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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 novelNow, 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 screenplayOK. 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 shotNow 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 powerfulShow 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 powerfulShow 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 guruI’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 FRIDAYNice 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

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.REFLECTIONSIn 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 FRIDAYOnce 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

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.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.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?‘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.’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?‘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.’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. …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.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.REFLECTIONSIf 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 FRIDAYOnce 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

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.REFLECTIONSLast 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 FRIDAYFeedback 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 descriptionSome observation (or action) which bridges the physical & the emotionalEverything 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

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 JerichoNow, 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 worksNow, 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 questionsAnswering those questions and replacing them with othersDeepening and complicating thingsThe 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.ReflectionsA 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, 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 FRIDAYNo 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

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 

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 FRIDAYWell, 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

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 FRIDAYFirst 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.

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

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 disguiseGet 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 restBy this point, readers are now engaged in worrying about the money and the sister, and so you have another functioning story motorThat 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 mysteryToday\'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

Last week, I explained that the trick of selling on Amazon is to achieve steadily growing traffic and sales over 4-7 days. In effect, you’re priming Amazon’s own algorithms to take over the task of marketing your book for you … and Amazon turns out to be rather good at doing just that.But how do you get your traffic in the first place? We’re going to look in turn at promo sites, Facebook ads, and mailing lists. Today, we’ll look at the simplest and easiest tool of all – namely, the promo site.These sites aren’t just useful to newbies – they’re nigh on essential. They bring the readership that you don’t yet have. Plus, they’re cheap. Plus (with one exception) access is easy.The BeastThe biggest, best-known book promo site is Bookbub. It promises readers that it will help them get ‘Amazing deals on bestselling ebooks’, and that’s just what it does. (And, to be clear, the site is all about ebooks. Now, of course, you can happily sell print books on Amazon… you’ll just find yourself selling 10 or 20 times as many ebooks, so that’s what this email will focus on.)In effect, Bookbub runs a massive mailing list – the biggest in this sector, by far. That mailing list is divided up into genres. So if you join Bookbub as a reader, it’ll ask you what books you’re interested in. In your specific case, you’ll tell it you like Literary Fiction, Crime Fiction, and Swamp Monster Steamy Romance. Bookbub will then send out regular emails which will notify you of selected books in those categories when they are on special offer. So, a book that might normally sell at $9.99 as an ebook could be available, for one day only, at $0.99.Bookbub is offered a LOT of books. The books that are chosen for the emails are editorially selected and standards are high. Unsurpisingly, if you like your steamy swamp monster romances, and you find a classy and bestselling title sold at a fraction of its normal price – you’re likely to jump on it. Loads of your fellow readers will do the same.For an author, this is bookselling gold… just relatively expensive gold. If you’re in a major category – like crime, for example – a Bookbub Featured Deal will cost you upwards of $1,000. You might think that’s pretty dear for a promotion of this sort… but on the three occasions I’ve had a Featured Deal with my books in North America, I’ve repaid the money by tea-time in the UK, which means barely midday in New York, and not-even-properly-woken-up time in California. The deal lasts all day, and the effects of the deal last even longer.So: if you can get a Bookbub deal, then do. And really, a disciplined author should put in for a deal at least 5-6 times a year. There’s no harm in knocking.In fact, the only real problem with Bookbub is that you have no guarantee at all of being accepted – and the odds are against you. (They used to say they take no more than 1 in 5 books offered. I think that ratio has gone down and is, in any event, increasingly biased towards authors with a well-established following.)That means, it’s good to know how The Beast works. It’s good to apply for promos. But it’s also good to have a back-up. And that’s why we need to get to know…The little sistersThere are literally dozens of book promo sites, many of which are simply useless. But there are still a good few sites with meaningful email lists and a meaningful capacity to drive sales for you.The best sites do change from time to time, so I always check out the latest information from David Gaughran and Nicholas Erik. Both of those guys are in the market a lot, for their own books and for campaigns they manage on behalf of other authors. I basically trust them to know the good sites and make honest recommendations to others.Be aware that the various sites do have their differences. Freebooksy, for example, will only handle books that are being promoted at $0.00. Bargainbooksy will handle promotions of $0.99 and similar. There are also sites that handle only specific genres. And so on. Prices are relatively affordable and should certainly be within your budget.Crucially, these sites are essentially non-selective. That means, if you’re a newbie author without a huge pre-existing following, you can still use these services. Indeed: not just “can”, but “bloody well ought to”. It should be the very first layer of your promotional campaign.Promo stackingYou’ll hear indie authors use the phase ‘Promo stacking’ – and it’s what I recommend. But the phrase is just a little misleading. A stack is a set of things piled vertically, right? A stack of books, a stack or ironing.And that tends to suggest that if your overall book promotion campaign is going to run Monday to Friday, that you should ‘stack’ all your promo sites on (say) the Monday. And that’s not right.Promo stacking means using multiple different promo sites, but spaced out so you can add traffic throughout your promotional period. BargainBooksy for Monday, RobinReads for Tuesday, Fussy Librarian for Wednesday, and so on.For under $200 you can build a five-day promotional campaign that will get your book out in front of thousands and thousands of readers. You shouldn’t leave things there – we’ll talk about more powerful strategies in subsequent emails – but even pro marketers working on big campaigns for authors making seven figures a year will start with the basics: bookings on promo sites running through the term of the campaign.It\'s easy. It’s low cost. And it works.Don’t forget the basicsAll that said, please don’t forget the basics.By far the biggest marketing failure made by newbie authors is to hurtle through to the very end of the selling process – booking promo campaigns, designing Facebook ads – when the preceding plumbing is woefully leaking.So:Is your book actually good, or is it just you and your mum who thinks so? If it’s just you and your mum, there is no amount of marketing that will make that turkey fly. You MUST get your book to the kind of standards required by high quality digital-first publishers. If that means investing in writing courses and professional editorial feedback, then spend that money. (Preferably with us! We’re very good.) If readers don’t like your book, Amazon will figure this out, you’ll get lousy reviews, and the more money you spend advertising the book, the more money you’ll lose. Write. A. Good. Book.Is your cover actually good, or is it just you and Dorky Phil who did the Photoshop work for you who think it is? Again: there’s no compromise here. Your book cover must look like something that could adorn a book put out by Penguin Random House or any of the other big boys. That also means that your pitch and your genre have to be visually assimilable – and quickly – from the thumbnail of cover and title. Here too, there can be no compromise.Is your blurb good? Do you have good reviews coming in? Is your pricing sane? Is your website up to scratch? Is your mailing list set up and do you have a proper welcome automation in place?If you allow any of these things to be sub-par, you will struggle. You are up against the best writers and the best publishers on the planet, so don’t think some lowlier standard applies to you. It doesn’t.Next week: a tool that’s more powerful and more scalable than anything else out there. It’s also a tool that will spend your money with glee and won’t in any way guarantee results. In short, we’re riding the bronco that is Facebook ads – and don’t tell me you’re not ad-curious. I know you are.See you next week.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Single Sentence SummariesBecause we\'re now at the end of Build Your Book Month, we ought to look at what you\'ve accomplished. So, I\'d like: A one sentence summary of your book, please. Just a quick explanation of what kind of book you\'re talking about.250 words or so of plot outline - which will include giving away the ending. You\'re not blurbing the book; you\'re summarising. Ideally, I want to see a nice tidy sense of shape. I want to feel the point of the book and the forward thrust. It\'s really not easy summarising in this way, and you can write a good book and a lousy summary - but still. Let\'s give it a go. When you\'re ready, post yours here.I have just noticed: I have many children. And they\'re still here. Oh yikes. They made pumpkin soup today, and I saw an actual footprint, in soup, on my kitchen floor. Till soon,Harry

Over the last couple of weeks, we thought about how to sell books the traditional way - print books sold through physical bookstores. The short summary: you try to amass retail footprint (via your publisher’s sales team) then create a real density of awareness once you have it. The lethal catch: if you don’t capture that footprint in the first place, there’s essentially nothing that can be done to achieve sales thereafter. Today, we turn from a world of tweed, pipe tobacco and hardbacks… to bits, bytes and algorithms. This email (and the ones that follow) are of particular relevance to anyone self-publishing their books, but I think they’re ALL of relevance anyway. No ambitious author should be without a mailing list under their own control. And the other tools we’re talking about are so basic to modern digital selling that you can’t afford to ignore them. And, to be blunt, plenty of trad publishing companies who ought to know better are still poor at digital selling. You won’t be able to understand or modify those failures unless you understand the territory. So: listen up. The big question today is: How, in theory, do you achieve huge sales via Amazon? Yes, I know that other online bookstores exist. But they’re so small in comparison with Amazon that they barely count. Kindle Unlimited alone is about equal in size to all other non-Amazon e-stores combined. So, I’m going to focus on Amazon. That’s where the sales are. And… the answer to our big question is easy. It’s: Achieve strong, steady traffic to your book’s Amazon page; andEnsure you have strong conversions once readers get there. I’m not going to talk about Part 2 of that very much. In a nutshell, you need a blisteringly good book cover. You need a strong blurb. You need to accumulate some reviews. You need a sensible price (which means a low one. My Fiona series is self-published in the US. The first book in the series normally sells at $0.99. The other books sell at $4.99.) And – have I ever mentioned this? – everything of course needs to be perfectly in line with your insanely strong elevator pitch. You all know what a strong Amazon page looks like, because you’re familiar with it as readers. Create that. So let’s turn instead to Part 1 of the question: an altogether harder and more thought-provoking question. How do you drive traffic to your Amazon page? The biggest source of traffic Before we start to answer it, I want to call your attention to the phrase “strong, steady traffic”. What does that mean exactly? Also: who cares? If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right? But no: that’s not right. That arithmetic is totally wrong. Because the biggest source of traffic to your Amazon page will be… tiny drumroll… Amazon. Amazon’s websites have more book-buying traffic than anyone else, by far. Amazon knows exactly who amongst their horde of buyers is likely to buy your book. Further, Amazon has any number of ways to advance or drop the visibility of different pages. For example, a really popular book page might feature on: An overall bestseller list.A sub- or sub-sub-bestseller list. (You can sit at the top of multiple lists.) A “customers also bought” selection attached to books by other writers in your genre.The home page for certain users. (So, if you’ve bought a lot of romantic comedies from Amazon recently, you may find that your Amazon home screen fills with various other rom-coms for you to consider.) A hot new releases list.Emails to selected users (i.e., readers in the same genre.) Search pages, where the search term is in some way relevant to your book. This could even be for another author’s name. So if I enter “Gillian Flynn” as a search term, Amazon will first display some books by GF and then start to suggest books that it thinks GF-type readers are likely to enjoy. And so on... So, the best way to get traffic to your book’s Amazon page is to get Amazon itself to boost your page’s visibility. Essentially, you want to make sure that Amazon’s algorithms and robots to decide that what they most want to do is feed traffic to your book page. But how?Strong and steady To answer that question, you need to know two things. The first is that Amazon’s bestseller lists are extremely sensitive to short-term movements. A classic bestseller list – the NY Times list, for example – reflects the total volume of weekly sales, and is updated once each week. Amazon’s list, by contrast, updates every hour. What’s more, the sales you’ve made in the last 24 hours account 50% of your total ranking. The sales you make in the preceding 24 hours account for the next 25%. The prior day for 12.5%, and so on. That means Amazon is electrically sensitive to quite small movements, in a way that the NYT list is not. That said, Amazon’s little robots know that a one-off spike doesn’t mean too much – it could be an email blast that gets a flurry of sales and nothing more before or after. So, the Indie Author Hive Mind (which is exceptionally smart, by the way) says: Work to secure sales over 4 days, not 1. A little longer than 4 days is probably better – say 5-7 – but that does depend on how much marketing oomph you can bring. Ideally, you’d have a gently sloping increase in sales over the period – so aim for something like 100 / 110 / 120 / 130 in terms of sales progression. (I mean these as indicative units, not specific book sales. A brand-new indie author would be doing very well indeed to shift 400+ books over four days.) If your sales tools are still in their infancy (i.e., no mailing list, smallish ad budget), then do what you can. I’d suggest that getting some sales on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4 would be a reasonable aim, with anything splashy you can manage coming on Day 4. You’ll note that this advice will NOT maximise your peak bestseller rank. If you wanted to do that, you wouldn’t just try to get your sales compacted into a single day. You’d ideally try to have them squashed into a single hour. And yes, you’d have the pleasure and satisfaction of a salesrank you can boast about to your dental hygienist. But you won’t get as many sales overall as if you follow the plan here. And sales matter more. What happens next? So let’s say you follow the plan, and achieve that gently sloping uptick in sales over 4-7 days. What then? You’ll have exhausted your mailing list. Your ad budget will be empty. What next? Well, what next is – Amazon. If you do this right, at about the four-day point, you’ll see a sudden surge in sales as Amazon takes over the marketing. Its tiny little underpaid, non-union bots are essentially saying, “OK, author-human, we’re convinced that this book of yours is worth marketing, so we’re going to start marketing it ourselves. We’re going to sift through the MILLIONS of readers who come daily to our website, and we’re going to show your book to the ones most likely to buy it.” That sounds exhilarating – and it is. But the exhilaration (and the sales) won’t last forever. New books come onto the market, new sales surges are manufactured, those underpaid little bots are fickle – FICKLE, you hear me? – and they will start flashing their glossy metallic ankles at other books and other authors instead. So, over a period of about 30 days, you’ll see sales tail off to a base level… then probably dwindle further as time goes by. You’ll do better in that 30-day period (and maybe extend it a little) if your Amazon page is all seven shades of fantastic: Amazon will prefer to send readers to a page that ends up in sales. You’ll also do better if readers read and enjoy and finish your book. (How does Amazon know if you finish your book? Because it collects data from a gazillion Kindles.) But nothing lasts forever. Your sales surge won’t. The arithmetic of sales Earlier in this email, I said: “If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right?” You can now understand why that logic is flawed. If you trickled those sales out over two months, your popularity on Amazon would almost certainly never rise to a point where you tickled Amazon’s bots enough to get them involved. So your expected sales would indeed be 1,000 books, or something similar. If you took the one-off surge approach, I think that Amazon would respond, just not in a very powerful or sustained way. But still. Books sold? More than 1,000 anyway. And if you took the slow and steady over 4-7 days approach? You’d easily generate enough sales to get a really good blast of love from Amazon and you’d see lovely, organic sales for week, after week, after week. That’s where you’ll really make the money. That’s also why smart indie authors are perfectly happy if their Week 1 ad campaign makes exactly zero profit. It doesn’t have to make a profit in week 1. It has to make a profit in the somewhat longer term. The approach outlined in this email tells you how to go about doing that. “Now look, you blithering idiot, you gibbering phytoplankton, you lumpen mass of curdled whey – why won’t you answer the ONE QUESTION that I really want you to answer?” I expect that most of you will be thinking along these lines – or a politer version anyway. Because of course, it’s all very well setting out the theory of how to apportion your traffic to Amazon, but how do you secure that traffic in the first place? I’ll answer that question in some detail next week, with deep dives into a couple of further areas after that, but suffice to say that there are lots of things that don’t work: Twitter / XInstagram Blogging Blog tours Organic Facebook traffic (probably) Boosted Facebook posts Amazon ads Traditional publicity, of the sort that Big Publishing uses. Some items on this list might be surprising: how could Amazon ads not increase sales on Amazon, for example? The answer is that Amazon ads may increase sales in a low-level, evergreen-type way. They are not well adapted to the kind of surge marketing I’m talking about here. I also think that Amazon ads tend to work better as a phase two option: that is, once you have already generated some good book sales through other sources. Or again: how could trad publicity not work, since it works perfectly well for trad publishers? And yes, of course it does: but they have a huge physical retail footprint. Trad publicity is pretty much hopeless for generating digital sales on demand. The two worlds – physical bookstores and all things Amazonian – are largely separate in terms of sales approach. So I’m only going to focus on three tools, but they’re all important: Promo sites Facebook ads Author mailing lists. That’s it. That’s what lies ahead. If you’re trad published, then knowing about promo sites is valuable, in that publishers should – these days – think of them when it comes to boosting your ebook. Author mailing lists are critical for everybody. And Facebook ads? Well, it will be essentially impossible to profit from them if you’re trad published. But indie authors will rely on them heavily – and I do think that trad authors just need to know what their publishers could be doing, and in many cases ought to be doing. You can’t even have the conversations, if you don’t understand the territory.*FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Selling StrategiesAn unusual task this week. Simply: Do you have experience of a selling strategy that really didn\'t work for you? Do you have experience of one that really did? You might be talking about something that your publishers conceived and executed for you. You might be talking about something that you did yourself. Either way, let\'s hear about it. When you\'re ready, post yours here.And? Yes: writing books is hard. Selling them is harder. But let\'s also not forget that loads and loads of books do get written and sold, and authors make money and find readers. Just this week, for instance, our very own Becca Day has published her latest thriller, The Woman In The Cabin, to rapturous reviews. So, this is a hard task, but not an impossible one. Avanti! Til soon,Harry

Last week, I talked about how print-led publishing is essentially dominated by the battle to secure retail space. If your book gets a really good level of retail space, it stands an excellent chance of selling well. If not, your book is mostly likely to sell badly, irrespective of its basic quality. I ended that Depressing, Pointless and Nihilistic email by promising you that this week I would offer you some Very Sound Advice. And yes: I will. But be warned. That advice is akin to finding running shoes for the portly gentleman at the start of his race. It’s akin to massaging his quads and calling his attention to a trip hazard en route. His odds will improve, for sure… but the race is still a crapshoot. The basic shape of the game remains unaltered. All you can do is boost your odds. So that’s coming up, but first: I got a LOT of replies from you guys last week, and quite a lot of you seemed to think I was saying that trad publishing is basically broken and that self-publishing is a better option. To be clear, I am not saying that. Trad publishing has its challenges. Self-publishing does, too – they\'re just different challenges. And, either way, a ton of books get sold all the time. Authors are taken on by agents, their books are bought by publishers, they’re sold to retailers, who sell on to readers. Despite the huge torrent of new media, books remain absolutely central to culture. And of course, you can earn a lot of money even if your book doesn’t sell: that’s what advances are for. So, trad publishing is great and full of opportunity. But it’s also difficult and full of challenges. Here’s what you need to do. Write a good book The quality of your book ought to matter, and it does matter. Ideally, the major retail buyers would read all the books offered to them by publishers, and pick the ones that were the very, very best. That doesn’t happen. Too many books, too few buyers. But quality still matters. Your publishers are sophisticated readers and will know the difference between a book that feels genuinely special and one that feels just fine. They’ll put more work into the first one than the second. That will affect every conversation between your publishers and the wider world. It can generate some startling, immediate, significant wins. For example: when my Fiona Griffiths series was launched in the UK, hardback sales weren’t great. They weren’t awful, but certainly mediocre. In the normal course of things, hardback sales are the best predictor of paperback ones… except that my publisher (Orion, part of Hachette) had an in-house book group. A reading group, in other words: a bunch of friends getting together to talk about a shared reading experience. That group read my book and loved it. That enthusiasm spilled over to UK’s biggest bookseller who ended up putting the paperback into their biggest monthly promotion, thereby sharply changing the book’s (and series’) sales trajectory. So: write a good book. That’s the only part you have real control over, so do it right. If you need or want help, then of course we offer a ton of ways to provide that. Two easy options are: Our Good To Great course, which is specifically there to help competent writers become dazzling writers – the sort that agents have to take on. The course is free to Premium Members, but everyone gets to have a free first lesson. Manuscript assessment. This is still the gold standard way to improve a novel, and our editors are very, very good. If I’d recommend any one thing, it would be this. Make nice Back in the day, I was published by HarperCollins and my editorial team also handled a major bestselling author, whom we’ll just call Jack. (The author in question? Rich. Litigious.) HarperCollins knew this author would earn them money, but he was horrible. Just a nasty human. So yes, they put together a pitch for this chap’s next book. Yes, they tried to win it. But – they were also kind of happy when they failed. Publishers will work harder for people they like. So make nice – and, really, that’s just a way of saying BE nice. It makes a difference. Be professional For the same reason, it helps to be professional. Delivering on time, working well with edits, responding fast to emails – all of that. Those things help your editor do his or her job, so being professional is basically just a way of making nice, in a way that is directly helpful. It all makes a difference. Be strategic If you’re lucky, you’ll get the chance to meet bloggers, and retail buyers, and booksellers, and other industry types. Those meetings really matter. Yes, there are often other authors floating around at those events and authors are generally more delightful souls than, erm, almost anyone, and so it’s tempting to curl up in a knot of drunken writers and ignore everyone else – but don’t. Be strategic. Booksellers and bloggers and other influencers matter, so seek them out, and be interesting and make nice. And retail buyers really, really matter so seek them out and make super-nice. And if that sounds too calculated – well, hell, I should probably add that you should be authentic too. Don’t just lie and flatter. Be yourself, just a polished up version of yourself. Make nice with the people who matter, then get hammered with your cronies. (Oh yes, and crime writers are WAY the most interesting authors, so you should probably write crime, not something smelly like lit fic or YA. And even when crime writers aren’t the most interesting, they have way the highest capacity for booze.) Care about your cover Your book cover matters – intensely. It’s something I’ve often not got right in my career. I don’t mean that I’ve chosen a poor cover, because I’ve never exactly got to choose. I’ve got to comment. (And, by the way, a publisher may be contractually obliged to consult with you about your cover, which sounds nice. Just be aware that their legal obligation would be entirely satisfied by the following exchange: Publisher: “What do you think of your new book cover?” You: “I hate it in every possible way.” Publisher: “Thank you for your opinion.”) But – even without having a contractual right of veto, it’s a rare editor who doesn’t basically want to make his or her author roughly happy. So: Before you see your draft cover, have a damn good idea of what the other books in this space look like. Yours can’t look worse. You want it to look better. When you do see your cover, be as honest as possible with yourself about your feelings. That’s harder to do than it sounds! Discard completely all feelings that have to do with the way the book, or the cover looks in your head. It doesn’t matter if the cover seems to refer to an incident or feature that’s not in the book. The key questions are: Does it convey genre? Does it convey mood? Is it arresting and just generally brilliant? That’s what matters. Tell your editor what you think. If you want changes, say so. If you want a total rethink, say so – and in those terms. Be direct. Do not be too people-pleasey.  Beware: if you think the cover’s wrong, your publishers is likely to “nice” you into submission. If your editor says, “Oh, I’m sure once you see the cover with the raised lettering and the foil effects, you’ll be absolutely blown away,” what they mean is, “Give us a chance to let a few more weeks pass, and then it’ll be too late to make changes anyway.” For that reason, make sure you get a reasonably early sight of your cover. If it arrives with you too late, you may be stuck with it. A bad cover will kill your book. A great cover could propel it into the stratosphere. Do not accept compromise – and throw your toys out of the pram if you have to. This is almost the only area where toy-throwing makes sense.  And when you are considering cover – or blurb – or marketing in general, then always remember: The pitch, the pitch, the pitch! Publishing is a machine. It makes its profits by employing good people, working them too hard, and paying them too little. It can seem like a privilege to work for a good, big publisher, but by heck they’ll take their pound of flesh (or 454g, for our EU readers.) The result is that books don’t always get the level of thought and attention they deserve. And in particular, your cover designer hasn’t read your book, didn’t commission your book, and has little more than a page or two of notes from your editor in terms of design brief. The result can easily be a lazily “me-too” cover, or one that simply doesn’t evoke the mood and tone of your book. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You are most likely to get stellar sales if: You have a brilliant concept – an elevator pitch; and Everything lines up perfectly behind that concept: the text, the title, the blurb, the cover, and every line of marketing yadda. Your job, as author, is to be the scent-following, rat-shaking terrier that ensures the fidelity of everything to your pitch. If your title and blurb promise one kind of experience, and the book cover promises another, that book will not persuade readers to walk it over to the till. You need a great concept. And everything – everything – needs to line up behind it. Honestly? Nowadays, I’d be blunt about it. I’d offer my own cover design brief to an editor. I’d suggest my own blurb. I’d say what I thought our pitch was and what tone we needed to strike. If you do that right, you won’t even come across as an asshole. Offer your material humbly and accept advice when it’s wise. Most of the time, an editor will actually be grateful: you’re making their life easier. That’s a positive blessing. But if they say you’re wrong about something, you also need to accept that you don’t know everything.  FEEDBACK FRIDAY:  Well, I’ve yammered away about the pitch – again – in this email, so let’s have another pitching challenge. If you haven’t watched the free first lesson of Good To Great, then do please do just that. And, in any event, please: Give me the pitch for your novel in a maximum of 20 words, and preferably fewer. If you’re stuck, try the “Premise + Conflict” recipe to see if that unsticks you like slippery egg on Teflon. Also, present your pitch as an extremely short list of ingredients “Teen romance + werewolf”, “Orphan + wizard school”. You have 3-8 words for this. For extra pepperoni on your pizza, then please also show me how everything is going to line up behind that concept: What’s your title? And how does that line up with your pitch? What kind of cover would work? You need to advertise genre and you need to advertise pitch. Don’t get too specific: just offer a sketch of a possible cover brief. What we’re trying to do here is make sure that your pitch flows right through to the places where your book is first going to touch the reader: on a bookstore table or on an Amazon search page. When you\'re ready, post yours here.NEXT WEEK We turn to the beast that is Amazon and all things digital. Til soon Harry 

