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This week, I’m still fishing in our Oceans of Jewels post. I want to present one more snippet from one of you. I’m going to comment on that, in the same way was I did last time, but I also want to draw attention to an issue that crops up in probably the majority of your pieces, and especially the ones that include some real descriptive writing. That issue is so prevalent and so crucial – and so easy to get right – that it’s worth spending real time with.So, let’s take a look at another one of your snippets, taken from this Ocean Of Jewels thread.The piece is from THE TAXI, by Helen Parusel, and it runs like this:My bare feet squelch in the cold, slick sludge that spreads vast and bleak before me. Linking arms with Stefanie on one side, and Anna on the other, I wonder if this was a good idea.Yesterday, Anna pointed at the events board, and looked at me, her jade eyes glinting. ‘You are not fully integrated in North German culture until you have experienced a Wattwanderung.’I’m not sure if trudging barefoot across the cold mudflats on the North Sea is a prerequisite for integration, but assured by Anna it would be a great laugh, I signed on the dotted line.We are a group of fifteen. Our guide, Guido, white bearded and crinkly eyed, tells us that when the tide recedes, the treasures of the Wadden Sea are revealed. But he has a warning: venturing onto the mudflats without an experienced guide with knowledge of the tide time-table can be fatal. We all nod, grateful to be in Guido’s capable hands as he leads us across the UNESCO World Heritage Site.With infectious enthusiasm, he splodges along with broad, brown feet, pointing at the scuttling crabs amongst the seashells, nuggets of amber and the heaps of sand-worm burrows scattered on the beach. Our feet make strange sucking sounds as tiny shrimps shoot out between our toes. We laugh and shriek. Despite cancer. God, this is good. The gusty wind flinging grains of sand and droplets of seawater against my face. My soul rising and dancing on the wind with the Oystercatchers, screeching above. Drunk on elation. I am here.There’s a lot of quality in this. The best bit is the paragraph about the scuttling crabs and the sand-work burrows. That kind of minute, specific observation forces you into the landscape precisely because it is so specific. Before reading that sentence, you probably didn’t know that sand-worms made burrows on tidal flats (I didn’t), but by calling attention to that detail, the author has brought the beach vibrantly to life. Indeed, even if you were actually on the beach, you might not notice the sand-worm burrows, so there’s a way in which this line of text makes you more aware of the beach than if you were there in reality. (More on writing evocative descriptions.)That’s what good prose does. It explains the world – life – back to us, in a way that just being in the world can’t always manage.OK, so good. As I say, there’s plenty of good stuff here, and I like it.But let’s have a think about that very first sentence. This one:My bare feet squelch in the cold, slick sludge that spreads vast and bleak before me.What do you think of that? Do you like it? Or hate it? Or are you carefully sitting on the fence? Just take a moment to see how it feels.And – full disclosure – I have a problem with it and my problem is simply this. That sentence feels like writing. And that’s not good.Now in part, that’s just the result of adjectival overgrowth: five adjectives in a sixteen-word sentence.My bare feet squelch in the cold, slick sludge that spreads vast and bleak before me.I also think the word ‘sludge’ is a bit imprecise here. Almost anything can be sludge – apple puree, radioactive gloop, a mudflat. I think that, especially, this opening description needs something more precise, more specific.So, OK, let’s fix the sentence to address those niggles. Something like this, maybe:My bare feet squelch in the chilly mud that spreads out before me.So, I’ve vaped three of the five adjectives, and I don’t really think we’ve lost anything. The phrase ‘spreads out’ implies extent, so I don’t think the word ‘vast’ added anything much. I don’t think we need the word bleak, because we’re on a North Sea mudflat which is – duh! – made out of mud. I think the bleakness is already baked in. And the word ‘slick’ – what is that really adding? How would you distinguish a slick sludge from any other kind of sludge? I’m not sure. Perhaps the writer is wanting to call attention to the smoothness and shine of mud that hasn’t yet been trampled, but the word ‘slick’ is just too compressed a way to suggest this.Oh yes, and I’ve changed the word ‘cold’ to the word ‘chilly’. How come? Well, no reason, really. It just felt better. But I think it’s mostly because the sentence is made up almost entirely of single-syllable words and it just felt rhythmically better to break that up.So the sentence has got better, but I still don’t love it and we’re now starting to get closer to my primary discomfort. The sentence has two chunks, which can be split up like this:My bare feet squelch in the chilly mud – focus is on the narrator’s feet.