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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 craftYou 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 thinkMy 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 firstApproaching agents is free. Getting editing help from us costs. So a perfectly sensible strategy is this:Write a bookEdit the heck out of itSend it to around 10 agents; see what they sayIf they take you on, then yippedee-doo-dah. Happy days. If they don’t, then …Either: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. orCome 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 adviceBecause 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 helpMostly, 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 joyDon’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

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 FRIDAYThis 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.

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 FRIDAYThis 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.

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 changeIn 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 complicationsThe 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.SettingsSettings 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 bitsAnd 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 investigationThings 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 FRIDAYThis 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

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 FRIDAYWe’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

Folks, this is the last Friday in April, which means it’s the last Friday in our self-editing month, which means that this is the last of our editing-themed emails. Outside my window, there is a chorus of sad ukelele music, accompanied by one sorrowful kettledrum and a blackbird with a nasty ear infection. The blackbird is consistently one semitone out of tune – but, you know, it has an ear infection, the poor thing. And who doesn’t love a kettledrum?And, you know what, last week’s feedback Friday asked people to ADD text to a passage from their work in progress. Unusually for me, I thought that pretty much everyone doing the task ended up improving their passage. Sometimes that meant going from good to excellent. Sometimes it meant going from OK to better. But no one’s passage got worse. Not one.But it’s also nearly always true that when people focus hard on deleting surplus text, that text gets better. Again, when we’ve done one of these exercises, there’s nearly always been a consistent improvement.And at its heart, maybe 80% of editing comes down to just these three tasks:AIMIf you don’t know what your elevator pitch is (the one that’s just for you, not for an agent or for anyone else on earth), it’s hard to check that your book is on track.So yes, I think you need to understand your pitch before you start writing anything. But inevitably the act of writing the full text will change your understanding of that pitch, so you need to check, refine and tweak it before you get too stuck into editing. Remember the boxes, remember those imps.SUBTRACTKill surplus text.Be utterly perfectionist. Two unnecessary words in a 16-word sentence is a massive issue and those words have to go. Three descriptive sentences will in most cases be at least one too many. Figure out what the best bits of that description is and make it more compact.Anything approaching a cliché should be treated in the same way as surplus text. It’s like a little bit of dead wood. A place where the reader’s eye is likely to skim forwards waiting for the narrative to engage properly again.Nearly all this skimming happens on a near-microscopic level. Two or three words here. A sentence there. An underpowered image over yonder.But those things are like plastics in the ocean or low-density cholesterols. The damn things cumulate. Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills / The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.Don’t let that happen to you – either the verbiage, or the cholesterols or (if you’re a porpoise) the whole sea-plastics thing.ADDThen figure out where your work is underweight. At key moments in your book, you need to linger to get your reader to feel the depth of what happens. What does your character think about what’s happened? What do they feel? How does this connect with other things on their mind (a husband, a loss, a quest)? What is the experience like of having this thing happen to this person in this particular setting?The challenge here is about layering. It’s about adding relatively small amounts of text in a way that adds whole layers of depth to the passage. We had our refresher on layering last week here.And that’s it. Aim. Subtract. Add. I’m not saying that’s all that’s involved, but it is definitely most of what’s involved.Grr. Attaboy. Attagirl.Those ukeleles are starting to annoy me.Feedback Friday: Edit, Edit, EditSo, your choice of challenge for this week:Aim: Give me your (just for you) elevator pitch plus a pretty one (for agents). Keep em short, please.Add: As for last week, give me a 200-word passage to which you have added 50 words or so. The aim is for that extra material to add richness and depth to the action which you already have on the page.Subtract: Give me two versions of the same passage, please. The first one needs to be 300+ words. The second one needs to be 250 words or fewer. And they both need to say the same thing. I’m looking for editing that produces no meaningful loss of content.As always, give me title, genre, and a word or two of explanation if needed. This exercise is always open to all, but I’ll only give feedback to you lovely Premium Members. If you happen to think ‘Odzooks and Jiminy Cricket, given that the whole membership paradise is available for just £12.50 a month (approx. US$15.50), I really would have to be duller than a country-turnip not to avail myself of all this writerly goodness,’ you can just scuttle over here and do what needs to be done.That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to re-home a blackbird and murder some ukelele-ists.Til soon.Harry