Last week, I said:“As you write, and as you edit, you are faced with 1,000,000 choices: again and again and again. Are you happy with this sentence? What about this one? Does the attacker strike your heroine? Strike her with what? Does he hurt her? Does she hurt him back? Does she escape? How does she escape?”And –Well, just casually, almost by way of an aside, I’ve assumed it’s just fine to write about violence against women. But is it? Pretty obviously, violence is bad, and male violence against women is especially unlovely … and making an entertainment out of all this? Isn’t that a bit Ugh?One approach is to say that violence of this sort should never be used for entertainment.A British screenwriter, Bridget Lawless, in fact set up a prize – the Staunch Book Prize – which rewarded novels that did not feature violence against women. The prize sputtered on for a few years before closing.The prize was never without controversy, though. Women thriller writers, Sarah Hilary and Julia Crouch, both noted that women do in fact suffer violence by men. Crouch said, what the “prize immediately knocks out is the lived experience of millions of women in this country.”That’s true of course … women do suffer violence, so we should talk about that rather than conceal it. And that feels like it might be a let-out, except if I’m being super-duper honest, my last book involved a contemporary detective running around searching for artefacts linked to King Arthur. The one before that involved an extended caving scene and some (literally) mediaeval monastic practices. My books aren’t really attempting to take the ‘lived experience of millions of women’ and make art out of them. They’re attempts to provide bloody good entertainment using stories which aren’t, quite frankly, all that plausible in the real world.I don’t think that I’m especially keen on having dead women, rather than men – I think I’m an equal-opportunities killer. But, yes, my books do involve violence against women. Fiona suffers ill-treatment in every single book and in many cases, other women are also victims, often dead ones.So do I use murder for entertainment? Yes.Does that include murder of women by men? Yes.Are my books intended to represent a carefully considered view of the actual ‘lived experience’ of women? No, definitely not.So, bluntly put, am I exploiting stories involving violence against women for pure entertainment purposes? Yes, I am.But do my readers, including my female readers, mind about any of this? No, they don’t. Or at least if they do, they care in such small numbers that the issue would seem not to matter all that much. And, I should say, I’d guess that at least 60-70% of my readers are women, maybe even more.Now, assuming that you (A) like writing books and (B) think that men whacking women is generally a Bad Thing, we need to figure out what’s going on here.The first thing to say is that books do generally need a splash of darkness. They don’t absolutely have to have an episode of violence at their heart, but an awful lot of books do. And it’s not surprising. We don’t want to read books about the everyday. We want our books to operate like really high-class gossip: “Gosh, no! Really …?” That reaction almost always derives from transgression of some kind and the blackest sort of transgression (especially in a sexually permissive age) is violence.The second thing to say is that there are ways of writing violence that are just … ick.Any time where the camera lens is pressed up against violence with a kind of glee is, for me, unreadable. (Indeed, I won’t even read on; I know I’m not going to like that book or that author.) Where the violence involves sadism or anything with a sexual edge, then any hint of glee or pleasure in the moment is, for me and, I think for a lot of readers, just a hard no.And for me, that’s what is always comes down to in the end.Does the way you write end up commoditising violence – making a kind of porno reel out of it?Or does your writing try to deepen our humanity? Does it try to enter those dark moments and speak truthfully of the fear, the grief, the compassion?I think if you do that, you’re OK – no matter what your genre, or story, or purpose in writing. There’s a moment in my upcoming book where Fiona comes across a corpse. The man has been hit hard with a frying pan, then shoved into a freezer, where he froze to death. That’s an ugly (albeit off-screen) dying, but it wasn’t played for laughs. It wasn’t played for sadistic thrills. The murder delivered a moment of quietness – reflection. And Fiona then went to see the dead man’s father and brother. And felt their shock and grief.None of this is filtered through some ‘holier than thou’ lens. The difference between my books and a sermon in church? Quite detectable, I’d say.So, for my money at least, entertainment is fine. Violence as part of that entertainment is fine. But – stay human, not icky.A good life rule, that....FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Be Bloody, Bold and ResoluteLast week, I asked for 250 words of happiness. Today – violence.The crack of a silver candlestick – Colonel Mustard falling – blood on the library floor. A country house aghast.Take any episode of darkness from your manuscript and let’s have a peep at it. Remember: we don’t mind a bit of blood and gore. But stay human, not creepy, please.Post yours here.Til soon.Harry

Who do you write for?I mean, readers, yes, obviously. But who? Your mum? That old English teacher you loved? Crime fans in general? People who love Patricia Cornwell in particular?There are two reasons to ask these questions. The first is marketing. If you’re writing people who want a fresh take on the Patricia Cornwell vibe, that would suggest a certain approach to book covers, titles, marketing slogans and so on. You might even refer directly to Cornwell, or her most famous character, Kay Scarpetta, in your marketing yadda.The second reason has to do with the choices you make as you write the book itself.As you write, and as you edit, you are faced with 1,000,000 choices: again and again and again. Are you happy with this sentence? What about this one? Does the attacker strike your heroine? Strike her with what? Does he hurt her? Does she hurt him back? Does she escape? How does she escape? Is her breath ‘hoarse and rasping’ afterwards? Or does it come in ‘juddering heaves of relief’? What phrase do you prefer? And what does she do next?Now, obviously, you’re going to make all those choices on the basis of what seems right to you – you have no other option. But at the back of your mind, there’s always a sense that you’re writing for one set of readers rather than another.For example, if I were writing forensically-led crime fiction, I’d have to assume that my readers knew Patricia’s Cornwell work and would be wanting me to break new ground. I couldn’t just reprise Cornwell’s tropes and expect success myself.Indie authors – intelligently analytical as they are – often take this further, and try to conceive of an ‘Ideal Reader’ – a dog-loving, mother-of-two Kansas 40 y.o. housewife, with plenty of friends, love of hiking, watches true crime shows on Netflix, reads mostly crime, but will cry at soppy love stories too.The idea is that if you know your ‘Ideal’ reader, you can craft your book and your marketing material to appeal perfectly to that one person.     And? OK. Very smart writers I know do just that and they say it works for them. In part, it works because book marketing works best when it’s micro-targeted. A good campaign is one that gets excellent conversions happening amongst a very tightly defined group of readers. A bad campaign is one that starts so-so conversions from a much broader group. So: a hyper-detailed picture of your Ideal Reader keeps your marketing focused.But I have a somewhat different take.I think you have to turn yourself into your own Ideal Reader.Partly, that means bringing your own tastes to bear. As I say, when it comes to editing, you don’t really have a choice.But you also have to ensure that you become your own readership. What books do you expect your readers to have read? What authors do they love?You need to have read that book and know those authors. If you’ve read Patricia Cornwell as keenly as your readers have, you won’t just repeat that stuff. In the end, your desire for novelty will be the same as theirs.These things go deep.I know, for example, that more of my readers are American than British. So I have a particular love of giving my American readers a taste of Wales that’s very Welsh. So, for example, a few miles from where my Mum lives, there’s a village called Newchurch. Easy to say, easy to spell, right? But I’d pretty much never use that placename in one of my Fiona books. Near Newchurch, lie the settlements of Rhosgoch, Glascwm, Llanbadarn-y-garreg, and (where my kids go riding) Bryngwyn. I’d use any of those placenames instead, joyous in the knowledge that Kate from Kansas and Ali from Arkansas will struggle to pronounce any of them.Or again: I wrote a book that had to do with the archaeology of the British Dark Ages. I know my readers to be literate and intelligent. Plenty of writers might have avoided a ton of ancient history detail, but I knew my guys would like it. (I know I like it. I’ve become them.) So the book is spattered with chunks of Latin, and late Celtic poems, and mournful Romano-British monks, and factoids about Anglo-Saxon vs British burials. (The main difference being that the Anglo-Saxon invaders were pagan, the ancient Britons were Christian, so their burial rites looked different. I am English, but I’m still on the side of the ancient Britons. Twll dîn pob Sais.)One last example:How fast or slow do you take a scene? Do you hurtle through? Offer a reaction shot or two, but still move at pace? Or do you allow yourself a paragraph or two of considered reflection?My writing creates my readers, but my readers also create my writing. I know that my readers relish the Fiona character – they want more of her, not less. So, while I’m hyper-sensitive to anything that feels boring or self-indulgent, I’m happy to allow proper space for reflection. On the whole, my scenes go slow but deep, not fast and shallow. That’s respecting my readers, not ignoring them.Over time, any difference between you and your readership gets snuffed out. You learn from them what they do and don’t respond to. You learn what books and authors they like. You follow down those trails.You don’t have to like everything that every one of your readers like. I’ll get book recommendations from readers (either via email, for example, or from names cited in an Amazon review) where I read the book and don’t like it. But that’s fine too. What matters is knowing (roughly) the universe that your readers inhabit, and using that knowledge to shape your tastes and your choices. The process becomes a rolling, laughing, respectful conversation with a multitude.And if you follow that path, things become easy.Your Ideal Reader? It’s you.***FEEDBACK FRIDAY: HAPPINESSModern Fiction often feels like it honours the dark over the light, the grave over the upbeat.And, OK, I don’t have a fight with Modern Fiction. But, just for this week, let’s lighten up. Give me a passage of 250 words that shows happiness. Anything upbeat. A moment of relief or laughter or gladness.Let’s share those excerpts and give feedback one to another, till evening falls.When you\'re ready, post yours here.Til soon.Harry

Last week, I threw out a Feedback Friday challenge based off the first volume of our Good To Great course.The essence of that task, and of the course material, was to consider your book’s elevator pitch not as a final thought – a sticker glued on to the book cover at the final minute – but as a blueprint for production. What’s the book’s DNA? What are its most essential ingredients, the elements that make it up? If your book is to succeed, that answer has to be compelling. Your book will stand, naked, on a bookstore table (or an Amazon page) that’s crowded with repeat bestsellers and authors much better known than you. There’s no way to win that contest except by having an idea that shines so bright and attractively that your book compels attention.The course video (which I urge you to watch; it’s free) talks about how to start with an ultra-short pitch/blueprint – a list of ingredients even – and how to build out from there. To characters, to settings, to themes, and so on.The aim here is that every aspect of your book should be firmly founded on your core idea – and that the idea itself should be so compelling that the book can’t not sell. The absolute key is to make sure that every part of your book lines up behind a single great idea.Pitching backwardsNow, I hope it’s obvious that that’s a sound way to build a book… and yet – have I told you too late? Almost all of you reading this email have already written all or part of your manuscript. So me telling you now that you should have done something 60,000 words ago may not exactly strike you as terribly helpful. (One of you on Townhouse said that “pitching backwards feels like a feat of gymnastics” – which is a fair comment.)And yet –It is helpful. These things are helpful at any stage and every stage. If you know what you’re aiming at – a book where everything lines up perfectly behind one stellar idea –you can always navigate from where you are to where you need to be.The trick is to navigate without cheating.What you mustn’t ask is:“How do I take the material I have already concocted and make it look as though it obeys these rules?”What you must ask is:“Honestly – does my material feel like it all lines up in this way? And is the idea strong enough? And, having thought these things through, are there adjustments I should make to the stuff I’ve already written, even though I know it will cost me weeks of work to make those adjustments?”Anything else, you can bodge if you like. You can have a character who’s a bit limp, a scene that’s a bit weak, a plot turn that’s a bit contrived, a setting that’s a bit bland. All those things – and your book can still sell. None of my books has gone out into the world with no bodging anywhere.But a weak idea? Or a book that doesn’t manifest the strong one that you started with? That book won’t sell. And it doesn’t deserve to.So yes, pitching backwards is an arse-over-tip way to do things. (That lovely phrase comes courtesy of my sister’s long-ago riding instructor, a woman so sweary, she’d make Princess Anne look genteel.) But if you didn’t do the exercise properly when you started out, you need to do it properly now.Is your idea strong enough?Is there total unity between that idea and everything else in the book – characters, themes, settings, everything? Are those things so tightly glued together that your book feels somehow inevitable, necessary?Those are the questions you must ask.They matter.And pitch backwards if you have to.Standing stones and character VerdictsWhen I set these Feedback Friday tasks, I’m often surprised at what comes back. Those surprises are always positive; I always learn something.Last week, I realised that we build character up in layers. To we humans, the top layer is the one that matters most. To a pitch-concerned novelist, it’s the bottom layer.Here’s what I mean:Who is Fiona Griffiths? How do we describe her? Here’s how I think about forming an answer:Standing StonesI start with some key facts – rocks projecting unmissably from the landscape. They’re the things that any explanation of Fiona has to acknowledge. Any triangulation has to start from there. So:Fiona had Cotards Syndrome as a teenager (she used to think she was dead).Fiona doesn’t know her true birth mother or father. She was found in the back of her adoptive father’s car when she was about 2 years old. For a long time, she was mute.Her adoptive father was (is?) a criminal.Fiona can be violent. (A creepy witness once felt her bum. She broke his fingers and dislocated his knee. She was a police officer at the time.)Fiona has a double first in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge – and won a university philosophy prize to boot.At the start of the series, she’d never really had a proper boyfriend. When at university, she had a phase of thinking she was lesbian.Fiona is a detective.All these things are facts. They’re not things that are up for argument or discussion. They refer back to things that happened or are true in the present. They’re standing stones, your rocks, the first and most critical layer of character-formation.(And in parenthesis: my character is quite big and highly coloured. If your character’s own standing stones are a little lower to the ground, that’s fine. You’re just writing a different kind of book.)DispositionsNow we get to the next level up – dispositions, ways of summarising your emerging character.So, again for Fiona, we have something like this:Fiona is electrically intelligent. She’s Sherlock Holmes level bright.She adores murder investigation. It’s one of very few things that fully engages her.She’s a dunce about many things-in-the-world. Her knowledge of pop culture is near-zero. She’s a hopeless cook. She has no dress sense. If there’s a glass wall in an office or a bus shelter, she’s quite likely to walk straight into it.She’s funny. She’ll make you laugh.Dead people calm her. She likes them. She feels them to be friends.Yes, novel-detectives are always mavericks. But Fiona really is. Illegal handguns? Growing and smoking her own weed? Solo mission to shoot up some bad guys? Throwing Russian baddies off a cliff? Yep, that’s Fiona. (And that’s just book one.)These things are facts, too. I mean, you couldn’t reasonably disagree about whether Fiona is intelligent or not. But this set of facts doesn’t have that standing stone like quality: single, obtrusive, unmistakable, un-ignorable – the marker-events of a person’s life.This second list of ours – ‘dispositions’ – doesn’t comprise things as singular as our standing stones. You don’t really know whether Fiona is genuinely funny until you’ve heard her for a bit. If she makes you laugh once, that could be a one-off. But if she does it again and again, then you have to say, yes, she’s funny. Same thing with her intelligence. Same thing with her dunce-in-the-world-ness.So, our second level of character analysis gets to things that are definite facts, but they’re not singular facts. They’re more like dispositions – repeated observations of a trait.And then, we get to our third level –VerdictsIs our character conscientious?Does she have a sense of right and wrong?Is she loyal?Is she open to new things, or does she prefer the tried-and-trusted?Is she valiant – or, perhaps better, what is it that brings out her valour? When does she show her courage?We as people like to discuss these things in relation to others, and as novelists we like to discuss them in relation to our characters. (And roughly: Fiona is not conscientious, she has a strong sense of right and wrong, she is loyal, she is open to the new, she is valiant in almost any context.)But?I don’t think these things should form part of your character analysis, or not really. I think something like the opposite is the truth. You build your character on the basis of your standing stones and your dispositions. Then you follow that character through the course of your story, writing her as carefully as you can. Then you can stand back and judge. Conscientious, yes or no? Valiant, yes or no?As it happens, I think that in most cases, those questions won’t even have easy answers. I just gave a quick-fire set of responses in relation to Fiona, but they’re not very good.Is Fiona conscientious? Yes: she goes way beyond expectations in anything murder-related. But in other spheres, she’s hopelessly unreliable. So: going through endless phone records because there’s just possibly a lead buried in there somewhere? Yes, she’ll do that, and without being asked. But: filling out a simple pension form, because someone in her office needs her to do it? Nope, she’ll avoid that until someone pretty much forces her.Why I’m even talking about thisThe reason why I’m plappering on about this (this word, courtesy of my elder daughter) is that when I asked you to give me your pitch / theme / character details, a lot of you shot straight through to the character verdict level. And I don’t want that. When you’re putting together the blueprint for your novel, the standing stones are way more important. The dispositions are next most important. The character verdicts don’t really matter at all – they’re something to argue about once the novel is finished.I hope that makes sense. In any case, since this week’s Feedback Friday is going to hammer away at this topic, it’ll make sense before I have done with you, or I’ll want to know the raisin why.This email is too long, so I will not tell you about the extraordinary encounter I had just yesterday with – but no. This email is too long.***FEEDBACK FRIDAY: STANDING STONESRight. Character. I want you to outline your character’s:Standing Stones. Big, singular, formative events or facts in your character’s life.Dispositions. Unmistakeable traits that run right through the book.Verdicts. What do you make of the character you’ve just created. (And, psst, I don’t really care about this bit of the answer. Nor should you.)Do you want an extra bonus point? You do? Then also please tell me:Your ultra-short pitch or list of ingredients.What we really, really want to see here is a lovely reverberation between the pitch and the standing stones. We want to think, ‘Oh yes, that character with that past in that story situation and that setting? Sounds glorious. Tell me more.’ If you do that, you’ve won. When you\'re ready, post yours here.Over to you.Til soon.Harry