… the chilly mud that spreads out before me – focus is on the extent of the mud.So that one sentence has a dual focus. Now that’s not, as it happens, usually a good thing to do with sentences, but sentences are flexible things and I’m not going to say that sentences can never point two ways at once. They can.But, but, but.Do you feel the problem? (And honestly, honestly, I’ll feel a gooey little thrill of pleasure if you do.)The issue is this.The sentence purports to convey the experience of the narrator. And the sentence sort of shouts out the kind of lessons learned in plenty of writing workshops.Look, I’m speaking in the first person! And the present tense! And I’m using a full array of senses (squelch, chilly, spreads out)! I’m showing, not telling! I’m right here in the narrator’s head!But phooey, says I.And piffle, says I. And balderdash, bunkum, claptrap and poppycock.The thing is: this sentence reads like something constructed in a writing workshop to sound like it conveys the experience of an alert narrator … without actually conveying a true first-person experience.So let’s say you, right now, were transported to a chilly North Sea mudflat. Your shoes are torn from you (politely, of course; and you’re given a chit so you can reclaim them when you’re done.) You are then asked to walk out on the mudflat.I think you experience one thing at a time. I think you bounce between sensations and thoughts. And I think you assemble the whole experience relatively slowly.Indeed, I think your experience might run something like this:It’s a strange experience stepping out on the mud. The mud appears as smooth as whalebone and I first assume it to be firm. My first steps give the lie to that. The mud is silky soft and squirts away between my toes, until I reach the hard sand beneath. It’s cold, too, the chill of January seawater. And as we start to walk, the group of us, it seems like the landscape broadens as we move. Spreading wider and wider, as we leave the dunes and beach-huts for the huge, open horizon.And look: you could write that same passage in a hundred different ways, and they’d all be fine. But I think you do need to isolate one experience at a time. If that experience is a new, strange thing – the purpose of the paragraph, in fact – then I think you need to tease it out. I think it needs two or three lines, not just the one. I think you can only move onto the extent of the sands, once you’ve properly dealt with the feel of the mud. (Or vice versa, of course. I’m not fussed.)And the real thing here – the Secret of Everything, in fact – is YOU NEED TO KEEP EVERYTHING FROM YOUR CHARACTER’S VIEWPOINT. Every detail. Every shade of every word.That dual focus sentence didn’t feel like how we authentically experience things like walking barefoot on mud. And the only thing that really matters in that sentence is capturing that exact experience. Not compressing it. Or rushing it. But capturing it and expressing it.I call that the secret of everything, because the issue is so widespread and infects even pretty good writing. Here’s another tiny snippet from that Ocean of Jewels collection. (This snippet is from Gabster’s Finding Charlotte.) Her opening para begins like this:One minute the sky was clear, then dark clouds rolled in, casting ominous shadows. Flashes of lightning on the horizon; a sense of anticipation. She tugged her seat belt tighter as the plane plunged into a dense grey massNow, again, that extract comes from a page of perfectly decent writing. (It tells of Charlotte’s encounter with a peculiar character on a flight to Cambodia. If I were reading that page, I’d turn onto the next, wanting to know what happened next.)But the problem here is pretty obvious, right? Charlotte, from her airplane seat, won’t really be able to see clouds roll in. She might see them thicken up as the plane moves, but she won’t really be able to distinguish rolling-cloud movement from travelling-plane movement. Likewise, what are the ominous shadows? They’re cast on the ground presumably, which Charlotte can’t see, because she’s in a plane. She can’t see a horizon, either, not in its normal sense of earth-meets-sky. And then “the plane plunged into a dense grey mass” might be a correct description of what happened … but that viewpoint would require an observer positioned outside the plane, so therefore not Charlotte.And so on. The result is that we can’t stay close to Charlotte’s own experience because we are constantly being pushed out of it.I could find probably fifty similar examples from that Ocean of Jewels collection with similar issues.And the issues, by the way, arise because the writer is trying to do the right thing (get specific, get descriptive, get atmospheric) but in a way that detaches the reader from the character’s own experience. (More on developing characters here.)And better to have a bland sentence that is authentically from the character’s viewpoint than an interesting one from the wrong viewpoint.That, my friends, is the secret of everything.That’s enough from me. If this email runs on any longer, somebody will shoot me.Till soonHarryPPS: Now look, you probably know we’ve got some Lovely London Events on shortly. Tickets are starting to run short, so don’t be a chump. Do what you gotta do:1.    Come to The Getting Published Day. Don’t fail to get published because you’re doing the basics wrong. We’ll tell you what to do and how to do it. Learn more.2.    Come to our Self-Publishing Day. I love self-publishing. It’s magnificently powerful, But you must, must, must do it right and ninety-something percent of self-pubbers do it wrong. We’ll tell you what to do.PPPS: If you are a member of Jericho Writers, you can submit your work to the upcoming Slushpile Live with the Soho Agency. That’s right: you get to pop a chunk of your work in front of a real live literary agent who is actively looking for new clients. We film the whole thing and stream it live so you can listen – and ask questions. Sign up page – for JW members only – is here.And if you’re not a member of Jericho Writers, then what are you thinking of? Hurry over to this page and put things right at once. We do these Slushpile Live events regularly, but they’re members only, kids.

