilty conscience. Or to build himself some cover. Who knows? Anyway, he gets serious. He finds God—or his own crazy and violent version of God—and he decides to make some changes in the way he operates …

And Parry’s new buddies, these monks, are more than a bit crazy themselves. They have this big silence and reflection and abstinence thing going. They have a deep sense that people who grew up with God in their lives have become deaf to His word …

Now, quite honestly that’s more of a hand-wave than an actual answer. Structurally speaking, what I say here is “Maybe … or … or … who knows? Anyway …”

For me, that’s fine. Even in a crime novel whose purpose is to solve mystery, that kind of thing is fine.

Here’s another example, at the end of another novel:

‘All a bit messy and last minute, but anything to get the job done.’

‘Yes, exactly. If we work hard enough, I expect we’ll find a link between Devine and Wormold. At any rate, I’m pretty sure that Devine gave the order.’

Jackson thinks about that. Gathers more daisies. We’re motoring now. Him gathering, me stitching them.

What we have here is a slightly disengaged conversation about how Bad Guy A ended up conspiring with Bad Guy B, but in the end, the business of making a supermassive daisy-chain seems more important and that thread is never picked up again.

I think so long as the text somehow acknowledges that yes, some questions remain unanswered, it doesn’t really matter that they exist. And, me – I prefer it. It feels more authentic, makes the world more real.

The long game

And at that same time, I also love the ridiculously delayed punchline – a way of tying things up neatly, but 10s of 1000s of words later than the reader might expect.

So in one of my books (chapter 29) this bit of dialogue takes place:

‘Twll dîn pob Sais,’ I say.

‘Pardon?’

‘Doesn’t matter. The address of the cottage, please.’

That phrase in Welsh isn’t explained. The matter is just left. In Chekhovian terms, that gun may be unimportant, but it feels very not-fired.

Except that, a full twenty chapters, later, we get this:

[In deepest Glasgow,] Two kids pass my car. One of them raps on my window. I wind my window down and say, ‘Yes?’ The kid says something in an accent so thick I don’t understand it. I reply in Welsh, the same thing as I said to Sophie Hinton.Twll dîn pob Sais. Every Englishman an arsehole. He goes off muttering. He might as well be speaking Icelandic.

That’s the punchline. We didn’t understand what Fiona said to pretty Sophie Hinton at the time, but now we do, and the delay is entertaining. It’s like the author was remembering that twenty chapters back, the reader felt a little moment of discomfort – tiny, but nevertheless a little negative prick – and, ta-daa, the author, smiling says, I hadn’t forgotten you. Surprise! Here’s your little gift. In the process, we understand something more about the Fiona / Hinton relationship. The whole thing feels more delightful because of the absurdly long pause.

Or here’s another example. Fiona is talking to the abbot of a small monastery in Wales:

‘You’ll recognise our patron, of course?’

It takes me a second, but I realise he’s talking about St David, a Welsh bishop of the sixth century and the patron saint of Wales.

‘David,’ I say. ‘A local boy.’

‘Local enough. He was preaching at the Synod of Brefi to a large crowd. Because those at the back couldn’t hear him, a small hill rose up beneath him. The dove here settled on his shoulder.’

‘That’s his big miracle?’ I ask. ‘Making a hill? In Wales?’

It’s hard to think of a more superfluous achievement.

That moment is complete in itself. No little prick of disappointment for the reader. But then, ten chapters on, we get this:

I chide him. ‘You’re thinking modern again, Inspector. You need to think medieval.’ That doesn’t illuminate things for some reason. So I explain, ‘This is the monastery of St David. He’s their patron saint. Now David’s big thing, his signature miracle if you want to put it like that, was raising a hill at Llandewi Brefi—’

‘A hill? In Llandewi? Why would anyone—?’

‘I know, don’t ask. But …’

And what this does is to bring the reader onto the inside of the joke. It’s like we and the reader are old buddies, with a shared set of jokes and references. When Inspector Burnett stumbles into the set-up, the reader has the delight of recognising it – “Oooh, I know this one!” We don’t even have to complete the joke properly to get that pleasure, and Fiona moves rapidly on.

One last example. In the Deepest Grave, Fiona proposes to fake an antiquity. Here she is talking with her two co-conspirators:

George stares at Katie. Stares at me. And back again.

‘Do you mean what I think you mean?’

Katie nods. ‘Exactly. Yes. She wants to make—’

I interrupt. Say, ‘Caledfwlch.’

Katie: ‘What?’

‘Caledfwlch. The damn thing is Welsh, not some fake Latin, medieval French knock-off.’

Now there’ll be some Welsh-speakers who know their ancient history and for whom that little passage is as plain as day. But the vast majority of readers, will be thinking huh? On the one hand, Fiona has just told us exactly what she intends to make. On the other, virtually no one has any idea what she means.

It’s that Chekhovian gun again, very not fired.

Only then … and again, many chapters later we get an incident at an archaeological dig in the south of England. The researchers have just extracted a remarkably ancient sword from a burial pit, when armed robbers swoop in, and steal it. Here’s what happens afterwards:

[The robbers] drive off. The whole thing takes two minutes, maybe less.

For a moment, just a moment, there is perfect stillness.

A bird, a lapwing maybe, calling aloft. The burr of the motorway.

Then Tifford, Dr Simon Tifford, Senior Archaeologist and a man now very close to tears, breaks the silence.

‘They’ve stolen Excalibur,’ he wails. ‘They’ve stolen fucking Excalibur.’

And, aha!, now we know what Caledfwlch is. We solve that little moment of mystery some 75 pages earlier, but there’s laughter here too. The reader’s saying, “Ah! You even told me what the thing was, and I didn’t guess, and I probably should have done, and now you’ve got an archaeologist wandering around swearily talking about the world’s most famous-ever sword. Yep, you got me there.”

It's the length of the delay that delivers the pleasure – all the joy rests in that huge delay.

The ragged edge, the long game

So yes, I do love a ragged edge to a story. A sense of nothing ever too tidy, questions still nibbling like minnows. But I do love jokes and puzzles where the punchline takes an age to come – that gun finally fired, but long, long after it was expected.

That’s it from me. Last night, I ate stewed apricot, served very cold, with big soft pillows of whipped cream. Toasted hazelnuts on top. Oh my. Summer is lovely.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The long game

Do you have any much-delayed punchlines or reveals in your book? Things held out of sight for a long period, then released to delight? Tell me about it. I want some quotes. Let’s feast on some actual text again – it’s been too long.

Log into Townhouse and share it in this forum.

Til soon.

Harry

A chatter of monkeys

Mostly, as you know (you know, you know),

These emails are long (too long! too long!),

But then again (and again and again),

At least they’re fresh (So fresh! So fresh!)

But this one isn’t. It’s a reprint of something I wrote five years back. I came across it at random, and I liked it, and I thought you might too. It goes – with some teeny-weeny adjustments – like as follows.

(Well, almost. I just wanted to call your attention to the ABSURDLY low price we’ve put on our Ultimate Novel Writing Programme mentoring taster sessions. In a nutshell, for £20 you get to have a twenty-minute mentoring session with one of the tutors from the Programme. If you’re halfway interested in doing the UNWP, then this is a brilliant option for you to explain where you are in your writing journey, what you want next - and to ask any questions you may have. But the offer isn’t restricted to UNWP-ers, so if the idea of chatting with a book expert is interesting to you, then jump on it. More info here.)

OK. Here’s the email proper...

***

Into my inbox, crept this little beauty from Cameron:

Hi Harry,

Inspired by your own recent releases, I thought it would be a fruitful exercise to compile a list of things I wish I had known before embarking on a writing journey.

It has been quite liberating and given me great perspective on how far I've truly come as a writer.

But I am curious: Of the many hard-fought lessons you've learned throughout your career, could you identify one as the single most important? Or, phrased another way, which one do you wish you would have learned first?

The short answer, of course, is that I don’t know and can’t quite engage with the question.

Most writing wisdom is born of experience and interlocks with every other piece of wisdom. So a question of characterisation is also one of plotting which is also one of theme which is also to do with sense of place, and so forth.

So mostly I come out with some stupid line that gets me away from the question and we move onto the next thing.

Only –

Actually –

It did occur to me that there is one big piece of writing wisdom that I don’t talk about as much as I ought to. It’s simply this:

You are many writers. You aren’t just one.

I started out writing books in the same broad vein as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer. I hope there was a little more to my books than those comparisons suggest, but they were big, old-fashioned, non-violent romps, with plenty of family drama. They were fun to write.

My first two books were contemporary dramas, but then, for no especial reason, I turned to a historical theme. The books were still in the same broad mould, but they had an extra richness because of the early twentieth century backgrounds.

And then –

Well, fashions changed and sales dwindled. My publisher would have been happy for more of the same, but not at the kind of advances I wanted. So I moved on again.

I wrote popular non-fiction.

I wrote niche non-fiction.

I did some ghostwriting work. One of those projects was a really lovely one which hit the hardback and paperback bestseller lists. Another one sold in plenty of territories, made me a big fat bundle of money, and was just a joy to work on.

And then, I changed again. I came back to fiction, to crime fiction this time, and found a character and niche I loved.

I do still love that niche, but (as you may have noticed) I’ve also had time to update some old how-to books and republish those. And I’ve turned a bundle of these emails into a whole new book. Oh yes, and I have a mad-as-a-box-of-snakes literary project on the back-burner. And I get a glitter in my eye when I think of some new non-fiction work I’d love to write.

I’ve also been traditionally published, self-published and am half-minded to flirt with digital-first publishing via a specialist firm.

Almost none of that was in the game plan when I started out, and I’m not unusual.

Yes, you have a few careers like John Grisham’s. His first book did OK. His second book (published in 1991) spent almost a year on the NYT bestseller list and sold a bazillion copies. After that, he’s bashed out a book a year, pretty much. His name has become almost synonymous with legal thrillers.

And even so – Grisham has written non-legal novels. He’s written kids’ books. He’s written non-fiction. He’s written short stories.

All those things are side dishes to the main thrust of his work – the raita to the tikka marsala – but I bet when he was writing those other things, he was fully engaged by them too. Even when you’re a hugely productive author who dominates your particular genre, it turns out you are multiple writers too. More than you ever imagined at the outset.

So my answer to Cameron is simply:

Be multiple.

Find other stories, other genres, other wings.

You can’t know yet what will work for you and what won’t. Life, it turns out, is not that interested in game plans.

And look, I don’t know your exact position. But I do sometimes see writers working for seven years, ten years, some huge stretch of time, in order to bring one piece of work to publication.

And sometimes that’ll be the right thing to do. But mostly it won’t. Mostly you try one thing – learn lots – see if it works – and if it doesn’t, put it down. Try a new thing. Something else in the same broad genre or something totally unrelated.

Your passions are like a pack of monkeys. They want to skip chattering across the jungle.

So let them. Chase them with your notebook. Catch the fruit they fling down from the trees. Watch them in the rain and in their nests at night.

You may not be the writer you think you have to be. That a frightening thought, but it’s also a liberating one. It liberated me, not once, but repeatedly.

My guess? My guess is, that if your writing career has any longevity, you’ll find the same is true of you too.

***

There you go. Not quite that fresh-baked smell, that warm-from-the-oven, butter-me-now, golden-flakes-on-the-chin sort of freshness that you’re used to. But still toothsome, no?

I mean – if you had a choice between that email and being thumped with a very small ruler, or having a bad-tempered copy-editor repetitively criticise your use of semi-colons, you’d take the email every time, right?

Me too, old buddy, me too.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Go on. Tell me. What monkeys chatter in your jungle? What book are you writing now? What others have you written or have started? What other books are in contemplation?

This isn’t quite a feedback-type exercise, I guess, except that there’s something about putting these things out into public that changes you a bit. So: put it out there - by which I mean, log into Townhouse and share it in this forum.

And that idea that you’re not yet really to mention to anyone? Tell us about that too. Let’s enlarge ourselves. Let’s multiply.

Til soon.

Harry

When (and if) to get help

We’ve talked about editing for five weeks now. Those of you following Debi Alper’s superb online Introduction to Self-Editing Your Novel course are reaching its end. (The course is free to members. Interested? Learn more.) And there’s one big topic we haven’t yet broached.

What about third-party help? Do you need it? And when do you need it? And what does an external editor do that a keen self-editor cannot? Today we’ll crack open that can of worms – or rather, we’ll use the handy little ring-pull which enables easy no-crack access.

And let me start by saying two things.

Number one, you don’t get better than a Jericho Writers editor. We use absolutely first class people and we scrutinise their work and if they don’t meet our standards – consistently – they will stop being a Jericho Writers editor.

The quality of editing is not something you can easily tell from a resumé. We have some spectacular editors who have not written bestsellers, or commissioned Hilary Mantel and Dan Brown and the entire Where’s Wally series. But those people are spectacularly good at editing, which is why we use them. So: if you do choose to get third-party editing, you’re in very safe hands with us.

Number two: you don’t need third-party editing. You may want it. You would certainly draw value from it. But you don’t need it. My first book never got third-party editing before I went out to agents. (I wanted it, but couldn’t afford it). But I secured an agent without too much fuss, then had a multi-publisher bidding war for the book, and it became a bestseller. So: good results can happen with no early third-party involvement.

And yes, it’s true that more and more writers are using external editors early on in their journey, and yes, it’s true that that does somewhat alter an agent’s perceptions of what to expect. But that doesn’t amount to me saying that you need an editor. You may not. I got an agent because I wrote a 180,000 word manuscript and I got an agent sitting up till 2.00 in the morning because she couldn’t go to bed until she’d finished it. That’s the basic outcome that you need to achieve. There is no single way to achieve it.

So – I’ve plugged our services (honestly) and I’ve told you (also honestly) that you may not need them. But now let’s dig into the ins and outs of all this. Here are some guidelines to hold onto.

Know the craft

You probably won’t get a novel to a truly publishable standard unless you know your craft. I don’t care how you acquire that knowledge – books and blogs, festivals and feedback groups, courses and classes: they’re all good. But know your craft. You won’t be properly attuned to the countless errors you can make until you’ve done that groundwork.

Edit hard – harder than you think

My first novel was 180,000 words long. When I got to the end of it, I realised I’d got better as I’d gone on. So I deleted the first 60,000 words and rewrote them.

I edited so many times that (going slightly crazy and getting close to the finish line) I went through the whole damn book just to delete surplus commas. (A copy-editor later put them all back, but she put a nice curl on them and settled them just so.)

As a very rough rule of thumb, half your time should be spent writing and another half editing. If one half is going to be bigger, I’d make it the editing half.

I stress this, because you will get vastly more value from a JW editor if you’ve done the work yourself first. Sometimes we get people who send us their manuscripts, and we come back with a report that says Character X is missing this, and Plot Point Y is awry because of that and so on. And the writer tells us, in effect, “Yes, I know all that, but if I fix those things, then what?”

And … well, we’re not magicians. We can only read what’s on the page. Ideally, you would only come to us for editing help if (i) you find yourself going round in circles or (ii) you just don’t know what to do next. But put in the hard yards yourself first. We can be much more productive if you do.

Nothing wrong with testing the water first

Approaching agents is free. Getting editing help from us costs. So a perfectly sensible strategy is this:

Write a book
Edit the heck out of it
Send it to around 10 agents; see what they say
If they take you on, then yippedee-doo-dah. Happy days. If they don’t, then …
Either:
1. Re-edit the work if something an agent has said gives you a flash of insight. You can send it out again if you genuinely feel that flash has been transformative. or
1. Come to us for a manuscript assessment.

I wouldn’t go crazy with the agent submissions. I think it’s just disrespectful to bombard agents. But sending out material to 10-12 agents? Nowt wrong with that.

How to use advice

Because I’ve just spoken about agents and any feedback you may get from them, let me just say now that editorial advice is only ever advice. It’s not a command. It’s not a stone tablet, ablaze with light, brought wonderingly down the slopes of Mount Sinai.

If a particular comment gives you a moment of insight, of recognition, of YES, then work with it. If a comment just doesn’t quite make sense to you, then leave it. Or, to be more accurate: consider it. Very often, an editor may feel a discomfort around X, but their practical suggestion as to what to do doesn’t feel right. In which case, figure out if you feel the editor was right to have that discomfort (they usually are), then consider what you want to do about it.

You are the boss of your own words, always. You should never write text at someone else’s bidding if it doesn’t feel right to you. As a very rough guide, about 60% of the time, you’ll feel that an editor is spot on. A further 20% of the time, you’ll think, “right issue, wrong solution” and go your own way on the topic. And there’s a good chunk of the time where (especially if you’re a stubborn sod, like me) you just think, “No, I like what I wrote” and take no action at all.

When you really, really should come to us for help

Mostly, I think it’s totally up to you when and whether you want to use our editorial help. There’s just one category, where I think you’re pretty much nuts if you don’t use us. I’m thinking here of writers who have had a lot of “almost but not quite” type rejections from agents. If you keep coming close to the prize, then – sweet Lord – get yourself over the line. There’s nothing more powerful than third-party editorial advice in improving a manuscript. It won’t always work to get you over that line, but there ain’t nothing better.

What help to get when?

The default for almost everyone should be a full manuscript assessment. With that, you get a pro editor to read every darn page of your work and give you a detailed, detailed report on what’s working and (especially) what isn’t working and how to fix it. This, in effect, is the backbone of any big publisher’s editorial process. Every manuscript I’ve ever written has gone through that process. Every single one has been improved (except maybe for one, where I had a terrible editor who butchered the book, then published it badly, and lost a ton of money on it. But that really is a rare exception.)

If you’ve already had a manuscript assessment and you think you’re close to the finish line, then you could think about getting a development edit. With that, you get the detailed report AND on-page text commentary and correction. I don’t really like that as a starter service though for anyone. If your book has some fundamental issues (and most books that come to us do), then the on-page correction is effectively swatted aside by some of the more structural edits that are needed. It makes no sense to wallpaper a room, if some of the walls are in the wrong place. But if your manuscript is close to the finish line, then, for sure, a development edit has its place. Our office team won’t let you do a dev edit before you’re ready, so feel free to have an open discussion with them about options.

And finally, there’s the whole area of copy-editing with lighter (proofreading) and heavier (line-editing) flavours available.

Most writers won’t need those services at all. If you get traditionally published, your publisher will pay for all that stuff. You can just sit back and admire those handsomely placed commas.

The group that will certainly need copy-editing is anyone heading for self-publishing: these days, you just can’t hope to win with a shoddily presented manuscript. A scattered group that may think copy-editing is wise includes anyone with sensible reason to doubt their presentation (eg: English as a second language, or dyslexia.)

Either way though. The “edit hard yourself” rule still applies. Sometimes we get a really poorly presented manuscript and the writer is assuming that our copy-editor will just work a kind of magic with it. Not so, old buddy, not so. Your job here is the same: bring the editor the cleanest manuscript you possibly can. I guess a copy-editor picks up 95% or maybe even 99% of issues, but if you have hundreds and thousands of errors and problems scattered through the text, no editor will pick them all up.

The sorrow and the joy

Don’t expect editorial feedback to be an all-joyous thing. It isn’t. You bring us your precious baby hoping for us to dart her off to some Festival of Glorious Infants … but instead, we’re much more likely to tell you that your lovely babe has some terrible problems and will need immediate surgery.

I honestly want to tell our editorial clients to wait 48 hours before emailing us after an MS assessment. You’re likely to have some shock and/or upset, before that gives way to a kind of relieved euphoria. The euphoria, were it to speak, would say (in ancient Greek of course, but I’ll translate), “Wise editor, you have found what is worthy in my book and what is to be cast out. I venerate all that you have done and know that my feet are now set on the path of Righteous Endeavour.”

You will feel relieved (to have the issues made clear to you) and energised (because you know just what to do and how to do it.) You should also feel the book rebuilding itself as you work on it. You should feel it becoming steadily and predictably better as you go through your to do list.

For some writers, this is a one-off process. For others, it isn’t. There’s no right or wrong; only what’s right for you.

If you want to know more, contact our office team (you can just hit reply). They won’t try to sell you anything that’s not right for you. Our only real instruction to them is “honesty, always.”

That’s it from me. Debi’s Last Assignment follows …

Til soon,

Harry

FEEDBACK FRIDAY:

This week, it’s Assignment Six from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course.

Revise a scene from your novel, applying the techniques you’ve learned from this course. Share in the forum. Make sure to add feedback on others.

(This fantastic, self-directed video course is FREE to Premium Members. If you’re not one yet, you know what to do: join us here!Alternatively, you can buy the course as a one-off for £99.)

When you're ready, log in to the forum and share your work. Make sure to add feedback on other people's work, too!

Til soon.

Harry

The pedantry and the poetry (Editing Series V)

For the past four weeks, I’ve talked in detail about how I personally edit a book. Today, I’m still talking about editing, but I want to focus in on the two lode-stars by which I steer.

The first, always, is pedantry. If you’ve done one of my Live Edit webinars (open to all Premium Members) you’ll know that I’m very, very picky. I always urge those listening to offer their reflections in the chat, but I think it’s safe to say that no one has ever out-pedanted me.

I care about:

Surplus words

Irritating commas, or their irritating lack

Slightly poor word choices

Slightly over-familiar imagery

Use of body-part type sentences that are a lazy way to denote feelings

Settings that lack real atmosphere

Hurrying the delivery of information that could safely be delayed

And of course, hunger and world peace, obviously. But I was focusing more on the editorial stuff.

And that’s not – not even remotely – a complete list of my nitpicks. And yes: any nitpick improves a sentence, but it also, nearly always, points to something a bit bigger. Here’s a tiny example:

“His words sprayed out incessantly, like water gushing from a broken hose.”

That’s the kind of thing that would reliably bother me. A hose can’t really be broken, can it? It can be kinked, or punctured, or it can be sliced through, but none of those things are really quite the same as ‘broken’.

But in any case, the first half of the sentence says ‘sprayed’, the second part says ‘gushing’. A gush is not the same as a spray. Which is it? One implies wide distribution, the other implies narrow-but-abundant distribution. Which way we go here indicates what we’re trying to say about the voluble fellow in the sentence. Is he talking to a large audience or just to one person? We need to fit the image to the situation.

Whatever the final set of choices here, the image will improve.

That’s a tiny example. But the picky observation very often widens out into something bigger.