There’s a sweet sadness about early September, isn’t there? The leaves aren’t quite turning, but they’re thinking about it. It isn’t quite cold enough for socks again, but my morning toes aren’t always so sure about that. The kids go off to school again, bravely, marking off their little transitions towards adulthood. And holiday mess is either put away, or lying around in piles, eyeing us balefully, awaiting disposal.I mostly like the season – I just don’t want the kids to get a day older, really. I’d happily glue them into some groundhog present, where school always involves projects on the Vikings, and science classes revolve around magnets and things dangling on string.And as for you? Ah me and oh my gosh – you’re to go back to school too, my hearties, and starting RIGHT NOW. Because, this week, we have a new course out, and it’s a goodie.Specifically, we know that most readers of this email are reasonably seasoned writers. Few of you are hesitating over the very first pages of your very first manuscript. Far more of you are deep into your first novel, or working on your second or third. You’ve mostly wrestled not just with writing a book, but with editing it too. Plenty of you have made a serious assault on Planet Agent, and are planning further raids with some sober expectation of success.This course is for you: the serious, competent, experienced writer. We call it Good To Great, because that’s the hurdle you now need to clear. You need to go from acceptable competence to writing something so compelling that an agent (or editor, or reader) can’t refuse the proposition you offer.That’s a big ask. I’d say that plenty of people – if they’re serious, competent and committed – can end up putting together a decent novel. Something shipshape and watertight. A novel that feels tight and well-fashioned.But none of that is enough. The competition writers face is heinous. If you’re a debut athlete, you work your way through multiple lower-level competitions until you’re expected to face an Olympic final. If you’re a debut writer? You get no kindness at all. No mercy. You are sent in to compete, immediately, against the most famous writers of the day. Your books are sold at the exact same price. And those other writers have a vast advantage in terms of sales footprint and brand recognition and marketing oomph. So, yeah, good luck.This course is my best attempt to give you that luck.Our aim is to help you, the competent writer, bring your book to the point at which an agent has to take it seriously. Yes, personal tastes and market movements will always play their part, but quality is still the most important factor in what gets bought and sold. Quality is the thing that kicks open doors, that arrests the flow of an acquisitions committee.The first lesson in the course is free to all and I honestly think it’s one of the most useful teaching tools I’ve ever produced. The lesson is entitled ‘Pitch, Theme, Character’, but really it’s about how to lay out the foundations of your novel so that saleability is built in from the very start.Most people (the merely competent authors) write the book that they want to write then consider their pitch as a kind of marketing sticker to be glued on top.You, my fine furry friend, are not aiming at the merely competent. Your pitch is not going to be glued on; it’s going to be foundational. And it’s not just the story idea that matters here. We’re want to ensure that absolutely everything lines up behind a stellar pitch: plot, character, themes, settings – everything.If you can do that – find a compelling pitch, and centre every aspect of your novel on fully delivering that basic promise – then the only remaining challenge is one of execution. And, OK, execution is a challenge, but it’s a doable one (and one which other lessons in the course will attack in plenty of detail.)The first lesson is, as I say, free. You can find out about it here. The whole course is available to Premium Members and I’d just love it if you took the whole lot.Feedback Friday this week is going to pick up on the task in that first video, so do please get stuck in. With any practical accomplishment, it’s never enough to read, or listen to, theory. You have to put it into practice. Actually shaping the words on a page or screen IS part of the learning activity. And when you team that up with Feedback Friday – where lots of intelligent and constructive writers in the same basic place as you offer a ton of thoughtful feedback – well, the learning impact is doubled, or trebled, I’m certain.The leaves are on the turn. It’s back to school time. Your toes are cold. Let’s up and at em.***FEEDBACK FRIDAY: PITCH, THEME, CHARACTERYou need to register for the course here to get your first lesson free.Watch that video; the assignment won’t really make sense without it.Then, I want:A total of about 300 words that comprises your:Very short pitch for the novel. (Nothing fancy or clever or abstract please. A short list of key ingredients is fine.)Notes on theme, character, settings, and anything else that seems relevant to you.I want to see a great pitch and a set of notes which tells me that your book will be firmly centred on those strong foundations.This could, just possibly, be the most important and transformative writing exercise you ever do, so jump to it.That\'s it from me. Post yours here.Til soon.Harry

Last week I said this:Next week … I want to look at how very basic plot summaries can give us important clues about the entire novel. If you’re doing our How To Write in 6 Weeks course, you’ll know just what exercise I’m talking about and (I hope) how illuminating it is.What I asked people to do was to write a very short plot summary of their novel, either in 1-2 paragraphs or as bullet points: Status Quo, Inciting Incident, Midpoint / Developments, Crisis, Resolution.Obviously, that kind of treatment is nowhere close to being an actual plan for a book. Writing a plan would take several pages of text, even if you were being quite compressed in your summary. I’ll also add that I pretty much never write a plan; it’s not how I work. It seems to me that a detailed plan is optional; a general sense of shape and purpose is not.And, OK, it’s all very well performing an assignment, but what is it for? What are the lessons you’re likely to get?The short answer to that is that you need to test your plot for seaworthiness – and doing that at book length is (a) extremely hard and (b) extremely time-consuming. Asking the key questions of a micro-summary isn’t going to give you all the answers by any means, but it does give you a fast, reliable way of understanding the basics.Here are some of the things you may well find:BlandnessHere’s a plot:Status Quo                           Woman (45) is dissatisfied with her lifeInciting Incident                  Her best friend pressures her to go to a pottery classMidpoint                               She resists the pottery, but ends up entering a competition, and failing badlyCrisis                                      She decides to give up the class and revert back to her old way of lifeResolution                            Her new friends intervene and make her realise that she now has a group of friends who love her; she’s turned her life aroundNow, I hope it’s obvious that something like this genuinely describe an important turning point in someone’s life. But as a novel? It’s hopeless. It’s just too dull, too lacking in bite to be picked up by anyone – agent, publisher, reader. Nearly all novels need a splash of the dark – and losing a pottery competition is not dark.ScaleAnother thing to ask is whether a novel has genuine novel-length scale. So take this example:Status Quo                           Karob is a prince – the king to be. He’s had a sheltered life and a loud, dominant fatherInciting Incident                  Dragons prey on the northern territories. Defence is the traditional task of the crown princeMidpoint                               Karob fights the dragons and failsCrisis                                      The king is ailing and courtiers are moving to prevent Karob from taking the throneResolution                            He returns to the north with a larger force and defeats the dragons.And, OK, that has darkness. But does it have scale? Does that feel like a story that could sustain 100,000 words of prose? At the moment, it certainly doesn’t. It feels more like a middle grade story that might run to 30-40,000 words.It’s always hard to be sure of these things when giving feedback to others. Is there more to this story than we’re seeing in those bullet points? Maybe.But if you’re doing the exercise for yourself, you know whether there is or is not meant to be more. And at the moment, that story is just too compact, too simple – too dull – to sustain a whole book. Basically it amounts to: X fights Y and loses, then fights again and wins. A book that can be summarised as briefly as that isn’t really a novel. You have to be sure your outline has enough scale to build on.TanglesThe last big route to failure is writing a novel that doesn’t know what it is. The first two examples might be hopeless, but at least they know what they’re doing. That’s not always the case:Status Quo                           Jax (27) is in a job that offers geopolitical risk assessment. Even she doesn’t know what that is and she’s kind of bored. Her last partner broke up with her 6 months ago and she’s wanting to find someone.Inciting Incident                  Yuri persuades Jax to help with his Azerbaijani import/export business. Jax also meets Luigi, a very good looking Italian personal trainer. Jax’s mother gets ill.Midpoint                               Yuri is working with the CIA but had KGB roots and Jax isn’t quite sure who she’s helping. Meantime, she’s dating Luigi but he becomes very controlling. Jax can’t get to see her mum, even though the mum has a dementia diagnosis.Crisis                                      There’s a major shootout in Baku. Jax is wounded. Luigi tells her that she has to stay at home and be an old-fashioned housewife. Jax’s mother goes into a home.Resolution                            Jax hands over her secrets to MI6, who give her a job as a central Asia analyst. She breaks up with Luigi. She sees her mum comfortably settled.And – erp? What is that story? Who is it for? Is it a rom com? An action romance? Is there any connection between Luigi and Yuri? Quite how does the mother connect to all this? It’s not that you couldn’t slot a romance into a geopolitical spy story – of course you can – but there’s a theme about coercive control that just doesn’t seem to fit into anything else. It’s like there are three stories here and none of them have ever met before.You usually get this kind of issue when a writer just wants to write about their chosen subjects and doesn’t take any feedback from the story itself.TruthAnd in the end that brings us to the essential element in this exercise – or really any writing exercise: truthfulness. You need to look at your work with a third-party eye, an unforgiving one. What, really, would an agent say about any of these three submissions, assuming they were being completely honest and not caring about the author’s feelings? They’d say: “boring”, “thin”, and “total mess”.One of the advantages of an artificial exercise – like this bullet point one – is that it puts distance between you and your work. That distance should help you get as close to the truth as possible.PitchAnd one more thing:Do you feel your pitch echoing through your plot summary? You should. If your pitch isn’t there in the DNA, then your pitch is probably just a marketing sticker that you’re gluing on after the fact. That doesn’t work. The pitch IS your book, or should be.That’s all from me. I’m going to take the rest of August off in terms of emails, but Feedback Friday will run as normal – and we’ll give you some of my greatest hits so you still get your dose of Friday yumminess.The kids have built a massive fort in the garden, including a toilet (“but only for wees”) and a bath, which is a wheelbarrow full of water. So far, they’ve used a puppy crate, a guinea pig hutch, a ton of fence posts, an umbrella, two brooms, some towels and quite a lot of scrap wood. I’m not allowed to look too closely because if I try, they tell me they’re throw a spear at my head.I don’t want a spear in my head.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #5 / ToolsWatch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)Do your assignment:Tell us what your themes are, and give us a passage (250 words) that shows them in action.A great assignment, by the way. So get stuck in! Upload the result to Townhouse here.Til soon.Harry

The kids are off school. Yesterday was – complicated. And right now, I have seven kids in the house with me as the only (vaguely) capable adult.So –A short email today, but one with a useful moral.On Wednesday night, I did (for our beloved Premium Members) a LIVE EDIT session, in which I took four short pieces of work and started to edit them much as I would if they were my pieces of text.When I do these things, I don’t pre-plan my edits: the point really is to offer a stream-of-consciousness view into how I approach things. And each time I start one of these webinars, I always wonder if I’ll actually have anything useful to say.I mean, I can always find trivia – this word repeated, an over-focus on bodily movements or sensations, a tiny muddle as to just how quiet a particular location is. At the outset, those things always seem to offer rather slim pickings. Good to correct, maybe, but perhaps not worth a webinar.Except – and Wednesday evening was no exception – these little things normally lead to something bigger. So here, for example, is the first paragraph from one of the passages we looked at:Aside from the weather and the hooting of an owl in the distance, it’s deathly quiet. Exactly what I wanted. But if that’s true then why do I ache for the comforting buzz of Jon’s Bar? Knowing he was asleep upstairs made me feel safe somehow, like I was alone but not really. Now there’s nobody, just me and the forest. Rain beats the roof above me in place of Jon’s footsteps on old floorboards, wind the only other breath for miles.Now, this was from a really quite good passage and the key emotional transition which followed was well and movingly handled. The author, Rian, stands a decent chance, I think, of writing something which agents will need to give serious consideration to in time.But? Well, the bit that niggled at me first was that damn owl.The first sentence here says, “it’s deathly quiet,” albeit that the place isn’t totally quiet because of some (undefined) weather and a distant owl.Only then, the last sentence says “Rain beats the roof above me.” It doesn’t say “patters lightly and almost without sound”. It says “beats”.So which is it? Beating rain or deathly silent? It can’t be both.And then, Jon’s bar is bamboozling too. Is the soundscape of that bar:a) A comforting buzz?b) Silent, because Jon is asleep upstairs?c) Nothing from the bar below, but footsteps from Jon walking around above, presumably after the bar has closed for the night?The answer seems to be all of the above.Now, these niggles are – I accept it – utterly trivial. The first sentence said “Aside from the weather,” so it did, if we’re being strict, make some allowance for the rain. And the thing about Jon’s bar? Well, obviously, the soundscape of that bar varied with time of day, but the woman is perfectly capable of remembering each bit of it. We as readers are also capable of figuring these things out.But these niggles lead to another. The structure of the piece at the moment is this:Deathly quiet hereComforting buzz of bar (past)Me and the forestJon’s footsteps on floorboards (past again)Wind the only breathSo we loop back twice to Jon, in the space of eighty words. That means that none of these soundscapes can be properly described or absorbed – we’re just shuttling to and fro too often. And what’s the emotional movement here? It’s got a bit lost in the shuttling.So, on Wednesday, we took these niggles and arrived at this:It’s quiet here. There’s the sound of rain on the roof, and dripping off trees, and somewhere an owl, hooting unseen. Otherwise, nothing – a forestful of silence.Exactly what I wanted. But if that’s true then why do I ache for the comforting buzz of Jon’s Bar? Knowing he was there, either serving beers or, after hours, moving around on the old floorboards upstairs, made me feel safe somehow. Like I was alone but not really. Now there’s nobody, just me and the forest. Me, the trees, the owl and the rain.That’s ten words longer, but clears up the niggles around what exact sounds we’re dealing with. More important, it cleans up the structure: we start with the forest, then we feel a pang for the buzz of the place left behind, then we consider again our solitary state here with the trees and the owls.In bringing a bit of order to these smaller points, we also get greater emotional clarity. The new passage now shows a flow from external observation (“it’s quiet here!”) to an emotional one (“Wow! I’m really alone here.) That movement – a deepening – goes via a contrast (in terms of sound, and aloneness) with the world the character has just left.This matters! The character is about to plunge into a howl of pain over her lost baby. The paragraph before that happens needs to set that up just right.The new passage does just that. It gives us silence – nostalgia – oh crikey, I’m on my own … The whole paragraph is now getting us ready for what follows.That, roughly, is how editing almost always works.You start with a fairly low-level worry – in my case it was beating rain vs deathly quiet.In solving that worry, we found others (was Jon’s bar buzzing or silent or footsteppy?).And in solving all those things, we got to something that:a) No longer suffered from those minor niggles, but alsob) Gave us a powerful and emotionally compelling route into the howl of pain which is about to come.Little things lead to big things. That’s how editing works. That’s why jumping on trivia is almost always important: it opens doors to things that you might not otherwise have sensed and found.For me, the activity has a free-form quality. Sometimes, I enter my text with a mission. (Turn character A from male to female. Improve setting B. Solve the plot conundrum in chapter X.) Often, though, I just read the text and respond to it.I find a niggle and tease away at it.Little things lead to big ones.The text improves.Next week, I want to do something a bit similar in terms of plotting. I want to look at how very basic plot summaries can give us important clues about the entire novel. If you’re doing our How To Write in 6 Weeks course, you’ll know just what exercise I’m talking about and (I hope) how illuminating it is.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #4 / ProseWatch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)Do your assignment:Take a scene. Cut it brutally. Layer it up the way we did in the video. Then present your before and after efforts. (The “after” version should be a max of 250 words, please.)Upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll be very keen to see the results of both the cutting and the layering up. I’m expecting beauty and wondrousness here, folks. Oh yes, and we’re at the one year anniversary of our Feedback Friday sessions. I’ve loved them. Thanks for participating.Til soon.Harry.

I once wrote a book about payroll fraud. (Yawn.) The fraud in question involved some kind of messing about with employee tax deductions. (Snore.) The fraud was perpetrated using online tools for sabotaging corporate databases. (Dull, dull, dull.)At one level, that book should not possibly have worked. It was like being trapped inside your very worst admin nightmare: dealing with government tax codes AND horrible tech stuff, both at the same time.Suffice to say, I don’t think the book did fail – or at least, certainly not for that reason. Because I knew that the underlying subject matter was profoundly tedious, I basically avoided it. I mean, I couldn’t avoid it completely, because the crime was the crime, but I never did anything more than basic window dressing. So, for example, a character at one point says this:“It looks like the basic mechanics of the fraud were initially set up by Kureishi. He installed software that gave external access to payroll. We’re confident he was not the ultimate beneficiary of the fraud. We simply can’t find enough money or signs of heavy spending. And the set-up looks remarkably professional. The fraud involves over a hundred and fifty dummy UK bank accounts. The money siphons via Spain, Portugal or Jersey to Belize. The Belize bank account is fronted by nominees and owned by a shell company in the British Virgin Islands. That shell company in turn is owned by a foundation in Panama.”That’s pretty much as specific as I ever got. “He installed software” – well, shucks. That doesn’t really say much of anything. Dummy bank accounts, money siphoning to Belize – well, I have no idea how to do that kind of thing and I never got even close to an explanation.In effect, my aims with speeches like the one I’ve just quoted were threefold:Make the whole crime setup look plausible.Make it look big and meaty – something that matters enough for my character to be deeply committed to the investigation. (I did that partly with the number of bank accounts, but more importantly with corpses – by this point in the book, my Kureishi character was very, very murdered.)Avoid boring the reader with too much technical jargon.You may not be writing about payroll systems yourself, but you quite likely are writing about something that involves technical knowledge – and if you are, you have some decisions to make.Where your knowledge is actually interesting, then share it. I also wrote a book about the early oil industry and readers wanted to know how wells were drilled, what happens when you strike oil, what happens when gas leaks from a well, how wildcatting operated in those days, and so on.Because of the intrinsic interest of the topic, I read a lot about it and shared plenty. Several specific accounts of striking oil in the book were drawn from actual strikes at the time – from huge gushers to small, but highly indicative, indicators that oil was close. Plenty of readers wrote to me saying how much they enjoyed that stuff. The former head of a major oil company wrote to me to tell me that he had an interest in the technology of the early industry and that I’d got my technical detail pretty much right. (Phew.)But –The reason I’m writing this email –But –Phones. Whatsapp. Messages. Facetime. Emails. Login credentials. Twitter. Who follows who. DMs. Verification issues. Instagram. Lost passwords. Account recovery process.For all of us now, a lot of our social interaction is mediated through tech and much of that tech is basically horrible and boring. As a matter of fact, I think that one of the reasons why people pick up books specifically is to avoid the specific negatives of tech involvement.With a book, the attention commitment is long not short – hours, not minutes or seconds. It’s emotional in a broad, deep, complex way, not in a “catty remark on Instagram” way. If we’re reading in print, then we’re doing so because we don’t want a screen in our hand.All this says: you need to avoid talking about the detail of tech in your book wherever possible. If you need “convincers” – as I did with payroll fraud – then stick them in. But the purpose of those convincers is really just to say “I know this is boring, so can we please agree that I know what I’m talking about, and we can leave it at that?” That means, as short as possible, as little as possible.You may think that this doesn’t apply to you – perhaps your book is a domestic noir psych thriller, not a book about payroll fraud or the oil industry.But in fact, domestic noir psych thrillers are precisely the kind of area where this issue crops up.Compare these two passages:Tech-ledShe looked at her phone and traced the unlock pattern to gain access. She navigated to Whatsapp and checked for unopened messages. There were a dozen or so messages in a school-related chat she was signed up to, but nothing from Emma. She tapped the search icon to bring up messages from Emma and was about to text her, when she saw a notice saying that the user had blocked her messages …Emotion-ledShe checked her messages – and found that Emma had blocked her. Why? Because of the Croissant Incident? But surely not. She’s already apologised for that and Emma didn’t seem like the kind of person to bear a grudge, no matter how covered in golden pastry flakes she might have been …I hope it’s blisteringly obvious that one is terrible and one is good. My mother could basically understand the second piece of text, but she’d have no idea what the first one was going on about. Now, OK, it’s not your job to write for my mum, but the point is broader. One piece of text places tech-navigation at its centre. The other one places emotion and relationships at its centre.You need to do the second, not the first.These comments are acutely relevant to the kind of smartphone technology we all have in our lives now, but they’re also relevant to any kind of Boring Tech – like my payroll fraud.If you’re writing about something interesting – navigating an ice-breaker, a 1930s gusher, Napoleonic artillery, the newsroom of a contemporary newspaper – then go for it. Find the rich detail and give us that. If you’re writing about something dull, give us the bare minimum and move away fast.In my oil book, I remember I had a roughneck fall out of an oil derrick, bounce off the tin roof of the power-rig, and lie on the ground saying, “Would someone find a cigarette for this broken-assed sonofabitch?” I didn’t make that bit up: I just took it straight from eyewitness reports at the time.The real gold? It’s reality – edited.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #3 / PlotWatch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)Give me your plot summary, as either:Five bullet points (Status Quo, Inciting Incident, Midpoint, Crisis, Resolution), or1-2 paragraphsEither way, stay short. We’re focusing on the basic shape of the plot here; the detail can come later.I know you’ve already done something towards plot, but I want you to get deeper and more specific this week. I’m looking for a further iteration of the work you’ve already done. If that means sharing something a bit more detailed than I’ve suggested, that’s fine.Upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll see you there. Everyone welcome.BONUS FEEDBACK FRIDAY: 250 Words / Live EditI’m doing a live feedback event next week, so your task this week is really simple. Premium Members can register for it here. I want, please, 250 words (max) that you really like. Also, title and genre.I’m going to give live feedback on this stuff next week, so if you don’t want your work torn to shreds in front of a baying mob, please mark it: NO LIVE FEEDBACK.(Truth is, I only pick work I already quite like and I’m never that mean. But if you don’t want the live experience, then please just tell me so.)Share your work here.Til soon.Harry

We had a good week last week: a flood of good replies, both in relation to “What do you want from writing?” and in relation to our Planning Your Novel module (which is the first lesson in the How to Write a Novel video course and completely free: access it here. You can still do the assignment and get feedback too.)And –I always learn something from this work. Last week was no exception.There was a tremendous amount of interesting work in response to the Planning Your Novel assignment (you can see people’s work here.) And look: the entire point of this module and this assignment is to encourage a kind of safe play. You need to sketch out your idea for a novel, so you can see it and feel it – and change it.In that sense, if someone gives me a page from a completed draft and I see obvious ways to improve things, then that page has weaknesses. It contains mistakes. But if someone gives me a sketch of an idea, then it can’t contain mistakes. Its job is just to exist – to make itself available for inspection. If you instantly see a way that the idea could be improved, that’s perfect. The sketch has done its job.The planning process is always circular (plot, characters, settings, themes, plot, characters, settings, themes …). And it’s experimental. Would this story work better in Sweden? Yes? No? Or kind of? OK, so maybe not Sweden. What about Iceland? Or Greenland? A village set up to support oil drilling on the Greenland west coast? Better?The fact is that you don’t get to the right ideas unless you give yourself permission to have the bad ones. And the bad ones don’t properly exist until they’re written down. You need to see and feel the plan taking shape in front of you.So – no criticisms in what follows. Just observations.First:The pitch matters. Always.Place your ingredients on a page in their barest, simplest form. Do you want to read that book? Would other readers want to read that book – remembering that your book will be sat next to hundreds of excellent books by authors much better known than you?Look at these pitches:Paleontologist + Murder + Theft of dinosaur bonesJane Eyre + Lesbian romance + more enlightened approach to mental healthNew intelligence agency + Run by women + New international crimeNow, I don’t know about you, but the first of those is obviously commercial. A murder story revolving around a niche-but-real area of crime, and one that’s of obvious interest? Yep. That works.The next two pitches are (for my money, but you may think different) almost but not quite there.Jane Eyre + lesbian romance: yes, perfect, it’s almost what the book is asking for. Adding a romance like that feels like an act of completion more than anything. But I got shivers of the wrong sort from the enlightened approach to mental health bit. I mean: yes, let’s in practice treat the mentally ill well, of course. But novels that have a “wouldn’t it all be better if we were nice to each other?” tone seldom make good reads – and agents and publishers know it. Now, I don’t think that basic idea needs a whole lot of tweaking to be right. I’d just want to scrub away any trace of the too-worthy from the pitch.The last idea: yes, I’m intrigued. But the ‘new international crime’ doesn’t mean anything to me. And why is a women-run intelligence agency even needed? What’s the bigger idea underlying its creation? Again, I’m halfway there, but – if I were the author – I wouldn’t embark on writing the book until I’d got some decent answers to those questions.Second:Density matters. Almost always.I came across at least two really interesting examples from your work:One involved a couple running a teashop in the North of England, but involving some kind of story involving Welsh dragons. Now that’s potentially a nice contrast – the homely teashop, the wild dragons. But why separate them geographically? Almost certainly the book gets better if the teashop is relocated to the Cambrian mountains where (as everyone knows) the world’s best and most ancient dragons still live. The book gets better because, even when you’re in the teashop, you’re still in a location where the possibility of dragons exists. You’ve given every object in the teashop world some kind of ambiguity. Is this only a teacup? Well, yes, maybe, except that beneath those mountains outside lie dragons, and so nothing in this world is ever quite ordinary. If the dragons are a four-hour car journey away, you lose that sense of ambiguity. The book has lost just a splash of energy.Another example: someone sketched out a novel running from the 60s to now about a mixed-race marriage in the UK. Now, there’s obvious interest there, but the story (as sketched and at least to me) felt a bit baggy – without obvious journey. That doesn’t work. So an author has roughly two choices. One, focus in on a particular time and place. Early 60s? The era of the Beatles and the miniskirt? A mixed-race marriage, with the couple based somewhere not obviously cool (ie: not Carnaby Street, London)? Yes: that clearly works. A lovely retro period feel combined with the iron tang of racial cruelty and complexity? Perfect.The other way you could justify a 50-year stretch is by giving that journey some kind of purpose. Let’s say the couple has a daughter who goes wild – rejects contact with the mother – before reuniting as the central couple reaches old age. That way, the book is, on the surface, about the mother-daughter relationship, even though in practice the book will also study the evolution of race-attitudes in the UK.In any case, density nearly always matters.Geographical density. Density of relationships (a cast list that looks much the same by the end of the novel as in the first quarter). Density of time. When planning a book, it’s nearly always a good plan to close up gaps where you can.And third:Darkness matters, nearly always.There was one planning assignment offered by a more experienced writer with an intriguing idea at its heart – a car crash, a ‘brother’ who’s really a son, a commune, some mental health strangeness. But … who or what was the antagonist? What did the whole story lean up against?The writer was aware of the issue and had some (perfectly reasonable) hesitations about the exact solution I offered, but … darkness matters. Some external darkness is nearly always important. Even in what is a elegant and morally centred comic romance – Pride and Prejudice, for example – the shadows are present. (The family’s potential poverty. The potential destruction caused by the Lydia Wickham elopement.) That book without those shadows? Basically inconceivable.So.Pitch. Density. Darkness.And plan – revise – plan – extend – plan – revise …If you haven’t yet joined our How To Write a Novel course, you’re missing out. The peer feedback is abundant and excellent. Always encouraging, always thoughtful. Premium Members can just register here for free. If you’re not a PM, you can always join us.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #2 / CharacterWatch this video (available to Premium Members)Do your assignment: Give me a 250-word scene that shows a rich, rounded character – we’re looking specifically for inclusion of multiple dimensions in the one scene. Everyone is welcome to take part and upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll see you there. Til soon.Harry