Here’s a challenge that we all experience, a challenge that in some ways grows larger the more imaginative and effortless you are.The challenge is simply this: what do you set down as your next sentence? Of the thousand and more things you could say, what do you need to say now?So let’s say for example that you have an army veteran teaming up with a homeless guy to buy a lottery ticket. They discover that the ticket is worth £1,000,000. (This example, as so much else in these emails now, is inspired by something from Feedback Friday. That said, the way I develop the example here is all mine, for the sake of illustration only.)Let’s say that the setting is on the street outside the shop where they bought the ticket and that your point of view character is Ed, the army veteran. How do you proceed next. Here are things you might consider talking about:The view down the street, perhaps ending in a view of docks, the glitter of water.Or the same, but ending in a row of boarded-up shops and the loom of a huge cylindrical gas-holder.The look of the ticket itself. The feel of it in the hand.A memory of childhood povertySomething to do with odds: more likely to be struck by lightning than to get a big win, that kind of thing.Something to do with odds, but from Ed’s army days this time. A companion-in-arms killed by a freak shot, perhaps.Or Ed’s own role as an army trainer, always calling on the men to consider the risks of any action or non-action.Or something in the relationship between the two men – a laugh? An embrace?Something to do with a future of money. A holiday Ed might have dreamed of. Or a burden of debt that can now be shed?Something purely random. A seagull that flies into a patch of sunlight on an awning, holding a stolen cherry in its mouth.Something that touches a romantic or sexual nerve – Ed thinking of a former girlfriend? Or a woman he fancies but has been to shy to properly talk to?And so on. You could go in any of these directions and none of them are wrong.In a funny way, you only have to list them out and you build a scene that starts to cohere in a somewhat collage-y, scrapbook-y way. Somehow, even the contradictory views (the gas-holder and the glitter of water) can be assimilated into something that feels real.So what? Do you put them all down, then scrap the bits that don’t feel so strong on the page? Or just write the first three sentences that come into your head? Or you set yourself a rule? One line on setting, one line on action-in-the-present, one line on memory or reflection?In looking at your Feedback Friday stuff, one of the commonest issues I see has to do with this exact issue. What people choose to set down in their text isn’t wrong exactly, but it’s not exactly right.Sometimes the issue is that the reader is being asked to look in five different directions all in one paragraph and the result is confusing. Other times (and most lethally) the reader is being asked to look in a direction where the character would not be looking, with the result that the scene in question pulls away from the character and diminishes them.As a reader, you feel that issue in your bones. One page like that, you can manage. Three, and perhaps you’re still reading. Ten pages like that? And – well, no one knows, because that reader is no longer reading that book.And that’s the solution. Your golden thread.Stay close to your character. Always. No exceptions.So take our lottery-winning veteran, Ed. He’s just won the lottery. He has a ticket in his hand.Be him.What does he see? Think? Say? Do? Experience? Remember?You could still go more or less anywhere. Any of the bullet points we started with could plausibly go into this moment. But how you do it still matters.Here are two passages that pick up on that seagull / awning / cherry image. First, a version that works fine:Ed looked across the street. A patch of sunlight had struck the white awning over the greengrocers. A seagull was perched in the sunlight with a glossy red cherry in its mouth, a cherry stolen from the crates below.Ed felt the curl of the ticket in his hand. The seagull. The light. The cherry. The ticket. None of it quite felt real, except for the booming wash of a tide which kept saying, “you’ve won, you’ve won.”That passage gives the reader a dissociated Ed, one where the shock of winning means he’s no longer thinking or feeling quite straight. Not just that, but by combining a bird, some sunlight and a stolen cherry into a single image, we offer up some good metaphorical meat to the reader. Free as a bird, something stolen, a glossy round fruit, something about to take flight? You can mix up the exact sauce as you fancy. That might or might not be how you’d want to write this scene, but it’s a perfectly viable route.Next, a version that doesn’t work.Ed looked across the street. A seagull was sitting in a patch of sunlight on a white awning. It had stolen something, a cherry, from the greengrocer’s shop below, and had the fruit in its beak, owning but not eating it.Stolen fruit. In Fallujah once, Ed had been patrolling with a comrade of his, a sapper called Aaron. Some IED had blown the corner of an old bank building apart, injuring a couple of people and killing the stallholder who had sold fruit from a wooden cart just outside. Ed and Aarron had picked up some fallen fruit – a pomegranate, Ed remembered, some oranges – then got into an argument about whether that counted as theft as not. Aaron had been from a dirt-poor background, always treated Ed – pharmacist dad, nurse mum – as something like a Rolls-Royce driving toff. Aaron had had his arm torn off five days later. A mortar attack from a house that had supposedly been cleared. It had been Ed’s job to tell Aaron’s parents.None of the content there is necessarily wrong for the book in general. But where’s the lottery ticket? How is Ed thinking about Aaron and mortar attacks and fallen oranges right here, right now?We’ve basically lost the character and that means we’ve lost the thread of any actual story.That’s one kind of failure, but the possibility of failure is endless.Here’s another example.In one of my books, Fiona is in a cave. The cave is flooded – it’s a big lake, essentially, but an underwater tunnel leads to the outside, so she dives through the tunnel and escapes.Suppose I had just written, “I saw there must be a passage out, under the water, so I emerged onto a little patch of sandy soil under a low cliff.” That feels wrong, no?Fiona is not some all-action Special Forces type for whom these things are standard, so it’s absolutely critical to my explanation of her movements that she reflects on the experience of swimming underwater through a tunnel of rock. If I don’t put that reflection into her mind, then the reader will be just perplexed. It’ll feel to the reader like a scratch on a record, some important bit of information simply missing. I was going to quote from that passage here, to show you how I do it in practice, but that tiny moment – escape from the cave – runs to more than 400 words, because the swim mattered to Fiona so it had to matter to the reader.Follow the character. Your golden thread.