For example, if you find yourself making a lot of deletions in a particular chapter, simply as part of your “murder all unnecessary words” programme, you may end up realising that this particular chapter has a lot of dead-feeling material. And that may cause you to rethink whether you need the chapter at all. And you may find ways of take the necessary new information / developments from that chapter and deploying them elsewhere. And you may end up reshaping your book in a way that makes a really significant improvement to the flow and feel of that awkward middle section.

Another common phenomenon: you notice a lot of body-part language. “Her lower lip trembled and she felt the sting of salt tears rising in her eye.” That kind of thing.

Now there’s a lot that I don’t love there, but the worst bit is that we’re trying to describe a person’s emotions via lip-movements and eye-salt-levels, instead of (duh!) just describing the person’s emotions. “She felt shocked, an almost physical buffet, but following close behind was a kind of horrified sadness, a sense of loss. Could it be that she had lost everything she had fought so hard to keep? And lost everything, in a single minute, through this almost trivial moment of ill-luck?”

And again, that minor-seeming insight into a dodgy sentence can end up making a difference to the entire book.

So much for pedantry. But there is also a kind of poetry, or should be, that grows the more you edit. I don’t mean you’re about to win sing-writing festivals or get shelved next to Beowulf… but, there’s a way that you write, that sounds right for you. You want to keep that.

When it comes to your agent and your editor and your copy-editor, you’ll find there are times that they want to snip away at things that make you you. Walk amongst them unsnipped. These days, I tend to issue a (perfectly polite) note to copyeditors, explaining the aspects of my writing that are non-standard (e.g.: lots of sentence fragments, sentences starting with a conjunction, and so on) that I wish to keep.

Equally, I’ve had instructions from an editor, that I’ve just ignored – sometimes, but not always, with a word of explanation. That doesn’t make me a crotchety writer; I’m not that. It just makes me a writerly writer: ones who chooses, with care, the words he wants to appear in print.

Do likewise.

Til soon,

Harry

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Five from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course.

(This fantastic, self-directed video course is FREE to Premium Members. If you’re not one yet, you know what to do: join us here! Alternatively, you can buy the course as a one-off for £99.)

Debi would like you to:

Pick a short paragraph from your novel that includes prose, description, and dialogue, then check for the points mentioned in lesson five of the course.
When you're ready, log in to the forum and share your work. Make sure to add feedback on other people's work, too!

How I actually edit (IV)

University creative writing courses absolutely have their place. Plenty of people get a huge amount out of them. If that’s you, I’m genuinely pleased. Writing should be joyful, and if a university course lit that fire for you, brilliant.

But they’re not for everyone — and they’re not for me.

Here’s why I’ve always struggled with the university model (with all due respect to the exceptions out there):

They often overlook genre fiction, which is where the vast majority of readers (and many writers) live

They’re often run by people with slender commercial track records

They don’t tend to focus on the business side of writing — things like agents, submission, and marketing

Self-publishing is often ignored entirely

It’s rare to get feedback on an entire manuscript, start to finish

They don’t properly grapple with plot (because that’s not something you can do by workshopping a couple of chapters)

The focus leans more toward earning a degree than getting a damn book published

Now, none of that makes university courses bad — it just means they have different goals. I care far more about getting a book published than I do about getting a degree. Your preferences may vary and it’s perfectly OK if they do.

But the reason I raise this is the workshopping phenomenon. Here’s how it works:

A university gathers together a bunch of people who care a lot about words and writing. They set a challenge: you’re going to write the kind of book that might get published by a cool literary imprint somewhere. Then, they ask Anna to read out 1– 2,000 words of her draft novel, so that Brian and Ciara and Dan and Ezzie and the rest of them can offer their thoughts. This whole process is overseen by an Author of a couple of works, often not even full novels, (whom two of the students secretly fancy) and it’s important to all of the students that they have the approbation of the Author of the two SLNs and so Brian and Ciara and all the rest of them get stuck in and try to show off how cool and literary they are as they give Anna her feedback.

And look: there are worse things in the world. In fact, what I’ve just described is among life’s better things and loads of people who go through one of these courses will enjoy one of the most rewarding years of their life. So good. If that’s your thing, then go for it. (Though, uh, read the PSes below before you sign up for anything.)

My reason for telling you all this? Because of the phenomenon that is the Universal Workshop Voice. It’s a thing. I’ve given classes in the past where someone reads me a snatch of their work and I can identify – immediately and accurately – that this has been through the university-style workshopping process.

A paragraph might start out like this:

A fly, a fat one, landed on his forearm. Ulf stared at it for a moment, then swatted it with his free hand, killing it. Leaving a fat purple stain, and nothing else.

I don’t know if that paragraph has any merit. I just made it up now for the purpose of this email. Whether it would ever find a place in one of my books, I don’t know. Probably not. But if you ran that paragraph past Anna and Brian and the gang, it would turn into something like this:

A fly, fat and freighted with the alien armaments of its kind, landed on his forearm. The blow, when it arrived, shocked even Ulf with its ferocity, a blow born of some dark ancestral killing field, a rapid-fire conversation between neurons that left Ulf himself a mere bystander. Where once there had been insect there was now only pulp, grapey and softly dripping.

And I don’t even hate that. I mean: I can’t quite imagine wanting to read that book, but maybe someone would.

Really, my concern here is that Anna’s piece, Brian’s, Ciara’s, Dan’s and Ezzie’s are all sounding pretty damn similar – and they’re sounding similar because the workshopping process exerts the same basic gravity on them all.

And from my personal editing process, that’s not what I want at all.

I want to sound like me. I uncover what my tastes are by just going at my manuscript, again and again, sentence by sentence, page by page. I don’t know if that produces the best book. It probably doesn't. I mean: if Hilary Mantel or Sally Rooney or Gillian Flynn were to edit one of my first draft manuscripts, presumably it would start to take on their particular genius-level shine.

But sod em. I don’t care. This is my book not theirs, and I don’t want their tastes interfering – and I definitely don’t want the Author of two barely-novels to exert any weight at all. And Ezzie? Nice girl and all that, but she can shove off. I don’t want her tastes (or Anna-Brian-Ciara-Dan’s) anywhere near my word-choices.

I suppose I could justify my attitude in commercial terms – agents and editors prioritise authors with a distinctive voice. Readers probably do too, if only in the sense that those books wind up more memorable.

But that’s kind of fake. My motive isn’t really commercial; it’s just my personal version of bolshiness. I don’t want to write like Ezzie. I want to write like me.

And the way I do it? Editing and editing and editing and editing. And yes, using my knowledge of craft to shape my decisions. But mostly working with my own taste. What sounds like me? What do I think is funny? What atmosphere feels right for this scene? Is this sentence better as 10 words or 8? Or lose it completely?

And flies freighted with alien armaments? Yes gods. Spare me. I’m pleased the damn thing got splattered.

Til soon,

Harry

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Four from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It's FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here, or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

Find a short paragraph from your novel and experiment with different POV’s. If you’re working with multiple characters, ensure each voice is clearly different. Post in the forum (remember to log in first) and share which POV you’ve decided on and why. See if others agree with you.

How I actually edit (III)

Continue here for How I actually edit (IV) here.

Over the last couple of weeks, in celebration of our new Introduction to Self-Editing video course, I’ve spoken about how I (repeatedly and compulsively) correct my manuscript before I ever get to the holy words, THE END.

Once I do hit those words, I’ll do multiple edits thereafter – some of them with a single, targeted purpose. Other times driven by a much more general hunt for dissatisfaction. On those hunts, I’m always looking for something I don’t love. That’s it. Anything that offends me, or niggles at me. Sand in the shoe: that kind of annoyance, both minor and impossible to ignore.

Every writer knows that, yes, yes, you have to delete surplus words. Stephen King (a former journalist) once tossed out the idea that the final draft needs to be first draft minus 10%.

And, OK, that’s not a horrible rule, so SK’s first drafts were probably leaner than most, because he was a professional writer before he ever became a novelist. But SK clearly doesn’t follow his own rule these days, because his work has become quite baggy. And in any case, it makes no sense to set a target for deletions. You have to let your manuscript tell you how long it wants to be. I’d guess that a majority of you need to cut more than just 10%. Cuts of 20-30% are often, often essential. We once made a bestseller by doing a hands-on edit of a manuscript that took it from 180,000+ words to about 90,000.

There are two reasons why this whole economy drive matters.

The first is simply that the force of a novel comes down to this equation:

Force = Emotional power divided by the number of words.

If the first term remains constant, then just cutting the second one will always, always improve things.

That sounds dully mechanical, but I’m repeatedly struck by how relentless cutting delivers a kind of magic. Sticky mid-book patches in a novel can throw a somewhat glum, depressed feel over the whole damn thing. Brutal, hard cutting can just relieve that at (almost) a stroke. Two to three days spent on deletions make more of a reliable impact than any other editing intervention I can think of. The novel lifts in the water. Feels harder. Sails faster. The whole craft has more purpose.

Cutting does that every time. Wow.

But the other big reason I love cutting is that it exposes the gaps. If your writing is flabby and unconcentrated, you can easily fail to notice that there may be huge things you aren’t saying. You have this background sense of “this writing is possibly a little baggy,” so maybe you make some cuts to address that issue, but you don’t go far enough, so the issue nags anyway.

But –

Because you’ve used one paragraph instead of one sentence to get your characters out of the gym and into the taxi, and because you’ve used two sentences to describe clothing, and one to describe a coffee spillage, you think (correctly) that it’s high time you got your character to meet her partner for the Big Argument. So you rush her off to her Big Argument, but never realise all the stuff you haven’t done. Have you properly described the setting where the Big Argument takes place? Did you depict her emotions in the taxi? Did you add a hint of that past infideility which is colouring her perspective?

The best way to find gaps in your manuscript is to cut so hard that there’s no excess verbiage to cover them. Once you strip back the word count, you start to feel where the novel feels empty – lacking. So you add those things back (but rich text, not duplicative, pointless text) and your novel stays lean – but takes on whole layers of new meaning.

This is a beautiful discipline, because the stuff you cut is always tedious – unnecessarily long ways of saying things that are often quite boring in themselves. Needless dialogue. Statements about settings that really add nothing in terms of atmosphere or feel.

And then – you see the gaps. Kayleigh is meant to be worried about her upcoming meeting with Jon, but she’s hardly given him a thought – all that clothes description and coffee spillage got in the way. And how could she be going through all this and not be thinking about what happened to her mother under the exact same circumstances 25 years earlier? And what was it like to enter a completely empty house, its front door swinging open and water everywhere?

The gaps you find are always more interesting than the text you removed, so the whole passage (and the whole book) just gets more layered and dense and powerful.

If you want more on this, I talk about it in my How To Write a Novel course and, in even more depth, in our Take Your Novel From Good To Great course. Both those courses are free to Premium Members, and if you haven’t yet caught up with the relevant bits, then I’d strongly recommend that you do. If you’re not yet a PM, you can get a taster lesson for free here. Or, why not become a PM today? It’s like wearing a rainbow in your hair, but not as damp.

That’s it from me. Last Sunday, my girls had a football tournament. And look, I love my kids, and it’s great that girls are into football now, and there’s everything to be said for community endeavour, and there was a pizza van there and almost-adequate coffee.

But – oh sweet Lord – we started before 8.00 am. And didn’t finish until after 5.00. And I had to watch every damn game. Every damn one, both girls. And now whenever I close my eyes, I see yards and yards of blue nylon, and sunshine, and kids air-kicking balls as they rolled gently along an empty goalmouth.

I earned beer that night, and plenty of it.

Til soon.

Harry

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Three from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It's FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here,or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

Find a paragraph from your novel that has a strong voice, check for the points mentioned in the lesson, and post it in the forum.

How I actually edit (II)

Last week, I talked about my micro-editing habit. This week, we expand a bit. The kind of editing I’m going to talk about here is something I also do in the course of writing the first draft, but it operates at a less micro-level.

I told you that I find it hard to make forward progress if I know that parts of the manuscript behind me are messy – and I write detective novels, whose construction is intricate. I don’t plot out my books in huge advance detail. (I might do, if I thought I could do it, but I can’t, so I don’t.)

(Oh yes, and this email is all about editing, because Assignment Two of Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course is live and online right now.)

The kind of things that might send me scurrying backwards are things like:

Character change

In one of my books, something wasn’t working – and I realised that by making a key character male, and in very male surroundings, I had lost something that I wanted. So I jumped back, and made that person a woman: a commanding, powerful, unsettling presence. That shift unlocked something for me; it opened narratives that wouldn’t have existed with a man in that same role.

That’s an example of why I think that in-draft edits can be almost essential at times. Why charge on with writing your draft if you know that you made a misstep early on? Correct that misstep and then see what you have? Yes, you lose time in making the correction, but you’re going to have to make it anyway – and by making it early, you avoid compounding your error.

Plot complications

The architecture of a complex mystery novel is at the outer end of fictional complexity. For me, a good detective novel should make perfect sense as you read it – and does, in fact, make a kind of mathematically complete sense if properly analysed – but readers should also be a bit challenged by it. Ask someone to summarise who-did-what-to-whom-and-why in, say, a Raymond Chandler novel and most readers would turn a little white.

That’s a sweet, enjoyable challenge for the reader, but for me as author, it’s kind of head-wrenching. “Oh hold on, I need a way for X to have escaped from secure confinement, but he also needs to have chosen to go back in, but he needs to have done so in a way that Y couldn’t have known about, so ….”

Those thoughts are crucial to good fiction-making and, for me, they’re ones I always deal with as they arise. Again, getting these things right are (for me) key to forward motion. If I just try to plough on knowing that there are tweaks to make behind me, it just complicates my whole onward plotting process. Solving the niggles when I see them basically removes them from my mental to-do list and makes it easier to focus on what lies ahead.

Settings

Settings are like a character in my books. If a key setting is awry, that also feels like a block to forward progress, so I’ll go and scratch away at the issue until it feels sorted.

Boring bits

And look, no first draft is ever perfect. My first drafts are pretty decent … but that’s only because they’ve been heavily revised before I even hit the final full stop. But, as I work, I’m also generally on the lookout for any material that just seems heavy, long-winded, dull, repetitive, undramatic – anything along those lines.

The reason is partly my messy-room aversion. But it’s also because a boring bit definitely tells you that there’s a problem which needs addressing – but it also often indicates a fundamental plot problem that needs sorting out.

So, let’s take the sort of example that I often run up against. We might have a situation like this:

There’s a murder and an investigation
Things go well for a bit, then the regular police investigation starts running into problems and looks like it’s going nowhere. (This kind of issue is basically compulsory in my kind of fiction. The only alternative is that the police are busily chasing up the wrong set of leads.)
So there often needs to be an “oh, no, this isn’t working” bit … which can often look a bit dull, because it is frustrating to those involved.

Now that’s all fine, except that what if the boring bit is too long? Quite often, the writer – me, for example – will create something dramatic in order to break the tedium. A man with a gun. An assault. A terrible revelation. And it’s easy to think, “Oh great, off we trot again. There was a dull bit, but it was only a few pages long, and now we’re on the road again.”

And OK, that approach may be just what your book needs … but maybe 50% of the time what it really needed was you to go back and delete the boring bit. The added drama now just locks in that boring bit and sets you off on the wrong path.

In the end, any bad bit in your book is telling you that there’s an issue and you may need to delete the last 5,000 words, say, to get back to the last bit where you felt truly settled. Plot is a sequence of stones laid one upon the other. If you sense a wobble, go back to the wobble. Sort it out. Then start building again.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Two from Debi’s Introduction to Self-Editing course. (Free to Premium Members. And if you’re not a Premium Member, then don’t be a Hufflepuff – slither in to membership here or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

Find a paragraph from your novel that focuses on one of your characters and post it in the forum.
Check for the points mentioned in this lesson, and don’t forget to offer feedback to others.

Til soon.

Harry

How I actually edit (I)

With the first lesson of our brand new Premium Member course Introduction to Self-Editing launching this week, I thought I'd share my own editing process with you. I honestly don’t know how much it helps to understand another writer’s process. What matters to you isn’t how I write best, but how you do. There’s not one way to play this game, there are a million. But if you’re interested, and in the hope that it helps, here’s how I edit.

The first thing to say is that, in my case, there’s no real distinction between my writing and my editing. I self-correct all the time as I write. My paragraphs are very often short, but if I write a reasonably meaty three or four sentence paragraph, I’ll almost always tweak it and nudge it into shape before moving onto the next. Indeed, I quite often edit a sentence before I’ve even hit the final full stop.

Why so twitchy? Well, a few things. I’m a natural fidget. I’m not at the threshold for ADHD, but I’m certainly that way inclined. But also, I’m like my wife. She can’t quite be content in a messy or ugly room. She’ll always seek to remedy what can be remedied before she can really make herself comfortable and turn to whatever it is that brought her there.

Same with me and bad sentences. Asking me to write new text when there’s messy text just behind me? It doesn’t work. The nagging distraction of that baggy sentence, that poorly chosen word, will stop me fully attending to whatever’s next.

Here’s the start of an upcoming Fiona novel:

Imagine this.

A cold night. A scatter of snow. Not much, but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour.

The light? Not much. A little moon naked under scraps of cloud. Streetlamps shining their joyless yellow. The colour of the last rags of autumn, but dimmer. More suppressed. Draining colour, not revealing it.

In the street: no cars moving. Almost none parked, if it comes to that. On this street, the cars – the BMWs and the Mercs, the Range Rovers and the Teslas – are sheltered behind walls, in garages, protected by the red blinks of security alarms.

And a white van, its lights off.

And two people moving. Not quiet, but not loud. Not furtive, but efficient. Dressed dark, dressed warm. Which, in this weather, is also a way to say that their shapes and faces are lost, muffled, disguised.

That’s how the text looks now. It’ll change again before publication, but nothing there really annoys me.

Here’s my editing journey to get there:

Imagine this.

A cold night. A scatter of snow.

These words went down first thing and I haven’t changed them. The first two words are critical: it’s not normal Fiona-speak – she doesn’t normally address the reader in any way – but they matter here for a reason which will become clear much, much later.

The cold / scatter of snow details are – for me – nice and easy: that way of giving physical detail is an established part of the Fiona voice. I like it because the voice is clear and well-differentiated, but I also love it because it’s so compact. For those writers who are still slave to the “Gotta have a main verb” dictum, the same seven words would have come out a bit like this:

It was a cold night, with a scatter of snow on the ground.

To my mind, all the additional words there are essentially dull and add nothing. So if I were a slave-to-the-verb kind of writer, I’d have added juice. Something like this:

The night was cold, with a light scatter of snow hardening beneath the frost.

And, OK, I like that more, except I’m always bothered by the word ‘with’ in this context – it’s just a lazy way to add bolt detail onto an existing unit. So I’d probably have replaced the ‘with’, by writing:

The night was cold and an earlier scatter of snow now hardened beneath the frost.

I’d be pretty much happy with that now – ‘hardened’ feels more active and, literally, harder than ‘hardening’ – but as I say, my Fiona-voice just skips over all that hoopla, and delivers all the information in two sentence fragments boasting a combined 7 words.

Then we got to this bit:

Not much [snow], but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour.

I had to pick away at that bit to get it into shape. An earlier version used the word ‘frost’ twice and I kept wanting to glaze things.

The leaves on trees bit is sort of dull, except that the reader has no idea yet of time of year, so this was my way of telling the reader that we were in November, not January.

The list of hard surfaces – paving stones and the rest – is also dull, but it’s dull in a quiet suburban way, which is just right for the location. I do not love the ‘around here’ phrase. Where else would the hard surfaces be? So those two words need to go: an edit that still needs to happen.

I like the ‘some new armour’ image: that’s true to Fiona’s voice, but it also delivers a sense of battle-readiness.

The next paragraph also needed some tweaking and plucking:

Again, the first two sentence fragments (four words in total) just went down on the page and stayed there. The moon and cloud stuff is quite like me – I’ve probably used something like that phrase before – but I’m happy with it. Should it be a little moon or not? I don’t quite know, but it’s going to stay little for now.

Also (I’m only just noticing now; I don’t observe these things as I write) I especially like it that we have these themes of battle and vulnerability emerging from the text. Although we’re really just describing a theme, we already have a hint of battle (armour), a hint of vulnerability (a naked moon) and references to draining colour – a disguise, not a revelation. All this means that the description has a kind of sprung quality. Nothing dark has happened yet, but you already know this is a crime novel, not a romance.

Then I had to tinker quite a lot to get the next bit right. I want to paint the colour of a suburban street, with a little snow on the ground, not much of a moon, and sodium-type street lighting. I could just say ‘The street is it by yellowy-orange sodium lights’ or something like that. But the point isn’t really the colour, is it? It’s the feeling. And what is the feeling? Well, that’s the bit I had to struggle to get to.

What I’ve ended up with combines joyless, rags, dim, suppressed and draining colour. Listed out like that, it feels alarmingly single-note, but I think it works OK on the page. In effect, we start out with a colour description (‘joyless yellow’) then work through a chain of thought to figure out that what’s really happening here is an emptying out of colour, not any kind of addition.

Oh yes, and some editors would worry about the repetition of the word ‘colour’, but I’m not fussed. The repetition doesn’t feel accidental or obtrusive, so it’s fine with me.

And so on.

The two people in the white van dump a corpse in one of these wealthy suburban gardens and then vanish. The book is about the investigation and shenanigans that follow. The chapter doesn’t quite say ‘they dump a corpse’, but it gets reasonably close… and this is a crime novel, so readers assume (correctly) that murder is going to be on the agenda.

All this is how my editing process runs, always. It often starts before I hit a full-stop. It usually starts before I reach the end of a paragraph. It is very pedantic. It cares about two unnecessary words or a not-quite-perfect word choice.

It’s utterly hard-wired and instinctive. The act of writing and the act of editing are so conjoined, I don’t really think of them as separate.

I don’t consult a style manual for these edits. In the end, what drives me is a sense of dissatisfaction with bad text and happiness with good text. My whole writing-editing journey is just about making 1,000,000 tiny choices that move me from a mostly-grumpy place to a largely-happy one.

Next week, I’ll talk a bit about my more macro-edits. Till then, I have the moon to worry about. Little, or not little? Hmm…

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

For the next few weeks, instead of posting into the Feedback Friday forum, I want you to post into the Introduction To Self-Editing forum. Remember, to log in first. The task I set each week will correlate with what Debi Alper teaches in that week's lesson, so if you're not a Premium Member yet and want to get the video teaching that goes along with the task, you can join here, or purchase the course as a one-off here.

This week's assignment from the course:

Share a plot summary (can be written out as a synopsis or just with bullet points) in the forum. Point out where you think tweaks to structure, plot, and pace might be required, and see if others agree.