Hello writers, we have TWO tasks in this week\'s email. If you want to take part in this week\'s Feedback Friday, keep reading to find out how to get involved - Jericho TeamSuperquick housekeeping to start off with: My How To Write A Novel in 6 Weeks course kicks off NOW. Anyone taking the courses gets a weekly video, an assignment, and peer-to-peer feedback via Feedback Friday.The first module (on planning) is free to all. I hope you get stuck in and make maximum use of it. More information in the PSes below about what to do next.After this first module, you’ll need to be a Premium Member to complete the course. If you’re not a PM and want to take part, check out our membership options here. I hope you join us.Righto.And today, I want to start with a simple question: What do you want to get out of writing?Don’t give me the ‘in your wildest dreams’ answer. We all know what you dream of: agents stalking you, publishers sending you limos with huge bunches of flowers, a bestseller list electrified by your presence, surging crowds at festivals, your own skincare range, Margot Robbie pestering you with requests to be in your movie, Ryan Gosling inviting you to his island birthday bash …And, OK, I’m sure that’s all bound to happen, but let’s have a sober version of your aspirations too.If you want to answer just that simple question, then do. We’ve put together a Townhouse forum, and please – everyone, not just Premium Members – get involved. The short version of the question is just this: What do you want to get out of writing?If you want to be more discursive (and please do!), then you might want to address any of the following questions which seem relevant to your situation:Do you think your basic idea for a book is strong enough?Are you going to finish your book?Do you intend to get help with the book (eg: via a manuscript assessment)?Do you intend to get help with your skills (eg: via a writing course)?If you’ve finished your manuscript, do you think it’s strong enough to market as it stands?What’s your preferred publication outcome: Big 5 traditional publication? Niche trad publication? Digital first publication? Self-pub?What will you do if you get your book out there and agents aren’t interested?What will you do if your self-publish your book and sales are miserable?What financial outcome would make everything worth it to you? Give us a figure.What other factors would make everything worth it? (eg: seeing your book in a bookshop. Holding a book in your hand. Getting some emails from readers.)Does critical acclaim feel important to you?Does feedback from readers feel important to you?Do you intend to write more than one book? If yes, then will you be writing in your current genre or multiple ones?Do you want to make a full-time career as author (ie: earn enough to live on from books alone.)Do you want to make a substantial part-time career as author? (Like loads of the team at JW, in fact.)Does a film / TV adaptation feel important, or is that just fantasy-land stuff for you?Don’t feel confined to that list. If there’s something I’ve missed that seems relevant, add that into your answers.And …Well, when I started writing, I definitely wanted a big 5 publisher. I definitely wanted an agent. I definitely wanted to make meaningful money.But I think the biggest thing for me was simply being a writer. I’d wanted to be an author since I was about 10 years old; I just always assumed that’s what I’d do. So being a writer for me was mostly about becoming me; anything else would have felt a bit strange, like having been born into the wrong body.I have had my work adapted for TV. That didn’t make a big difference to me, either emotionally or financially.I have had my work sold all over the place. That’s been gratifying, for sure, but not in an especially deep way. It’s fed my ego, not my soul, and these days my ego isn’t that fussed either.I’ve generally had very positive reviews from critics, but, honestly, that means less to me now than it might have done once. I feel that I know reasonably well how good or bad my books are. I’m not massively affected by what some third-party thinks. If someone doesn’t like my book, that’s as likely to be a matter of personal preference as it is to be something more fundamental.Getting really committed, insightful communications from readers? Well, that’s always been special and it’s become much more frequent in the internet age and (especially) with a bit of self-publishing.I’ve always enjoyed trad publishing (though it has also, often, frustrated the heck out of me) but I’ve always liked self-pub too (which has been much less frustrating and more reliable in terms of income.)I like writing fiction and non-fiction, but fiction is definitely harder – a lot harder, in fact.I definitely want to publish more books, but I don’t have the same fever around it as I used to. (Nor, admittedly, the same financial pressure.)I’ve never taken a writing course, but I have done courses on self-pub (well worth it) and no book of mine has ever been published without deep, professional editorial input.So: those, roughly, are my answers.What are yours?Write down your answers and actually give them some kind of sense check. If you have things like “Explore merchandise range to accompany my middle grade novel”, then ask yourself how many authors you know who have successfully done this. If your answer doesn’t get further than ‘JK Rowling’, you may want to reconsider things.The fact is that writing is hard. Getting published is hard. Not getting published is more common than getting published … and getting published in a small way is more common than getting published at scale.So, what\'s the point of all this? Well, we\'re not in the business of daydreaming. I want you to think practically about your writing future. If you have a goal in mind, it\'s much easier to reach if youknow what that goal looks like andhave concrete steps that will bring you closer to achieving it.Ask yourself: what does that journey look like? What can you do today, this very minute, to bring you closer? This could be any number of things but some ideas include: Clearing a set space in your week for writingImproving your home-writing set up to remove niggles or distractionsFinding beta readers (Try Townhouse)Getting formal expert feedback (Try a manuscript assessment, but do this only after you’ve worked hard at self-editing your work. It doesn’t pay to rush in.)Really structuring what your book is trying to be. Getting specific about things like your elevator pitch, your plot outline, your character plans, and so on. (That means writing things down, by the way. Thinking about these things while walking dogs won’t achieve the same thing.)Cultivating a writing community (Feedback Friday is a great place to start)Improving your writing craft. Why not dip your toe with this week\'s How to Write lesson? If there\'s another area you need bolstering, hit up our Masterclass library (available to Premium Members). There are also more rigorous, structured options like our flagship writing course. It really depends on where you are at and where you want to be.Doing the scary stuff. Not sure if your manuscript is ready to be marketed? Try sending it out to agents. See what response you get. Or book an agent one-to-one and ask for direct, truthful feedbackFor now though, that first step could be as simple as writing out your answers to the above questions and making sure every goal has a first step you can realistically make in the near future.Post your writing goals and next steps here. Don\'t want to share with the wider world? Reply to this post and let me know.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: HOW TO WRITE / MODULE #1 / PLANNINGWatch this video (this is the first lesson in the How to Write a Novel course. It’s free to watch, the rest of the course is for Premium Members)Do your assignment:Your pitch in <20 wordsWrite 1 short paragraph of plot summaryWrite 1 paragraph on everything else (notably character.)Upload the result to Townhouse here. I’ll see you there. Everyone welcome.Til soon.Harry

Righto.Now, last week, in Feedback Friday, we were looking at your mysteries – not detective novels, for the most part, just places in your book where a mystery intrudes, presses itself at the characters.And one of the things I noticed was that there’s very often a sense of something sacred about the actual places or artefacts involved in these mysteries. So a letter, written in 1944 and being read by people in 1948, can have the quality of some treasured relic – a saint’s bone, a lock of Mary Magdalene’s hair.Place too can acquire this sense of being close to something magical – inhabited by spirits. As though a deserted house gathers some of the spirits you might expect to find at Stonehenge during Solstice, or Glastonbury Tor, or Tintagel Castle.That sense of powers that lie beyond the ordinary and known can enter any book at all. You’re likely to find those passages:In portal scenes – any time that your character steps from one world into another, less known, world where the rules seem shifted. This could be a really ordinary type transition – a working class student entering some high end and ancient university for the first time, for example – in which case, the sense of the sacred clearly exists in the character’s head alone. Or it could be more clearly linked to the spiritual – a Western adventurer entering some tribal burial ground, for example – in which case, the sense of the sacred is at least partly ‘owned’ by the space itself. Either way though, there’s a transition which needs marking.Where you have some kind of relic. That could be a Dark Ages sword, obviously, but is more likely to be a family letter, or a heavy iron key, or a set of war medals. But the meaning and history attached to that relic can give it weight, no matter how ordinary the object or how (relatively) recent its past.Where you have a place around which some special sense hangs – a mystery, the past presence of someone important, a place heavy with memories from a different time.Where you have a person that – even just temporarily – seems to shimmer with something a bit unworldly: a tiny flash of superpower, a hint of the mage.Once you find these moments in your book, I think it’s good to ask yourself the question, ‘Am I making the most of this?’ If you’re not writing fantasy, you can’t jump straight into magic, but you can borrow some of the tones of magic. You can introduce a note of the strange and perhaps the sacred too.A very talented kids’ author, who used to work as an editor for us, once told me that whenever he wrote a portal scene in one of fantasy novels, he always wrote it as poetry first, before tucking it back into prose. It’s that sort of attitude that I think any of us can use.Here, by way of example, is a chunk from my The Deepest Grave. Th characters are in a remote Welsh church. They have just interrupted a robbery and are trying to figure out what the thieves had been looking to find. So far, they’ve found nothing. Then:The light now has failed almost completely. The two men won’t be found unless they’re the stupidest or unluckiest criminals this side of Oswestry.The uniform goes. The forensic guy goes. The church lighting somehow just emphasises the darkness. It thickens the air into something yellowey-orange. Gluey.We regather in the vestry, just because Katie’s left her coat there.Bowen lifts the 1953 fish-restaurant newspaper out of the wooden wall box.‘I suppose that can go.’He looks glumly at the mess behind the cupboard, knowing that it’ll be his job to clean it. Katie looks into the box, now missing its newspaper floor.Glances once, then looks more sharply.‘No, that’s not right,’ she says, and starts picking at the bottom with a fingernail.I already looked under the newspaper and saw just the pale, bleached colour of old pine – pine that has never seen the sun – but that was me being dumb. Me not knowing how to see.Katie picks at the bottom and it comes away.A sheet of paper, blank on the upper side, but with writing in clear purplish-black ink on the lower.Latin text.A hard-to-read medieval hand.Bowen stares. I stare. We all stare.‘Katie,’ I say, ‘This paper? We can get it dated, presumably?’In the gluey light, she shakes her head.‘No. No, we can’t.’‘We can’t?’There’s something about this light, this thickened silence which makes everything seem slow, unnatural.‘We can’t test this paper, because it isn’t paper. It’s vellum. A dead sheep, basically, scraped clean and stretched out thin.’On the one hand, this is a cop and archaeologist just doing their job. But those comments about the ‘gluey’ light and ‘this thickened silence’ give the moment the quality of something like the discovery of a sacred relic – as though some other, more ancient, world were suddenly touching this. That’s sharpened up, I think, by a sense of these layers of history: from a 1953 newspaper to Latin text, from a sheet of paper to a sheet of vellum.Those are the signals that, if you like, lie in some external reality. But the characters’ reaction also expresses their sense of transition: ‘Bowen stares. I stare. We all stare.’ The way everything come to ‘seem slow, unnatural.’Because the characters are feeling that, the reader does too. And what could have been an ordinary moment in a detective novel, temporarily at least, wears the clothes of something deeper, older, stranger and perhaps more magical.Poetry, then prose. The magical, in the ordinary.That is a power you can seize, if you choose to seize it. I hope you do. There’s another chunk from the same book that operates as a proper portal moment: a transition that, in this case, involves a literal door. Again, I didn’t write that passage thinking about portals and fantasy and magic … but those things are present nonetheless. I’ve popped that chunk into the relevant Feedback Friday forum, so you can see it for yourself.Don’t forget about that How To Write Course. I’ve done all-new videos for it, and the feedback from the first viewers has been all positive. You can take the first lesson for free now, the rest is available for Premium Members only. Details on how to join here.FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Fantasy / MagicalThree weeks back, inspired by historical fiction, we looked at research. Two weeks ago, inspired by romance, we looked at the Absent Beloved. Last week, inspired by crime, we asked you to find mystery. This week – inspired by fantasy or any kind of magical realism – I want you to find a moment where some sense of the magical or sacred intrudes into your book. That could be:Discovery of a ‘relic’A portal momentSome shifting sense of a character possessed of a not-quite explicable powerA place that has a touch of something beyond the ordinaryIf you are writing out and out fantasy, then those moments will be easy to find, obviously. If you’re note writing fantasy, then those moments still probably exist.What I will say is that you may well find (let’s say) a portal moment in your book that slightly misses or underplays its sense of magic. So do please feel free to edit / rewrite those moments before uploading them to Townhouse. Try pushing the magical gas pedal a little and see if people like the results. You could even try writing the scene as poetry first, before putting it back into prose.I think Sofia Samatar talking about ‘the strange, the weird, the speculative’ is quite inspirational here. It almost feels more fun to me finding the strange in a book that is basically not strange.So what I’m after this week is:TitleGenre1-2 sentences of explanation, as needed250 words where something a bit like magic intrudes into your book. Some sense of a dimension beyond the ordinary. I really don’t mind if what we’re seeing here is a trace – a hint – a suggestion and nothing more. Just something to suggest that dimension beyond.I’m kind of interested to see what you make of this task. I’m quite interested to think what I’d find in my own books too.That’s it from me. We’re getting our one week of English summer this week – with actual sunlight – and the kids are celebrating by running around half-naked and building barricades in the garden. Teddy told me, quite peaceably, that he needed a better weapon, and marched off (mostly naked) to find one. He came back with an eight-foot fencepost. I didn’t intervene, but am mildly worried as to what will happen next. Post yours here.Til soon.Harry

We had a nice exercise on Feedback Friday last week – all about finding the romance between him and her, when one of the two is not present. This week we’ll be dealing with mystery – more about that below. But as of July, we’ll be devoting ourselves, for six weeks, to a complete course in writing a novel. Every week, there’ll be a (roughly half hour) video from me guiding you through particular aspects of writing. Each week, I’ll give you a task. Then we’ll all meet on our regular Feedback Friday form to upload our tasks and exchange feedback. The modules will cover: Week 1 Planning Week 2 Character Week 3 Plot Week 4 Prose Week 5 Tools (points of view, etc) Week 6 Self-editing If you are a Premium Member already, you don’t need to do anything at all – you’ll have access to the material automatically. That said, if you want a plump little video from me to plop into your inbox trussed up like a fat little partridge with bacon on top, you can register for the course here. If you’re not a Premium Member, you won’t get the course videos (or feedback from me), but you can join us here. (The cost is as little as £12.50 / about US$16 per month.) Okie-doke. Enough of that. Pigeons. I came across a great phrase the other day, from someone frustrated by a particular issue – they said it was like ‘playing chess with pigeons.’ So you think: OK, I’ll get a ready for a game of chess. I’ll brush up my knowledge of openings. I’ll play a few practice matches. I’ll push for territorial advantage early one, maybe get slightly ahead in terms of pieces, then I’ll move in for checkmate. You go to the park, lay out the chessboard – and find that your opponent is a pigeon. So you make your move. Perhaps the pigeon starts by making a few somewhat random-n-wild moves of its own. You get ahead in the game earlier than you had expected. And yes, perhaops, you find yourself picking up pieces from the ground and resetting them on the board perhaps a little more often than if you were playing a FIDE grandmaster. But you make allowances. This is a pigeon, after all. And then – ha! – you still have your queen and both rooks. You command one file completely. The pigeon’s king is trapped behind its own pawns. You are ready to move in for the kill. You make your move and say ‘Check!’ The pigeons flaps its wings and knocks over a piece. You put the piece back where you think the pigeon maybe intended to move it and – another move. One more and you’ll be ready for mate. At which – the pigeon flaps its wings, knocks everything over, pecks crisps from a litter bin, craps all over the board, and flies away. So: have you won? Or not won? Was this even chess at all? Now, I really don’t want to exaggerate, and there are plenty of really great author-publisher interactions and loads of really excellent author-agent relationships, but … Well, there are also far too many episodes where authors – trying really hard to play a disciplined and professional game of chess – discover that they have ended up playing with a pigeon. For example: The agent who gushingly requests your full manuscript, then never replies to you again. The agent who wants to take you on, but asks for some edits, which you do and send, but then the agent never responds meaningfully again. Or the agent claims to have sent your book out to editors, but never tells you who has seen it and there’s something unsettlingly vague about the nature of any feedback received. Or publishers who take your work on with mwahs and champagne, but then the marketing seems absent or just never really thought about Or your editor is changed on you, without you getting a say, and you feel that your new person is basically totally uninterested in your or your book Or your book gets published, but you get very little data on sales and very little to tell you if those sales are above or below expectation, and you relly don’t know if your authorial career is basically dead – or just stalled – or doing pretty much fine, actually. There are a million variants on these basic stories and you don’t need to hang out with professional authors for long to encounter them. What’s more: neither agents not publishers ARE pigeons, but they can exhibit pigeon-like behaviour for perfectly rational reasons. Take that change of editor issue: the new editor didn’t acquire your book. Maybe they don’t like it. That editor has a heap of other books to publish. He / she might perfectly rationally think they’d do well to concentrate their attention on what they see as their more likely wins. That’s tough on you, but no one has been an idiot. Or a publisher goes from mwahs and champagne to chilly silence? Well, OK, maybe the sales team pushed your book hard with retailers and just didn’t make sales in the expected volumes. So that publisher, has now ratcheted down its expectations from X to maybe one tenth of X. So you are now getting the treatment standard to an X/10 author. Again, that’s hard on you, and not your fault, but that’s just how it is. And? People often come to us looking for solutions. We offer (I hope) sensible, intelligent, experienced advice. But … Well, you can’t play chess with pigeons. Or, if you do, you’ll find they crap on the board, knock the pieces over and are more interested in pecking at crisps than exploring what its knights could do in a more advanced position. In the end, if others don’t act professionally, you need to do whatever you can (in terms of mitigation, trying to rescue things, etc) but accept that maybe there’s nothing much to be done. Except of course, write another book, find another publisher, sign up with another agent – or, of course, self-publish. The more omni-skilled you are (writing craft, industry knowhow, author-led marketing competence), the more your career can rest in your hands, not those of others. Meanwhile – chess with pigeons? A bad idea. Or rather, one that doesn’t necessarily offer any winning strategy. I’m playing chess with 8-year-olds at the moment, and that’s strange enough. Squawk! Flutter! Yikes! FEEDBACK FRIDAY: mystery Two weeks back, and inspired by historical fiction, we looked at research. Last week, inspired by romance, we looked at the Absent Beloved. Today, inspired by crime, I want you to find mystery in your novel. We want any moment where your character encounters a puzzle – about the past not the future – and feels its mystery. Crime fiction, more or less by definition, will have these moments, but almost any novel will – no matter how big or small the mystery, how temporary or how permanent. What I want from you is a sense of that mystery: especially the atmosphere in the room, the character’s reaction, etc. Take inspiration from these four great crime writers, and plunge in. I want: Title Genre 1-2 sentences of explanation, as needed 250 words where your character is toying with mystery, where we feel that mystery present in the room. This is an especially good task for anyone not writing crime fiction – that is, where the mystery may not already be at the heart of the book. Til soon. Harry 