We’re working on a major revamp of our courses programme at the moment. Lots to do but, in due course, plenty to announce. One of the things that we’ve been thinking about a lot is simply: how do we learn?A good, obvious first stage answer is simply: deliver useful information appealingly presented.Hence, our blogs, our books, our (premium) video courses. Those things obviously appeal, because the blogs get read, the books get bought, the courses get taken.But?The learning model that underlies that basic approach feels, in some ways, a bit Victorian. It feels like I’m a Victorian schoolmarm, sweeping up and down a dais in my long skirts, telling a whole room full of silent pupils what they are meant to do. And that’s the issue: the pupils in this model are silent, not doing.So we adapt our model.We combine instruction with doing. So, here’s a particular topic (characterisation, or plotting, or prose style or whatever) and here is an assignment which will help you develop the skills in question.And good, that’s already better. My How To Write video course (available to Premium members) doesn’t have homework assignments exactly, but it does hugely emphasise the practical. The approximate message is, “Here’s an easily learned technique which you can apply to your manuscript right now and which will definitely improve it.” The feedback I most appreciate on this course is anything which says, “I had to stop watching the video so I could mess around with my manuscript.” That’s perfect. That’s exactly the kind of reaction I wanted to generate.But …?Our schoolroom has got better, but it’s still imperfect. The ranks of kids (grubby-kneed boys, some alarmingly pinafored girls) are now bending over their schoolbooks and practising their skills, but isn’t there something strange about the silence?A modern classroom isn’t quiet. It’s noisy. It’s productive. It’s social.It’s a commonplace to say that writing is a solitary activity, and I suppose it is. But writers are generally a tad introvert (I am) and the idea of a solitary activity being a bad one has never really made much sense to me. I like writing. That’s why I do it.But writing is one thing, learning is another. The social element in learning brings a kind of glue. My kids run off to school eagerly each morning, not because they’re desperate for another spelling test, but because they want to see their friends. If learning becomes a social task, it becomes easier to do. Less an act of will than a pleasure in itself.There’s something else here as well.Analysing weaknesses in your own book is an emotional endeavour. Your instinct is to avoid finding fault. But with your friends and fellow students? Ha. Let’s be honest, finding fault is part of the pleasure. “Ah yes, love that extract, but I did wonder if maybe …” (Insert knife, twist, repeat).The opportunity to look at work other than your own gives you a kind of safe-play area. The more you practise, the better you get. That’s why our peer-to-peer courses (like our Write With Jericho one, again just for premium members) offer a step-up on the basic model. We have instruction, we have assignments, we have a social, interactive peer-to-peer element as well.Great.But …?There’s a reason why we have teachers, not just classrooms. My kids’ teachers are not about to replaced by robots spewing videos and homework assignments.And what is the teacher there to do?Yes, they’re there to deliver the course material, but what else?The easy answer is that they’re there to give feedback on the students’ work. And, OK, that’s important. But the thought which has been most enlightening for us is this one:What if the teacher is largely there to give feedback on the feedback?In a peer-to-peer course, people will be offering advice to one another, but the quality of that advice is vastly important. Compare these two comments:GENERIC: “I loved your piece because I thought it was very atmospheric, but I didn’t really get the feel that your character was really scared.”SPECIFIC: “Great. There were some lovely words here (mullioned, brocade, umber) which lent a really rich, somewhat creepy atmosphere, but your character’s emotions were indicated entirely through rather cliched bodily responses (her teeth chattered, hairs rising on the back of the neck). I wonder if you could reduce or get rid of those bodily comments and just describe exactly what your character was feeling.”It\'s obvious that the second type of comment is of greater value to the recipient. But it’s also helpful to the giver.The more you practise the effective (detailed, specific) analysis of text the more instinctively you’ll bring those skills to your own book.There’s a comment from James Mitchner which gets a lot of play on the internet: “I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.”That’s helpful, but in truth these skills merge. Writing, editing, rewriting: there comes a point where all those things blur together. You start out by writing a sentence on the page, coming back to it two months later, rewriting it, and so on. As you get more experienced, you edit the sentence as you lay it out on the page – tweaking it multiple times before you hit that full-stop.  And then you find that the edits happen in your head before you even hit the page. Yes, of course, you go on editing afterwards, but it’s the same basic activity.So, for our courses, we’re going to work to see that people learn feedback-giving skills as well as what looks more obviously like writing-skills. Giving great feedback and writing better – it turns out that’s more or less the same thing.And yes: courses are a great place to learn that stuff, but you don’t have to take a course. Any time you read a book, or a chapter, or a page, or a line that doesn’t quite hit the mark, just ask yourself why. The right answer will follow the SPECIFIC model above. The GENERIC one is next to useless.That is it from me. I have a schoolroom to tidy and a cane to polish …Til soon.Harry