Til soon.

Harry

You Impostor! You fake! You dunce!

This month, we’re talking editing. Indeed, if you’re a Premium Member, I very much hope you’ll trot along to my live-editing workshop this coming Tuesday. (Log in and find details here. Not a member? Join us today.)

And I want to start the month with a short but important message. It’s one you already know, yes, but it’s a point we can all easily lose.

It’s this:

Writers are hopelessly vulnerable to Impostor Syndrome.

That might be part of our psychological make-up (dreamy, introverted, bookish) – but I don’t think it’s mostly that. Perhaps it isn’t that at all.

If I were a stone-walling guy, I’d drop my tools in the late afternoon and look at my day’s work and think, 'Yes, I just built that.'

If I were a drainage-contractor or a chimney-sweep, I could count my accomplishment in yards of drain unblocked, or so many vertical feet of chimney cleared. (I once cleaned my own chimneys, then set the house on fire, but it was only a little fire, and the fire brigade came, not once but three times, and the kids were all at home with friends, and got to watch everything, and the firemen let the kids try on their helmets and climb around the fire engine, and everyone had a very nice time.)

And, OK, lots of white-collar jobs can’t be measured by the yard, but there’s still a rhythm of feedback: client meetings, reports, ad campaigns, emails. What’s unusual about the job of novelist is that you have essentially two ways to measure accomplishment, the first of which is phoney and stupid and you know it to be those things. So, novelists can measure accomplishment, via:

Word Counts. Which gives you a sort of feedback, the way a dry stone wall gives you feedback as you build it, but if the words are sh*te, then the feedback is meaningless. And because you know that, you don’t trust the feedback. And because first drafts are first drafty, the words probably are sh*te, so you are right to be suspicious.
Book deals. And yes, a book deal comes with an actual contract, signed by a serious and moneyed counterpart. And there’s money. And there’s the whole hoop-la of publication. So this is serious, meaningful feedback. Same thing with self-pub: you don’t achieve meaningful sales unless your work has been good, so sales is also a metric that matters. But book deals come along once in a blue moon. I mean, if you produce a book a year and work with a standard two-book deal, then you only get confirmation that you’re not an idiot once every two years. That’s a very long time.

So authors get regular meaningless feedback (word counts) and very, very infrequent feedback that matters (book deal, or successful book launch.)

And a lot of what we do involves creating a bad first draft so we can then turn it slowly into a good final draft.

The result? Impostor Syndrome is endemic among writers. It’s endemic among proper published authors too. I know plenty of top 10 bestselling novelists who are pretty much guaranteed to feel like their work is hopeless before they (once again) do what they do and produce an excellent book.

The solution? There ain’t no solution, except to recognise the problem. You will feel that your work is inadequate, because – right now – it is inadequate. And that’s fine. That’s a stage we clamber through to get to adequate and then excellent.

The ladder from rubbish to excellent is Editing. It’s self-editing to start with and – even if you’re wise enough to get a Manuscript Assessment from us – it’s still self-editing after that, because it’s still you that has to choose how to react to your editor’s comments.

So. Write, edit, publish, repeat. You may only get meaningful feedback on your output about once a year. That’s just the way it is. Other indicators may not be accurate. You are not an impostor. You’re a writer.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

We’ll get back to text-analysis next week, but this week, let’s just throw it open. Do you struggle with something like Impostor Syndrome? How do you solve it? Just open up about the issue; you’ll get a LOT of understanding, and you might find suggestions that help. Come and fake it till you make it here.

***

And look: in my defence, I did clean the chimney, and perfectly well. But some idiots had removed most of the flue, so the more I cleaned the chimney, the more the debris fell into a big pile of dry material that I couldn’t access, or see, or have any reason to believe existed. Two or three sparks and – fire. The kids arranged chairs as though for a pop-up cinema and watched the entire show with glee.

Til soon.

Harry

An open embrace

OK, battle of the clichés. Which is truer: “You can’t judge a book by its cover” or “A picture is worth a 1000 words”?

Well, please pick your preferred platitude – but when it comes to book marketing, then the thousand-words cliché beats the can’t-judge cliché into a cocked hat. A cocked hat with gold frogging and a generously sized rosette.

The fact is that, whether a reader is looking on Amazon or on a bookstore table, they start with only two really key bits of data. (I’m assuming, of course, that you don’t happen to have a name like Margaret Atwood or Dan Brown. If you do, I’d say that potential readers have three key bits of data, and the name wins out.)

The two bits of data are:

1. The book cover image

2. The title.

There may be shoutlines or puffs or subtitles on the cover too, but a reader doesn’t really grapple with those until they’ve assessed the first two items. And the hand doesn’t reach for the book, the cursor doesn’t move in for the click, unless those two things intrigue the target reader enough.

So how do you get the click? That is, probably, the most single important moment in the entire marketing chain.

This is a complicated question and every book and every situation is different, but my guidelines would be as follows:

Communicate genre

Take a look at these two images:

Which is better? The first is the current book cover, the second one is from the movie DVD. Assume that the book is newly launched and can’t yet sell itself on name and reputation alone.

And the answer, surely, is that the actual book cover does a very poor job. The book is a dystopian fantasy involving an all-action teenage heroine. The readers you want to attract are young adults who want a dystopian fantasy featuring an all-action teenage heroine. The first image is … what? A historical novel? A lament for vanishing wildlife? A literary meditation of some sort? It’s entirely unclear. (That’s not a criticism of the 2025 cover, though. The book has become iconic, so it can afford a purely iconic cover.)

The DVD cover on the other hand does everything it needs to do. Dystopian? Yep. Fantasy? Well, probably, because most contemporary teenage girls don’t mess around with flaming arrows. Tough teenage heroine? Uh, yes. And the font says “speculative / future-set” not “Roman / classical / literary / boring.”

So, that’s your cover’s first job. Communicate genre. Establish an immediate link with the reader you’re targeting.

Communicate niche

Within any genre, there are any number of sub-genres. Cosy crime has a different vibe and a different readership from mainstream police procedurals… and both of those feel very different from gangland, mobster-type crime.

Your cover needs to find the niche within the niche. Your target reader needs to become curious with her very first glance.

Ignore your book

OK, you don’t have to ignore what actually happens in your book, and if the image in the cover relates to the text itself, then so much the better. But the worst self-made covers I’ve seen all fall into the trap of trying to interpret, over-literally, the story and settings of the actual text.

Perhaps those covers would be satisfying to people who had already read the novel and understood the allusions. But this is a marketing tool! People don’t know what those allusions mean. The cover has to attract people in – not provide an after-dinner mint to people who have just enjoyed your offering.

Here’s a cover that has effectively nothing to do with the text of the book:

The book is – duh! – not about moths and windowpanes. But who cares? It’s beautiful.

Layer your messages

Clare’s book cover also nudges a further point. The title has an opportunity to convey a message (or messages) of some sort. The cover art gives you a second opportunity to do the same.

So don’t repeat yourself! Set up an interesting reverberation between the two.

Suppose that book cover had shown an open hand and a moth flying away – that would have repeated the message of the cover… and produced something utterly bland.

As it is, the cover here says, “Trapped.” The title says, “Released”. What’s going on? It’s that sort of question which invites further investigation. That’s the question which makes you read the shoutline. (“A tragic accident. A past you can’t escape.”)

In effect, the reader is being led along like this:

1. Beautiful image (of the right sort of mood) attracts the eye

2. The title and the image kind of fight each other, prompting curiosity

3. The shoutline (and the title, and the domestic image) confirms your hunch that this is a psych thriller and that there are interesting mysteries to explore

4. You pick up the book and turn it over.

Step 2 – the layering of the messages – is absolutely crucial to the whole sequence.

In effect, the title and the cover are dancing a tango – but in loose (“open”) embrace instead of close embrace. You feel the linkage, but you also feel a distance.

The open question

For the same kind of reason, the title / cover needs to invite a question. That’s why the classic romance cover (woman in big dress, man with very open shirt) invites derision. It’s so single note: a tune played with one finger.

The best covers – even in the romance aisle, where readers are seeking a relatively simple happy ever after story – all play with two hands, a full range of notes. Books like these:

Those covers are beautiful... they talk about romance and they intrigue.

That book about summer yells about happy summer days – but then strongly suggests them ending. Huh? What happens to this happy, splashy couple?

And a book offering a love story shouldn’t talk about endings, surely? So what’s going on with the pair in the Yulin Kuang novel?

“Isabel and the Rogue” has a rather more typical romance title – naming both parties and suggesting the guy has some growing up to do – but the image subverts that. The yellow-dress woman looks very much in control. The nice chap sitting next to her looks very mannerly and not at all rogue-y. So what’s going on? The same title with an image that just repeats the ‘girl + rogue’ meme of the title would be killingly bad.

In every case, it’s an open question which intrigues the reader and prompts exploration. I think it’s probably true that EVERY good cover creates that intrigue.

Work at thumbnail size

Whether you’re working with a trad publisher or whether you’re commissioning your own self-pub cover, you will find that your designer presents you with your cover image at the hugest scale the internet can deal with. Ideally, a designer would like you to view the cover at monster size in the comfort of your own home cinema.

Which means that the first thing you should do is shrink that damn cover down to Amazon-thumbnail size and see if it still works. Every test I’ve suggested in this email needs to work at diddy-size as well as at full size. As a matter of fact, I always think it’s helpful to superimpose your draft cover on a screen grab of an Amazon search page to see if your cover holds up against the competition you will face.

Make a fuss

My last command is for you, not your book cover.

And it’s this: I know you are a very nice person. You’re like the gentleman seated next to Isabel, very nicely mannered, always ready to pass a bun and apologise for any crumbs on the carpet.

But if your cover is weak, say so, say so, say so. You have a pram, I hope? Throw toys out of it. Throw your sticky bun on the carpet. You wish to hurl, not throw? Then hurl away. Hurl hard.

Do not accept a mediocre cover. I’ve done that too often in my career (publishers coax you into acceptance), but do not do it.

Make a mess. Yell. Scream. Get yourself a decent cover. That’s easy to do if you’re self-publishing. Harder to do – but just as essential – if you’re trad-publishing.

You can go back to being nice again afterwards.

Feedback Friday is all on titles this week. Anyone can have a go. I’ll be around, offering feedback, but my feedback is only for Premium Members, so if you’re not a PM, you have a sad life ahead, unless you Do What Needs To Be Done.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

We’ll do titles this week. Tell us what your book is about in 2-3 sentences, and tell us the title you’ve chosen. If you have a subtitle or shoutline in mind, then tell us that too.

We want to feel a ripple of intrigue – a question we need answered.

Once you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work here.

***

Til soon,

Harry.

The crown of my life

I yap on a lot about novels in these emails: I’ve written plenty of novels; I like writing them; the vast majority of you guys are writing them too.

But I’ve also written non-fiction: Five books under my own name, but I’ve been quite involved in ghost-writing or similar with several others.

So: I like non-fiction too. And, within that, I like creative non-fiction: writing narratives that are essentially true, but using broadly the same set of literary techniques that a novelist brings into play.

I’m bringing this up now, because we have a new course available: a 6-part a 6-part video course on an Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction. The course is led by Sam Jordison, a writer himself, but also the founder of the quite brilliant Galley Beggar Press. The course is free to our lovely Premium Members, naturally, but you can buy it for £99 if you really want to. (But why would you want to? You can get everything in Premium Membership for £150.) More info here if you want it.

Of the memoirs I’ve worked with most closely, two come to mind.

The first is West End Girls – a memoir by Barbara Tate. She grew up before and during the War. She had a terrible, flibbertigibbet mother and was mostly brought up by a stonily cold, icily respectable grandmother. So she emerged into the world of post-war London, a young and now-independent adult who had never really experienced love.

And then – in 1948 – she met a glamorous, exotic, beautiful and warm woman, Faye, with whom she instantly bonded. Faye just happened to be one of the most hard-working and successful prostitutes working in Soho and she needed a maid. Barbara became that maid.

Barbara’s book tells the story of that friendship. The author was in her 80s when the book came to us. It was vastly long and discursive. It didn’t really know what story it was meant to be telling. With a younger author, we’d have simply given guidance and let her do the work. Given Barbara’s age, I essentially took on the work myself, cutting out the excess material and stitching the remaining parts back together.

Barbara had gone on from maid-ing in Soho to achieve plenty in her life, but when I told her that we’d sold her book for good money to a major publisher, she was thrilled. We sat in her sunny Ealing garden and she waved a cup at me and said, “Harry, this will be the crown of my life.”

That book went on to be a beautifully well-published bestseller.

Another book I especially remember was Please Don’t Make Me Go, a story with a lousy cover and a weedy title (both chosen by the publisher to line up with the Misery Memoir kitsch, then very much in vogue.)

The author, John Fenton, was a tough, smart man. His book was a brutal, brilliant account of his time in a young offenders’ institution – he’d been sent there, on the basis of no actual offence, by a dad who just wanted rid of him. The book ended with an astonishing climax: just as things were going to go very badly indeed for the young Fenton, he managed to break into the office of the man who ran the place and found material so compromising that the outcome flipped in an instant, from very bad to very good.

And? My conclusions from working with those books?

Simply that pretty much every technique that applies to a novel applies also to non-fiction, of the kind we’re talking about.

Dialogue? Yes, John and Barbara both wrote dialogue that could easily have lived in fiction.

Scene construction? Definitely the same.

Characterisation? Yes, of course.

And the structure of the story itself? Yes, yes, yes. That’s key. Both the books I’m thinking of had this astonishingly novelistic structure – and in both cases with endings that just linger in the mind.

Now, personally, I think it’s OK if non-fiction writers nudge their facts into shape a little. I don’t mean outright lie, but I do mean shape. Omit something if it occludes the structure you’re building? Skip over some things, bring others into much greater prominence? Yes to all that.

Build your story.

I do warmly recommend Sam’s course. (The guy is something of a publishing genius and it’s just brilliant that we can bring a bit of him to you.) But also:

The reason why I talk so much about novels in these emails is that pretty much everything I talk about applies to you non-fictioneers too.

Build your story. Write well. Have fun.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

If you’re writing creative non-fiction, then let’s have the opening page of your book, or any chunk that represents a kind of manifesto for the book people are about to read.

As soon as you're ready, log into Townhouse and post your work here.

And those who are completing the Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction course too, don't forget to complete the lesson assignments and share your work in the course forum.

If you’re not writing non-fiction, then you’ve got the week off. And a Happy Easter to you.

***

Til soon.

Harry

A line of green lamps

All agents have passions. At our Festival once – late at night and after plenty of wine – one agent started listing hers. I know there were sharks on her list and haunted houses, and child killers, and twins, and (I think) anything Victorian, and definitely mistaken identity, and… the list went on. Somewhere out there, a perfect novel exists for her with all those things in one beautifully weird melange.

But? Mostly agents want surprise. They want that sense of, ‘Gosh, I had no idea I’d want something like this, but now that it’s in front of me, I really, really do.’

Pitch

I wrote a week or two ago about how the ghost of an elevator pitch needs to glimmer in your query letter. And it does. The ingredients for a compelling story need to be present. The agent needs to feel that intrigue from the very start.

Because I plappered (my daughter’s chosen verb) about that recently, I’ll say no more now.

Good writing / instant authority

Agents say they want a distinctive voice; of course they do. But if you try to analyse what that really means, I think it comes down to this. Agents want to read the first page of a manuscript and just know that the writer is in perfect control – of their sentences, their characters, their story.

That control will, most of the time, come with a voice that sounds like that specific author, and nobody else – simply because you don’t normally get that level of control in over text, without putting your own personality into it.

But does John Grisham, say, really sound so distinctive? Or Stephen King? I’m not sure they do. They are masters of their craft, of course, but it’s not really their voice that you’d want to pick out.

So, I’d focus less on voice, and more on authority. Can a professional reader tell from the first page or two that you are in control, and that good things lie in wait? The answer needs to be yes.

A plausible story

Most agents will regard your synopsis as the least important part of your submission package – which is just as well, because synopses are tedious to write and tedious to read.

That said, synopses can be massive time savers. Let’s say I were a busy agent. I’ve read a query letter and I’m intrigued. I’ve read the opening page or two, and I feel the authority of the writing.

So now what? I read 200 pages, only to find that the story massively disappoints 2/3 of the way into the book? Or discover that the basic theme is simply not marketable?

Well, I should say that the clues given from the query letter and opening pages are generally more solid than that. Those authority-clues are powerful and they don’t often lie. But still. It takes four hours to read a book. It takes five minutes to read a synopsis.

So an agent will mostly want to sense-check that synopsis for the basic story shape. The question is essentially: does this feel like a novel? Could this story fill out an 80,000 word book?

An avenue to market

But also, through all of the above, any agent will be asking themselves the one key question that will determine their decision: can I imagine how a publisher would market this?

What kind of cover? What kind of pitch? What sales messaging to the putative retailer? What comparable books?

Now, for clarity, you don’t have to be a marketing expert and you don’t need to come up with solutions. Or rather: it may be an asset if you can supply those solutions, but it’s not really your job to do so. (And if you do want to do so, then do so with tact, ‘In the vein of recent bestsellers, such as Robin Banks’s The Greatest Heist and Lottie Lightfingers’ The Wallet That Wandered...’)

But the agent is a professional salesperson, and therefore also a marketing expert. They’re a saleswoman (or man) whose job is selling to editors. Those editors will then have the task of selling your manuscript to their team and then, if they’re successful, selling your book to retailers and, through them, to the public. In fact, the number of successful sales needed is significant:

Sale #1: You to your agent
Sale #2: Your agent to an editor
Sale #3: Your editor to their acquisitions committee
Sale #4: your publisher’s sales team to retailers
Sale #5: Your publisher’s marketing team to the public.

Your agent knows your book only succeeds if all those lamps are shining green. It’s that sense of commercial potential which will, almost certainly, define the response you get back.

A line of green lamps

And for you to achieve that line of green lamps? Well, by the time you’ve written your book, you’re kind of stuck with it.

But the advice never really changes. It all comes down to:

Knowing your market. You need to be deeply involved, as a reader, in the market you want to end up writing for. That knowledge will insert itself into your text. It’ll ensure that you write for the market as it is today, not as you want it to be.
A great pitch. I hammer away at elevator pitch a lot, because that pitch is just crucial. A so-so written book with a great pitch? That’ll sell. Most really big bestsellers are moderately written but with great pitches. If your pitch is weak, even great writing may not save you.
Good or excellent writing. Great pitch + good, competent writing: that’ll work. Adequate pitch + genius levels of writing: that’ll work. Any sort of pitch + clumsy writing? That’s a fail, every time, as it jolly well ought to be.

But that’s what we’re here for, right? To help you get to the point of pitching to agents, or self-publishing, with confidence.

This thing that you want? It ain’t easy, but it is doable. And we’re here to help.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Another slightly left-field task this week. (Though I realise this is a sporting terminology, I don’t really understand. I mean, in cricket, we’d normally say leg-side, except that you’d need to say off-side if the batter was left-handed. And since bowlers bowl quite happily to left-handed and right-handed batters, there’s no big difference between a legside ball and an offside one. So left-field or right-field? I don’t get it.)

Anyway. Here’s a different sort of task.

1. Give me the pitch from your book, in any form you like (super-short / short / 2-3 sentences.)

2. Find two or three books which are recent, successful and comparable. Give me the pitches from at least one of them.

That’s an ouchy task: demanding to do. But if you can do it, and your book sits happily amidst your chosen company, then you have a marketable work on your hands.

As soon as you're ready, log into Townhouse and post your work here.

***

I’m writing this email on Tuesday. It’s my birthday today, one that I share with my wife.

The kids are being… not horrible. There is sunshine and there are tulips and much tea. Tulips are maybe my absolute favourite flower, except that I do have a soft spot for dog roses, and I’ve got enough of Wales in my blood that I am easily seduced by a daffodil.

And cherry blossom? Hmm. But I think tree-flowers need a different category, no?

Til soon,

Harry.

A black shirt and glops of golden yoghurt

As you’d expect, there’s quite a lot of research into what makes people buy stuff. And, as you’d expect, writers are mostly very, very, very not interested in exploring it.

But that’s tough on you, because this email is going to tell you anyway. And yes, I know you want to write books and leave selling to someone else. But that’s not how it works. Even if you’re traditionally published, you’ll be asked to review blurbs, think about cover art, review social media yadda and email lists… and, if you self-publish, then you’ll be thinking about Facebook ads and the like as well.

You don’t have to turn into the sort of person who wears a black shirt, and a gold medallion, and fake tan so thick it looks like a kind of golden yogurt. But you do have to engage with how your book strikes people on first view, not just on full view.

And here are some tips. They’re all based on actual scientific research (hence the slightly weird precision in the data), so what follows isn’t just an opinion piece. That said, books are different from a lot of consumer products, so you have to adjust accordingly. (For those interested: here's where I got my data.)

Say you

Address the reader as though they’re in the room with you. Say, ‘you’. The result of that direct address is that people feel around 20% more involved in your brand. Since you’re really trying to build that direct relationship, that involvement matters.

Say I

And be you. Don’t depersonalise yourself. Not 'This story was written to thrill,’ but, 'I wanted to thrill you.' Keep the relationship front and centre.

The difference between 'I' and 'we' in a study was a sales improvement of around 7%. My guess? With a brand that ought to be focused on you as author, the positive results are probably greater than that. The author-reader relationship has the potential to be way stronger than (say) the toothpaste-manufacturer / tooth-owner relationship.

Here and now

For the same sort of reasons, don’t jump into the past. Keep any marketing-type copy in the present tense. The stats say that this helps it sound up to 26% more helpful / compelling. And you want to compel.

Be assertive

There are different ways of being assertive. You can make firm claims rather than wishy-washy ones. (So ‘all’ or ‘always’, not ‘mostly’ or ‘often’.)

Strong negatives also show assertiveness: 'you won’t read a better thriller this year' just sounds punchier than 'this will be one of the best thrillers you’ve read for a long time.'

The effect of this kind of language can boost engagement by up to 18%.

Avoid technical language

Yes, your book may be a near-future SF story about a moon-mission gone wrong. But keep your blurb clear, not cluttered. If you write 'When the landing craft hit the rim of a crater…', the reader knows instantly what you mean. If you write 'When the orbital descent vehicle foundered on the lip of an impact basin…', you’ve lost your zing.