We think romance is about him and her, right? That it’s Lizzie and Darcy dancing at a ball, emotions pushing at each other. Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Anna Karenina and Alexei Vronsky.And, OK, that’s true. But there are two sides to romance and they both matter.There’s romance when the two protagonists are on the page together. And the romance that happens when they’re apart. They both matter – and I want to do a little bit of dissection of both.Him and herSo here, to start with, is a chunk of early Fiona, with her at an early stage of her first important relationship. The two not-yet-lovers are both coppers. In this scene, they’re sharing a moment on the office stairs. My comments in square brackets.The door at the top bangs and Brydon’s tread starts to clatter down. He’s both heavy and light. Heavy because he’s a biggish lad, and light because he has a natural athleticism, a bounce that carries through into every movement he makes.[In any decent romance, the physical presence of the other is a note that wants to carry through into most encounters. The constant awareness plus a good splash of attraction.]‘Hey.’‘Sorry to grab you. I just had to see you. Sorry.’Brydon is on the step above me and I’m talking somewhere in the region of his belly button. ‘First things first, Fiona,’ he tells me. He comes down a step, then hoists me up to where he’d been standing. We’re still not eyeball to eyeball, but we’re a lot closer.[This shows the man being manly – taking control, lifting his girl. She’s accepting of all that – in effect playing a very traditional female role here, though she is not in general very traditional at all.]‘Do I see DC Griffiths in a dress?’ he says. ‘Have all relevant authorities been notified?’That’s Brydon humour for you, like it or lump it.‘And heels,’ I say. ‘Look.’[Here, we see both Fiona’s inner and outer worlds. The inner one notes Brydon’s rather ponderous joke – affectionately, yes, but without admiration. But she doesn’t give Brydon that ‘rather ponderous joke there’ memo. Instead, she flirts in a tiny way, by calling attention to something prettily feminine. The fact that she chooses the soft route here, not the more abrasive one, tells you a lot about her choices, her inner emotional state.]He smiles at me. A nice smile, but I know that half his mind is occupied by the clock. He needs to get off to London as soon as he can […]‘I just wanted to tell you I might need to take things slow.’‘OK.’‘It’s just . . . things can get a bit crazy in my head, and slow tends to be better than fast.’‘OK.’‘I don’t want you to think that because I—’I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, so I end up not saying anything.‘You don’t want me to think that, although you almost walked out into a line of cars on Cathedral Road last night, you’ve got some kind of death wish.’‘That’s it,’ I say. ‘That’s exactly what I was trying to say.’The scene closes with female, emotional awkwardness and a male rescue – a rescue notable for the simple directness of Brydon: he physically moves her to a better position, he makes dad-jokes, he says ‘OK’ when she signals emotional complexity, and so on. That simple directness isn’t a limitation of Brydon: it’s what Fiona seeks and needs. (And what, ultimately, will prevent their union.)What I really notice about this scene, reading it back, is that Fiona adopts, for the purposes of this early romance, the posture of girlfriend. She simplifies herself and feminises herself. It’s not fake, that. She’s flirting. She’s in love. But nor do we see the full Fiona here – the one who is quite likely to throw a bad guy off a cliff, or smoke a joint, or expose others to her abrasive humour.I think that, probably, in any early romantic scene, we’ll feel the presence of the physical, the jostle of traditional male / female roles, and self adapting to the presence of this lovely other.Her without himNow none of this is at all unexpected. But I do especially want to point out that the romance continues – and is just as intense and maybe even more so – when one of the parties is absent. Here’s how the scene above plays out once Brydon has gone:He’s off. Up the steps. Heavy and light. Thumping the door at the top open so hard that it whacks against its doorstop. The stairwell echoes with the noise of his departure… [A big male departure in other words. Even the sound of his going carries his physical presence.]I sit on the step, getting my head into shape again. My pulse rate is high, but it’s steady. I count my breaths, trying to bring my breathing down to a more relaxed range …This isn’t love and this isn’t happiness. But it’s like I’m in the hallway and can hear their music spilling out of the living room. Their laughter and candlelight. I’m not there yet. I do know the difference. I’ve had just a single date with Dave Brydon. Nothing that remotely constitutes a relationship. These are early, early days and anything could happen from here. But for once in my life, for once in my hopeless crackpot life, I’m not just in the same timezone, I’m actually shouting-distance close to the love-’n’-happiness twins.I feel the feelings, piece by miraculous piece. Bum on a concrete step. Heart thumping. A floaty green dress and sandals with two-and-a-half-inch heels. A man who hoisted me up a step because I was talking into his belly button. This is what humans feel like when they are getting ready to fall in love.I get up from my step and walk slowly back upstairs to my desk.I’ve compacted this scene quite a bit for reasons of length. (Fiona’s relationships with her own feelings is odd, so it takes her awhile to figure out her own thoughts.) But what you feel here is the huge presence of Dave Brydon, even when he’s not there. I almost want to say: especially when he’s not there.When the two of them are together, Fiona can’t get into the detail of her feelings too much: there isn’t the space to do it. With him gone? The world opens up: “I’m in the hallway and can hear their music spilling out of the living room. Their laughter and candlelight.” She can start to review those feelings in detail. Her review of the situation still includes all the elements necessary to the start of a hot (and hopeful) relationship:Self as feminine. (The floaty green dress and sandals.)Self as physically embodied. (Bum on a concrete step. Heart thumping.)Physical and masculine presence of the other. (A man who hoisted me up a step.)Feelings as rare and precious (piece by miraculous piece.)Him and him, her and herIf you only felt the romance on the page when the two people were present, that romance would fail to ignite. It would be incomplete. It’s the two things together – romance with, and romance without – that gives you your complete brew.I’ve never really written a gay relationship, so I can’t speak with authority there. But I think the basic principles remain the same. In the chunks we’ve just read, we see Fiona self-simplify, into someone more feminine than she really is, in order to get her man. That process of self-simplification will, I think, happen in gay relationships too, just not necessarily along classic masculine / feminine lines. If you have insights here, do please share them!Romance with a lower case rI’ve only once written something that would be classified as a real Romance novel – it was longlisted for a romance award and a German publisher wanted to publish it under the name Emma Makepeace. But all my novels have had the flutter of romance somewhere, and nearly all novels need them. There’s a particular pleasure, in fact, in interweaving romance and action. Both elements shine the brighter. Just don’t forget all about the romance when the action happens. If the Beloved leaves the Lover’s thoughts too long and too often, it’s not much of a romance at all.Feedback Friday: RomanceLast week, we relished an excursion into hist fic. This week, it’s all smooochy kissing and close dancing. Or actually – the opposite.Here’s a useful masterclass on romance in all its different manifestations – from a woman so prolific, she needs two names. Please don’t ignore that video if you don’t write capital-R romance. We all need to know how to write about love.The exercise this week involves scenes where your character is thinking about their beloved, when their beloved is not present. It’s your version of the ‘her without him’ bum-on-a-concrete-step scene.Specifically, I want:TitleGenre1-2 sentences of explanation, as needed250 words where your character is thinking about their loved one, without that person being physically present.I’m going to be looking for physical awareness, strong feelings, and some sense of the way that the character is being squashed into a different shape (perhaps just temporarily) as a result of their passion. Off you go – and ah! My heart beats faster, my cheeks are a little pinker …That’s it. Feedback in Townhouse as per usual. If you aren’t a Premium Member, you can’t access the masterclass. That’s it from me. Post here.Til soon.Harry

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. And yes, the military significance of those landings looms a little larger in Anglo-American eyes than it does in German / Slavic eyes, but still – golly. That invasion involved what was by far the largest invasion fleet in history. In one single day, 133,000 men landed in France, under fire. By the end of June 1944, almost a million men had been put ashore, along with 150,000 vehicles and an infinitude of supplies.Now, I happen to have one of those little author soft-spots for this bit of history. I wrote a historical novel once about the oil industry, and D-Day featured in the climax of the book. It was all very well to land 150,000 vehicles (in less than a month) – but how were those vehicles to be fuelled? There’s no oil in Normandy and slow-moving oil tankers were desperately vulnerable to attack. So … PLUTO: The PipeLine Under The Ocean. It had never been done before, but, eighty years ago, it was done, because it had to be done. A pipeline unrolled on the ocean bed to feed petrol through to the liberating army. Wow.I’m always moved by those things, but also – listening to voices and memoirs on the radio – I’m struck by the precision with which ordinary language captures the fleeting moods of history.If you had people today talking about a similar venture, they’d sound different. They’d use different language, pick out different details, have slightly different humour, and so on.For example, I heard an account of the moment, written by someone then only 8 or 9. Some American soldiers were camping out in Hampshire. And they had this ‘big bit of lamb stew’ cooked up in ‘great tin pot’. The soldiers (‘very generous’) offered the boy some of their food, and the boy, used to sparse wartime rations, clearly revered the memory of that meal.My kids are the same age now as that boy then. They might talk about a lamb stew, but they wouldn’t talk about a ‘great tin pot’ and I think they’d be a lot less likely to talk of a ‘big bit’ of stew. And obviously, they don’t even know what ration cards are or were.Now I say this, with both a narrow focus and a broad one.The narrow focus is simply this: if you’re writing historical fiction, you need to get as close as possible to the words and experiences of the people who were there. So yes, you need your grand history books: the military histories which tells you about what the US 1st Army achieved, how fast or slowly the British and Commonwealth 2nd Army advanced, and so on.But that’s background – of secondary value almost. The closer you can get to the texture of life, the better. That means letters and diaries. Scraps of newsreel. Any opportunity you get to hear or read actual dialogue of the era. What did those soldiers eat? Did they have tents? Bivouac bags? Nothing? What? Those things don’t matter much to military history, but they made up the experience of life on the day. How heavy was a Bren gun? How was the ammo for it carried? Did it jam? What noise did it make? The closer you can get to accuracy there, the better. There’s no substitute for as much real-life memoir as you can get.That’s the narrow focus, but the issue is broader too – one that affects every novelist and, indeed, any memoirist too.The presence of (actual, or very well faked) authenticity matters hugely.If you’re writing about, let’s say, ad industry execs in London, or New York, or Paris – do you have their voices right? Do you have their attitudes right?Another bit of memoir I heard on the radio today came from a (then) young woman who had parachuted into France to support the Resistance. Her job was to transmit coded messages back to England. She landed in a wood, feeling understandably anxious, but her memoir commented, ‘I thought, well, I’m here now, so I might as well get on with it.’You can just feel the 1940s matter-of-fact spirit oozing from those words. How does a modern-day, urban-elite ad exec talk? What attitudes do they unwittingly convey in everything they say / do / feel? I’m not too sure – it’s not my world – but the perfect ad-land set book will nail those things. The vocab, the attitudes, the minutiae of life.With historical fiction, the need for a certain kind of precision is clear: you can’t get History wrong. But it’s the same thing with all other story-telling too. You need to be true to your world, not just in big ways (Spitfires? Or F-22s?), but in little ones – great tin pots and the ‘might as well get on with it’ attitudes.That’s all true, even if your world is utterly imagined. You might be writing a book about a mining colony on Mars, and it would still matter what people eat, what attitudes they evince, what they call a ‘great tin pot’, what kind of footwear they have, and so on.My mother-in-law was born in Poland in 1942, to a German-speaking (and Protestant) father and a Polish-speaking (and Catholic) mother. She survived, and might not have done. Her family survived, and might not have done. They all, in time, made it to Munich and the glorious, beautiful safety of the American zone. Thank you, D-Day. Thank you, generous American soldiers and their big bits of lamb stew.Feedback Friday: Catching the moodThis month, we’re going to be tackling projects attuned to specific genres … but will also make sure that the disciplines we focus on will be applicable to most writers.Today, I’d love you to take a look at one of our hist fic classes – here - on researching your book. That has a huge relevance, of course, to historical writers, but it’ll affect loads of others too. (Even, say, people writing about mining-on-Mars. I mean, what minerals does it have? What are the Mars-specific extraction challenges …? Those things really matter.)What I want this week:TitleGenre1-2 sentences of context if needed250 words that show your research in action. Everything from tone of voice to the specifics of (guessing, here) Martian molybdenum mining.The thing that will please my soul here are things like “Well, I’m here now, so I might as well get on with it.” The tone there is just perfect for the age and the historical moment. These things are hard to pin down, but they matter so much …That’s it. Feedback in Townhouse as per usual. If you aren’t a Premium Member, you can’t access the masterclass. So um, you could join us – or invade France – or make a really big ball out of rubber bands....That’s it from me. Post here. Til soon.Harry

This week – on Tuesday if you really have to know – I did a live event for Premium Members, in which I did some live editing of people’s work. Massive kudos to the people who put themselves up for such things; hat tip to each and every one of you.There were some lovely pieces of work, include a mental-but-joyous piece on time travel and British sarcasm and anger management and English as spoken by Czechs. It also used ‘you’ as the narrative voice, which is a very rare choice but, honestly, I think it worked. (And I’m not usually a fan of fancy footwork for its own sake.)Anyway. One theme which came out of the event is, I think, worth sharing more widely.It’s this:We’re often told, as writers, that novels should be pacy. The idea is that if a novel is ‘pacy’ readers will keep turning the pages. Indeed, that proposition is so close to universally accepted that ‘pacy page-turner’ feels almost like tautology.I don’t agree. Yes, there are pacy page-turners. James Patterson is the most prominent practitioner of this approach. Pages seldom go by without a gunshot, a kiss, an escape, an explosion.But other approaches are possible. Harlan Coben (a talented guy, who’s much funnier in real life than he chooses to be on the page) writes high-twist / high-event fiction, but he pauses much more. There’s more time for character and setting to bloom. Most commercial authors follow a template more like Coben’s than Patterson’s.In the end, people turn the pages of a book, because they’re engaged in the story. Lots of explosions generates one kind of engagement, but really caring about characters generates another. The best books combine decent story with rich characters: that is, they are not-especially-pacy page-turners.Okie-doke. That’s a long preamble, but now take a look at this. (From the Countess Elizabeth von Billigerkaese. She had a uniformed flunky cross the North Sea in a rowing boat to bring us the text; she thinks email is for poor people.)Pam realised the landlady had mistaken her pause as a compliment. ‘I used to stay here with my husband. The last time was just before he became.., before he died. I think we were in this very room. It’s certainly changed a lot. I mean the rooms didn’t have an en-suite then,’ she added.‘I’m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor’s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.’‘She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.’The landlady nodded. ‘She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.’‘Oh, I’m sorry. Dementia?’Now this is good (and the passage gets better. Turns out the landlady believes in the spirit world and ‘communicates’ regularly with the dead. She assumes that’s why Pam is here: to reach her husband.) The piece is simple, but deft. Even from this tiny fragment, we feel Pam keen to please, to say the right thing. The landlady is played just right too. Not purple veils and rings on every finger. Just – a woman who really believes she can talk to the dead.Good stuff.But? For my money (and it’s always hard to judge these things out of context) we want a tiny bit more here. So Pam says to the landlady, ‘she was so kind and a great cook…’ That’s clearly Pam’s version of the socially necessary politeness. Oh, it was your aunt who used to run this place? You probably quite like her. I should say something positive.But that doesn’t tell us what Pam really thought, so that’s something we might want to add. And what about Pam’s dead husband? He’s in Pam’s thoughts, because she’s here, in a place where they used to stay, remembering their last visit. And the room has changed its décor. And were the breakfasts all that good anyway?Now, we can’t just fill in every detail that occurs to us – we don’t want to drown the text – but we can do something.I wrote something impromptu on Tuesday, which I can’t now recover, but it went something like this:‘I’m so glad you liked it here enough to come back. Your last stay would have been when my aunt and her husband ran it. I took it over three years ago. I probably even still have the visitor’s books from when you stayed. Auntie kept everything.’‘She was so kind and a great cook. The breakfasts were what kept us coming back.’Pam wasn’t sure that she had been a great cook. The breakfasts were abundant and full of meat, and her husband had loved them. But the only time Pam had cleared her plate, she ended up feeling rather like the new bolsters on the bed: overstuffed, yellow, inert. A slight sheen.The landlady nodded. ‘She loved the business, not that she remembers much about it all now.’That’s the addition of 50 words. That’s hardly going to capsize things, but here we have:1.      Pam’s real thoughts as opposed to her purely social ones.2.      Something connecting this dialogue back to her husband (whom she is surely thinking about.)3.      Something that connects to the physical setting.4.      And something that connects to the theme here. Those references to meat and inert bolsters put a little scent of death into this scene, without our needing to name it.Now, of course, I don’t know the book and maybe this added piece of text is quite wrong for Pam, or her husband, or for the theme, or whatever. But assume that Countess Elizabeth sits down in her Schloss and adds 50 words of text to her own specifications that picks up the four elements above – inner Pam, husband, setting, theme.Her book has just got a little less pacy, and a little bit more layered. Less shortcrust, more puff pastry.Has it got better or worse? I’m pretty diddle-dum-certain that her book’s just got better – and not least because this is a significant passage. It’s the one where the book’s Big Idea is about to be introduced.Layering matters, and you can do a lot with a little.That’s it from me.The Countess Elizabeth is annoyed with me. She handwrites her book on vellum made from calves reared on the Billigerkaese estate. Each time she makes a correction, it’s a lot of rewriting – and a lot of calves.Feedback FridayThis is self-editing month and the task this week picks up from the event on Tuesday – and this email.Please pick a passage where you sense a bit more layering is needed, and add those layers in, just as I did above. Aim to add about 50 words to a 200-word passage, but you can add 75 if you really must. You get points for lovely writing, of course, but in particular, we want to see you adding a lot of layers in as few words as possible. My 50 words above added four new layers to the text. See if you can do the same, or better.What I want is:TitleGenreA line or so of explanation, if needed.A 200-word passage with 50-75 words added in bold. The text you add should add layers of depth and richness to the passage you started with.Got that? You’ve got that.That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to rescue some Bavarian calves … Til soon.Harry

Because I’m charging around in Wales with the kids – I’m going to keep it short this week.One thought and one thought only:There’s a heck of a lot of luck in writing.The way we talk – the way I talk – often suggests that if you’re just good enough at your art and craft, you can force your way to success. And that’s just not true.For sure:A strong elevator pitch is the single most muscular thing you can do to maximise your chances. And I don’t mean that you write your book, then come up with the best single sentence with which to pitch it. I mean roughly the opposite of that. I mean you come up with a brilliant idea, then you write the book of the idea, then your pitch can be any old phrase that gestures at your brilliant idea.But yes, the pitch matters.Then too, you have to be able to write. You can’t achieve any kind of success without basic competence … but there are plenty of commercially successful writers who don’t have huge literary talents. Their sentences work, but never sing. That’s OK. That can definitely be enough.And then on top of that, if you can actually write well, it really boosts your chances, not least because agents and editors do recognise good writing when they see it and they want to be close to it. They want to help it along.But …It’s still a game of luck. If three big supermarket chains take your book – based off little more than a title and a book cover – and if they sell that book at a nice little discount – then your book will be a bestseller. It’s not about whether the book deserves it or not. Just that number of feet walking past a well-displayed and sweetly discounted title WILL produce sales.You can’t produce that outcome by force of will. A publisher can’t either. They all play the same game and all want the same outcome. They’re all professional. They all make nice book covers. They can all put together decent catalogues. They all know how to pitch.Self-publishing is less chancy to be honest, but even big-selling authors don’t really know whether Series X is going to succeed as well as their big hit Series Y. They can put the same craft and market intelligence behind both, but in the end, they don’t know until they get the book out there.So don’t judge yourself by sales. Aim for sales, yes – I always do. But it will be the Lady Luck herself, in her green-hemmed gown, who will determine whether you win or lose or just muddle through to some kind of draw.Light a candle, eat a shamrock – and write another book.Feedback FridayLast week, another elevator pitch discussion kicked off (here; you need to be a logged into Townhouse to view that link.) The discussion is all good and the topic really, really matters. Take an owl ‘n’ imp refresher here.Then just give me your pitch.Let’s shake this up and you can give me:Ingredients: 2-4 ingredients only. So your pitch looks like “teen romance + vampires”. Very short, and not even a sentence.Short, messy: A short pitch (<15 words) that is for you only. It’s not going to go on a book or a movir poster, so keep it scruffy please.Short, elegant: this is the line you want on the movie poster of your book. Or the back-of-book headline.Longer version: Up to 50 words.You don’t have to do ALL those pitches. Just offer what appeals. If you’ve done this before, then repeat the exercise but with a different book.***That’s it from me. Post yours here. Very normal service resumes next week.Til soon.Harry

Last week’s Feedback Friday was all about synopses, so we’ll talk synopsis in a moment … except that first, obviously, we need to deal with a squirrel.At the weekend just gone, my kids found a dead squirrel in the garage. We think maybe it was Haselnuss, a squirrel who used to eat out of my girls’ hands a year or two back. Now, I won’t swear to the animal’s identity, but clearly any dead squirrel in the hands of 8 to 10-year-olds needs proper ceremonial burial, so we dug a grave beneath her favourite tree and did the honours.That sounds sweet and sombre, and it was, but there was also a bit of mucking about. Getting Haselnuss to ‘wave’ her paw at people to say good-bye. Pretending that she was coming back to life and wanting to bite people. Wondering whether she was moving in her grave as we scattered the earth.The kids liked all that so, no sooner than our maybe-Haselnuss was laid to rest, they demanded a really scary story about a squirrel.Since we had a car journey ahead of us anyway, I obliged. The ingredients: a dead squirrel with an unusual marking – an upside down cross – jolts of static and apparent movement in the corpse – a thunderstorm – strange sounds in the loft and night – a displaced tombstone in the churchyard – a village myth.And so on.The hardest thing with making up these stories on the hoof is exactly the same as the challenge with writing a synopsis. You have to figure out what your story is. What’s the arc? What’s the beginning, middle and end?With a kiddy story made up to while away a car journey, it’s easy enough providing the bits of detail. The grey film over the dead eye, the sudden flash of being in a still corpse, the rain and thunder of the darkened churchyard. But to get the story to work, there has to be some kind of coherent shape. And that’s hard.It’s the same challenge in a synopsis, and people almost always think about the synopsis backwards.To get the synopsis right, you need to understand two (or maybe three) things. They are:Your synopsis is one of the many daughters of your elevator pitch. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? Your owl, imp and box refresher is here.) Your synopsis has to deliver on the basic promise of that pitch: to show how it works in terms of story.An agent doesn’t give a dead squirrel’s tail about the minutiae of your story. They can’t. They might read 30 synopses in an evening, and that’s about as fun as eating a plateful of brickdust. All an agent wants to see is the basic shape of your story. Does that shape look right? Does it feel satisfying?The maybe-third thing to know is that agents don’t care too much about the synopsis. It’s probably the last thing in your submission package that gets read. It’s also the least important. Agents vary in how much importance they attach to the synopsis but, honestly, some of them barely care.Now, a synopsis is, supposedly, a summary of the book. So most writers think, logically enough, that they need to get accurate with their synopsis. Chapters 25-31 deal with Astral’s difficult journey to the White Kingdom. You’ve calculated that you can spare 35 words with which to deal with those chapters. You tie yourself in knots trying to come up with the most compact summary and are deeply torn as to whether or not you need to name YANOK (114, a dwarf of poisonous temperament).But stuff that. Who cares? Those kind of worries arise because you’re thinking about the synopsis backwards: from 100,000 word book to summary.You need to think of it the other way round. From concept to summary – and ignore the 100,000 word manuscript completely. The point here is that:Shape is everything.So forget about the hassles en route. Just say, “Astral makes a difficult journey to the White Kingdom, where …”Your synopsis needs to honour and reflect your elevator pitch.It needs to show the shape of your story. The more detail you are able to omit, the better your synopsis gets.That’s it.Feedback FridayGetting Published Week #3 / Opening PageFirst week, query letter. Last week, synopsis. This week, the bit that matters: opening page. I want:TitleGenreYour opening page. No more than 300 words or soAttaboy. Attagirl.And don’t forget: we’ll be selecting opening pages from Feedback Friday to discuss at our live critique event this coming week. To be considered for that, please post your material by Monday. And if you don’t want your work to be shredded live in front of a baying mob of (erm) very nicely behaved JW members, then please mark your submission as “NOT FOR LIVE REVIEW”.***That’s it from me. Post yours here. I’m off to reset a few tombstones in the churchyard.Til soon.Harry