I’m not talking here about the language inside the book – your book and your characters and your story will need to determine that. But don’t fail to get people through your entrance door. And that means, keeping it clear and keeping it simple.

If you do clutter up your language, sales drop by up to 16%. (And, honestly, in the context of books where the nearest competitive product is only a click away, I think sales will drop a lot more than that.)

The rule of three

An interesting one this, because at first sight it doesn’t apply to books. The rule is: list three benefits, not two, not four, not five.

Why? Well, three just beats any other number by 10.4%. It appears that three works because it establishes a pattern without seeming too fake.

Additionally, there’s evidence that says if you list three excellent benefits of X, and then also two good benefits, consumers take a kind of average score and think, ‘Yeah, not so excellent really.’ Sticking only with the excellent options means that consumers were willing to spend up to 37% more.

Now, you’re not offering a baking tin or a waterproof jacket. You’re offering a book, and the benefit of a book (assuming it’s fiction) is just that it’s good and will grip the reader. So maybe listing benefits doesn’t really apply.

Except that… Netflix uses the rule of three all the time. Take a quite excellent programme – Harry & Meghan, for example: it’ll be described with a trio of adjectives – Captivating / Investigative / Social-cultural.

I think the same applies to any time you try to intrigue a reader with your book. Take my Fiona books. If I used a trio of words, it might be something like ‘Intelligent, Intense, Suspenseful’. If I tried to layer things on top of that (‘Literate, dark, celtic noir, thought-provoking’), the pitch to the reader becomes so muddled as to be indecipherable.

And that rule of three applies even where you might not expect. Let’s say you’ve picked the adjectives and themes you want to push. Everything needs to point at those specific things.

So if you have a reader-review that chimes beautifully with the adjectives you’ve picked – then great, use it. But quite likely, you also have a reader-review that says something positive, but not aligned with your core themes. In that case, including the review is muddling the message. It’s leaving the reader uncertain about what you’re offering.

So pick your themes – three of them – and work those hard.

Syntactic surprise

And here’s an interesting (and more writer-y) piece of of advice:

According to research shared by Thomas McKinlay, simply using a surprising sentence pattern in your copy can help you get a 127.5% increase in click-through rates (CTR).

So here’s your expected sentence structure:

Red Bull will give you energy for hours.

Take a trip anywhere you feel like going.

Uber Eats can deliver a delicious meal to your door.

Boring, right? And here’s the same thing, made a little less expected:

Red Bull gives you wings

Belong anywhere. [AirBnB]

A delicious meal at your door, by Uber Eats.

There used to be a way to calculate ‘syntactic surprise’, but the online calculator tool seems dead. That’s a shame, but you’re a writer – you don’t need it. Making nice sentences is your thing, right?

And a 127% increase in click-through rate? Wow. That’s the difference between an Amazon bestseller and one that’s nigh on impossible to market profitably.

Use these tools. Use them well. Be happy.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Ooh, a challenging task this week. It comes in two pieces:

Give me an Amazon book description of 150 words or less.
Give me a ‘shout line’: a phrase or sentence (max 12 words, and ideally under 10) suitable for the front of your book. So for example: 'Every family has secrets – some more deadly than others.'

We’re going to be looking for clear and compelling, mixed with a dash of syntactic surprise. A hard task this one, but a goodie.

As soon as you're ready, log into Townhouse and post yours here.

***

That’s it from me.

Til soon,

Harry.

The ghost in your query

Last week, we talked about query letters and I asked you to pop your draft letters up on Townhouse for feedback.

That’s always an illuminating exercise, and on the whole, what I saw was pretty convincing.

But one topic I did want to address was this: your query letter absolutely wants to deliver your core elevator pitch... but you probably don’t want to state your elevator pitch in the letter.

Now yes, that’s sounds puzzling – and I’ll explain – but I should also say that it’s easy to overthink these things. For one thing, personal tastes differ. Some agents will relish what I or other agents would not advise.

More important, though, a query letter itself isn’t terribly important. You need to talk about your book in a way that interests the agent – but the default for an agent is to read the first page or two of your work. It’s way better to have a drab query letter and some excellent opening chapters, than to have a dazzling query letter and drab text. The latter manuscript will never be picked up. The first one almost certainly will be.

So, please don’t get stressed. If you want more help with the query letter, last week's Lesson Three of How to Get a Literary Agent course will tell you EVERYTHING that you need to know. (If you're a Premium Member, log in to access this course for free. Otherwise you can purchase the course for just £99).

OK. So. Elevator pitch and query letter.

As you know, I love a very tight elevator pitch:

“A Cardiff-set crime novel, featuring a detective who used to think she was dead.”

That’s 14 words and I wasn’t even really trying to go as short as possible.

I don’t even mind elevator pitches that just collapse into a list of ingredients. For example, here are some that just list ingredients but still have a relish to them. (The first pitch describes my Fiona series, of course; the other two are just invented.)

“Murder mystery + detective who used to believe she was dead.”

“Antarctic research station + troubled oceanographer + ghosts”

“YA story: Victorian circus + orphan boy + murder story”

But an elevator pitch is, first and foremost, for you. It’s so you can define and understand the purpose of your novel. It’s so you can keep the text on the iron tracks that will deliver commercial (and actually artistic) quality.

From that point of view, the scantier your pitch, the more clearly you yourself understand what you’re dealing with. But a query letter has to dress like a query letter. You can’t just toss out a dozen words, like ham knuckles on a plate, and expect to whet an agent’s appetite.

So you need to introduce your book in a paragraph or two, and those paragraphs need to have nice tidy prose, and they need to ensure that they’re delivering information on genre, and setting, and anything else that an agent might want to know before she tucks into the manuscript.

And the elevator pitch needs to shimmer behind all that – the gold behind the veil.

So to take that (invented) book about the Victorian circus, my query letter might say.

“Oscar is an orphan. He never knew his father and his mother (a lady’s maid) died when he was eight. For two years, he lived a harsh and semi-feral life on the streets of London, until a kindly trapeze artist at one of London’s largest circuses took him in. His life at the circus is comparatively idyllic until one day, when tasked with clearing out the animal cages, he finds evidence that the lions have recently dined on a human – and, quite possibly, Lady Pamela Dulverton, whose recent disappearance is the talk of the town.

Drawn into the resultant investigation, Oscar is forced to grow up fast – and finally learns family secrets that will change his life forever.”

Now, you can absolutely feel the elevator pitch there: Orphan. Victorian circus. Murder. Boom! That’s a book we want to read. The rest of it (the trapeze artist, the lion’s cages, the status of the murder victim) are all just dressing on top of that basic skeleton. If the murder victim had been trampled by an elephant or tossed from a trapeze or skewered by a strongman, it wouldn’t really affect the story. It would be equally unimportant who took Oscar in. The elevator pitch, however, you can’t alter at all without fundamentally changing the story itself.

Oh yes: and the ‘family secrets that change his life forever’ – that’s also not really part of the pitch. Of course, a YA story has to deliver some major form of life-changing outcome, but it doesn’t have to be a family secret. If an orphan came into money or some form of real job security or decided to set up shop as a freelance investigator, any of those things would also complete the story in the necessary way. The pitch is iron and can’t change (unless you decided to write a different story altogether.)

So, the elevator pitch is all present and correct. The agent will feel its presence.

At the same time, you can feel that the extra dressing just helps the pitch appear at its best. It’s as though your query letter is saying, “Look, our pitch is basically orphan + Victorian circus + murder mystery. You gotta love that, right? But if you want help understanding how those ingredients cohere into an actual story, then let me tell you about Oscar, who …”

So, yes, your elevator pitch needs to light up your query letter – it needs to be felt.

But no, the pitch alone is insufficient.

So do what most of the Feedback Friday people did last wee. Write a fluent paragraph or two. Make sure the elevator pitch is there behind the curtain. And write a paragraph that engages the reader.

It’s that simple.

And don’t stress. If you can write a book that’s good enough to be published, you can definitely write a query letter. (And download the query letter and synopsis builder. It’s good.)

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Since we’re doing agent-y things at the moment, we may as well do synopses too.

If you haven’t already posted your query letter for feedback, then I suggest you do that this week here. If you posted your query letter last week, then let’s take a look at your synopsis instead.

I will say that reading back-to-back synopses is a task about as interesting as eating a plateful of brick dust, so I won’t get stuck in too deeply. What I will do, though, is take at least one synopsis from this week's assignment of Lesson Four of How to Get a Literary Agent and give in-depth comments in the forum for that course (and I’ll make my post sticky, so it’s easy to find.)

***

That’s it from me. Brick dust is yuk, because it lodges between the teeth. A bowlful of gravel though, with fresh milk, and a little grated dandelion? Yum.

Til soon.

Harry

PS: Premium Members have been enjoying our How To Get a Literary Agent course – lessons are released weekly and we’re now on week four, all about how to writing a winning synopsis. The course is free to Premium Members – or you can buy this course as a one-off for £99. But don’t be a silly billy. It makes no sense to buy a one-off course, when you can get an entire suite of courses (and everything else in membership) for just £150 a year (or, for cancel-any-time flex membership, just £30/month.) Membership info here.

How to hire a plumber

Last week, we dealt with hyper-intelligent beings in the form of robots. This week, we turn to… literary agents.

The gist of this email is short and easy.

Agents are there to sell services to you. Over the years, if your career does well, you’ll certainly hope to spend thousands (of pounds or dollars) on those agents. With a little luck, you’ll be spending tens of thousands. If your career really flourishes, you could easily be spending six digits on all that agenting.

Don’t get me wrong, that money is bloody well spent. I’m hardly ill-connected in the world of agents and publishers, and I have in fact sold books for Jericho Writers clients in the past. (Under exceptional circumstances only, and no, I won’t do it for you.) But an agent lives in that market, day in and day out, and there’s no question that they do a better job than I would.

As you know, I’m a big fan of self-publishing and if you want to go that route, you stand an excellent chance of making more money than you would by going trad. But if you do want a traditional publisher, then the 10-15% commission you spend on your agent will be rewarded many times over by the uplift in revenues you’ll collect. I’ve never thought that agents are overpaid.

But –

You pay these people. They work for you.

And OK, this is a two-way deal. They don’t offer representation unless they think the deal will work out for them. So yes, you have to pass a kind of audition. But in a way that’s even true of plumbers. If they don’t fancy your bathroom renovation job, they either won’t do it, or they’ll quote a sum that induces you to say no.

Forget about the audition stage. It’s irrelevant. These people work for you and, if things work out, they will make a lot of money from you.

So treat them like plumbers, not gods.

If an agent stops responding to perfectly legitimate emails, then they’re behaving childishly and unprofessionally. Move on.

If an agent asks for editorial changes that you’re sure are wrong, say no.

If an agent’s submission process is unnecessarily fiddly or non-standard, then either ignore their requests or choose a different agent.

If an agent’s contract has some pissy little clause that you don’t like or seems unfair, then say so. Negotiate.

Most standard advice tells you to approach an agent with a kind of genuflection in your query letter. (“There are 1400+ literary agents in the world, but I’m writing to YOU because you bedazzle me in the following way …”) And, for me, that’s horse-poo. The things that people say in those letters almost always come over as inauthentic. In most cases, you know pretty much damn all about an agent, and you’re writing to them because you don’t totally hate their face, the agency seems OK, and you’ve got to bang out a dozen query letters anyway. If I were back in agent-querying world, I wouldn’t do that little genuflection. I’d just say, “here’s my book. If you want to represent me, let’s talk.” I mean, I wouldn’t phrase it quite like that, but I wouldn’t curtsy.

Also – send out multiple query letters. Agents used to promote a kind of sequential process: first one agent, then another, then another. That process served their interests very well and yours not at all. You wouldn’t do that with plumbers. Don’t do it with agents.

Ask for information. You should expect to know which editor at which publishing house has received your work. You should expect a submission strategy to be worked out with you in advance. Don’t ask for those things timidly. Expect them. Require them. A plumber needs to check with you before selecting bathware. An agent needs to check with you before selecting editors.

And that’s the message. They’re not gods. They’re plumbers. Expect good behaviour, and you’ll (probably) get it. All being well, you’ll have an excellent professional relationship that lasts for years. You’re paying the money, so you’re within your rights to have expectations.

Ask for what you want.

Be polite and professional.

And don’t curtsy.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Biff boff. Your task this week is to show me your query letter.

Despite what I say above, I’m perfectly happy if you do insert the “I’ve chosen you because….” language. I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s obligatory.

If you’re not at the querying stage, then do the exercise anyway. It’s always helpful to think about your book from an agent’s perspective. When you're ready, share yours here.

That’s it from me.

Til soon,

Harry

Arranging tables – and the importance of making readers work

Well, golly gosh, I thought last week’s Feedback Friday was interesting - and brave for the good souls who took part.

We asked people to post an excerpt from their manuscript – plus the same scene, as delivered by an AI tool. (You can see the full results here, and I do urge you to take a look. If the link gives you a “whoops” message, that’s because you’re not a member, or not logged in. So either log in, or join us completely free. You get load of good stuff if you do.)

Just for fun, here’s part of the scene that I posted. Fiona (a police officer, but working undercover) is meeting a senior member of a criminal gang she is seeking to penetrate. They meet in a wine bar:

My version of the scene

Vic emerges from behind a raw oak pillar. My face must change somehow, because the waiter swings round, sees Vic. Some look is exchanged, and the waiter waves me over to where Vic has a table waiting.

‘You made it,’ he says.

He clucks around me, a fussy uncle. He wants me to remove my coat, but I keep it on. Take off my hat, but keep it close.

He wants me to choose a drink. Pushes a long wine list at me, tells me to order anything. I ask for water. He tells me again to order anything, meaning that water doesn’t count, so I say orange juice, a small one.

He orders another glass of red wine for him, a bowl of olives, toasted ciabatta slices and olive oil, a selection of antipasti, and my orange juice.

I sit there with my bag on my lap. The bag is wired for sound. So is my coat.

‘Filthy day, isn’t it? I don’t mind it cold, but this is vile.’

I don’t say anything. Maybe shrug. Look sideways.

‘Listen, love, you’re frightened, aren’t you? And that’s my fault. I think I frightened you yesterday. Let’s just get to know each other a bit maybe.’

AI version of scene

The soft clink of wine glasses blended with murmured conversations around me. I’d chosen my outfit carefully – a worn blazer and faded jeans that screamed low-wage worker, a direct contrast to the polished mahogany and crystal elegance of the wine bar. Vic sat across from me, his pinstripe suit a silent declaration of power.

“You’ve got a reputation for being… resourceful,” he said, swirling a glass of Cabernet. His steel-gray eyes never left my face, measuring and calculating. I could feel the weight of his assessment.

I kept my posture slightly hunched, the defeated stance of someone desperate for work. “I go where I’m needed,” I replied, my voice low and neutral. “Cleaning’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills.”

A thin smile crossed his lips – predatory, knowing.

Comments on this

For me, the AI scene is desperately crude. Conversations (inevitably) are murmured. Wine glasses (inevitably) clink softly. The bar is (for sure) polished mahogany, even though that wood feels like a somewhat Victorian choice; it certainly isn’t high style today. And of course the eyes are steel-grey and calculating.

The trouble here is that there’s no sub-text. The reader isn’t being asked to do any work at all. “Hmm, I wonder how we should think about Vic Henderson? Well, he’s predatory and calculating so he’s probably Bad News, right?”

That’s so crude.

My version of the same man is almost the opposite. He clucks around Fiona like a fussy uncle. He nudges her into ordering something. And he accepts blame for her feelings: ‘Listen, love, you’re frightened, aren’t you? And that’s my fault. I think I frightened you yesterday. Let’s just get to know each other a bit maybe.’

But the reader knows this isn’t the whole Henderson. Not only do we know for a fact that he’s the face of a criminal enterprise, but we see him rejecting her request for water. There’s compulsion here and it’s the compulsion that we feel.

Some of the comments on this pair of scenes was:

“the AI writing here isn’t good. I don’t think it has the capacity to be indirect. It overexplains with tired language. And it has that generic voice.”
“There is always a lot of telling description that gives AI away. ‘Low and neutral’ ‘ thin smile’ ‘predatory’ ‘hands trembled’. The revised version has a lot of flowery descriptions. However, with your excerpt, we are picking up things as readers and not being told what to think.”

I think those comments are just right.

And just to finish, here’s a chunk (edited for length) from Sally Roone’s Intermezzo. The monologue comes from Ivan, a gifted chess player. He’s watching an arts centre get set up for a 10 vs 1 chess tournament, where Ivan is the 1. He then meets Margaret, the attractive arts centre organiser.

Sally Rooney / Intermezzo

Standing on his own in the corner, Ivan thinks with no especially intense focus about the most efficient way of organising, say, a random distribution of tables and chairs into the aforementioned arrangement of a central U-shape, etc. It’s something he has thought about before, while standing in other corners, watching other people move similar furniture around similar indoor spaces: the different approaches you could use, say if you were writing a computer programme to maximise process efficiency. The accuracy of these particular men in relation to the moves recommended by such a program would be, Ivan thinks, pretty low, like actually very low…

A woman enters. She happens to be noticeably attractive, which makes her presence in the room at this juncture all the more curious. She has a nice figure and her face in profile looks very pretty … She works here, the woman named Margaret, here at the art centre: that explains her sort of artistic appearance. She's wearing a white blouse, and a voluminous patterned skirt in different colours, and neat flat shoes of the kind ballerinas wear. He begins to experience, while she stands there in front of him, an involuntary mental image of kissing her on the mouth: not even really an image, but an idea of an image, sort of a realisation that it would be possible to visualise this at some later point, what it would be like to kiss her, a promise of enjoyment simply to picture himself doing that, which is harmless enough, just a private thought.

Do you play chess? he asks.

Nowhere does this say, “Ivan is a chess geek.” Nowhere does this say, “Ivan is certain to be awkward around women.” Nowhere does this say, “Ivan will not come across as sexually impressive.” But we know immediately that all these things are true. We also know that Ivan would slaughter us at chess and also be far more likely to remember the formula for a Gaussian probability distribution.

The point here is that the reader is being made to work. They have to bring their own knowledge of the world (geeky men / arts centre-y women) and build out their understanding of the scene from facts they’ve acquired about the world. The AI text almost assumes that we have no knowledge of the world, so if an observation isn’t in the text, it doesn’t exist.

But it does exist! It’s the most interesting part of the text. The joy of reading Sally Rooney isn’t Sally Rooney text alone. It’s ‘Sally Rooney text plus our own human wisdom.’ A robot couldn’t read Sally Rooney and form any real sense of what makes it worthwhile.

You don’t believe me? Well, I asked a robot to ‘rewrite and improve’ Rooney’s passage. The result is in the PS below. But suffice to say – I do not love it.

And nor should you.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

OK, here’s a rather different task from what I normally hand out – but still on the theme of this email and the last.

Post a 200-250 word excerpt from your manuscript
In [square brackets and italics] add your comments wherever you detect the kind of subtext that you would not expect a robot to pick up.

Once you're ready, log in to Townhouse and post yours here.

I’m going to like the excerpts that have lots of italics!

***

That’s it from me.

My massive Viking longship was handed in to school and duly admired. It’s now sitting in my garage. When summer comes, I’m going to find a petite red-headed Viking and launch her off into the biggest lake or river I can find. The ship is papier-mache and is likely to dissolve, but wotthehell. The Vikings sailed to America, right? I reckon they’ll manage the Thames.

Til soon.

Harry

***

PS: Here’s the AI version of that Sally Rooney passage: which scrubs all subtext with a total lack of self-reflection. Ms Rooney has nothing to worry about just yet:

Standing in the corner, Ivan observed the chaotic rearrangement of furniture with detached analytical interest. His mind, perpetually seeking patterns, calculated the optimal sequence for transforming this random scatter of tables and chairs into the intended U-shape. It was a familiar mental exercise—one he often entertained while occupying the margins of rooms like this, watching people execute with human imprecision what could be solved with algorithmic elegance. He estimated the efficiency of these particular men at perhaps thirty percent of optimal—their movements dictated by intuition rather than calculation, by conversation rather than silent computation.

A woman entered the space, and Ivan's algorithmic thinking stuttered. Her presence was an unexpected variable in what had been, until now, a predictable equation. She moved with confidence through the disarray, her figure drawing his attention with a force that felt almost mathematical in its inevitability. Her profile cut a precise silhouette against the institutional wall—high cheekbones, a determined chin, eyes focused on something beyond the immediate disorder.

Margaret, he recalled from the program. She worked at the art center—an explanation for both her presence and the deliberate aesthetic of her appearance. Her white blouse provided sharp contrast to the chromatic explosion of her skirt, which moved like liquid as she navigated between half-arranged furniture. Her ballet flats made no sound on the floor, adding to the impression that she floated slightly above the mundane proceedings.

Without warning, his mind produced not an explicit image but a theoretical construct—a placeholder for a potential visualization involving the pressing of his lips against hers. Not even a fantasy so much as a mathematical proof of a fantasy's possibility: If x equals proximity and y equals mutual attention, then z could equal... He felt a curious satisfaction at the mere architecture of this thought, this harmless private equation that would never require solving.

"Do you play chess?" he asked, the question emerging from some calculation deep beneath his consciousness, a gambit whose purpose even he couldn't fully articulate.

AI, a Viking longship and the future of writing

For a long time, I’ve held off writing about the impact of AI on what we do. Partly, none of us knows the answer and I have no special expertise in the area. But also, the impact still seemed quite remote. AI has seemed like something that might impact relatively tedious tasks (writing Google-optimised articles about vehicle maintenance, say) but not more obviously artistic / complex ones – like writing a memoir or a novel.

But – well, here’s a story.

Or rather, here WILL be a story, except that I want to put a shout out for Harry Harrison’s book THE WELFARE. I never met Harry, but he was a loyal Son of Jericho – always kind, always helpful, and a wonderful writer. He died recently, unexpectedly soon and with perfect bravery and grace. His book was unfinished, but his lovely writing group helped complete his book. It’s available now, in paperback. Harry Harrison was a beautiful man; this book is a lovely memorial.

OK. The story:

My kids were given an extended homework task that involved writing a ‘day in the life of’ story about a Viking.

My older boy, who is no huge fan of the written word, settled down, rather glumly, to perform the task.

Sometime later, he showed me his story. It was typed, which is fine: he’s happier with the keyboard than the pen. He had written about 200 words. And the story was really quite good. It had a simple dawn / voyage / battle / rest structure. The prose was simple, but clear and effective (“The air was cool, the sea was calm.”) There were no typos or punctuation errors, but Tom explained he’d used the spellcheck tools to get rid of them.

He seemed genuinely proud.

I was, I have to say, sceptical. I put the text through a plagiarism checker to make sure he hadn’t just lifted it wholesale from somewhere. But he hadn’t. I even checked his internet search history. Honestly, I ended up thinking that he’d done the work and I was proud of him.

He hadn’t, of course.

He’d used the copilot tool in Word (which I’ve never used myself or shown him how to use) and just had AI create the story lock, stock and barrel. That story, alas, was better than anything Tom was capable of writing himself.

Now, we’re talking about a 200-word story ‘written by’ an 11-year-old. We’re not talking about novels, let alone novels for adults, let alone anything with aspirations to art.

But take a look at the following chunks of text. One was written by AI, one by my (text-averse) son, one by my (text-ophile) daughter. Oh, and just to make it more fun, I’ve included a fourth chunk of text which represents a second excerpt by one of those three writers. The order is random.

Text A

It was lunchtime, when the cook Eirik was calling me. I climbed down from my platform and went to eat. There was freshly caught fish and sour milk. After a while I went back to my platform.

Suddenly, I thought I saw a ship.

“I’ve seen a ship,” I shouted.

Text B

"Hold the net tight," his dad told Leif as they rowed out. They spent a long time catching fish in the sun.

At lunch time, they came back with lots of fish. Leif helped his dad put salt on some fish to keep for winter. Later, in the middle of the village, an old man got everyone to sit around the fire. He told stories about Thor's hammer and brave fighters who sailed to far-away places.

Text C

I smiled. I had no doubt our boat was queen of the seas. No one doubted it, except for Arne our old, wrinkled cook. He cooked amazingly, though sometimes pieces of hair from his long grey beard swam in the stews he concocted. His beard was so long, and he was so ancient, that people believed many generations of ravens, with feathers as black as charcoal, had roosted within its tangled mass.

Text D

The new ship was getting nearer by the minute. It was here. I swung across to the other ship.

I started by killing the weak and feeble, then moved on to the hulks and the better fighters. I so nearly got killed, but Halfdan saved me. Phew, that was close.

Just take a moment to sort through who you think has authored what.

OK.

I think it’s not hard to determine that Text D is my son’s work. That just feels eleven years old, right? A boy wants a battle scene but has only the very vaguest notion of how to choreograph it, and Text D is the alarmingly hotch-potch result.

Text C clearly belongs to my daughter. It’s just too bananas, too off-piste, to have been generated by a machine. That’s true of the whole raven / beard image. But it’s also true of the details – ‘pieces of hair’ rather than ‘tiny hairs’, for example.

Then Text A versus Text B? Well, I’m not sure there are many tells here – except that Text A more obviously joins to Text D, so we can figure out that Text B belongs to a machine, A and D to a rather small human.

And what does all this tell us?

Well, I think it tells us that the current, still immature, generation of models is weirdly powerful. No news there.

I also think it reminds us that AM – Artificial Morality – is not even in its infancy. It’s unborn and barely thought of. From what I understand, my son basically asked a machine to help him cheat and the machine did so without a moment’s pause. The machine did not say, as any vaguely sensible adult would have done, ‘Look, are you sure? Wouldn’t it be more helpful for your education if you actually did this work yourself? Maybe you could do it and I could nudge you when you get stuck?’

AI without AM seems like a dangerous path to me. That’s also not exactly a novel observation.

But I also think this whole episode tells us that, for now, what those models are good at is generating the kind of text you expect to see because it’s the kind of text you’ve seen before. Because the internet isn’t full of people like Tom writing breezily about killing the weak and the feeble before moving on to the hulks (!), the models don’t pop that kind of sentence out.

When Tom is writing (Text A) in the way that he’s expected to write for this assignment, the machines (Text B) keep almost perfect pace. In fact, from a pure prose perspective, the machine is writing just that little bit better, albeit still in the range of 11-year-old vocab and sentence structure.

But text C? With its generations of ravens and pieces of hair? In the end, what AI models are doing is stunning, but the heavy lifting is still, in the end, a kind of creative statistical analysis of huge volumes of text. Almost inevitably, it tends towards the median, the average – the expected.

Clearly, as models get better, they’ll get more capable and the range of uses will become more expansive. Suppose, for example, you wanted to create a primer on German-English grammar along with some vocabulary lists suitable for early learners. I think you could probably create a very good first draft of that book in about a day, relying on AI to do the heavy lifting for you.

That says to me that already, at the most mechanical end of the education market, AI is capable of (very largely) replacing the work now done by (underpaid) authors.

But what about next year? Or in 5 years’ time?

I don’t know. But:

The more distinctive your voice – the further away from that median line you tread – the longer it’ll take for a machine to catch you up, and perhaps it never will.
The stronger your relationship with your actual readers, the more impossible it is that any machine could ever replace you. That relationship needs to be founded on delivery of value of course (great writing), but it’s also supported by just being a nice human in regular communication – we’re talking about mailing lists, here, or at least an active Facebook page.

And all that syncs with everything I say anyway. Write well. Write distinctively. Ditch generic ways of expressing yourself in favour of ways that are loaded with character and enriched by layers of subtext.

Build that mailing list.

Be you. Be human.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

A different sort of task for Feedback Friday this week:

Take any 150-200 word scene from your book.
Ask any AI chatbot to write the same scene. (Tell it who the characters are and what's happening, and give it the same 150-200 word limit.)
Upload both scenes - and comment yourself on how hard or easy it is to distinguish between the two!

Scary, but fun. I'll pop an AI-Fiona and a real-Fiona scene up there, too.

Once you're ready, post yours here.

That’s it from me. Crocuses are going over, daffodils are coming. Springe is icumen in. Lhude sing cuccu.

Til soon,

Harry.

Don’t just do something, stand there

A new air, a fresh day, the first narcissi and a sense of spring.

The Write with Jericho course no longer occupies these emails – hooray – but it’s still there for Premium Members to enjoy at any time.

And (’pon my word – how we do spoil those fellows) we have a whole new course for Premium Members to feast on: the Crime Writing for Beginners course.

If you’re not a Premium Member, that course is available for a mere £99. But why on earth would you pay that? Become a Premium Member and you can get it for free, tra-la.

But enough of Mere Commerce! The Muse summons us.

Thought One: televising a novel

Now, when my first Fiona novel was adapted for TV, the production company hired a fancy screenwriter to produce a script. In an early draft of that script, there was a direction which ran something like this:

“Fiona remembers her harrowing years in hospital as a teenager.”

To be clear, that wasn’t introducing a kind of flashback moment, where we saw images of the hospital, Fiona as teenager, things that were harrowing, etc. It was just an acting direction. Hey, Sophie Rundle, here’s what we want you to show in your face.

The excellent Ms Rundle was not quite sure how to deliver that moment, and the direction was altered.

Thought Two: novelising a screenplay

OK. Hold that thought, and let’s turn our attention to this (lightly abbreviated) chunk from the script of Casablanca:

Ilsa: But what about us?

Rick: We'll always have Paris. We didn't have – we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.

Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.

Rick: And you never will. But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going, you can't follow [...]

[Ilsa lowers her head and begins to cry]

Rick: Now, now...

[Rick gently places his hand under her chin and raises it so their eyes meet]

Rick: Here's looking at you, kid.

Now, if I’m honest, I’m never sure that Casablanca deserves its haloed status as Greatest Screenplay Ever Written. But it’s clearly a more than decent script and this is THE key moment from that script.

And obviously a novel can in principle handle such moments. But not (I hope) like this:

Ilsa said, ‘But what about us?’

‘We'll always have Paris,’ he answered. ‘We didn't have – we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.’

‘When I said I would never leave you.’

‘And you never will. But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going, you can't follow [...]’

Ilsa lowered her head and began to cry.

‘Now, now,’ he said, and raised her chin with his hand until their eyes met. ‘Here's looking at you, kid.’

That’s the exact same scene, no? Same dialogue, same actions, same content, same everything.

And – the scene is terrible. It’s not moving. It feels perfunctory and limited and mechanical and pointless.

OK, hold that thought too.

(You now have two thoughts in hand, right? One about Sophie Rundle and a difficult-to-execute stage direction. Two about novelising Casablanca. And, OK, you want to go and check out that crime writing course, so you have three thoughts to hold onto. Plus, you’re a writer, so you quite likely also have a cup of tea. Hold steady.)

Thought three: the magic of the reaction shot

Now someone somewhere once said something like this:

The greatest special effect in cinema is the ability to have the star’s face in close-up on a giant screen.

Few of us get to hang out in real life with (say) an Ingrid Bergman at her peak of beauty and acting prowess. But even if we did, normal etiquette would mean we couldn’t just stare. And even if we did, she’d presumably be life-size, not large enough to fill the screen of whatever cinema we might happen to be in.

But screenwriters do get to use Ms Bergman’s face. And that face means that the little screenplay moment works perfectly. Our poor novelist – who had no beautiful giant face to play with – wrote a drab and forgettable version of the same thing.

So what to do?

Well, it all lies in the reaction shot.

On screen, we just need to see a charismatic face doing some Acting. “I’m not just sad, I’m noble and sad. In fact, I’m noble and sad and regretful and loving (and also beautiful and perfectly lit) and you will never forget this moment.”

In the novel, we can’t do that, but we have something more powerful. The interior reaction shot. Cinema can’t handle that Sophie Rundle stage direction – not without some very clunky backstory footage. But a novelist can do so with ease. You want to convey a complex reaction to something? Convey it, buddy. Want to reflect on the past? Go right ahead. Want to tease out the difference between this kind of noble-but-sad feeling and some other sort? You tease away.

And, OK, all this is a long way to say that in a lot of the work I see, writers are too busy rushing forward to deliver a proper reaction shot.

But cinema doesn’t make that mistake: the whole emotional punch of cinema is delivered in two steps:

Concoct a plot and characters that result in a character feeling something powerful
Show the character having that feeling – up close, on screen.

Your job as a novelist is the same:

Concoct a plot and characters that result in a character feeling something powerful
Show the character having that feeling – by jumping into their mind and heart and telling us what’s there.

Don’t go to all the hassle of (1) without collecting the revenues that you get from (2). That’s where the gold lies.

A word from our writing guru

I’ll end this cinema-themed email with a quote from that fountain of wise writing advice, Clint Eastwood. He once said:

My old drama coach used to say, 'Don't just do something, stand there.' Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing.

That’s my advice to you. Let your novel stand there a moment. Let your camera rest on the character. What are they thinking / feeling?

Tell us and tell us properly.

Only then should you move on.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Nice obvious task for Feedback Friday this week:

Find a scene from your novel when you deliver a proper reaction shot. Max of 200-250 words. Include just enough that we know what your character is reacting to – then show us the character’s reaction.

Once you're ready, post yours here.

That’s it. And I bet that some of you realise you often don’t have reaction shots that last more than a sentence or so. If so, try beefing that moment up and seeing if it works better.

***

That’s it from me. Half-term is over: a relief.

The school has given the kids a project to build a model Viking longship in 3-D. My older daughter has built a ship in papier-maché that will be a full three meters long, by the time its dragon figurehead is finished. And when I say that she has built it, I mean of course that I built it with the most minimal assistance from her.

Til soon.

Harry

Showing, telling and breaking the rules

This week is a good and beautiful week, but also a sad week; a week that enters with the last note of a bugle fading on the evening air.

Why? Because it is week four of our Write with Jericho course, and therefore the final week of the course. Premium Members will be sad because WWJ is drawing to a close, but they will also be happy because there are a host of other courses they can relish - and because new courses will be popping up all through this year like mushrooms in a damp October.

And yes, non-members will have an extra sadness because they've missed so much excitement of late... Except that they know doing this one small thing will give them abiding and highly cost-effective joy.

(Also: if you're a non-member and want to enjoy week one of Write With Jericho for FREE, then go on. Enjoy it. It's open to all.)

In this week's final lesson, my colleague Sophie Flynn is teaching about showing & telling, which is a topic that kinda drives us mad at JW Towers, because so many people get it wrong.

The rule is “show, don’t tell,” and it’s a good rule. I like it. It’s always helpful to have at the back of your mind.

But it’s also a terrible rule, because it’s so often false.

Sophie gives an example of this.

Telling: “It was now midday.”

Showing: “The short hand was already more or less pointing at the twelve and Josie saw with panic rising in her throat that the long hand was now all but upright too.”

That second version is terrible in so many ways it’s hard to count. For one thing, it’s mystifying. It’s so obvious what “it was now midday means”, whereas the second sentence needs a kind of anxious decoding… And even once decoded, it leaves the reader with a slight well, that was weird feeling.

Of course, the second version is also far baggier and less efficient than the first. What's more, it still uses telling, because it tells the reader that poor old Josie – trapped as she is in a terrible novel – has panic rising up her throat. On a strict show-don’t-tell model, you’d have to somehow show that panic rising. How you’d go about doing that, I just don’t know.

So, the Idiot Version of the rule is just plain false.

In a way, I’d prefer it if we replaced that formulation with a simple command to dramatise. Suppose Jane Austen had written the following:

Telling: “Mr Darcy proposed to Elizabeth Bennet, but she refused him with some asperity.”

That’s a perfectly accurate account of one of the most famous scenes in English literature – but also quite clearly a terrible replacement for the scene that Jane Austen actually wrote.

Dramatic action needs to unfold in what feels like real time to the reader. Everything else can just be neatly stitched in with brief but accurate snippets of telling.

I won’t talk about this more – Sophie does all that in her course video – but I’ll do again what I’ve done throughout these Write With Jericho emails and just take a look at what one of my own scenes does. I’ll use the same scene as I used last week which, if you remember, I just picked at random.

So here we go again. The scene itself is in bold. My comments are in italics. Where possible, I’ve shortened the text for brevity.

Dad is talking about the security issues that his clubs have faced recently. Nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional idiot with a knife. The odd binge-drinker who gets violent.

This is telling: Fiona’s swift summary of something that isn’t that interesting and doesn’t need to detain the reader for long.

I don’t premeditate the thought, just blurt out, ‘I know. I sometimes think I should get myself a gun. You never know what might happen.’

That’s all I say. A stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. But Dad’s on to it straight away.

‘What do you mean, love? You want to become an armed officer, is that it? Are detectives even allowed to carry guns?’

This is showing – dialogue always is. Even here, though, Fiona doesn’t try to show that her statement was a a stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. That’s not something that can be easily shown. It’s not dramatic. So she just tells it in a perfectly straightforward manner.

I backtrack straight away. No, I don’t want to join some armed response unit. No, I can’t see the South Wales force thinking that DC Griffiths would be the right person to wave the heavy weaponry. No, it’s probably a stupid idea.

This is still probably showing. We’ve dropped the direct speech, but Fiona is summarising reasonably accurately what she actually said.

‘You mean have a gun at home? A licensed thing? But you know, these days, you can get a shotgun or whatever for going out hunting. Air rifles, that sort of thing. But they won’t let people carry handguns. Not off a shooting range. And quite right too. The number of crazy people there are. If I could ban the whole damn lot of them, I would.’

‘Yes, me too. I’m not really saying anything. Just, like you say, there are some idiots out there.’

‘You worried about something, Fi girl? If you are, you need to say. Maybe the police isn’t the right job for you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re fabulous. CID bloody lucky to have you, never mind what I might have said. But you mustn’t take risks you shouldn’t, you know.’

Dialogue = showing. This is the dramatic heart of this (tiny) scene. But just feel how flat the scene would be without this dialogue at its heart. The heart of ANY scene should be showing, That’s where the drama is.

He pauses, the shadows of our old arguments crossing our lamplit present.

His suspicion of anything to do with the police. His fear. My determination to pursue the career of my choice. Two obstinate people, digging in.

And to be fair to Dad – and I didn’t perhaps understand this as well as I should have done – he was worried about me too. He’s always been protective of me, doubly or trebly so during my illness and afterwards… even when my life was all put back together again, he felt that a career in the police force was absolutely the wrong one for me. Too much danger. Too much stress. Risks physical and mental…

Anyway. The present pause compresses that whole debate into a few seconds of silence. It’s Dad’s way of saying that I can always quit the police, come home, take a job with him. My silence is my way of saying, ‘Thanks, Pa, but no way.’ Our argument unfolds in a few beats of nothing at all.

All telling.

But there’s absolutely no way to show this past history without diving into entire chapters of pointless backstory. Those chapters would have murdered any forward momentum in the plot, whereas three or four paragraphs of reflection work perfectly fine – especially because the reader will by this point be very curious about that past of Fiona’s. (They’ll still be curious, because Fiona still hasn’t talked about The Big Thing that makes her the way she is.)

Then it finishes. Finishes with a truce.

‘You look after yourself, love. If you need anything, you just say.’

‘I will, Dad. Thanks.’

Back to showing.

It’s bedtime. I feel oceanically tired. Tonight, I know it already, I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.

Back to telling.

REFLECTIONS

In a way, there's not much to reflect on this week. For me, two things stand out:

The movement between showing and telling is constant and seamless. A reader wouldn’t remotely notice the movement from one to the other.
The dramatic heart of the scene is shown – in this case through dialogue, but you could imagine something purely physical instead, a fist-fight, for example.

Really, the choice between showing and telling is a choice between Efficiency (telling) and Drama (showing.)

Altering the reader to the fact that it’s midday? Probably better told. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth Bennet? I’d show that if I were you.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Once again, Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho course this week. Sophie has asked you to:

Rewrite a scene from your novel or non-fiction project, focusing on when to show and when to tell.
Choose 250 words of this scene and share the before and after over on Townhouse.

Once you're ready, post yours here.

***

That’s it from me for this week.

Til soon,

Harry

A shimmering green gown & an unreliable smile

This week is a good and beautiful week, one of the best weeks ever.

And why? Because it is Week #3 of our Write with Jericho course. (Which is free and exclusive to Premium members.)

And just because we love ALL of you not just our lovely Premium Members, you can catch the replay of lesson one of the course for free. Enjoy the mighty Becca Day on adding BOOM to your scenes.

This week is all about dialogue and subtext and internal reflection, which are all things that are vast fun to play with and also vastly effective on the page.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve beaten one of my scenes to death, so no more of that. Instead, I’ve picked up another scene from the same book. As before, I’ve chosen this at random – literally just moving my cursor at random through the text until it plopped onto some meaningful dialogue.

So: let’s review this little scene thinking about subtext. And internal monologue. And what the spoken words tells us about the two characters involved.

The scene is set in Fiona’s father’s study-cum-lair. Her dad is a former criminal, but charismatic and warm towards his family. Fiona’s in a bad head-place. She’s just been physically assaulted in her own home and has returned to her parents’ place for a sense of security. This is now late in the evening.

Bold text is from the scene. My comments in italics. I’ve shortened the text here and there, just for brevity.

Dad is talking about the security issues that his clubs have faced recently. Nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional idiot with a knife. The odd binge-drinker who gets violent.

That is: the scene opens neutrally. Whatever her dad is talking about has no relevance to the story.

I don’t premeditate the thought, just blurt out, ‘I know. I sometimes think I should get myself a gun. You never know what might happen.’

That’s all I say. A stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. But Dad’s on to it straight away.

‘What do you mean, love? You want to become an armed officer, is that it? Are detectives even allowed to carry guns?’

Now, there’s quite a lot of code going on here. The surface text is clear. Fiona says, “Should I get a gun?” Her dad takes that thought and remodels it as, “Oh, you want to become an armed officer?” (In Britain, police officers don’t routinely carry firearms.)

But there’s also subtext.

Fiona knows damn well that her father was (or is?) a criminal who may well have used illegal firearms in the past. So is her ‘blurted’ thought really just the expression of a woman in shock? Or is it a trial balloon sent up to see what her father might offer her?

And then the dad: he’s no shrinking violet when he comes to violence, but he (deliberately?) turns aside from Fiona’s obvious meaning to explore a legal / official way in which she might get access to a weapon.

Notice here that there’s some implied dialogue which is just summarised, rather than written out in full. Rotating between direct speech and indirect speech is a way to keep the rhythm of your scene nicely varied. It’s also just quicker: Fiona’s backtracking would probably have taken up more page space than this quick summary.

Note that the dialogue has reversed already. First, she says, “I want a gun” and then she says, “No I don’t.” Fiona may be in shock, but she is very smart, very strategic. What is going on here?

But her dad isn’t dropping the idea, even though she just told him to. But he’s shifted it from, ‘Oh, you want a gun at work?’ to ‘Oh, you want one at home?’

The gun idea has become a little more personal, a little less official.

And this former gangster is saying he’d ban all handguns – really? Or is this cautious man, who has a police officer daughter, just playing things extremely safe in the event that someone was recording his words?

‘Yes, me too. I’m not really saying anything. Just, like you say, there are some idiots out there.’

Fiona is now steady with the ‘Oh, no, I don’t really want a gun’ message. But she did put the idea out there. And she did blurt the thought to perhaps the only person she knows who might be able to lay his hands on an illegal handgun. So how real is her denial?

Her dad has now crept from ‘armed officer’ to ‘licensed shooting range’ to ‘are you in trouble?’ He often uses a kind of burble of white noise – happy, positive chat – to disguise his strategies, and he does so here. But he’s saying: (A) don’t take risks, and (B) are you worried about something? That’s like any dad to any daughter … except that she’s a police officer and he’s a (former?) gangster.

He pauses, the shadows of our old arguments crossing our lamplit present.

His suspicion of anything to do with the police. His fear. My determination to pursue the career of my choice. Two obstinate people, digging in.

And to be fair to Dad – and I didn’t perhaps understand this as well as I should have done – he was worried about me too. He’s always been protective of me, doubly or trebly so during my illness and afterwards. … even when my life was all put back together again, he felt that a career in the police force was absolutely the wrong one for me. Too much danger. Too much stress. Risks physical and mental. …

This is quite a lot of internal reflection that makes sense of the current pause. And this is a lot of revelation: more information than we’ve ever had on the father / daughter relationship during her troubled teenage years. Because the reader STILL doesn’t know what Fiona’s illness is, this scrap of text will be carefully scrutinised for any clues. And it emphasises her dad’s protective nature. And she just asked and then un-asked for a gun. What does a protective and criminally inclined dad do with that request/not-a-request?

Then it finishes. Finishes with a truce.

‘You look after yourself, love. If you need anything, you just say.’

‘I will, Dad. Thanks.’