Today I am wearing:Gleaming leather boots, in blackSilk pantaloons in duck-egg blueA ruffled shirt worn open to mid-chestA tattoo, only somewhat visible, of a humming-bird in flightA wide leather belt worn with a pistol and a scabbard shaped for an estoc-style stabbing swordA black hat so wide of brim that passers-by are frequently startled, as though by an unexpected eclipse.None of this is relevant, however. I’m talking about marketing.Specifically (and this is now about number 5 or 6 in my ‘walking the talk’ series of emails), I’m talking about how I’m intending to market The House At The End Of The World.We should start, I suppose, by clearing up the misconception that selling self-published work involves a huge amount of self-promotion on social media.I do as it happens have accounts on both Facebook and Twitter (though not Insta and not, yeugh, TikTok.) But I haven’t posted on either place for years and have no intention of breaking that godly habit now.No. Marketing a book is about four things:1. A very good book2. A very clear elevator pitch3. A set of marketing assets (notably book cover, title and blurb) which honour that pitch, while at the same time recognising their own specific role in thingsAnd then:4. Getting traffic to the relevant Amazon book page.That’s it. That’s the whole deal. Everything else is essentially footnotes.If yelling about myself on Twitter worked, I might have a go at doing that. But it doesn’t. I have a friend who had a tweet go viral – a million plus views – while he had a pinned post beseeching people to buy a very well-reviewed ebook, then on special offer at $0.99.A million views. A special offer. And …He sold ‘low single digits’ extra books. Maybe he sold none at all, in fact, as the possible bump in sales was so small it could have been just noise. In short: nonsense on Twitter just doesn’t work.So, I need to get traffic to Amazon. Social media won’t do that. What will?Here’s what I’m planning to use:1. Email. This is still the bedrock of every indie author’s marketing. It’s still by far the most powerful and controllable tool that exists anywhere.2. Promo sites. There are book promo sites which tell their users (by email) about hot new offers. I’m planning to grab a bit of that loveliness.3. Facebook ads. These aren’t the highest converting ads in the world (people go to Amazon, not Facebook, if they want to buy a book), but the ads are easy to build and the potential traffic is more or less infinite.And that’s it.What’s more, I’m not going to spend much time with this stuff. I mean, yes, there’s some prep needed to get ready, but my actual marketing campaign will last a week, then end. I’ll probably aim to do a Bookbub promo later in the year (across the whole series) but the actual launch campaign will last a total of seven days.That may sound weirdly short to you, but:1. The most powerful book-marketing system in the world is Amazon. Your job is not build an alternative to Amazon. Your job, as author-marketer, is to prompt Amazon into doing what it’s best at: marketing books, and yours in particular.2. Amazon’s marketing bots get going when they see a title achieve sales from outside of Amazon’s system.3. But those bots don’t love one-off sales spikes. They love steady and (ideally) growing traffic over 4-7 days.4. If you create that kind of sales curve for Amazon, Amazon will take over and do the rest itself.Now, it’s true that sales success on Amazon is a fairly short-lived affair, but that short-livedness is deeply embedded in its system. Short of being an EL James, your book just will have a relatively short time in the sun. That doesn’t matter. The secret of successful burst-marketing on Amazon is: Do everything you can to boost sales (in a steady way) in that first week, end up with high visibility all across Amazon’s system, then enjoy the profits as you gently float down the sales rankings.Indeed, it’s perfectly OK if my first-week marketing loses money. I hope it won’t, but I really won’t mind at all if it does.That sounds like a bad approach to take, but hear me out.The traditional way of figuring out whether an ad makes money or not is this:1. Figure out the cost of 100 people clicking on an ad;2. Figure out the number of those people who end up buying the book (probably 5 or so);3. Figure out the revenue you earn from those 5 or so people;4. Compare those revenues to the cost of achieving them.That number is quite likely going to show a loss.But …Some of the people who buy my latest release will fall in love with the character and the series and dive back through the six previous novels. That’s extra money for me.And how much visibility I’m getting on Amazon has to do with my overall level of sales. So if I artificially boost those sales via Facebook, my overall visibility will improve, which will bring me a host of organic (no cost) sales that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.And of course, the higher I manage to drive sales during that launch phase, the longer and richer the post-launch sales trajectory will be.And my books are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, so it’s not just sales that will come my way but income from KENP page reads.All these things will definitely earn me money. So that early burst-marketing can’t sensibly be measured simply by the amount of cash it makes during the week of launch itself. And, look, I should also be clear that if you’re a newbie, your mileage will vary. I already have a good footprint on Amazon and Amazon knows exactly who my readers are. It just takes time – and books – to build that footprint. There are no shortcuts.And the really glorious thing about this plan of mine?Burst marketing is intense, but it’s short. I don’t have to worry about finding evergreen ways to make money. I’ll hardly even bother (unless I happen to find a miraculously successful ad.) I’ll just blitz for a week, then let everything drop. If I secure a Bookbub promo later in the year, I’ll run the whole cycle again then. But two weeks of marketing effort in a year? That seems more than acceptable to me. Honestly, it’s harder work being trad published: you’ll spend more time interacting with your publisher than I’ll spend this year on marketing.If you’re interested, we’ll do a somewhat deeper dive into the art of the Facebook ad in a week or two.FEEDBACK FRIDAY | FEEDBACK FRIDAYThis week, we love our Premium Members so much, they’re going to have Feedback Friday not once but twiceWrite with Jericho / Week #9 / Self-EditingHomework link here (Premium members only.)And tis with a sob and a sigh and a hi-de-hi that we come to the end of our Write with Jericho course. (The good news: we have fab things starting next week, and we’ll keep going with the goodness all year.)The challenge here is simple-bimple. We want the first 250 words of your novel, beautifully self-edited, and wearing its best frock.Specifically, please, I want:TitleBrief genreYour elevator pitch: either the one you did before or a polished up version of thatThe first 250 words (ish) from your manuscriptReflections or Questions. I’d love to get any feedback from this course. What worked? What didn’t? What did you get from it? We’re going to run an even bigger and more in-depth course later in the year and we’d love to learn from your experience of this one.Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Title of your WIP, Genre of your WIP’.Getting Published / Week #1 / Query LettersThis week, please take a look Becca’s Query Letter Workshop (here; Premium Members only) and then post your query letter here for review.As always, the best feedback comes from you all, so please don’t just post your query letter – be generous in offering others constructive advice. He or she who giveth is also he or she who receiveth. Becca Day (our marketing queen, but also a published author) will be offering her feedback too.And, since I’ve disclosed what outfit I’m currently wearing, I think I should tell you that Becca is equally glam. She’s wearing a floor-length dress adorned with a mass of faux ostrich feathers in brilliant white. She looks amazing, but we have a major problem with static electricity and are working to unstick her from the ceiling right now.Til soon.Harry

Today, I put on a pair of deerskin breeches, a red coat with tails, and a kepi, adorned with a fistful of white ostrich feathers. Thus adorned, I present:An extremely short, but beautiful emailOn Cover Design –This is the fourth email in a loosely bundled series on Walking the Talk: an attempt to show you guys how the things I yap on about in these emails actually translates into the decisions I make as a writer.So: cover design.In my boxes, owl & imp email on elevator pitches, I wrote:“The cover quote and the book blurb and the cover design and the query letter and all those things: they are the daughters of your elevator pitch. They spring from it, but they are not it.”That’s true. The elevator pitch is the magic juice which underlies everything else. Literally every time your manuscript touches the world, the elevator pitch should inform what that touch looks like.But the pitch doesn’t necessarily have to dominate – it just has to play its part.Cover design is probably the single clearest illustration of this. Yes, a cover design can’t be at war with the elevator pitch … but the first job of the cover design is to get someone to explore the book.Cover designers (understandably) always want authors to look at the full, 4 quadrillion megabyte version of their cover image, and ideally on a 96” screen. That, for sure, is the best way to admire the cover designer’s art. But in practice, the most significant role of the cover design is as a thumbnail on an Amazon selection screen.At that stage, the thumbnail’s job is mostly: “Induce someone to click through to the book page itself.”You can’t completely ignore the elevator pitch: if you stick a sign in your shop window saying “Brilliant new summer dresses at 75% off”, there better blooming well be some summer dresses inside the shop when people walk in.Same thing with the cover design. There needs to be reasonable continuity between the promise made by the thumbnail and the more detailed view offered by the book details page.But if you had to rank the order of priorities here, it’s something like this:#1 Goal Attract readers in your genre(ie: get the click)#2 Goal Honour your elevator pitchBoth goals matter, but the first is more important.I write gritty crime – so my genre is something like Celtic noir / police procedural. Because my book is #7 in a series, a lot of the design decisions are already set. That said, my elevator pitch (covering both the book and the series) is something like this:Homicide detectiveUsed to think she was dead (Cotards Syndrome)Murder investigationSecure psychiatric hospital50 special forces veterans as inmatesI want a cover design to (a) fit in with the other covers, (b) attract readers in my genre, (c) be consistent with the promise that will be made on the book details page itself.And …?You can see the results here:https://harrybingham.com/fiona-griffiths-book-7-cover-decision/You like? You not like? Do let me know.Oh yes, and an interesting issue came up with my designer.Actual hard-copy printing is done using a four-colour system: CMYK, which comprises cyan, magenta, yellow and key, meaning black. What you see on screen is RGB-based, namely a mix of red, green and blue.My designer couldn’t get the “pop” in CMYK that he could get in RGB: the colour was more muted. That said, he thought that maybe the more muted colour looked classier overall, more stylish. He thought maybe we should tone down the ebook / RGB version of the cover.And …?Viewed as a pure design matter, he was probably right. (He usually is.) But remember that selection screen, where all you have is a thumbnail. I didn’t want muted, I wanted the pop, so we went for the zingier version. The first job of that cover is to secure the click.Again, you can see the book cover choices we made, and a couple we discarded on this page. Let me know what you think.Feedback FridayWrite with Jericho Week #8 / Show Don’t TellIf you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.Here’s what I’m after:TitleGenreA passage of 250 words. Take any scene from your work, and convert it into a screenplay. No interior monologue. Nothing in the script that you couldn’t film.Then give your own feedback on the scene. What has it gained? What has it lost? What (if anything) did you learn from the exercise?That’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Show Don’t Tell, Title of your WIP, Genre of your WIP’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.Til soon.Harry

An odd topic this time: the author’s note. I’m currently writing a note for The House at the End of the World and realised that it’s a topic almost no one ever addresses.That note is not something that anyone ever seems to care about. It seems less consequential than a synopsis or query letter – and, in any event, much easier to write.But you have to think about what you want from writing and how you expect to achieve it.Maybe, you’d love to get one book accepted by one publisher and that’s it. Perhaps you don’t want or expect to make a living from writing. You may not want or expect to be writing a book a year. Perhaps the idea of marketing your own work fills you with horror.And that’s truly fine with me. Those aims are perfectly honourable and your life is your life. If you’re one of those people, then this email is not especially aimed at you.For everyone else – everyone, that is, who wants something like a career from writing – then the author’s note matters.It matters for two reasons.First, because it gives you a chance to make a personal connection with the reader. Your text itself is your product. People want (let’s say) a crime novel. So they go to Amazon or a physical bookstore and buy a crime novel. A huge proportion of novels are never finished by their readers (especially literary fiction, ahem.) But that means, if someone gets all the way to the end of your novel, then chooses to engage with your author’s note, they’re well on the way to being fans.What do you want to do at that point?If you were at a physical book signing, and someone asked you to sign a book, telling you that they were a fan, what would you do? Would you scribble your name on the inside cover, tersely hand the book over, and yell ‘Next’? Or would you engage in a couple of minutes’ conversation? Would you seek to cement the relationship which the book itself has started?Of course, you choose the latter option. I mean, if you have the sentience of an amoeba, then of course you do.You do that because you are a naturally nice person, of course. But you also do it, because you are more likely to get a repeat purchase from someone who has bonded with you, no matter how glancingly.The author’s note is a place to create that bond.It’s not as good as face to face, of course, but one note can reach tens of thousands of readers. It’s a place to be personal, revelatory, funny, honest. It’s a place which can show your personality, shorn of the constraints placed on you by fiction.If you do it right, people don’t just think, ‘Oh, today I finished a great crime novel.’ They think, ‘Oh, today I finished a great crime novel and I feel that I made some little personal connection with the person who wrote it.’ That’s the start of a relationship which leads to multiple purchases over multiple years.That’s the first reason.The second reason is that you can parlay that moment of connection into an actual marketing tool.Every serious author today ought to run their own email list. It can be very cheap and easy to set up. (Use MailerLite if you’re starting out, Convertkit if you’re more ambitious and more techie.)And your author’s note can say, “Hey, folks, if you liked this novel, then join my Readers’ Club.” Best practice is to offer a little gift in exchange for any sign ups. Roughly speaking: if you give me your email address, I give you a story that’s free and exclusive to club members.Remember that in ebooks, that invitation – join my Readers’ Club – can use a clickable link to take readers straight through to your sign-up page.And once you have readers on your mailing list, you can stay in touch. You can tell them jokes, share news and enthusiasms … and, of course, announce book launches.I won’t get into the details here, but suffice to say a small but well-run email list can generate sales well above the size of the list itself.There are multiple ways to seed your email list with names, but no question at all, the very best technique comes from harvesting enthusiastic readers who have just finished and loved your book. Those are, pretty much by definition, the very best emails to have.So use that note.Don’t be crass. Be seductive, not pushy. Be authentic … but maybe, be your best-authentic self, not your woke-up-on-a-rainy-Friday-with-a-headache authentic self. And ask for readers’ email addresses.They’ll be happy to give them to you.Feedback FridayWrite with Jericho Week #7 / Point of ViewIf you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.This week, the task is important … but optional. It’s really focused on anyone who’s not sure about their POV choice. If you’re happily first, or third, person, then just go with that. There’s no especial reason to rethink it. I’ve never once thought about writing my Fiona novels in anything other than first person, and the result is about 800,000 words all written, first person and present tense, from the inside of Fiona’s head.But, OK, plenty of people are worried about the decisions they’ve made, and this exercise is for them. Here’s what I’m after:TitleGenreA line or two of explanation, if neededA passage of 300 words or so. Choose a passage where you’re not too certain what Point of View feels right. Pop that passage (max 300 words) on Townhouse and say what your issues are. Let’s see what others think. And if you want to offer the same passage with two different POVs, then please do. Just make it clear what you think your preferred version is!That’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘POV task, Option X, [Title of your WIP]’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.Til soon.Harry

For Feedback Friday last week, we wanted to look at whether your characters are multi-dimensional.We asked: does your character have physical sensations? Memories? Characteristic patterns of behaviour / speech / thought? Do they have real-seeming interactions with other characters, where those interactions honour the individuality of each person? Does the character have a sense of humour? And so on.It’s a hard task, actually, because it would never make sense to cram every character dimension into a single 300-word passage. Quite the opposite. Those multiple dimensions are there to be called on as and when the story demands. If the story doesn’t demand (say) the character remembering stuff from their childhood, it would make no sense to try and insert some Interesting Recollection, just for the sake of it. My forthcoming novel might have, I don’t know, perhaps a dozen significant memories in the space of 10,000 words, and that feels plenty.Also: although we tend to separate things like Character and Settings for the purposes of teaching people how to write, those things should always bleed into each other.If you’re seeing an autumn wood through the eyes of your character, the reader should experience both wood and character. It’s always X’s experience of Y that the reader wants to encounter.So – and again as part of my ‘walking the talk’ series of emails, I thought I’d take an extended chunk of my forthcoming book and talk through how I personally handle these challenges.The point here isn’t so much “I’m a really great writer so you should do these things exactly like me.” It’s more that I feel queasy about lecturing about things if I don’t show some ability to exhibit those things in my own work – and, at the very least, I ought to try to do those things.So here we go. Here’s a chunk from towards the end of The House at The End of the World. Fiona, a detective and my lead character, is walking in the grounds of a secure psychiatric hospital with one of its patients – Jared Coad, a former Special Forces soldier with severe mental health challenges. The situation she’s in should be acutely dangerous, but she doesn’t quite feel it that way. The passage follows, in italics. My comments are in square brackets and bold.You might want to read the italicised passage first, before coming back to the comments.There’s an outcrop of limestone at the tip of the headland. Glittering and pink. Orange lichen. Moss. A hardy little mat of stonecrop, a few whitish flowers still holding on.[It looks like this paragraph is pure description, albeit voiced in Fiona’s characteristically terse manner. And, OK, it mostly is pure description. But when you really look at it, the description echoes the title and the elevator pitch. The “tip of the headland” – that is, the very outermost point of this strip of land, which itself lies ‘at the end of the world’. And that thing about the hardy mat of stonecrop and its flowers is an observation about survival – about life and death. That is the deepest theme of the entire series.]We scramble up the rock. I hardly need assistance, but Coad offers a hand and I take it. He lifts me with that startling physical ease. A power that finds it hard to calibrate itself against my sub-fifty kilo weight.[Coad is a very strong, fit man, so this passage characterises him a bit, but it also brings Fiona’s own physical being into play. She’s a small woman. He’s a strong man. This tiny bit of action observes those physical facts – and does so in a way that’s totally consistent with the moment.]‘I served with a girl once,’ Coad tells me. ‘Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Part of the set-up in Hereford. She was good. Very fit. Didn’t take any shit.’I wait for anything further, but nothing more comes. But perhaps that’s all Coad needs by way of summary. Good. Fit. Takes no shit.I score two out of three, then.[This is Coad’s way of talking – and Fiona’s way of not talking. It also gives voice to Fiona’s interior observation – and the reader will know Fiona well enough to know that she is good, doesn’t take any shit, but isn’t especially fit.]‘Have you thought what you’ll do?’ I ask.‘What? After you fuck off to whatever you fuck off to next?’‘Yes.’‘Yes. As in: yes, I’ve thought about it.’‘And?’‘Fuck knows. Staying here was never in the plan.’‘No.’[In fact, what happens is that Jared Coad decides to swim out to sea and drown himself. This bit of dialogue is setting up that future. But again, I hope the dialogue feels realistic, or realistic enough, and has the personality of the two participants in it: Coad’s sweary military directness, Fiona’s intelligent but economical language.]We look at the sea for a while. There are rolls of wire out here too, but we’re on the highest point of the headland here and the wire lies below us, not out of sight exactly, but almost. Enough that it doesn’t have to bother us.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.[Jumpy and agitated? We are approaching the climax of the book, so the sea here is providing a visual image for the mood of the story itself. And there’s something else here too. This bit of land is beautiful – a lovely part of coastal Wales – but is also, effectively, a prison with more-than-Supermax levels of security. Is it hell or heaven? It hovers between the two, but here, the wire is out of sight which means that the heaven version tends to dominate. Again, there are shades of the ‘house of the end of the world’ theme here, and the ambiguity in what the end of the world might signify.]Coad: ‘You know, you think, if you could get out, you could just stay away from trouble. You know, like you live on some remote Scottish island or something like that. You’d be OK.’I nod. ‘Yes. I can see why you’d think that.’‘But then, you know, you’d meet other people. Someone would do something to piss you off. Not even a big thing. Just, you know, something.’I think of Rashford and Edwards. Or the two builders he assaulted. The guy with his head in a cement mixer. The other tossed into a roll of razor wire.I say, ‘Yes. Something would come along.’‘So …’He says nothing further, and I nudge him.[More dialogue. Coad is worried that he wouldn’t be safe out in the world, so, for him, leaving this hospital is probably not an option. Fiona agrees with that opinion, but here a little fragment of memory comes into play – remembering the violent incidents that brought him here as patient – and her here as detective.]‘I should get going. It’s almost twenty to seven.’‘OK. Yeah. OK.’We walk back to the hospital, taking a looping route to stay clear of the admin wing, the view from their windows. Coad says that before seven o’clock, there won’t be any staff activity on A-Wing itself. That we’ll be in the clear.That’s all very well, but as we arrive back, the patients are still at their windows. There’s more clapping. Also, a few mimed suggestions as to what we might have been doing out on the headland.[The other patients – also psychiatric inpatients with a history of violence – can observe Fiona and Coad on their walk. The ‘mimed suggestions’ are obviously crude and, given the men involved, probably very crude. Fiona is conscious of the sexual chemistry between her and Coad but she’s also a woman with an appropriate sense of her personal boundaries. That phrase picks through those issues as well as she can – but in doing so acknowledges herself as a sexual being – yet another dimension of character.]Coad says, ‘Don’t worry about those arseholes. I’ll deal with them.’‘Does “deal with them” mean “beat them senseless”? If so, maybe you could just leave it.’‘Sure?’ he asks, as though querying a takeaway order.‘Yes, Jared. I’m sure.’‘OK. That’s good. Swinford’s a big fucker.’That makes me laugh. I’m not an unqualified admirer of all of Coad’s choices, but he has a basic integrity that I like.I say, ‘Oh, I bet you could take him.’[There’s some authority here from Fiona – authority and wisdom. She understands what ‘deal with them’ is likely to mean and steps in to avert some unnecessary acts of violence. Also: we see Fiona here (and Coad) as moral creatures: each operating according to their own code of integrity. The moral dimension is pretty much essential to any deeply considered character.]I butt his upper arm with my head and reach for his hand. We walk hand in hand to the hospital. I can’t quite look directly, but I have this sense that Coad is going red. But he clearly likes it. He holds my hand in a grip that’s too firm, but also gentle. We feel like a boy and a girl on their first date. Not a modern one, even. Like some pair from the fifties, where he’s come round to fetch me from my parents, calling my father sir, and bringing a little gift for my mother. I’m the same. I’m in my flared skirt with a short-sleeved blouse and bobby socks and hairband. I am a thing of pastel prettiness and line-dried cotton, and Coad is a young man of seventeen, with short hair, meticulously gelled, and a smart jacket, and an ironed shirt, and no injuries, no damage, no war, no history.[This is pure fantasy, of course. Coad is about to die and Fiona’s life too is about to be in serious danger. Also, Fiona is about as far from a thing of ‘pastel prettiness and line-dried cotton’ as you can get. She knows that perfectly well too. So what is this passage about? I think it has to do with a yearning for a simplicity greater than either of these two can manage. And yes, there’s some sexual desire going on here, but the desire for a world without violent complication is even more prominent than that. It’s like the whole ‘house at the end of the world’ idea has been scrubbed away and replaced by this lovely – and utterly impossible – fantasy.]I’m acutely self-conscious, saved only by the belief that he’s the same. He squeezes my hand in an on-off-on rhythm that’s meant for my reassurance, I think, but is also for his.We march stiffly to the door at the base of A-Wing. He opens the door – with his keycard, of course. Except for my presence here, this is all within normal hospital limits. He holds it open for me, a good boy, attentive and courteous.I go through. My card, the regular one, permits me to exit any red-zoned area. It gives me access to my staircase and my tower and my room and my safety.I am on the threshold of my parents’ house again. There are moths fluttering in the porchlight. My hair-gelled beau has delivered me safely home and I have a decision to make.I stand on tip-toe and kiss Coad on the mouth, again. Privately, just for him, no one watching, no public display.More than a sister. Less than a lover.As I pull away, I give him real eye contact too. His grey-blue eyes fix on mine. The intensity is there. The troubled quality. But something else too. A softness. Gratitude maybe, although I have as many reasons to be grateful to him.[And we’ve returned to the world of the hospital with its keycards and red-zones and all of that. The kiss seals some kind of deal that they have. Some kind of sexual/romantic agreement, but also an agreement that has to do with the remaining action in the story. The gratitude they feel to each other is another character dimension in operation.]Doing this exercise surprised me, in fact. I was startled to see how deeply and repetitively the themes of the novel emerge in the text: that hardy stonecrop and its flowers that just about manage to survive. I didn’t put that in because I was thinking about my elevator pitch. But I’ve so deeply absorbed and understood that pitch, it just pops up whether I’m thinking about it or not. That’s nice to see.And when I started this, I thought, “Oh gosh, I’m not going to find that many character dimensions in any one bit of text.” But this chunk (about 900 words in total) has physical observation of the landscape, thinks of Fiona as a physical being, as a sexual one, as one with memories and gratitude and humour and authority and morality and desire. Now, OK, this is an important passage between the book’s two most important characters. It needed to be fairly rich. Other passages of equal length might be significantly less rich in dimensionality.But that, roughly, is what character multi-dimensionality should look like. Not something to be forced into the text, but something that arises naturally when you write well and know your character intimately.Feedback FridayWrite with Jericho Week #6 / DialogueIf you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.A really brilliant task this week.I want you to choose a scene (max 300 words) between two different characters in which each wants something from the other and are trying to get what they want (eg: money, information, intimacy, etc).The key here will be not just the conflict, but some sense of subtext heaving under the surface. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.I want:TitleGenreA line or two of context for the scene & charactersThe scene itself, max 300 wordsThat’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Voice Task, Option X, [Title of your WIP]’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.Til soon.Harry