This is a bland ending. Except that the subtext is still here. After all, the gun question hasn’t really been resolved. And Fiona could have chosen to respond to the ‘Are you worried?’ question, but she didn’t. If she had said – credibly – ‘no, I’m not worried’, then maybe the whole gun question could have been genuinely laid to rest. If she had said, ‘yes, I am worried’, then it would have looked like she was asking her criminal father for the use of a weapon.

But – both parties just evade the question. Lay it to rest with platitudes.

It’s bedtime. I feel oceanically tired. Tonight, I know it already, I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.

And – we’re done. ‘I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.’: that suggests some emotional issue has been settled … but we’ve just had a bit of dialogue that raised an issue – then denied it – then evaded it. What’s been settled?

Well, at this stage, the reader doesn’t know. But before too long, Fiona’s dad sends a workman round to her house to fix some cupboards that barely needed fixing. The workman chatted as he worked. In the course of that chatter, he mentions an unlicensed shooting range and gives Fiona directions on how to find it.

Fiona does indeed drive to the firing range at night and finds a gun laid out on a bale of straw. With bullets. She fires off a hundred or so rounds, trying to get the feel of the weapon. Then an unnamed man arrives, gives her some basic instruction in how to shoot. She leaves the range with the gun and ammo.

And by the end of this firing range scene, we finally know how to interpret that father-daughter gun conversation.

Fiona came to her gangster-dad and said ‘I want a gun.’

But gangster-dad can’t say to his police-officer daughter that, sure, he can find handguns no problem, so he evades the question.

Fiona, being a police officer, has to deny her own request, so she does – repeatedly.

The gangster-dad tests out various neutral options, none of which get an, ‘Oh yes, that’s what I meant’ from his daughter, so he asks her if she has fears for her safety.

She can’t say yes, because that would be like affirming that she wants a gun, so she evades. But she hasn’t said, ‘no, I’m not worried’, so gangster-dad comes away with three messages: (A) his daughter is afraid, (B) she wants a gun, (C) she wants an illegal, deniable weapon, because if she didn’t, they wouldn’t have had to go through that whole rigmarole.

And because gangster-dad loves his daughter and is very good at what he does, before too long a handgun is put into Fiona’s possession … but via a route that can’t possibly connect back to her the man who put it there.

REFLECTIONS

If you scan the italics and the bold above, you’ll see there’s way more of the former. And the beautiful lesson there is that subtext is much richer and more encoded than the text itself. To unravel the subtext, we need to spend more time and words than was present in the text itself.

And how enriching this all is!

A beautiful and unexpected plot strand is surfaced by this little bit of dialogue. (And of course, this illegal weapon ends up being used in the book’s climactic shootout.)

And our understanding of both characters are transformed by this little scene. Not necessarily during the scene itself – but once the handgun is produced, and we reconsider the dialogue that prompted its production, we realise that both these two characters are very strategic, very risk-averse – and vastly effective. Fiona asked for a handgun and her dad supplied one. And the two of them secured this outcome without ever saying anything that the Chief Constable him- or herself could take issue with. This is the first time in the series we see quite how subtle and potent Fiona’s dad is. It’s also the first time that we see quite how risk-averse he still is, even with his criminal past (probably) behind him. The whole incident adds a darkness, intrigue and depth to both characters … still without either of them having said anything so remarkable.

That’s the beauty of subtext and the beauty of dialogue. I love everything about writing, but if I could only go on a date with one aspect of it, I’d take Dialogue out to dinner, in her shimmering green gown and unreliable smile.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Once again, Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho Course this week. Laura has asked you to:

Share 300 words from your scene, making sure to incorporate subtext and internal dialogue. You’ll get extra points the richer and yummier your subtext is. Once you're ready, post yours here.

***

That’s it from me. I shall wear a smoking jacket in royal blue and bring with me a deck of marked cards and a two-headed coin.

Til soon.

Harry

Twinkling in the half-sunlight

This week saw the launch of Week #2 of our Write with Jericho course. (It’s free to Premium members, naturally. If you’re not a member and are curious, just take a look at what membership offers here.)

This week is officially The Best Week of the Course, because it’s the one where I get to tell you about adding atmosphere to your scenes. I don’t want to go over everything I talk about in the course video, but I do want to pick out one small – but tremendously powerful – technique that you can use pretty much anywhere and for pretty much anything.

The idea is to find descriptions – of people, of places, of moods, of anything – that are both literal, physical descriptions AND suggestive of something emotional or personal or even some kind of foreshadowing. Descriptions like this are acceptable to the reader because they’re just literal, right? They’re conveying useful information. But because they also smuggle a whole lot more into the scene, they enrich it vastly.

Last week, I just took one of my scenes and checked it against Becca’s “a scene must develop questions” template. This week I’ll do much the same. I’ll take the exact same scene as we looked at last week and pick out any descriptive language that straddles something physical / literal, and something more suggestive too.

Bold text comes from the actual scene. Italics are my comments. If you remember, the scene last week involved Fiona meeting a dodgy ex-cop, getting a key to a suspect’s home, and entering that property (illegally). Fiona finds a stack of presumably illicit cash, then gets quickly out of the house.

OK. Here goes:

Speed bumps in the road and cars neat in their driveways.

Does this count? I think it probably does. On the one hand, this is a very literal description of a street. But also – the speed bumps are emphasising a modern safety-consciousness, and the cars stand ‘neat’ in their driveways. Both observations suggest that in this environment, people are cautious and law-abiding. They don’t drive too fast and they park their cars with a rectilinear exactness.

Now that clearly doesn’t describe Fiona at all – the reader already knows her. So really, this description is, yes, picking out some simple physical details, but it’s also telling us, “Fiona does not fit here.” Again, we already know that Fiona isn’t the backing-down type, so if she enters a cautious and law-abiding environment, whatever happens next is likely to be the exact opposite.

In effect that tiny bit of description is foreshadowing the darker material to come – like writing, ‘it was quiet, almost too quiet’, only not a terrible cliché.

There’s an unloved dark blue Toyota Yaris parked up

‘Unloved’, as applied to a car, presumably just implies rust-spots and the like. But the car’s owner – dodgy ex-cop Brian Penry – hates himself enough that he stole enough cash to get himself caught and (soon) jailed. We learn shortly that Penry even used the stolen money to buy himself a piano that he never played. So it’s not just Penry’s car that’s unloved, right? It’s him.

He gets a key out of his pocket. A brass Yale key, which he holds up twinkling in the half-sunlight.

Why ‘half-sunlight’? I mean, yes, that’s a description of a part-sunny, part-cloudy day. But this whole part of the scene is on the edge of something. Just as the key is in half-sunlight, so too Penry is preparing to unlock part, but not all, of what Fiona needs to know.

And Fiona is only half-sunlit herself. The sunny part is that of a clever detective doing her job. The very-much-in-shadows part is that she’s about to enter a house illegally and without her boss knowing.

A little later, Penry ‘half-smiles’ at Fiona, then ‘half-salutes’ her. This whole scene is teasing, not committed. The whole scene is teetering on the verge of something – until Fiona enters the house, and then the tone darkens decisively.

The street is empty and silent. The sunlight occupies the empty space like an invading army.

This is a bit more fanciful than anything we’ve had so far – the first time anything feels writerly in the scene. And again, it offers a description that does dual work. The sunlight fully occupies the space (so we’ve moved away from half-light to full-light. Even my pedant-brain doesn’t mind that though: light conditions can change.) In literal terms. I guess we’re being asked to imagine a scene sun-drenched and simple. But the ‘invading army’ is a totally extreme image suggesting foreboding and the threat of violence. So we have quite a peaceful scene (a neat suburban road in sunshine) and something almost recklessly violent alongside.

There’s been an ‘is it or isn’t it?’ type equivocation in the scene so far, and this description merrily sits tosses fuel onto both sides of the fire. ‘Oh, yes, it’s peaceful, all right. Look at the speed bumps and the sunlight. But, yeah, this whole thing is going to blow up in a second, THERE’S AN ENTIRE ****ING ARMY RIGHT HERE.’

If you said that thing directly, it would just seem nuts. But metaphors play by different rules; that’s why they’re fun.

I approach the door, insert the key, turn the lock.

I feel a kind of amazement when the lock turns. It’s like turning the page in a fairy story and finding that the story continues exactly as before.

At one level, this is saying something simple about opening a door and feeling surprised. But – this is Fiona – the imagery sometimes goes way over the top. Why is this like a fairy story? I don’t completely know, in all honesty, but I think it’s that there’s been a sense of unreality in this scene so far. The neat suburban close should not contain darkness and terror, but there is a sense of something very dark lurking close. So there’s a contest between apparent reality and lurking (but imagined?) darkness. The fairy story image makes that explicit.

In the living room, three fat black flies are buzzing against the windowpane. A dozen of their comrades lie dead beneath them.

On the one hand, this is just a description of flies. On the other hand, this refers back to the invading army and the possibility of violence. Because we’re only dealing with flies, we can suggest a lot of violence without breaking the rules of the actual place we’re in.

[After Fiona finds the illicit cash and exits the house] I’m sweating and cold at the same time. I try to go back to that feeling I had on the print-room stairs [when she was talking happily with her new boyfriend]. That feeling of being somewhere close to love and happiness. Living next door to the sunshine twins. I can’t find them anywhere now. When I stamp my legs, I can hardly feel my feet when they hit the floor.

The sunshine twins: it was sunny in the close before Fiona entered the house, but there’s no reference to sunshine now that she’s come out. So the ‘sunshine twins’ is a reference to love and happiness – a phrase she used when we had the scene on the stairs with her boyfriend – but it’s also a reference back to how the world was before she found the dodgy cash. In effect, when Fiona says ‘I can’t find [the sunshine twins] anywhere now’, she’s saying that she can’t go back to the past boyfriend-happiness state OR the sunny street of ten minutes ago, before she had irrevocably entered a house illegally and found the cash.

This passage strongly hints that the consequences of leaving that sunny state may well involve something quite dark and dangerous. And of course, the novel does start to tip into an ever darker mode from here on.

REFLECTIONS

Last week, I said:

‘A lot of writing advice is generated because people have to generate something. They have a blogpost to write, or an email to send, or a course module to fill,

But the only advice worth anything is advice that helps you solve problems in your writing. So when I read or listen to advice, I always ask: does this actually describe what I personally do when I’m writing well? Does this advice actually generate insights that will help me when I get stuck?’

And honestly, I think if you took the literal-but-not-really-literal element out of my writing, you’d lose a really big chunk of what makes it worthwhile.

The technique is so rewardingly simple: ‘Cars neat in their driveways’? Any idiot can come up with that, right?

You just need two things to make this approach work for you.

One, you need a ‘handbrake off’ approach to your writing. A willingness to put near-nonsense images into your work. (Sunlight like an invading army? That’s ridiculous. Welsh sunlight is never like that, but try it. Write it down. See if it fits.)

Two, you need the judgement to figure out what works and what doesn’t. That’s a matter of gut feel rather than the kind of analysis we’ve just done here. I honestly never thought about this scene in this hyper-analytical way until just now. I did bring a kind of gut feel test to every sentence, though. That’s usually enough.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho course this week. I asked WWJ students to do this:

Share 250 words from your scene. I’m looking for:

Atmosphere / physical description
Some observation (or action) which bridges the physical & the emotional
Everything 100% consistent with the character.

Because this email has been all about the middle one of those bullet points, I want you to make sure that anything you share has at least one example of that technique. If you want more background, then my course video will explain all. Once you're ready, post yours here.

***

That’s it from me. I am as hungry as a boar and as lean as a pencil. I don’t know why.

Til soon.

Harry

The porpoise in every scene

Novels are necklaces. We talk a lot about the structure of a plot, and stress about it, and we’re right to talk and stress because plot matters so intensely and is so hard to get right.

But a book is just a chain of scenes, right? And yes, it’s a carefully sequenced chain, but each scene has its own story and its own structure.

Write with Jericho

Now, as you probably know, as part of our MAGA policy (Make Authors Great Again), we’re launching a new-and-improved version of our Write with Jericho course. Lesson One – Making Each Scene Purposeful – drops this week, led by my colleague (and psych thriller author), Becca Day. Next week, I’ll be teaching about building atmosphere in the scene. My colleagues (and authors) Sophie Flynn and Laura Starkey will also lead lessons.

The course is free to all Premium Members and the above link tells you more about how to participate. It also tells you what to do if you’re not.

So: take the course, listen to Becca, and think about scenes.

How one scene works

Now, I’m not going to repeat all the things that Becca speaks about, but what I do want to do is to take one short scene and see what it’s doing in terms of:

Opening with some questions
Answering those questions and replacing them with others
Deepening and complicating things

The scene – which I’ve chosen literally at random from Talking to the Dead – is one where Fiona arrives at the home of a man called Huw Fletcher. She suspects him of real wrong-doing, but knows he’s missing. She doesn’t have a way to get into the house … but she does have a strange kind of friend/enemy relationship with a bent copper, named Brian Penry.

The bold text is the scene itself. The italics are my comments. I’ve made some minor edits for the purposes of brevity.

Modern brick houses, double-glazed and comfortable. Speed bumps in the road and cars neat in their driveways.

The scene opens with several questions. One, what’s happened to Fletcher? Two, how does Fiona expect to get into a house when she has no means of entry and no search warrant? And three, what’s in the house?

Nothing remarkable about any of it, the house or the street, except that there’s an unloved dark blue Toyota Yaris parked up in front of Fletcher’s address, window wound down, and Brian Penry’s darkly haired arm beating time to some inaudible music.

I’m not surprised to see him. I don’t altogether know what the dark lines are that connect Rattigan, Fletcher and Penry – though I’ve got my ideas – but [I had ways to send signals to him and did what I could.]

I wasn’t sure that any of that would bring Penry, or what I’d do if it didn’t. But I don’t have to worry about that. Here he is.

Penry gets out of the Yaris and leans up against it, waiting for me.

OK, so a new question now jumps out at us: what is Brian Penry’s connection with any of this? As far as the reader’s been concerned, he’s under investigation for an entirely different crime. But notice also that one of the questions we started with – how does Fiona get into this house? – already feels different with Penry’s presence here.

‘Well, well, Detective Constable.’

‘Good morning, Mr Penry.’

‘The home of the mysterious Mr Fletcher.’

‘The mysterious and missing Mr Fletcher.’

Penry checks the road. No other cars. No other coppers. ‘No search warrant.’

‘Correct. We’re making preliminary enquiries about a reported missing person. If you have any information that might be related to the matter, I’d ask that you disclose it in full.’

This is fencing, and it feels like it. Neither party is saying what they actually think or feel. But notice that Penry is now making that question about access to the house explicit. He’s basically saying, “You can’t legally enter that house because you don’t have a search warrant.” And he’s right. That question is now centre stage.

‘No. No information, Detective Constable.’ But he gets a key out of his pocket. A brass Yale key, which he holds up twinkling in the half-sunlight. ‘I want you to know that I have nothing to do with any of this. I made some money that I should not have made. I did not report some of the things that I should have reported. I fucked up. But I didn’t fuck up the way that idiot fucked up.’ He equals a jab of the index finger equals Huw Fletcher.

I reach for the key.

He holds it away from me, polishes it in a handkerchief to remove prints and sweat, then holds it out. I take it.

Now both our starting questions get attention. Penry for the first time acknowledges that he is in some (still mysterious) way linked to Fletcher. That’s the first time two major story strands have been formally connected in the book. And the question about access – well, he has a key. Him wiping prints off the key emphasise the not-very-official nature of what’s happening.

‘Time to find out what kind of idiot you aren’t,’ I say.

Penry nods. I’m expecting him to move, but he doesn’t, just keeps leaning up against the Yaris and half smiling down at me.

‘You’re going in there alone?’

‘To begin with, yes. Since I am alone.’

‘You know, when I was a young officer, a wet-behind-the-ears DC, that’s what I’d have done too.’

‘Junior officers are required to use their initiative in confronting unforeseen situations,’ I agree. I don’t know why I start speaking like a textbook to Penry, of all people…

The access question is solved by the key, but that question is instantly replaced by this one: are you going in there alone? That’s partly a safety question (is it safe in there?), but it’s also a legality one. Fiona doesn’t have a warrant. Does she intend to break the law?

Penry says, ‘You’re like me. You know that? You’re like me and you’ll end up like me.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Not maybe. Definitely.’

‘Can you even play the piano?’

‘No. Not a single bloody note. Always thought I’d like to, but I get a brand-new piano in the house and I never touch it.’

‘That is like me,’ I nod. ‘That would be just like me.’

Penry is now saying, “Yes, you will go in there illegally and you’ll end up like me – a bent copper who’s about to be sent to prison.”

When Penry stole money, one of the things he bought with it was an upright piano, which Fiona saw earlier at his home. The non-playing of the piano shows how pointless the thefts were. Penry destroyed himself for no gain, and is telling Fiona that she’ll do the same. It’s not quite clear if Fiona even disagrees.

So now we have a new question – and one much bigger than those we started with – which is: can Fiona manage her future in a way that doesn’t destroy her? And, in fact, because we know she’s about to enter the house illegally, the question has edge. It looks like she is on the path to self-destruction.

His half-smile extends into a three-quarters one, … then vanishes. He gives me a half-salute, slides back into the Yaris and drives off, slowly because of the speed bumps.

So the Penry-related questions are closed off (for now). The questions about this house-entry loom large.

The street is empty and silent. The sunlight occupies the empty space like an invading army. There’s just me, a house and a key. My gun is in the car, but it can stay right where it is. Whatever’s in the house isn’t about to start a fight, or at least I hope it isn’t.

I approach the door, insert the key, turn the lock.

I feel a kind of amazement when the lock turns. It’s like turning the page in a fairy story and finding that the story continues exactly as before. At some point, this particular tale has to come to an end.

This is a pause, but it’s weaponised. The invading army, the gun, the fight – all those words add menace to this moment. In a somewhat metaphorical way, the story is telling us that things are starting to turn serious. The stakes are rising.

The house is . . . just a house. There are probably twenty other houses on the same street that are exactly like it, near as dammit. No corpses. No emaciated figures of runaway shipping managers chained to radiators. No weapons. No stashes of drugs. No heroin-injecting prostitutes or little girls with only half a head.

OK. So far, so nothing. But there’s no release of tension. Slightly the opposite. The reader knows that something’s about to happen – there’s been too much made of this house entry for there to be nothing inside.

I tiptoe round the house, shrinking from its accumulated silence. I’ve taken my jacket off, and wrap it round my hand whenever I touch handles or shift objects.

I don’t like being here. I think Brian Penry is right. I’ve got more of him in me than of, say, David Brydon [a very upright police officer, and Fiona’s first proper boyfriend]. I wish that weren’t true, but it is.

Another reminder that Fiona is acting illegally, and that her future is in doubt. That question feels even sharper now. Fiona’s two possible futures are personified: the upright Mr Brydon, and the self-destructive Mr Penry.

In the bedroom, there is a big double bed, neatly made with white sheets and a mauve duvet cover.

In the bathroom, just one toothbrush. All the toiletries are male.

In the living room, three fat black flies are buzzing against the windowpane. A dozen of their comrades lie dead beneath them.

More stillness. More waiting for whatever The Thing is that’s about to show its face. But also – those dead flies. A little drip of reminder about the darkness that lies here.

In the kitchen, I open cupboards and drawers, and in the place where tea towels and placemats are kept, there is also cash. Fifty-pound notes. Thick wodges of them. Held together with rubber bands. The drawer below holds bin liners and kitchen foil, and even more bundles of notes. These ones are stacked up against the back of the drawer, making multiple rows. A little paper wall of cash. With one finger, and still through my jacket, I riffle one of the bundles. Fifties all the way down.

Ah! Here’s the thing. That third question – what’s in the house? – is now fully answered. But that also means it’s instantly replaced by a “and what are the consequences?” type question.

I don’t like being here at all now. I don’t like being Brian Penry. I want to go back to plan A, which was to practise getting ready to be Dave Brydon’s new girlfriend. To experiment with my putative new citizenship of Planet Normal.

I close the drawer and leave the house. The lock clicks shut behind me. I find an old terracotta flowerpot in the garden and stow Penry’s key underneath it.

OK, so we’re done with questions about the house. The questions about Fletcher remain, but now he’s not just missing. He’s a missing person with tons of surely illicit cash in his home. But what about Fiona? She shouldn’t have gone in there. She did. She found something which her less rule-breaking colleagues surely need to know about.

Back in my car, I find that I’m sweating and cold at the same time. I try to go back to that feeling I had on the print-room stairs. That feeling of being somewhere close to love and happiness. Living next door to the sunshine twins. I can’t find them anywhere now. When I stamp my legs, I can hardly feel my feet when they hit the floor.

I call the Newport police station. It’s all I can do, and I feel relieved when the silence is ended.

OK, the scene – which has been low-key emotionally – ends with some big emotions. Fiona is a long way now from ‘the sunshine twins’. The darkness of these crimes is enclosing her.

But she does at least call her police colleagues. She’s doing something to restore legal / official order to affairs.

But notice what’s happened to our opening questions. They were:

What’s happened to Fletcher?
How does Fiona expect to get into the house?
What’s in the house?

The first of those questions is still a big Don’t Know – but the question has become deeper and darker as a result of what’s just happened.

Question 2 has been answered, but it’s been replaced a much bigger and more interesting one: “Will Fiona destroy herself the same way as Penry did?”

Question 3 has been answered, but it’s been replaced by a “What the hell is going on with Fletcher?”

And notice two more things before we finish:

The Fiona / Penry relationship has just become deeper and more complicated. In this little scene, they found a kind of kinship, but based around Fiona’s capacity for self-destruction. That’s interesting – but we also want to know how that strand plays out in the future.
The stakes have risen. Although this scene was very quiet, there was an invading army, twelve corpses (only flies yes, but still symbols of death), and Fiona seems close to collapse.

The story after this scene ends is more complicated, darker and deeper than it was before And this was a short scene. And nothing much actually happened: a man gave a woman a key. And she found some cash in a drawer. That’s not much by way of actual action.

Reflections

A lot of writing advice is generated because people have to generate something. They have a blogpost to write, or an email to send, or a course module to fill,

And, without talking about everything that Becca discusses, I have to say that, yes, her insights described exactly what was happening in this scene. Not just that, but it was surprising to me to see how mobile the scene-questions were. How they changed, not even from page to page, but every few paragraphs. That’s presumably why good writing feels alive, mobile and unpredictable, and bad writing feels stagey, dull and dead.