As you know, I’m a writer – or I used to be.But a little while back, I had the idea of making the Writers Workshop (as we once were) into a bigger, sleeker, better Jericho Writers. I wouldn’t say that the idea was a bad one exactly – I’m fantastically proud of the work we do – but it had more of an impact on my writing than I had expected.Now, and thanks entirely to the incredible team we have at the top of JW, I’m in a position to step back and write some books.And that means that …Finally ….I’m getting very close to …The release of a new Fiona Griffiths book: THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD.Given how long it’s been since the last Fiona book graced the shelves, that feels like a very big ta-daa. It will be the seventh book in the series – and the penultimate one. The next book will be the big, and series finale when all the storylines from the series will finally come together.I’ve adored writing these books and, if it’s not nuts to say so, I’ve adored knowing Fiona. She and I have enjoyed our time together.It’s great to be back in the saddle, but I’m also pleased because I’ve never much relished the sight of writing tutors who don’t write. If I offered to teach you carpentry, you’d rightly want to see a table I’d made. If my table was rubbish, you’d draw the obvious conclusion.So, in the run-up to publication, I want to talk you through different aspects of how I conceived the writing and publishing of the book. The point here is simply to connect these (somewhat theoretical) Friday emails to the (intensely practical) topic of how I actually approach my writing.We’ll start this week at the very beginning: with the book’s basic elevator pitch. (If you want to remind yourself about my thoughts on that topic, this email is probably the best place to start. It’s the one involving 11 boxes, 2 imps and an owl.)OK, so what’s the pitch?Because this is a series novel, it has two pitches: one for the book and one for the series as a whole.As you know, the pitch for the series is something like:A homicide detective is in recovery from Cotards Syndrome – a genuine condition, in which sufferers believe themselves to be dead.If that feels too baggy, the pitch works fine like this:A murder detective who used to think she was dead.I probably prefer the longer version: it’s important that these are not fantasy novels and have no speculative elements. But hey ho, you can choose. I don’t care.The past novels in this series have sold well and have an established fanbase, so a lot of those readers will buy this book just because they trust me to deliver. But each time I release a new title, completely new readers enter the series, decide they like the book they’ve just read, then start back at the beginning.In other words: the pitch for the new book matters too. And that pitch goes something like this:A Fiona Griffiths murder mystery set in a secure psychiatric hospital, populated by special forces veterans.If you put the two pitches together, you get something like this:Murder detective, who used to think she was dead, has to solve a crime originating in a secure psychiatric hospital, populated by special forces veterans.That’s 25 words long, which is longer than I generally recommend for pitches, but seems acceptable, given that this pitch is explaining both the book and the series.As you know, I also don’t mind pitches that just collapse into a list of ingredients. With this book, that list runs roughly like this:Homicide detectiveUsed to think she was dead (Cotards)Murder investigationSecure psychiatric hospital50 special forces veterans as inmatesYou only need to assemble that list to notice two things. (1) A secure psychiatric hospital is likely to pose specific and extreme challenges to someone with Fiona’s mental history. (2) The special forces guys are probably quite dangerous and probably don’t much want to be locked up for the rest of their lives.I hope that you look at that setup and want to know more. And that’s the point of any pitch, right? To prompt further investigation. If you’re a fan of crime novels, I’d hope that this pitch piques your curiosity. If it has, it’s worked.The Daughters of the PitchI’ve written before that the elevator pitch is for the author, and only the author. That’s why my own pitches are notably rough and ready. I don’t really come up with the same formulation any two times in a row. I don’t bother to come up with a line that could sit comfortably on a book cover or a movie poster.But the pitch has many daughters, and those daughters all need to honour their parentage.The daughters that any author needs to consider include:TitleBook coverFront cover quotes / shout linesBack jacket blurb / Amazon book descriptionBack jacket quotesQuery letter [if you’re not agented and want to be]Other marketing material: social media content, social media ads, email content, and so onAll those things need to line up behind the pitch. They can’t be inconsistent with it, and they should do what they can to broadcast it (while at the same time, performing their own specific role.)If all this sounds a little vague – well, that vagueness is deliberate.Take my title, THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD.Clearly, no title can cram an entire ingredients list into a few words. If I had to try, it would be something like CRAZY COP IN PSYCHO HOSPITAL DRAMA. That ticks more boxes, but it’s a terrible title. Remember that a title needs to do several things:Work well with the chosen cover design,Be suitable for the genre – that is, appealing to the right group of readers,Honour the elevator pitch.None of those three things are optional. If you choose a genre-unsuitable title, for example, your book just won’t sell. That’s not a requirement where you can compromise, even a bit.Likewise, the title really has to work with a cover design: two elements that work in tandem. It’s not uncommon for a cover designer to come up with a brilliant cover, which then prompts a change in the title. This has happened, in fact, with several of my books.For all these reasons, a title need only hint at the elevator pitch. It’s part of a “first impressions” package, where cover design is the other absolutely key ingredient. (I’ll talk cover design for this book in a later email.)With this book, I hesitated over the title and, ultimately, was torn between whether to use the word HOSPITAL or HOUSE. I went with the latter, largely because the word ‘hospital’ is arguably misleading. The word conjures up normal hospitals, not a place heaving with hyper-fit special forces soldiers. Also, the word ‘hospital’ somehow pulls the book away from the crime genre: they’re places of healing, not multiple murder, and I want a sense of murder to lie heavy over the book.Obviously, though, it’s the final phrase which does the work. Those words – THE END OF THE WORLD – allude to a lot of things:To the hospital’s remote location,To murder: for a number of the characters in the book, this story really does bring about the end of the worldTo Fiona: for her, this case does almost spell the end of the world, because of her mental vulnerability,To the situation of the special forces veterans themselves: when they were sent to this place, and with no prospect of release, their lives were effectively ended.Now obviously, the words in the title alone don’t convey all that. But there’s a limit to what any title can ever do. And a pitch, remember, is there to prompt further investigation. Nothing more. So if someone is intrigued by the book cover and title combo, all we want them to do next is explore the blurb. That’s where the pitch can start to expand from mere hints to a fuller presentation of what the book offers.More of all that in another email.Oh yes, and I did just want to say that the whole Write with Jericho / Feedback Friday thing is being intensely brilliant. We launched the current course as a bit of an experiment but the level of engagement has been just fabulous. We’re going to do more and go bigger. If you’re already a Premium Member, then do get stuck in. If not – well, do think about joining us for our next big course.Feedback FridayWrite with Jericho Week #5 / CharacterIf you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.A difficult one this, just because character is something that expands and finds its range over the course of 100,000 words. Trying to find a passage of c. 350 words that does everything in one place is definitely a bit artificial. I’m a decent character-writer myself but would struggle to find a single passage that displayed everything in one place.That said, here’s the exercise.Choose a passage of (absolutely max) 350 words, which shows off your character as being fully alive. Some of the questions we’re interested in is whether your character feels:Distinctive (not clichéd)?Lifelike?Multidimensional?In a nest of relationships?In the physical world?Has a full set of emotions?Coherent?Surprising?Choose ONE passage, to a maximum of 350 words, and share it. Please also include:TitleGenreBrief context for your passage, including why you like it and what your doubts might be.Remember always to give feedback on other people’s work while you are there. Can I ask that you offer at least 5 comments on other people’s work? That way, you put out good juju and good juju will surely seek you out.That’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Voice Task, Option X, [Title of your WIP]’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.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.

This email is something of a follow-up to last week, so if you didn’t like last week’s missive, I strongly suggest you ditch this one IMMEDIATELY before you LOSE ANY MORE OF YOUR LIFE to what I can only honestly describe as PURPOSELESS NONSENSE. If that means you aren’t sure how to spend the next four minutes, let me offer you:My daughters’ favourite guide to different horse breedsSudoku for idiots, and I do mean idiotsA collection of botanical reliefs by the mighty Rachel DeinA discussion of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida.An excellent video that gives you a step-by-step guide on how to set fire to your hand, or indeed any other part of your anatomy. [My 7-year-old safety adviser says: “No, not your head.” She’s right.]Right, then.Knowledge and ignorance.We all know that it’s important to give your characters character. So, we think about:Physical appearanceThe way the person dressesTheir close relationshipsTheir jobTheir childhood and family backgroundTheir special skills (riding? Martial arts? North Siberian dialects?)Their memoriesTheir objectivesTheir valuesTheir personalityAnd so on.And good. All this is good. It’s necessary. If you haven’t done this good, patient, multi-dimensional work, you need to do it. The more you know the character, the more that knowledge will flood your writing.Some of the things you know about your character will almost certainly enter your writing directly. (Your protagonist had a hideous car accident on a level crossing when a teenager? An accident where he was at fault? Where others were seriously injured? You’ll almost certainly want to let that life-defining incident seep into your story somewhere.)Other things may not directly enter your writing. Your character grew up in a Wiltshire village? He can still remember the blue curtains with yellow flowers? The lumpy bed? The low cottagey ceilings? The hens from next door who used to invade their summer games of cricket? Well, some of that might get into your book, but a lot of that knowledge is simply there if you need it. It’s on hand, accessible.The simple guideline is: Your knowledge of a character is sufficient, when anything you care to reach for is immediately present.To be sure, there’s a sleight of hand involved here. It’s not that you create a stock of knowledge before you start to write and are limited to that stock as you proceed. On the contrary, it works more like this: you develop your imaginative knowledge of your character to the point at which the thing you need (the memory, sensation, response, clothing choice, observation) leaps to mind the moment you need it. It’s as though you reach up to get a cup from a shelf and the act of reaching creates the cup.The thing that’s key here is simply: is the option supplied by your imagination right for the character? For the story? Has a specificity that seems personal rather than general? So there are plenty of people, for example, who grow up in English villages, but there’s something unique feeling about the exact blue-and-yellow curtains / lumpy beds / cricket ‘n’ hens combo.OK. All this is good, wholesome stuff. But what I really want to talk about is ignorance and uselessness.When I made a list of character traits above, you won’t have balked at my inclusion of ‘special skills’ on that list. If you made some kind of character inventory before starting to write, you almost certainly ticked that box.But what about ignorance and incompetence? No one is a genius at everything. No one is even ordinarily competent at everything. The great philosopher may be a dullard in the kitchen. The martial arts ninja may have terrible taste in clothes. Or (to think of a character close to my heart) a genius detective may well also be:A terrible cookAn underwhelming girlfriendForgetful of extremely basic facts about her own lifeA very undependable cleanerUnnervingly unpredictable in conversationAs infuriating as she is brilliantAnd so onThe gaps are at least as interesting as the superpowers, and perhaps more so. If you create a character with one or two superpowers (a martial arts ninja who is also an acclaimed sushi chef) that character will inevitably seem a little flat if there are no deficiencies to offset the accomplishments. Your character will always have an air of fantasy about him or her, and that air of fantasy prevents proper connection with the reader.Another issue is the loss of the opportunities for humour that idiocy offers. There’s a particular joy in relishing a character’s idiocy just a page or two after you’ve relished their brilliance.And –Really, the secret of good writing is to force a reader to engage deeply. The deeper that engagement, the more attentive the reading, the more fully that book will satisfy its audience. And if a story keeps tacking between “Wow, how did they accomplish this?” and “What kind of an idiot would do that?”, the engagement is more or less guaranteed.Now, to be sure, I work with a highly coloured character and these things are more visible with such characters. But still – an illustration may help make the point, even for people who run with more everyday characters. So, I once wrote a fight scene that had Fiona in ninja mode: breaking a bad guy’s jaw with astonishing speed (and after astonishingly little provocation.)Those kind of fight scenes are standard thriller-fare. But then Fiona gets incredibly shaky. Walks to a bus shelter. Has an inane conversation with the only other person there. (Him to her: ‘Are you all right?”. She to him: “I don’t know.”) Then she walks smack-dab into the Plexiglass wall of the shelter and bruises her forehead. Goes home, has a bath. Smokes a joint. Does some real detectiving (phoning round hospitals to see if she can find the man with the smashed jaw.) Keeps pressing the bruise on her forehead because it reminds her that she’s real. Then calls her boyfriend and has a flirty conversation with him, which she knows is somewhat fraudulent (she’s only high because of the fight and the shock afterwards.)It\'s just not possible to steer an orderly path through this lot. You can’t just go, “Oh, Fiona’s great at everything” or “Fiona will certainly behave like X”, because the truth is that she’s just not predictable that way. The deficiencies in Fiona’s character keep setting potholes in the way of a more orderly progression.It’s the same with knowledge. Fiona’s knowledge of the law and police procedure is exemplary. Her knowhow around certain sorts of law-breaking is alarmingly high. She knows plenty about cannabis cultivation. She has pockets of surprising knowledge – history, geography, books – but there are huge gaps too. She knows not the first thing about cooking. She’s ignorant of anything mechanical. She has no dress sense and no interior design sense. She doesn’t know anything about popular culture. (In a very early tale, she had to puzzle out, slowly, that Clint Eastwood was a movie star.) Her grip on office politics and gossip is erratic at best.The result of this is that the reader can’t predict my character’s journey. Not from the start to the end of the book, but not even from the start of the page to the end. That means the reader has to pay close attention, or they’ll miss something. The more predictable your character is, the easier it is for the reader to start skimming.And skimming is death.That’s more or less it from me, except that – while we’re on the subject of death – please do read the PSes below before you start setting any part of yourself on fire.Oh yes, and it’s Good Friday next week, which is an actual holiday, so I’m going to take an actual holiday. That means no email from me next week. Normal service resumes the week after.Til soon.HarryPS: That setting yourself on fire thing? It’s real. I have set my arm on fire and it’s fun. I can’t advise you to have a go – in fact, please don’t do it, because it’s obviously unsafe. But if you are fool enough to do it, then do it outside. Make sure your arm is thoroughly wet (with ordinary water, not butane-spiked water) before you start. And have a plunge bucket (again, ordinary wet water) ready for emergencies.But, yeah, better not to do it at all.

Right. So:In one of the Bond movies, Bond and The Girl (in this case, Madeleine Swann, played by Lea Seydoux) are standing at a rail-stop in the desert when a car approaches, shimmering out of the dust. Swann says, ‘What’s that?’, which is not a dumb question, because the vehicle is barely visible. Bond lets the car get a little closer, then says, with a kind of satisfaction, ‘That is a 1948 Rolls Royce Silver Wraith.’And look: this is a movie, not a book.And look: a Bond movie is more of a fantasy movie, than it is a realist one.And look Bond is Bond. We appraise Bond movies according to a general scale of Bondishness. Ordinary critical tools are not strictly relevant here.Nevertheless, Bond is a useful way to explain the temptation. Bond’s comment there tells the reader that he loves vintage cars and is at least somewhat expert in them. In other movies, Bond shows a similar expertise in wines, in Russian military secrets, and much else.The movie makers (and Ian Fleming, the author) are at pains to characterise via expertise. Bond knows about the good things in life (wines, cars, watches). He knows about the violent things in life (guns, weapons, and the rest.) The viewer or reader understands something of Bond’s character from the knowledge he chooses to display.But – Bond is a fantasy, given licence by its fame. Your novel does not have that licence. Let’s say an author creates a character who is (why not?) a professional escort with ambitions to become a spy. She’s with a client and comments ‘He wears an Alexander McQueen double-cuffed shirt, with custom-made silver links. A Patek Philippe Nautilus gleams from beneath the cuff …’What are your thoughts as a reader?The author, I think, wants you to have two things in mind. First, this character lives in a world of exciting luxury and, second, that she has a kind of enviable expertise to share. The knowledge she has lends her a kind of class.I’m not sure that either of these things is achieved. As a writer, you want to get the reader feeling present in this world of luxury. For me, and for most readers, that will not be achieved by a list of brand-names. I can’t picture a Patek Philippe Nautilus. I’ve no idea how an Alexander McQueen shirt looks different from any other kind of shirt. As a reader, we don’t think, ‘Yes, I feel present here …’. We think, ‘Oh, the author wants me to know that this is all very luxurious.’ That second thought is a hopelessly poor substitute for the first.Once upon a time – when Ian Fleming was writing, for example – technical knowledge did, I suppose, bring some cachet. “Oh, Ian Fleming must know plenty about wines if he says that the Petrus ’54 was markedly better than the ’57.” But today? Phooey. We all have Wikipedia at our fingertips. We can all know as much of anything as we want. (Even my nine-year-old has achieved a strange degree of expertise in her chosen discipline: “Which horse has more stamina, a Morgan or a Connemara …?” “How many hands is a Welsh cob?” “Is a Friesian horse good for beginners …?” My wife and I have promised to buy her a horse, once she has saved up enough to buy a field to put it in.)The really severe problem, however, is that in most cases the rush to brand-namery ends up emptying the character. So, honestly, how many people can tell from a brief glance at a watch peeping from beneath a cuff, what make and model it is? I’d say almost none. Even the Patek Philippe-wearing crowd wouldn’t be able to do that. Presumably a seller of posh watches could tell one from another. Ditto anyone deeply involved in the industry itself. But who else? Virtually no one. So either our escort has a side-hustle as a saleswoman. Or she’s just peculiarly interested in watches. Or (in practice) the author is simply steam-rolling the character in order to get a brand-name in.You can’t do that. Your character is the most important element of your whole book. The most delicate. If you crush her – however temporarily – for the sake of a brand reference, you have diminished your reader’s attachment to the person whose job is to get the reader through the book. That’s never a choice worth making.If you want to show that your escort character is comfortable with this kind of environments, you need to do so in a way that reflects who she is. This kind of thing, for example:“He spends a lot of time adjusting his jacket, his shirt cuffs, the gleam of his watch. Before the end of the evening, he’ll have to mention what kind of watch it is. The less classy types – that is, most of them – tell me how much it cost. The lowest figure I’ve been given is eight thousand pounds. The highest is nearly hundred grand. To begin with, I assume they were bullshitting me, that these numbers were all part of the brag. Now, I think the numbers are pinpoint accurate. Money is the only metric for these people, the one thing they never lie about.”That passage still shows expertise of a sort: an expertise in sleazy rich guys. It also displays a useful sliver of ignorance. She doesn’t really know about the prices of these things. Her judgements are to do with people, not watches. The result is that the passage enhances her credibility as a character. We’re further into a fictional world, not pushed out of it. We feel the world that the author wants us to see, but we encounter it in a way that places character first. That’s the way to do it, always.I don’t write about high-luxury environments myself, but I have included in the PSes a chunk of one of my Fiona Griffiths books, in which my character (operating undercover as a low-paid, semi-homeless cleaner) enters an upmarket winebar. The bar is not remotely at the Patek Philippe level of luxury, but the step from Fiona’s current life-level to the bar is a big one. I don’t mention a single brandname in the chunk below, and don’t need to.You’ll need to read the passage to see if it works, but if it does, it achieves its effect by:Using simple, telling detail – a hole in a boot, a sodden foot.Using descriptive language that explicitly avoids excessive knowledgeImagery that emphasises distance, not belongingGetting the character to behave in a way that’s wrong for the place she’s in.Simple to say and, phew, simple enough to do.I once bought a knock-off Rolex in New York’s Chinatown for $10. It looked really nice until all the gold rubbed off, but even then it had a kind of charm. If I had $100 million, I still wouldn’t buy a fancy watch. My little Tabby might get a pony though …Til soon.HarryPS: Here’s the chunk. My comments in square brackets.I was here early. Six twenty. Have been walking up and down since then looking in at the warmly lit windows and feeling out of place. One of my boots has a hole in the sole and my foot is sodden. [Simple indicator of poverty]But in the end, I go in.It’s a smart bar, nicely done. Dark wooden floor. Scrubbed wooden bar. Lots of heavy fittings: oak casks, brass nautical lamps, a huge glass bowl filled with wine corks and dried hops. [Nothing resembling a brandname, let alone expert knowledge. The opposite, in fact. These are observations that anyone at all is capable of making.]I stand, dripping, in the entrance area as men in suits and women in tailored outfits talk, laugh, fiddle with their phones. [Again: the opposite of brandnames. The emptiness of that phrase, tailored outfits, almost says, ‘Look, I expect other people would know how to describe those clothes better, but I don’t, because I’m not of that world.]A waiter with a stubbly beard and a blue neckerchief approaches. He’s wearing a smile but I have this vision of him simply clearing me away, the way you might if you came into your kitchen and found a dead pigeon or a stray drowned mouse making a mess of your scrubbed limestone floors. [A characteristic Fiona-ish image, but again one that emphasises the huge gulf between her and this place.]I stand there, dripping, waiting to be tidied. Wet cotton mops and metal buckets.But I’m not tidied. Vic [the person she’s here to meet] 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. [She does the wrong thing, socially, in this environment. It’s not just the badness of her clothes. She doesn’t know the right way to behave.]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. [Ditto!]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. [Vic does know the right way to behave and his unfussed accuracy of behaviour is a better clue to his social milieu than the kind of watch he chooses to wear.]