Anyhow: I hope you enjoy the Write with Jericho course. More info below if you need it.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

No feedback from me this week. Becca takes over. Her Lesson One video (available to Premium Members only) contains an assignment to do and upload to Townhouse. In addition to feedback from your peers, there might even be a chance of getting feedback from Becca. If you aren't a Premium Member, then you can sign up, and join the course, immediately and for free.

***

That’s it from me.

Til soon.

Harry

Conveying your characters’ feelings (effectively)

Last week’s email was all about staying close to character and I ended, in a way I seldom do, by being a bit mean about another author’s work. Specifically, I wasn’t keen on the amount of clenching, contorting and panicking that went on. We wanted to rustle up other ways to convey inner state. I gave some examples in that email, but today I want to give a more comprehensive, more fully ordered list of options.

Honestly, I doubt if many of you will want to pin those options to the wall and pick from them, menu-style, as you write. But having these things in your awareness is at least likely to loosen your attachment to the clench-n-quake school of writing.

So.

Let’s say that we have our character – Talia, 33, single. She’s the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at a major London museum, and the antiquities keep going missing. She’s also rather fond of Daniel, 35, a shaggy-haired archaeologist. Our scene? Hmm. Talia and a colleague (Asha, 44) are working late. They hear strange noises from the vault. They go to investigate and find some recent finds, Egyptian statuary, have been unaccountably moved. In the course of the scene, Asha tells Talia that she fancies Daniel … and thinks he fancies her back.

In the course of the scene, Talia feels curious about the noises in the vault, feels surprise and fear when she finds the statues have been moved. And feels jealousy and uncertainty when Asha speaks of her feelings for Daniel.

We need to find ways to express Talia’s feelings in the story.

Here’s one way:

Direct statements of emotion

Talia felt a surge of jealousy, that almost amounted to anger.

Bingo. Why not? That’s what she feels, so why not say it? No reason at all. Some writers will panic that they’re telling not showing, and they’ve read somewhere that they shouldn’t do that (at all, ever), so they’ll avoid these direct statements. But why? They work. They’re useful. They help the reader.

More complicated but still direct statements

Somewhere, she felt a shadow-self detach from her real one, a shadow self that wanted to claw Asha’s face, pull her hair, draw blood, cause pain.

That’s still saying “Talia felt X”, we’ve just inserted a more complicated statement into the hole marked X, but it still works. And that dab of exotic imagery gives the whole thing a novelly feel, so we’re good, right? Even though technically, we’re still telling not showing.

Physical statements: inner report

Talia felt her belly drop away, the seaside roller-coaster experience, except that here she was no child. There was no sand, no squinting sunshine, no erupting laughter.

Now as you know, I don’t love text that overuses physical statements as a way to describe emotion, but that’s because overuse of anything is bad, and because the statements tend to be very thin (mouth contorting, chest shuddering, etc). If you don’t overuse the statements and enrich the ones you do make, there’s not an issue.

Notice that here, we have Talia noticing something about her physical state – it’s not an external observation. But both things are fine.

Physical statements: external observation

Colour rushed into Talia’s face. She turned her head abruptly to prevent the other woman seeing but Asha was, in any case, more interested in the case of funerary amulets.

Here, we’re only talking about physical changes that are apparent on the outside, and that snippet is fine too. It doesn’t go very deep and, for my money, it feels like a snippet that would best go after a more direct statement. “Talia felt a surge of jealousy, anger almost. Colour rushed into her face, and she turned her head …”

Dialogue

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …”

Dialogue conveys emotion. It can also provide text and subtext in one. So here, the overt meaning is Talia’s doubt that a mid-thirties Daniel could fancy a mid-forties Asha… but the clear sub-text is a catty jealousy on Talia’s part. And readers love decoding those subtexts, so the more you offer them, the better.

Direct statement of inner thought

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …”

Doubt what? That he’d fancy the glamorous, shaggy-haired Asha, with her white shirts and big breasts and pealing laughter?

The second bit here is a direct statement of Talia’s actual thought. We could also have written:

Doubt what, she wondered. That he’d fancy …

That inserts a “she wondered” into things, but as you see, we can have a direct statement of her thoughts with or without that “she wondered”. Either way, it works.

Memory

Talia remembered seeing the two of them, at conference in Egypt. Holding little white coffee cups on a sunny balcony and bawling with laughter at something, she didn’t know what. Asha’s unfettered, unapologetic booming laughter and all the sunlit roofs of Cairo.

That doesn’t quite go directly to emotions, but it half-does and we could take it nearer with a little nudging. And, for sure, if you want a rounded set of tools to build out your emotional language, then memory will play a part.

Action

When Asha spoke, Talia had been holding a small pot in elaborately worked clay. It would once have held a sacred oil with which to anoint a new bride. Talia felt Asha looking sharply at her, at her hands, and when she looked, she saw the pot was split in two, that she’d broken it, now, after two thousand three hundred years.

OK, is that a bit on the nose? Breaking a marriage pot. Well, maybe, but it’s better than quaking, clenching and contorting all the time.

Use of the setting

They were in the vault now, marital relics stored in the shelves behind them, funerary relics and coinage on the shelves in front. Leaking through the walls from the offices next door, there was the wail of Sawhali music, the mourning of a simsimiyya.

At one level, that snippet is only talking about hard physical facts: what’s stored on the shelves, what music they can hear. But look at the language: we have marital and funerary in the same sentence. The next sentence brings us wail and mourning. This is a pretty clear way of saying that Talia’s not exactly joyful about things. Every reader will certainly interpret it that way.

And there are probably more alternatives too, and certainly you can smush these ones up together and get a thousand interesting hybrids as a result. I said you probably won’t want to pin this list up on a wall anywhere, but honestly? If you do read back a clench-quake-contort passage in your own fiction, then you might want to (A) delete nearly all of that that clenching and quaking, then (B) check back here for alternative approaches.

Your writing will get better, instantly, if you do that. And – you’ll have more fun.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Take any passage in which you’ve got excessive dependence on physical statements about your character and rework it, using any mixture of the tools here. You’re welcome to keep some physical statements in your scene, but make sure you keep a nice balance overall. We want to get a rich and rounded sense of the character’s emotion – written in a way that doesn’t make me want to scream.

What I need:

250 words from your scene

2-3 lines of introduction as needed

I’ll give feedback to a good handful of you. All are welcome to participate, but I’ll only offer feedback to Premium Members. When you're ready, upload your material here. If you’re not yet a Premium Member but would like to be, then you can join us here.

***
That’s it from me. We have a new puppy in our lives. He’s called Dibble, and he’s a black-and-white poodle / papillon cross. He has four white socks, a white bib, a touch of white on his nose, and the end of his tail looks like it’s been dipped in white paint. The little lad is an absolute darling. My girls are smitten, but I’m not exactly unsmitten.

Til soon.

Harry

Car windscreens and fallen magnolia petals

One of the bits of feedback I give most – and really, I’d want to give it almost all the time, on auto-repeat – is: stay close to character.

Sometimes that means simply reporting what a character thinks of something.

The coffee shop was white, vaguely seaside-y in its timber and flaking paint, over-priced and, Niamh thought, pretentious.

That ‘Niamh thought’ simply plops the character’s view right into the description without feeling a tad out of place.

But character can and should sneak in anywhere.

The bickering couple moved away from their seat in the window, and the rain had left, and there was sunlight on the wet street, shining off car windscreens and fallen magnolia petals.

And, yes, in a way that’s just description: a matter of stating simple facts. Except why is Niamh observing these facts? There are other observations she could have made. In the same place at the same time, she might have chosen to observe:

The door to the toilets wasn’t properly closed and the sound and smells of plumbing eased through. Coffee here was four pounds a cup, and the most prominent aroma was pine-scented disinfectant.

One of these snippets suggests one mood. The second delivers quite another. And we all know that if we’re depressed, we see the world differently from if we’re not. Our views of people and situations are coloured by our own mental state.

It’s the same in books. If I’m describing sunlight on a wet street, I’m offering you something (however hard to put into words) about the character’s mental state. If I’m passing on facts about the price of coffee and toilet smells, then I’m suggesting something quite different.

But character can invade even more directly than this. Take this:

The coffee arrived. Each cup came on its own copper-trimmed wooden tray, with a small glass bottle of milk and an oat-biscuit about the size of a large button. The waitress, inevitably, paused to tell them about the Colombian estate from which the coffee had come.

That whole chunk is factual narrative, but always filtered through the observation of a particular character. The ‘size of a large button’, for example, tells us about the character’s range of reference. ‘Button’ is quite homely, quite domestic in nature. A ‘good-sized poker chip’ would tell us something different. A ‘heavy-duty washer, the sort you’d use in roofing’ would give us something else.

But look a little deeper. The little snippets I’ve created for this email are all voiced in the third person. We have an unnamed, impersonal narrator whose job is mostly just to describe facts: what happened, what Niamh said and did, what she thought and felt, and so on. The narrator knows as much as we choose for them to know. For all I know, in the next chapter, the narrator will be talking, not about Niamh, but a burly Polish roofer called Lech. But no matter who the narrator is talking about, he or she is basically impersonal. A being of no interest.

Look back at that oat-biscuit snippet. It says, “The waitress, inevitably, paused…” That word, ‘’inevitably’, belongs to Niamh, not the narrator. It’s her sarcastic comment about the café’s pretentiousness: the narrator doesn’t really have a view.

In effect, you can write third person, but your character should still infuse the entire text, with every observation, with every choice of word.

Now all that sounds as wholesome and good as an artisanal oat-biscuit. So why make a big deal of it?

Well, the reason is that plenty of text just feels like … words.

Here for example:

Before Sarah has time to find an excuse, they're standing inside the dark entrance hall. She shudders. It's as cold as the grave.

The man [an estate agent] fumbles on the wall beside the door and clicks the light on. A single bulb spreads a sickly glow around the room. Sarah takes in the parquet floor and wooden panelling and the smell: mould and cat pee. She can see the man properly now. Close up, he looks older than she'd first thought. Fine lines score his face and she wonders if his luxuriant dark hair is quite natural.

'Do you have a place to sell yourself?' he asks, his voice casual. ‘I take it you're on the move?'

She focuses on his face, concentrating on keeping her eyes steady and her mouth from contorting. She tells herself she must try to appear normal, even if she feels far from it.

'Yes, probably, quite soon,' she says, her voice unnaturally bright.

He smiles, a professional smile, still probing. 'Is it in the area?' He shakes his umbrella and slips it into an oak stand beside the door.

Her fists clench involuntarily. She's not going to tell this man that her life has imploded. That only a few hours ago she walked out on her husband with just three suitcases and a couple of tea chests to show for fifteen years of marriage. How can she talk about it to this stranger before Alex himself knows - even though she owes him nothing? Panic washes over her …

Now, look, that chunk is lifted from a book called The Orphan House by Ann Bennett, and it’s got lots of lovely reader reviews, and I haven’t read it, so maybe the book has depths that I can’t assess from this passage. Sorry, Ms Bennett.

But:

I do not love this writing. I do not love prose that works like this.

In this short passage, Sarah shudders. She concentrates on keeping her eyes steady and has to work to prevent her mouth from contorting. Her voice is unnaturally bright. Her fists clench, though she doesn’t ask them to. Panic washes over her. That’s a truly vast amount of shuddering, panicking and clenching, while at the same time keeping the voice bright and the eyes steady. It’s such a barrage of information, it’s not quite clear we can meaningfully assemble it, except in a very basic “oh, she’s feeling emotional and upset” way. I don’t even think the author has any more precise conception of her own. If she had, she’d have given it to us.

The factual observations give us nothing either.

The house is as cold as the grave, which might mean that the character has her mind filled with death and the end of everything … but is much more likely to reflect the unconsidered use of a tired old cliché.

An old, unheated house smells of mould (normal) and cat pee (not so much, unless the place is so derelict that there are ways for cats to enter the property.)

The light is sickly. But what does that mean? Normally, that would suggest a greenish light, but why would a house have bulbs any different from anyone else’s bulbs? The observation isn’t followed by anything, which makes me think that the word ‘sickly’ is used simply in order to convey a very general “this property doesn’t look all that great” message.

In short, we have a passage that is NOT invaded by character. The author doesn’t use the tools she has to deliver character via back-door routes, and she compensates with a whole barrage of shuddering and panicking.

The result feels both flat (because of the deadness in the observation) and over-coloured (because of the babbling, quaking character on the page.) That’s a bad combination.

My advice? Don’t write like that.

My further advice: Stay close to character. Always and everywhere.

You’ll like it if you do.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Well, it’s clear what we need this week: 250 words from your text that is infused by character. We’re going to be looking especially for factual observation that conveys something about the character present. Extra bonuses if there are places where the character sneaks control from the narrator.

If you’re writing first person, then all of this is easier and more natural, but that also means the demands rise. Every word of your passage needs to belong to your character. We need to be smelling him or her in every line.

Please also give us the title of your book, and a line or two of introduction, so we can make sense of the scene.

When you're ready, post your work here.

***

That’s it from me. I am going to clench, shudder and panic my way over to a coffee pot and see if caffeine will help. It surely will.

Til soon.

Harry

The great books you can’t write (and the one that you can)

Most nights, I watch a bit of TV with the missus before bed. She does not get ready as fast as I do, so I usually have 15 or 20 minutes watching something on my own before we settle on something that works for the two of us.

And, out of curiosity really, I just started watching (in 15 or 20 minute chunks) David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. I’m not sure how widely known that name is outside of Britain – but the guy was an Oxford scholar of the Middle East who ended up uniting the – normally squalling – Arab tribes in a revolt against their Ottoman overlords. This happened as part of World War I, and since the Turks were allied with the Germans, them bashing the Turks in the Levant was (a bit) helpful to the overall cause.

OK, that’s the historical background. The film history is that David Lean – already a well-known filmmaker – brought the film out in 1962 and was nominated for 10 Oscars in the 1963 awards, winning 7 of them.

The film runs for 3½ hours. It’s perfectly willing to have long, long takes that show little more than figures (and camels) moving through a landscape.

It involves a sexually ambiguous hero, who is (it is implied) raped mid-film.

The story doesn’t have a happy ending, as Lawrence’s dreams of Arab independence collapse as a result of individual greeds and colonial realities.

Could the film be made today? I doubt it. A niche historical drama of that length? With no superhero character, no bestselling source material, and not even a well-known lead, I think the film would stand no chance of securing the necessary funds.

Is it a masterpiece? Well, don’t ask me; ask the American Film Institute, who have the film ranked #7 in their list of the 100 best ever movies.

A masterpiece, that no one would make.

And don’t lay the blame on the passage of time. 1962 is not so long ago. We’re not dealing with the cultural distance of Shakespeare. We’re talking about the cultural distance of Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

And books?

The same, the same, the same, the same.

There are any number of great and successful books from the past which wouldn’t be bought today.

Sometimes, it’s just that something has been done to death. (Imagine trying to sell Twilight now. Publishers would groan at something so stuffed with genre cliché, and with so few twists on a theme.)

Other times, politics would come into play. Part of the problem with making Lawrence of Arabia today would be having a white man in a rescuer role. Publishers have become nervous and – some would say – oversensitive in their approach to navigating similar issues in the twenty-first century.

Then, perhaps, there’s just a sense that something has dated. So, for example, I don’t think my Fiona Griffiths books will date quickly – they’re not especially wedded to their period. But my first book, The Money Makers, felt dated within years of arrival, because of its setting in the 1999/2000 financial industry.

But looking at all the great books that could not be published today misses the point.

The publishing industry is not in some sort of collapsed state. Old tropes die and new ones are born. If Shakespeare had been reborn in Victorian times, he wouldn’t have written the works of Shakespeare – he’d have been a Dickens. If Dickens were writing his first book now, it wouldn’t be Bleak House or Oliver Twist. It would be – well, we don’t know, because the man was a genius and geniuses aren’t predictable.

And you?

What about you? Because this email isn’t about Dickens, or Shakespeare or David Lean. It’s about you.

And you, my friend, are going to use this glorious great stretch of 2025 – a whole big, loping, empty year – to write something wonderful. Or to complete the wonderful thing you’ve already started.

And you’re not going to complain about the broken state of publishing because (A) it isn’t broken and (B) there are more ways to find readers than there ever used to be. But also, and mostly, because (C) you are writing your book in the glorious year of 2025, and every sentence you write is embedded in the culture of today – with all your knowledge of what people are writing about, responding to, watching, getting annoyed by and so on.

Believe in that culture. Be part of it. And, for sure, you can yelp about the stuff that annoys you, or subvert current tropes for something you think is better. Take yesterday’s idea and twist it in a way that makes it shipshape for tomorrow.

But whatever you do, apply your bum to that seat.

And write.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

First up – apologies. At the end of last year, I asked you for your agent questions and then got too overwhelmed by the onset of Christmas to answer properly. I’ve remedied that now. If you had a question about agents and all that, then check out the forum again, and you’ll find an answer there from me.

As for this week, it’s a New Year, so let’s make that the theme. Please give me:

The opening page (max 300 words) from your current project. As always, give us enough background that we know what kind of book we’re dealing with.
If you’ve submitted an opening page recently, then just give us something new – a chapter beginning, for example. Again, just give enough of an intro, that we know what we’re dealing with.

When you're ready, post your work here.

Do please be as generous as always with your comments for others. Don’t forget to give useful, specific feedback as well as positivity and encouragement. The latter is nice; the former improves books.

Til soon,

Harry.

A simple, repeatable joy

My last email was grumpy. Bah humbug. A silver cane waved menacingly at orphans.

This email is festive. A Merry Christmas to us all! A shower of sweets for street-children, a fat goose for chilly clerks.

Just two things to say:

One, aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we as writers lucky, to have this thing we love doing? Laying down sentences on an empty sheet. It’s free. It’s creative. It’s reliably joyful.

And yes: this whole game has its arduous aspects, of course. All good things do. Getting an agent? Hard. Getting sales? Hard. Writing well enough to deserve either of those things in the first place? Yes, also hard.

But that’s not the core of what we do or why we do it. It’s writing things like this:

I’m Homer, the blind brother. I didn’t lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out. When I was told what was happening I was interested to measure it, I was in my late teens then, keen on everything.

Or this:

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of her head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.

I didn’t write either of those paragraphs. (EL Doctorow did in Langley and Homer, and Gillian Flynn did in Gone Girl.) But imagine the joy of writing those things. Not all at once, of course, but getting there slowly, chipping away at a paragraph – chip, chip, chip – until the exact right pattern of words made itself felt.

We get that pleasure, you and I, and all we need is a laptop. Lucky us.

That was number one. My number two thing to say is, are you a member of our Townhouse community? If not, you ought to be. It’s free and it gives joy and companionship… and, as it happens, it’ll give you useful feedback, support and encouragement too.

Just go to the Join Us page on our website and select the FREE option.

If you aren’t yet a member of Townhouse, you are genuinely missing out. You have friends there; you just haven’t met them yet. Make that a little free gift to yourself this Christmas.

That’s all from me.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY:

Your Feedback Friday exercise this week is simple: eat so much Christmas pudding that your EYES BULGE. In my view, it is perfectly acceptable if you get the same effect from eating mince pies. My wife likes Christmas pudding so much, she buys 12 of them at a time. They line a whole shelf and wink at me each time I open the cupboard, whispering softly of puddingy secrets.

When it snows, at any time of year, we get a pudding from that cupboard, walk up into a snowy field and eat it there, with squirty cream from a can.

And so, as Tiny Tim said: "A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!"

Til next year.

Harry

It’s not them. It’s you.

Friday email – Friday 13 December

Subject: It’s not them. It’s you.

Hmm. We’re getting close to Christmas and this email has a bit of a bah, humbug tone – but I’m also writing on Friday the 13^th, so I think I can get away with a little cheer-spoiling, so long as I don’t err again soon.

And –

I saw a blog post recently, from a guy in the fitness niche. He’d been asked about why someone wasn’t losing weight, even though they were controlling their diet and exercising properly and doing everything right.

And he just said, BS. It’s not possible that you’re doing everything right – over a period of weeks and months – and not achieving the desired outcome. Like: you’d actually have to break laws of physics if you eat (say) 1800 calories a day and spend (say) 2200 calories a day, and then not (over time) notice weight loss.

That’s not the way our blogosphere normally goes. On the whole, telling customers or readers or users that they’re completely wrong isn’t a brilliant way to attract customers / readers / users.

But, OK, sometimes people are wrong and it helps to say so.

In our niche, the myth I most often hear is some variant of:

“I know my book is fine [because of Made-up Reason X], but agents don’t want it because they only give book deals to friends / they can’t handle conservative viewpoints / they only want books by pretty blonde thirty-somethings / they only want books with violence / or whatever else.”

All assertions of that kind are basically false.

Agents want books they can sell. They want books that they can plausibly sell to Big 5 publishers, or to the kind of independents that can compete financially with those guys.

It IS true that agents will be dubious about taking on niche literary fiction. There are excellent, tiny imprints that do a great job with more demanding, niche, or experimental novels. But “great job” in this context does not mean “generating huge amounts of moolah”, and agents working with this kind of fiction are essentially doing it pro bono.

It’s also true that agents may well be dubious about working with digital-first publishers. Those guys can create huge sales, but they don’t always, and advances are small. If an agent thinks that a digital-first imprint is your most likely destination, they may say yes anyway, but they will be thoughtful.

And there are niches – certain sorts of fantasy or science fiction, for example – where self-pub is so dominant that Big 5 publishers don’t really compete.

So yes, there are examples of good, saleable books being rejected by agents. But that doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. It just means you’re knocking on the wrong door: you’re a fisherman trying to sell your catch to a cheesemonger. If you want an agent, you have to make sure that agents basically want your type of thing in the first place.

But that’s not mostly what I hear. Mostly, I hear authors who have written, let’s say, a standard issue crime novel complaining about being rejected by agents.

And if you’ve written a crime novel, and you can’t place it with agents, then EITHER:

You haven’t yet tried enough literary agents (10-15, let’s say)

Your book isn’t good enough.

Assuming an even basic level of professionalism in your approach to agents, then one of those two answers WILL apply to you.

And the commonest, commonest, commonest reason for being rejected by agents?

Your book isn’t good enough.

It’s not them, it’s you.

We’re not really supposed to say that in the blogosphere. It’s not the most supportive, friendly thing to say. But it’s true. And, actually, it IS the most supportive thing – because it’s the only message that will really alleviate your issue.

At Jericho Writers, we do of course have a ton of services aimed at helping you make your book better. (The gold-standard service? It’s manuscript assessment, of course – or the Ultimate Novel Writing Course if your book is still a work-in-progress. Call or email us if you want honest advice, tailored to you and your exact needs.)

However, the paid-for service part of things comes second.

The first part lies with you. You need to recognise that your book may not yet be strong enough to sell, and that fixing this issue lies in your hands.

Honestly? If I could choose between working with a gifted but feedback-resistant writer and a less gifted, but feedback-responsive one, I’d choose the latter every time.

Write a book. Write it better. Edit it harder. Market it professionally. And don’t complain about agents!

Good luck, and I promise I’ll be less mood-spoily next week.

*** 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY:  

Let’s use FF this week to just consider all any questions you have about literary agents. If you have experience of submitting, then share it, even if you don’t especially have questions arising from that. Let’s just share experience, unearth your questions, and see if we can help each other. Log in to Townhouse, then post your thoughts here whenever you’re ready.

***

The missus is reading the kids a (somewhat edited) version of The Sons of Adam, my third novel from way back. It’s a historical romp, set mostly in the oil industry of the 1920s and 30s, but flanked by world wars at either end of the book. The kids are loving it, especially the war stuff. Tucking the kids in one night, I literally couldn’t find two of them, and was blundering around in the dark trying to find them.

Then two blond heads poked up from a little crawl space in between the end of one bed and the wall. ‘We’ve built a dug-out, and we’re going to sleep here.’ Honestly, the kids are small but the space they’d made for themselves was tiny.

They spent the whole night there and refortified their den in the morning. But – the power of fiction, eh? The loveliness of imaginative play.

I was thrilled.

Til soon

Harry

PS: If you’d like 1-2-1 feedback from a literary agent on your submission package, we can help with that, too! We’ve just released a batch of sessions spanning January to April 2025. Find out more about what’s on offer and how to book here.

PPS: On a similar note – if the word of traditional publishing bewitches but also baffles you, why not consider our Path To Publication course? In eight weeks, our expert tutor Kate Harrison will teach you everything you need to know about the inner workings of the publishing industry

The easiest technique in fiction

Lots of things in writing are hard. One thing in particular is very, very easy… but it’s astonishingly neglected by a lot of writers.

Here’s an example of getting something wrong, using an extract I’ve invented for the purpose. In my mind, this extract might stand at the start of a novel, but it could be anywhere really.

So:

Dawn woke her – dawn, and the rattle of trade that started to swell with it. Barrels being rolled over cobbles, a cart arriving from the victuallers’ yard, men starting to bray.

It had been a cold night and promised to be a cold morning, too. Her feet found the rag mat next to the bed. She washed hands and face briefly, and without emotion, then lifted her nightgown and began to bind her breasts, with the white winding strip she always used. Round and round, flattening her form.

She continued to get dressed. Blue slops. Bell-bottomed trousers, a shirt, a waistcoat, a blue jacket, loose enough for her shoulders to work. Just for a moment, she looked at her hands. They’d been soft once, and were coarse now, hardened off by the scrambles up rigging, the hard toil on ropes.

Caroline – Charles as she was known to her fellow ratings – had been forced to take work as a man when her father died two years ago, right at the start of this new war against Napoleon. She had tried taking work as a seamstress, but the pay had been poor, and she had a younger sister always sickly to look after. In the end, she had found herself forced to dress as a man and work as a man, here at the great bustling port of Portsmouth…

I hope you can see that this passage is kinda fine… and kinda fine… and then disastrous.

The first paragraph here is fine: it starts to establish the scene.

The second paragraph is intriguing: why the flipping heck is this woman (clearly not a modern one) so keen to flatten her chest?

The third paragraph inks in a bit more of the mystery: OK, so this woman works on ships of some sort in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So why is she disguising herself as a man?

And then –

The disaster –

The writer makes the horrendous mistake of answering that question. The story was just beginning to make fine headway. We wanted to grip our reader and thrust them forwards into the story. Our first three paragraphs set up a fine story motor, which was already starting to chug away. Then by completely solving the mystery, we destroyed almost every shred of momentum we had.

By the end of that extract, we still have an interest in seeing what happens to this woman, but we don’t yet know her very well as a character. We can’t at this stage care very much about her. But we did care about that mystery. And the author just ruined it.

The lesson here – and the easiest technique in fiction is – take it slow. If the reader wants to know X, then don’t tell them X.

That’s it! That’s the whole technique.

A much better approach here would have been to simply follow Caroline/Charles’s morning. I’d probably have given her some kind of problem to solve. Perhaps, she owes an innkeeper money that she doesn’t have and needs to slip away unseen. Or she has to collect some belongings from one part of town but has to get back to her ship in order not to miss the tide.

That way, one part of the reader is asking, Will she get back to her ship in time? But that’s just a top layer to the more interesting underlying question of Why is she disguised as a man?

Indeed, we’ll study the whole rushing-about-town episode with extra interest, because while we’re not that fussed about whether she misses the tide or not, we are interested in that second question – and we read about these ordinary story incidents as a way to uncover clues about the bigger issue.

The key fact here is that readers love solving mysteries. They like reading a text to find clues and hints and suggestions that lead them to an answer. I think for most readers that process has an extra impetus if the mystery is embedded in something very personal to a key character.

So the technique you need to adopt is:

Create a mystery. Then,
Don't solve it.

Whenever you find chunks of text – perhaps only a paragraph, perhaps only a line or two – that delivers mystery-busting information, ask yourself if you can withhold it. Does the information need to delivered now, or can this safely be left until later?

In my Fiona Griffiths books, I took the biggest mystery about her (Why is she so weird?) and didn’t answer it until the very end of book #1. I have some minor mysteries (What colour are her eyes?) that I’ve never answered.

In Caroline’s case, I don’t think you could plausibly avoid telling the reader about the need for male disguise for as long as that, but a good strategy would be:

Get readers intrigued by her need for disguise
Get readers involved in the other details of her life (which they'll love because of item 1)
As we start to involve readers in those other details, you can slowly reveal the money problems, the sickly sister and the rest
By this point, readers are now engaged in worrying about the money and the sister, and so you have another functioning story motor
That means you can slowly give up your first one and it's safe to start revealing the reasons for the male disguise.

That’s one way to look at it – and a good one. But you should also ask: what does my character reflect on or think about right now?

In our sample chunk, Caroline did think about flattening her chest, because she was in the actual act of doing that. She had just washed her hands, which made her think about her hands. But she had no reason to start thinking about the whole reason she’d taken on male disguise. On the contrary: she was up at dawn, she had lots to do, she had problems to solve – those are the things that would have dominated her mental landscape.

So another way to put things is simply this: narrate what matters to your character in the moment that it matters.

Gosh, how easy that is.

And honestly, if you go to your manuscript with these thoughts, I’ll bet that 90% of you will find places where you give away information too early, or in a way that clashes with your character’s own focus of interest.

Create a mystery. Then don’t solve it. The easiest technique in fiction.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Creating (but not solving!) a mystery

Today's challenge neatly follows on from what you've just read.

Find a passage - 250 words or so - in which you create but do not solve a mystery. Post yours here when it's ready. Give whatever context we need to make sense of that passage. And please also tell us how many words / pages / chapters it will be until the mystery is solved.

(By the way, I'm approaching a million words on Fiona and haven't yet given away her eye colour, so beat that. I'll send you a plateful of cherries if you do.)

The challenge is open to anyone who wants to do it, but my feedback will be reserved for Premium Members. If you want to become one, I have good news! We've extended our 30% off November promotion into one last weekend, so now is the perfect time to join us.

***

My Year 5/6 children performed in their school play this week - a version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. And golly gosh, what an old pro Dickens was. It's not just his literary gifts I admire, though I do. It's his joyously unembarrassed commercial instinct. "I want your florin, and by God I intend to get it." He'll use every tool he has to secure your attention. The idea that literary fiction has to be boring to be acceptable? Bah, humbug.

Till soon,

Harry

This be the email

A short one today. And a little bonus.

The bonus is that I’m doing a FREE webinar today at 12.00. The theme is elevator pitches and specifically how to:

Build a pitch that fully expresses the DNA of your novel;
Use that insight to help your novel fully express the delicious idea at its heart;
Use that work when it comes to selling your book

I’ll give you a clue right now: Part C is the easy one.

If you're a Premium Member, you may already have done our Take Your Novel From Good to Great course. If so, you can ignore this offer as the content of the webinar is very similar to module one of that course. If you aren't a Premium Member and haven’t done that first lesson, then this is a good opportunity to scope it out! As I say, it’s completely free - just sign up here to register.

Now then...

Last week, I ended a long series of emails on selling with a question to you all, via Feedback Friday. Or four questions in fact:

What matters to do you in writing?
What do you want to get out of this?
What do you think the biggest obstacles are?
What would help?

It’s really worth taking a look at how people answered.

On the first two questions – what matters – people mostly agreed. “Just seeing my books out there in some form or other would be cool.” Entertaining readers was a near-universal goal. People often wanted to be able to sustain themselves by writing, but no one had dreams of vast wealth from it.

Other comments that spoke to me:

A lot of people spoke about “the pure joy writing inspires, the fun we have putting pen to paper.” That’s true for me too. It has remained the one absolute constant through my career.
“Recognition. The biggest buzz of all is when readers tell me they laughed or cried, or felt that constricted feeling in their throat — the feeling of something that *really* matters.” And yes, same here.
“I want to be traditionally published and have a readership that likes my stories.” A lot of you were in that rough area, although I noted an increasing awareness of the various upsides of digital-first and sel-publishing options.
“I’m already getting what I want out of this. It may sound crass, but all I ever wanted was to get my stuff out there. I’m achieving this now [via self-pub].”

And a special mention for this comment, which we can all relate to:

"What matters to me in writing? I love it. Even when I hate it, I love it."

On obstacles

Comments that struck a chord were:

“It is my first time writing, and turning a passion and an interest into something commercially marketable with no prior knowledge of the industry, standards, expectations, process, etc. – it’s terrifying.”
“Second guessing every decision is really slowing things down and stopping me writing fresh stuff.”
“Time. There is never enough time to write, to research the market, do the marketing, without all the things that Life throws at me.”
“The system. Agents are the gatekeepers and agents are human. They pass certain things I would throw out. The publishers publish certain books I would never buy, but they regard as commercial. Thank goodness there are Indie Press and self-publishing routes.”

On what would help

Some really good feedback here:

“A little marketing genie would be good.”
“Time. Money … But also actionable advice, feedback, safe spaces to ask questions. Knowing I’m not alone … Community has been more of a help than I realistically ever thought it would be.”
“Help would help. Much like people who climb Everest, I would really appreciate the help of a Sherpa. Someone who’s seen and done it all. Someone who knows the secrets and can guide my feet over the dangerous terrain. I’m happy to do the hard yards. I want to get to the peak and plant my flag. But I can’t do it alone.”
“A guide on what makes a good story and how to slice and dice away nonsense.”
“Blue skies and sunshine …Someone to do all the advertising. Marketing, promotional stuff.”
“What do I think would help? A kick up the arse. I’ve had some wonderful feedback on my work from some lovely people here. I’m deeply grateful for their kind words. They inspire me enormously.”
“Access to professionals at a reasonable cost to those of us who are struggling to find the spare cash. I think JW already do this with their [premium membership service].”

And look, we know where you're coming from.

We'll use your insights to shape Jericho Writers Premium Membership for the coming year. We have a strong sense of what you want, and will be making some really huge improvements in 2025. We won’t announce anything until we’re closer to launch, but we’re aiming high.

If you're not already a Premium Member, remember: today is Black Friday: a day of dark commercial magic, where we try to make your wishes come true! If you join us today, you’ll do so at the best price we’ve offered all year - and your writing, as well as your chances of publication WILL improve. We'd honestly love to welcome you, because this community gets better, the more voices it has.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: An Especially Lovely One

And because it's a special Friday, let's have an especially lovely Feedback challenge.

So: I want a passage of yours (about 250 words) that you really love. Give us any context we need, and tell us why you love it. That's it.

Post yours here when you're ready.

***

My two daughters are, just possibly, turning into writers. They love starting novels – all called “Murder in the Stableyard”, or rough variants on that. Then they write a cast list, which involves perhaps half a dozen individuals, notably girls 2-3 years older than my two. Then they extend the cast list by adding about four horses. Then they ask me to praise them. Then they write a first sentence or two. Then … they start again with a new novel.

Some of you giving comments on Feedback Friday last week, noted that writerly procrastination did at least deliver a very clean house and a punctual approach to on-coming chores.

I have not noticed the same effect with my kids.

Till soon,

Harry

How to Sell A Book, if you have the right mindset

We've spent seven weeks thinking about how to sell books. In my last seven emails to you, we have reviewed:

The split in the books market between ebook and print
How print books are sold by publishers
How you can maximise your chances of success when working with a trad publisher
How to sell via Amazon
How to use book promo sites to sell your ebooks
How to use Facebook
How to build your mailing list.

If you are confident you want to self-publish, you can probably afford to (mostly) ignore emails 2 and 3 from the list above.

If you are confident you want to be traditionally published (and are also confident that you’ll get the chance to do that) then emails 5 and 6 are less relevant to you – though email 7 is very relevant, and you’d be nuts not to properly absorb the lessons of email 4.

But I want to end with some thoughts on mindset. All that follows, but two things first.

One, please can EVERYONE take a look at Feedback Friday this week. I'd love as much involvement as possible.

And two:

NOVEMBER ALERT!

It's November. This month, you can become a member for 30% off our normal prices. Members get:

An entire suite of video courses. On How to Write, on taking your novel From Good to Great, on Getting Published, on Self-Publishing – and more. You could easily spend well over £1,000 on individual courses and not get as much useful information as you do from these.
A huge collection of masterclasses. We have hundreds of hours of masterclasses: on craft, on finding agents, on working with publishers, on marketing your work – and much more. If you’ve got a concern about writing or getting published, we almost certainly have an expert to answer it.
A vast range of live events. From “Ask Us Anything” to themed months on Build Your Book and Getting Published, and now including an online Writers Retreat, we have a ton of events to keep you educated and motivated – and in community with other writers.
AgentMatch – a proprietary database of 1400+ agents, complete with detailed profiles and easy search / filter tools.
Feedback Friday and query letter reviews - plus discounts on our other services. And more!

Most of all, you get to be in a community of expertise and passion. I was in an internal meeting the other day with three of my Jericho colleagues. And – I noticed that all of us, all four, were published authors. We’re in this business because we care about it – and know a heck of a lot about it. With Premium Membership, we aim to make that knowhow available to you.

You can sign up today at 30% off our normal prices. Info here. I really hope you do. We love serious writers and that includes you.

BACK TO MINDSET...

Right: mindset.

Writing books is not easy. Many of you will therefore set the endpoint of your dreams to getting published: getting an agent, getting a book deal. After that, presumably, the whole show is in the hands of grown-ups who know what they’re doing, right? And you can kick back, and write more books, and let the adults do their thing.

Except –

That’s not reality. Writing books is hard. Selling them? Also hard.

There are (estimated to be) well over 12,000,000 ebooks on Amazon. There are probably over 50,000,000 books of all varieties and formats on Amazon.

How many of those actually get sold? A minority. It’s probable that at least half of ebooks have made no sales at all. Not one. And if you set even a very low bar for acceptable sales – a few dozen, say – then well under 10% of books will ever reach even that hurdle.

Having a big publisher is certainly some sort of protection against these frosts. If you have a Big 5 publisher, you will sell some books, for sure, and not just in the low dozens.

But…

Print publishing is still a matter of 12 portly gentlemen running for the same door. On ground that’s slippery with rain, and in a high wind.

My first Fiona Griffiths book was published by one of the best editors, at one of the best imprints, at maybe the best publisher in New York. The book was a Crime Book of the Year in a couple of major US newspapers. It was positively reviewed in the NY Times. It got starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. It had a halo around it: it was destined to do well, no?

But it failed. The hardback didn’t do great, but the paperback was so shunned by retailers that it sold fewer than 1,000 copies across the entire United States. It was that failure which led me to buy the book back from the publishers and to self-publish instead. Buying the book back cost me $10,000 but within a short space of time, as a self-publisher, I had vastly expanded my readership and was making over 4 times the money I’d earned by way of advance from my trad publishing.

The moral of this story?

Not that self-pub is good and trad publishing is bad: they both have strengths and weaknesses, and the right choice for you depends very much on your book and your situation.

No. Rather, the moral is that you will always need to stay in control of your own sales destiny – or as much control as you can possibly retain. With that in mind, here is some final advice before I end this chain of emails and turn back to the happy busyness of the Writer’s Craft.

Mindset

Writers – myself included – tend to want to skip the boring bits.

Writing – that’s fun. Editing – well, I hope that’s fun, because it’s desperately important. Getting an agent and a publisher? Well, that’s fun and it’s glamorous and you get paid, so that’s a particularly good bit. And being published? Seeing your book on a shelf somewhere? Dropping the book in your mum’s kitchen waiting for her to go all pink and shiny with pride? Also good bits.

But to turn that book contract into sales success relies on lots more.

And yes, among other things it relies on luck. But focus on the parts you can control.

Ask yourself:

Is your book cover good? Not just good in itself, but good in comparison with its immediate competitors? This issue is so important, I’ll revert to it in a moment.
Is your blurb strong?
Is the pricing of your ebook realistic?
Does your Amazon book page look OK?
Have you been sent a proof of your ebook? And is that ebook laid out in a way that will boost your mailing list and encourage sales of further books by you?
If physical bookstores don’t take your book in any quantity, does your publisher have a meaningful Plan B – which would need to place Amazon and your ebook at the centre?
Does everything – the cover, the blurb, the other marketing materials – line up with the pitch that you’ve spent so long thinking about and honing?
Is there anything you can do to foster your relationships with booksellers, with retail buyers, with book bloggers, with reviewers, with festival organisers and so on?

One of the most professional authors I know used to visit bookstores in every town she went to. She introduced herself. She offered to sign books. She bought a coffee. She made nice.

She also never let her publisher send out proof copies without including a handwritten note from her.

She also wrote – always – to thank festival organisers and the like for events she’d attended. She made sure to know the names of book bloggers, and to find out about them, and to ask them about their children / dogs / pet iguanas the next time she saw them.

Her mindset was right. Every detail mattered. No detail would even add 1% to sales, but if you take care of enough details, these things start to add up.

You can have the right mindset and things can still go badly wrong – but your chances improve, and improve drastically. Don’t sit back. Don’t let the grown-ups take care of things, unsupervised. These are your books. You care more than they do.

Lean in.

Mailing list

I spoke in the last email about how to build your email list, but I didn’t say this:

Your mailing list is your strongest insurance against disaster.

If you have a robust mailing list, you kind of know that you can sell books and make money. (Not if the books are terrible. Not if you publish them unprofessionally. But if you do those things right.)

And that means, even if you are traditionally published and want to go on being traditionally published, you still need that list because of the protection it confers. It will be helpful if you (slightly) change genres. It will be invaluable if you switch publishers.

Build that list. Cherish it.

The book cover

It’s odd, but no one – including me – ever talks enough about book covers.

However, those covers are INSANELY important.

They matter in print publishing, because retail buyers are picking from a flipping catalogue. They are looking at one page of yadda about your book to see if they want to order it. The brightest, most attractive thing on that page is your book cover. They have essentially no text of yours to look at. The book cover (and your elevator pitch) matters hugely.

And in a bookstore: readers are hesitating over which book to pick up. They can’t yet see the back of your book. What else do they have to go on, aside from its cover?

On an Amazon selection page, the issue is even more devastating in a way. Users can’t even see a full cover, they can see a squashed-down icon of a cover. They see that, and book title, and price, and a summary of review ratings.

The cover is vastly influential at that first moment of choice – and a bad cover can easily crush your sales conversions here severalfold. A good cover (and title) can increase conversions severalfold.

And it’s not just that first moment of choice. It’s everything else, too. Your other visual marketing material will be (or should be) keying off that cover. You can’t, for example, create a good Facebook ad unless you have a strong cover. I mean, literally, you cannot do it. Because if you place the book cover on the ad, it looks weak, because the cover is weak, and you won’t get clicks. And if you don’t place the cover on the ad and use something more visually attractive instead, then you will get the clicks, but you won’t get the conversions when people land on your unattractive Amazon page.

So, your book cover matters.

If you’re an indie author, you sort of know that already and will have put proper time in to getting the cover right.

If you’re trad published, it’s very easy to be seduced by the grownups-know-best thing and to accept the cover you’re given. (And everyone will try to massage you into accepting that cover; publishers do not love having to redo something that’s been settled internally, even if they secretly know that the settled-internally option is not yet good enough.) So trad-published authors need to be on their guard. If that cover seems off to you, it is off. Fight for a better one.

Take your time

When you’re writing and editing a novel, it’s almost a matter of pride amongst authors to boast about how many drafts they’ve done. How many times a paragraph gets re-written.

But with marketing, it’s often the other way around. We like to get a job done so we can move on to the next thing that’s calling – maybe, some damn paragraph that wants another rewrite.

Do not be like that.

I’ve found when I mock up (say) Facebook ads on Canva, that I do something, and I like it. Yes: I like it after trying this element here or there, and this colour or that one, and this font for another.

But I’m quick to like something.

If I come back to the same task again the next day, I’ll do something better.

And if I come back the next day, I’ll do better again. By this point, my first attempts don’t look amateurish exactly… just not quite good enough.

And, realistically, for a lot of tasks – and definitely Facebook ad creation – you don’t need one utterly professional looking ad, you need loads. One of those ads will outperform the rest, but you can’t tell which one it’ll be until you try ‘em out.

So take your time. Do multiple versions. Pick the best.

And – good luck. Writing is hard. Selling is hard. And I hope these emails have helped.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

An odd one, this week, but a good one to do.

What matters to do you in writing? What do you want to get out of this? What do you think the biggest obstacles are? What would help? Let me know. I think it’ll be an amazing conversation.

See you there.

Til soon,

Harry

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Our Articles

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Your research

GRABBIT & GO BOOKS

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Fight scene

Raymond Chandler: "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."

P.D. James: "Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary, the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it."

Zadie Smith: "Don't romanticise your 'vocation'. You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle'. All that matters is what you leave on the page."

Billy Wilder (screenwriter): "A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever." And another rule: "In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they're seeing."

Feedback Friday / Your rules

1. Never open a book with weather

2. Avoid prologues

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Rain, full stop, new paragraph