Benjamin Jowett was a Victorian professor of Greek, a theologian and a college reformer. Photos of him have a somewhat stern and whiskery air, but he is responsible for one of my favourite quotes ever:We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps have found it. But have we had any fun?I love that. As writers, we’re not all that interested in truth, so perhaps we can rephrase: We have sought a decent story, and sometimes perhaps have told one. But have we had any fun?That quote is in my head because it occurred to me this week that perhaps my best books are also the ones I most enjoyed writing. It’s certainly true that the ones I most laboured over ended up proficient enough, but less joyous in the reading.For example:My first ever book, The Money Makers, had less craft in it, less knowledge of writing technique, than anything else I’ve done. But it was powered by a great concept and burned with a kind of pleasure. That pleasure does, I swear, transmit itself in the reading. You end up just plain liking the book and, as a result, you’re inclined to forgive its lack of sophistication.My non-fiction history book, This Little Britain, was a passion project for me. I had to write it at extreme pace (big advance, short deadline) and the book somehow benefitted from the resultant lack of reflection. I had to dig in, write fast and enjoy the ride. A longer writing time would have delivered a smoother read, but a more engaging one? Maybe not.Of the Fiona Griffiths novels, the one I probably enjoyed the most was The Deepest Grave. That book is plain bananas: it’s a police procedural about a hunt for relics of King Arthur. The novel ends up with a swordfight in a cave. There’s no writing manual on earth which says you can write a realistic modern-set police procedural about such things, but I did, and I loved it, and my delight in the subject matter echoes through the book. Of all my FG novels, that’s probably the one that has most resonated with readers.Overall, I think it is true that a joyous writing experience leads to a better reading experience.That’s nice to know in one way. Most writers could make more money in other jobs – or indeed, use those other jobs to fund their writing time – so it definitely matters that writing is fun.But …Life ain’t always easy and writing isn’t always pleasurable. What happens if you are finding the writing a slog? The joyous writing = good writing rule is a comfort if you’re having fun. But doesn’t that also mean that painful writing = bad writing? In which case, the rule seems to double your troubles.I think maybe it does.I do strongly believe that you should write mostly for the fun of it. If you’re not actually under contract to a publisher, then why write if you hate it? Of course, in any book, there’ll be tough patches that you just have to push through, but that’s the same as any challenging hobby. Overcoming those challenges is part of the joy.But some books have the joy/challenge balance wrong. The joy’s never quite enough, the challenges rather too constant.So what to do? As usual, I don’t really know the answer, but my personal cocktail of solutions includes the following:KBO. This was a core part of Winston Churchill’s philosophy on life. If women were around, he expressed it as “KBO”. If they weren’t, he said it plainly: Keep Bu**ering On. (I’m only putting in some coy little asterisks there, by the way, because I reckon this email will end up in your spam folder if I don’t. I’m sure you could handle a pair of missing Gs.) In the end, an ability just to push through the tough patches is the single most important quality of any writer.If possible, take a break. And the breakier the break, the better. A sharp change of routine – a holiday, a love affair – is going to work better than “everything the same, but no writing”.Related to the above: if you have a life problem to deal with, then deal with it. I know that’s easier said than done, but it is often the shortest and best way.Figure out if there’s a technical flaw somewhere. A big one this, especially for less experienced writers. So often enough, you start a project with enthusiasm. At about the 30,000 word mark, that enthusiasm starts to dissipate. Then you write more text, but it just seems pointless. You don’t like what you’ve written. You give up. And often, often, often it’s because of an identifiable and fixable technical fault. So it could be something you’re doing wrong in terms of points of view. Or your sense of place. Or your plotting. Or almost anything. Those things will make your writing seem bad (because in this one specific way, it is bad). Then, since you don’t know what the issue is or how to fix it, you just give up. That’s where better skills help massively – and a JW manuscript assessment or a writing course will most likely sort you out.Cut. Oh my goodness, this is so simple and so powerful. If you are telling a good story in 120,000 words that you could express equally well in 90,000 words – and it’s very, very common to see such things – then you have attached a huge drag anchor to your narrative. It can never leap free because you are burdening the reader with 30,000 purposeless words. Cut, my friend. Cut more than you think you can cut. Take joy in cutting. You will feel your manuscript lift and surge forward in the water. It’ll love you for the surgery. Be ambitious.The dagger in the table. And sometimes, simply enough, a narrative starts to drag because it’s a bit draggy. The set-up is great. The ending you have in mind is fantastic. But the bit in-between? It’s all a bit ho-hum. So kill someone. Or have a bank robbery. Or have someone get abducted or buried underground. Offer a mid-story incident that shatters the shape of the story that the reader was expecting. Write a novel with two climaxes. Plunge the dagger into the table and watch it quiver.Ask yourself: have a nailed the basic concept for this novel? If you don’t have a stellar concept, your novel will never be stellar. If your concept – your elevator pitch – just isn’t all that strong, the novel will essentially be unsaleable no matter how many nice little plot turns you have in chapter 22, and no matter how quirky you make Aunt Maisie. And if you have embarked on a novel with too little zizz, then add it. You don’t have to scrap what you’ve written and start again. You just have to find the ingredient – a ghost, a murder, a secret letter, a splash of magic, a something – that gives life to all the rest.That’s it from me. This is now the second day of a school strike. We had seven kids in the house yesterday – my four plus three others – and five today. School returns tomorrow. School and quietness …Til soon.Harry

I’m reading a book at the moment that came recommended, a psychological thriller about a small, close group of friends.I’ve started the book. I’m seventy pages in. I already know I won’t finish it.The problem, a terribly common one, is that I haven’t bonded with the characters. They don’t feel like real people. If I’m honest, I can’t tell one from another, or not really.Now, quite likely, part of the problem is me. I’m TERRIBLE with names and faces. Always have been, always will be. I forget character names in my own books. I fail to recognise people I know and have chatted with extensively. My uselessness in real life probably carries over into books too.But good characterisation should still overcome reader idiocy. Perhaps I might be slow to assemble the characters in my head, but I should still get there in the end, no? I shouldn’t be fifty pages in and still have no meaningful idea of who these people are.Also – alarmingly – this book has avoided all the common pitfalls. So, the author has:Been sure to give the characters distinctive names. They’re not all Amy, Anna, Alice and Andy.Given them distinct physical characteristics. We have (inevitably) the pretty sexy one, the hunk, the dark scowling one, and so on.Put a bit of zing in their dialogueEndowed them with plenty of interpersonal history, likes and dislikes, divergent backgrounds and so on.It looks like the author has done all the things she’s meant to have done – all the things that the writing books suggest. All the things that, erm, helpful weekly emails on writing advice are likely to suggest.So what’s the problem? Why do some books never quite ground themselves? Why do some characters end the book still feeling two-dimensional and unreal?The short answer – I’m not sure.The longer answer is threefold.First, I’m confident that you can’t just introduce your characters in a rush. When you’re at a party, that “Harry, meet Amy, Baz, Charlie, Dino and Esmerelda” thing doesn’t really give you a chance to remember who everyone is. But if you get five or ten minutes chatting with Amy before you get to meet Baz, and so on, you’re likely to win this game. Amy is no longer just a face and a name. She’s now someone who comes stored with her own little fact-file. When you meet Baz, you have enough data on Amy that she can safely be put into storage as you meet Baz.I think the same rule applies in books. Slower introductions are better. And if, for example, your book just does have a group of characters turning up in a cluster – a group of friends meeting up for a long weekend – you can still split them apart. Amy and Baz can hike to the house from the rural train station. Dino and Charlie can score a cheeky snog in the kitchen. Esmerelda can just be late (she’s always late) and arrive in a flurry at the end of chapter two.And then too, I think you need to look away from, not directly at, the issue.What I mean here is that you don’t solve the problem of character identification by aiming to provide a torrent of quick data. “Hey, reader, you haven’t met Charlie before, so here’s a quick summary of what you need to know. She’s the tall, blonde, pretty one, OK? Gifted at university (studied English), but wasted in a sort of glam-but-dead-endy PR job. Blah blah blah.”That kind of introduction, especially if it comes amongst a spatter of other such introductions, is likely to wash over and through the reader. I think they just don’t work.Instead, just show your characters in action. Then it’s simple: just tell the reader what the reader needs to know to make sense of the action. So let’s say that two or three friends have gone out to dinner. Leaving the restaurant, Charlie breaks a heel. You now have a perfectly sensible opportunity to describe her clothes. You might well use the chance to describe her appearance more generally. (“I could see passers-by looking over at us. A woman, blonde and pretty, in a silver sequinned dress, lying on the pavement. You can tell they thought she was drunk, and perhaps she was a bit …”)You’re still conveying data to the reader, but you’re not doing so by presenting an index-card of facts. You’re doing so by telling a story. The reader doesn’t feel engaged by the index-card approach (it feels like work), but they do feel engaged by story (it’s why they’re reading.)The third trick, I think, is that you can do much less than you think. It’s easy to think that you need to do it all: How tall is our pretty Charlie? What’s her eye colour? What do her mum and dad do for a living? Can she ride? (I bet she can ride.) Was she academically strong? Is she lazy? Does she love kids?The more facts you shove at the reader, the more the reader is likely to resist.And – it doesn’t matter.Your mantra can be simply this: tell the reader what’s necessary for the story. Not more, not less.That way, you’re not asking the reader to keep track of data that they don’t need. You’re giving them only what they do need, when they need it, in a way that slots logically into your story. Right at the end of the PSes, I’ve put a chunk of text from early in a novel – a group of five people going out to dinner.What’s interesting to me, reading that chunk back in the light of this email, is how brusque I am. Two of my five characters aren’t relevant longer term, so I essentially discard them. I tell the reader next to nothing about them.The other three do have longer term relevance, but even here I present virtually no character-data unless and until it becomes relevant to the moment in question. So one of the characters – David ‘Buzz’ Brydon – is a fit, intelligent, capable, courageous police officer. He’s not introduced like that, until it becomes relevant. Then, when the story needs him to run, Fiona says simply, “Buzz, who’s superfit …” That data slots so naturally into the story, that the reader just absorbs it with the story. There’s no sense anywhere of an index-card being presented.With Buzz’s colleague, Jon Breakell, it’s the same thing to start with: appearances don’t matter. Then Fiona asks him to stay with the two women and he “puffs out his not-very-mighty chest and indicates his willingness to protect the women from all perils and dangers of this night.” That’s still hardly a complete physical description, but you already have something about him that’s memorable and presented in a way wholly congruent with the story-task at hand.Buzz and Jon Breakell start to take shape as the story takes shape. The reader’s expected knowledge of those two keeps exact pace with the story itself.You can do the same. Go slow. Stick with story. Do less than you think you ought to.That’s it from me. I’m off to buy a coffee and have a swim.Til soon.HarryPS: Here’s a chunk from a (not yet published) Fiona Griffiths novel. The chunk presents exactly the conundrum we’ve been talking about: five characters to introduce early on. My comments below [In square brackets and italics] show how I’ve been thinking about things …I know this that a crime has taken place because a group of us have been out to dinner.Me.Buzz – Sergeant David Brydon – my first proper-proper boyfriend and the man to whom I was once engaged. [Boom. One piece of data here and it’s a big one – hard to forget. But nothing about appearance or anything else. Just a single fact.]Penny Haskett, the blushing damsel who will, next summer, step into the ivory satin shoes that I vacated and trip fetchingly up the aisle to become the first Mrs Buzz. [Penny Haskett doesn’t really feature in the novel, so I just offer the key bit of data – Buzz’s fiancée – and move on. I don’t care if the reader forgets her name. I haven’t bothered to do hair colour and all that, because it doesn’t matter.]Also two fig-leaves: Jon Breakell, a colleague of mine in Major Crime, and Jade Harding, a friend of Penny’s whom Jon is courting. Jon and Jade will make a good couple, I think, but they’re here mostly because the whole me / Buzz / Penny triangle can still feel a bit weird at times, so we try to dilute the experience wherever possible. [Jade also has no longer-term story relevance, hence no real pretence at an introduction. Jon Breakell is a character who emerges again, but he isn’t relevant in the story NOW, so there’s no need to deliver data now.]Anyway. That’s our fivesome. We’ve been to a bar, then on to a pizza place.Pizza. Puddings. The works. A nice enough evening, except that it’s got to the point where everyone wants to go home.So we troop up the Hayes, beneath a soft night sky and the first hints of oncoming rain. We’re talking of nothing much, when Buzz’s phone bleeps a text. He looks at the phone and says ‘Crime report. Up here.’His finger points us up the Hayes, where it forks off into Victoria Place. He starts walking faster. I can see he wants to run, except he doesn’t want to abandon his Intended.I say, ‘Jon, can you stay with Penny and Jade? We’ll meet you up by the castle.’Jon nods. Puffs out his not-very-mighty chest and indicates his willingness to protect the women from all perils and dangers of this night. [As soon as Jon becomes relevant to the story, he starts to take shape. Fiona is characteristically colourful in the way she speaks about him, and we still don’t know hair colour or family background or that kind of thing, but we start to feel Jon because we see and feel him in the setting of a story.] Buzz and I jog, then outright run, up Victoria Place, then down Church Street.Buzz, who’s superfit, says, ‘Double assault. Ambulance on the way. Uniforms present. Sounds nasty.’ [Now we start to get more data about Buzz – he’s fit, he’s efficient in a police-y sort of way – but again, we only get data relevant to the situation.]I don’t comment, just run. The truth is, if the scene is already being attended by police and ambulance services, our services aren’t really required. Buzz isn’t even a detective these days. He now runs a Data Intelligence Team which helps the force direct its resources to where they’re most needed.But still. Buzz is the kind of man whose boots run towards disasters, not away from them. My own, more elegant, boots share that same basic mentality. [More data in these two paras. Again, directly relevant to the matter at hand.]Victoria Place.Church Street.The NCP car park on Quay Street looms into view.Two ambulances there, lights lazily flashing. Patrol cars too. Uniforms taping off the street. [That’s it. Only a few hundred words, but we already have a loose sense of the emerging protagonists and – because the two spare women have already been discarded – we’ve also been effectively told who it’s safe to forget about. Very simple. And I bet you remember who’s who.]

The start of your book is a delicate, beautiful thing.It has a joyous quality for sure. Something like cracking open an egg, the peep of new sun, climbing on board a train, feeling the flap of a sail, a rope straining at its mooring. You only get that feeling once per book, and it’s worth relishing.You can go big, if you want to. You can start in the middle of a bar-room brawl, with bottles flying and chairs thwacking. Or you can start with something apparently small, except that the wriggle of a little story-worm catches the reader’s attention and, dammit, they find they’re hooked.But, of course, there’s another issue with beginnings, a bothersome one. Because agents, blast them, start books from the beginning too and they are very unusual readers indeed. Partly, yes, they’re unusual in that they’re professionals looking for work they can sell. But also, they start reading literally thousands of novels a year. How many first pages does an average agent read? Maybe two thousand. How many actual books does an average agent read? Well, probably roughly as many as you do – or a few more, because they’re pros.Because agents read so many opening pages, they are deeply – horribly – familiar with the clichés of the genre. That means, they are exquisitely sensitive to badness in openings.What’s worse is this: the opening of your novel may well be the first thing you’ve ever written. It’s where you’re at your least experienced, not your most. That’s true in general, but it’s also true of this particular story. Midway through your book, you’ll know your characters better, your story better, your themes better, your voice better – everything better.Which means that when an agent picks up your book it’s effectively an encounter between a Story Opening Super-Analyser and a scarily undercooked Story Writer. Not fair, right?And look: nothing I go on to say in this email is absolute. You could pick some horrible cliché to open your novel with but, if you deliver that opening in a confident and well-written way, then any sane agent will read on, with interest. For everything I say below, you should bear in mind that there’s almost certainly a classic of world literature that takes the cliché and rebuilds it into something wonderful.At the same time, clichés feel wrong for a reason. If you can avoid them, you probably should. And with that said …DreamsThere’s something horribly schoolchildish about any story that starts with a dream, before, two or three paragraphs later, admitting, “Then I woke up.” It feels cool, but cool in much the same way that my kids think that making pots of green goo out of ordinary kitchen ingredients is cool. Once your age hits double-digits, it’s time to move on a bit.I think there are also two more specific reasons for concern. One is that dreams are totally unboundaried. Not rule-governed. And that doesn’t just break the laws of life, but of stories too. Even kids’ fantasy fiction has rules that govern its fictional world. Opening without rules feels disappointing – the difference between a park kickabout and a World Cup tie.The other is that, once you get two or three paragraphs in, you play that limp trick on the reader: ha, ha, fooled you, it was only a dream. That yields a feeling akin to disappointment. “You made me read this, on the premise that it mattered, but it didn’t matter. Oh.” I’d gently suggest that this is not a feeling you want anyone – still less an agent – to encounter on the first page of your novel.BedsMore generally, one agent once told me that a stunning proportion of all manuscripts she read – she reckoned well over ten per cent – opened with a character in bed. She reckoned she’d almost never, perhaps literally never, offered representation for such a book.There’s nothing obviously wrong with that. You could imagine some Beckettian novel that opens with a character in bed and keeps that character in pyjamas for most of the story. But … again, I think there are two specific issues here.One is that you don’t want to bracket yourself with the ten per cent of novels that an agent is most inclined to reject. The other is this: why is it that so many authors start with a character in bed and (usually) waking up?I think it’s that the writer themselves are warming up. They are aware of embarking on something new. Of introducing a new character to the world. So they start at the beginning: the opening of the day. As they move their character through toilet / shower / coffee / conflakes, they limber up, like your pre-gym warm-up.And: don’t warm up. Or, if you do, don’t do it on page. Don’t do it anywhere that the reader is going to see it.Poetry & prologuesThe fantasy manuscripts we see start with a snatch of poetry by way of prologue. Or if not poetry, then myth, or incantation, or something similar.And again, you’re going to tell me that Tolkein did this all the time, and maybe he did. But poetry (and myth and the rest of it) is, almost by definition, harder to penetrate than prose. An opening needs to gently lift the reader into your story vehicle and get them drifting away from the bank, the train gliding away from the platform.Forcing the reader to wade through a couple of pages of (often quite dodgy) poetry is the opposite of that gently lifting model. It’s like you’ve built a low wall in between the reader and the railway carriage you want them to get into.I talked about prologues a couple of weeks back, and they usually generate the same kind of issue. The definition of a prologue is roughly, something detached from the main story. That means you are having to gently lift the reader into your prologue and then, in the chapter following, you’re asking them to get out of that first vehicle and into another. You’ve just doubled the obstacles in the way of full reader engagement.Too much, too soonPersonally, I’d vastly prefer a dream-story, starting in bed, and written in poetry, encased in a prologue, than the beast I’m about to describe.My least-favoured story opener is with highly extreme emotion of any sort. Often some horrible situation (a prisoner under torture), but really any sort of extreme emotion, conveyed with a plethora of emotional superlatives.The reason why this doesn’t work is that stories have the quality of new social situations. You’re meeting characters for the first time. If your best friend had a terrible heartbreak sob story, you’d be prepared to listen to the whole thing, dishing out biscuits and tissues as needed. But if you had just for the very first time met a new parent at the school gate and you got the same excessively tearful download, you’d just want to pull away.A reader doesn’t care about an emotional drama for its own sake. They care because they care about a character. And that means learning them, building them, creating the knowledge that will generate sympathy.That’s the ‘too much’ error, and it’s a particular bogeyman of mine. But there’s a ‘too soon’ error as well.That error is giving away your punchline much too early. You have a world where gravity can be rubbed away via a smartphone app? Or memory works only for twenty-four hours? Or your character, a woman, is working, disguised as a man, on board an old three-master?Then great! I love it! What great ideas!But don’t tell me about them. Not on the first page, nor even the third, nor anywhere in the first chapter. Yes, of course, you scatter tantalising clues. A coffee machine that has to be pulled down from the ceiling. Reminder post-its on the mirror. Some odd piece of behaviour by a ‘seaman’ apparently remembering a husband.The clues are what tantalise. They’re what drag a reader through the story. Once you deliver your punchline (“An anti-gravity app! 24 hour memory!”), that particular sequence of clues carries no more force. For sure, other things will come along – you’ll start introducing the full Technicolor complexity of your story – but we’re talking about openings. If you want to get the reader into your story-vessel and pulling happily away from shore, then those tantalising clues are a brilliant way to maintain engagement. In time, as the reader bonds with your character, you won’t need the clues any more. But during this first chapter, don’t give the game away too early. Use the clues, delay the punchline.***That’s it from me. My overcomplicated week last week has floated into the past. The first yellow crocus nosed into the garden this morning. It’s probably regretting its impulsive decision: early February on an Oxfordshire hill is a bit unkind, even for croci. But what the heck, m’deario, and what the heck, my dearies? Where one crocus boldly goes, spring will surely follow.Til soon.Harry