Blimey.Somewhere in the world today, there’s a bloke who woke up with a bit of a cough … and later figured out that he (or she) was the person who introduced a new coronavirus to the world. A little thing leading to a big one.Well, last week, I muttered something about a change of subject: “Blah, blah. Let’s turn to your work. Blah, blah. Hey, why not upload something to Townhouse.”Yeah. Good idea, Harry. I was expecting a trickle, perhaps even a decent flow. Instead – a deluge. More than 400 of you commented on that Ocean of Jewels post (here), and there are more comments still coming in. And that’s great. Really fantastic.So.I’ve picked out five of your pieces and given proper comments. Oh yes, and this post is all aboiut editing, right? If you want to read our thoughts on how to edit your book, you will find them here. If you want a proper manuscript assessment from one of our superpowered editors, you can get it here.Right then.Five writers. Five pieces. Five sets of comments from me. Here goes:Evolution\'s Leap, by Ross CorriganScene:  A failed attempt to track down a gifted individual:A bitter Swiss morning brought with it an overcast sky and the threat of further flurries. Earlier, snowflakes had tumbled and drifted in the headlights of passing cars, like fluttering white moths of frozen rain, and the accumulation had managed to drape a first winter jacket on the sloping shoulders of the town’s picturesque Alpine buildings. Well-heeled and suitably wrapped-up locals hurried by, though not before glancing and shaking their heads in dismay. The town of Zug was used to many things: Maserati drivers, Swiss and foreign directors of businesses domiciled in the local Canton, or state, and well-off tourists attracted to its pretty lakeside old town. What it wasn’t used to was a drive-by shooting of a foreign national—a young Chinese woman—right in front of the exclusive Park Hotel.Though the clothed body was obscured by the flapping, hastily erected cover, the corpse’s exposed head wasn’t. Disturbed by an ill-timed gust, the dead woman’s eyes stared lifelessly out towards the Metalli Shopping Mall. There was no doubting the cause of death. With the black humour typical of their secretive trade, the agents referred to it as lead poisoning—two shots: one to the chest, one to the centre of the forehead. My commentsThis is already good, and isn’t that far from really good.That final paragraph reads pretty much like a class piece of crime fiction. Good description of the corpse. Strong sense of place. Excellent bit of macabre police-humour at the end. (The one niggle in this paragraph has to do with a grammatical issue. The issue is that an adjective / adjectival phrase – “disturbed by an ill-timed gust” – is modifying the wrong thing. What the author wants us to think is that the cover over the corpse has been disturbed by an ill-timed gust. But grammatically, the sentence is saying that the dead woman’s eyes have been disturbed. I’m not normally one to fuss over grammar much, but the niggle in this case does create a tiny problem of comprehension, and those things are always bad.)But mostly, give or take a copy-editor’s slicing pen, that last para feels like crime fiction wonderfully well done.The first two paras – well, they’re almost there too. I’ve got one definite niggle there and one probable one.The definite one is that the first paragraph reverses on itself. So it describes the morning weather, then jumps back into the prior night (“Earlier, snowflakes had …”), then catches up again with well-heeled locals. And all this is by way of preamble to the actual corpse. I don’t mind time-reversals too much in principle, but when you put them into a preamble, it all ends up feeling a bit confusing and congested.So I’d definitely want to keep my timeline straightforward here: snow in the night, overcast morning, well-heeled locals, corpse. (And notice, by the way, that the author is slowly zooming in on the corpse. Going from large observations to increasingly specific ones, right on until you reach the dead woman’s eyes. That’s nice.)But I’d probably also want to take a sentence or two out of this. Without the broader context, it’s hard to say, but it felt maybe a little longer than necessary.Overall though: this feels like a book I’d like to read.Benjamin Tate Lives Among Us, by “Alan”The main character is a runner. Here, he is 18. His parents used to drive him to races, he now drives himself.It was different now that he had learned to drive. For the last few years he’d grown increasingly embarrassed to arrive at the track with his parents in tow. He was taller than his mother and stronger than his father. He’d walk in front or behind them, pretending to be alone, and then remain in the changing rooms a long time after his shower so there were fewer people to see them leave together. Eventually his parents began to withdraw. They no longer cheered loudly from the stands when he led down the straight, they kept their distance before races and waited for him in the car afterwards. Then one day his father handed him the keys and stood in the road with his mother watching him drive away. Ben had seen them in the rear-view mirror getting smaller and smaller.My commentsThis is really simple, and really strong. The best line here is the closing one about the parents getting smaller in the rear-view mirror. Because of the set-up in the first para, we know this isn’t just a comment about them receding into the distance. It’s also about them becoming a smaller factor in his racing life, and in his life generally.Another bit of skill here is the way the piece divides into three. First, some specific comments about the race track: walking in front, staying in the shower. That’s quite specific in focus. Quite close up. Then you have the bit that begins ‘His parents began to withdraw’. That withdrawal starts the process of exit. The parents are still at the track but physically distant. They are still in view of the camera, but this is a long shot, not a close up.And then, with the rear view mirror, the parents come to disappear completely – but the withdrawal (physical and metaphorical) has been going on all through this passage.No one sentence here reads like great writing, but this has the quiet skill of an Anne Tyler or an Elizabeth Strout. It’s class.Ascetic of the Sword, by ChimpledusFantasy short story about martial arts, mastery and obsession. The main character aspires to achieve \'the Perfect Cut\' in his swordsmanship but has severely injured himself in his narrow path to perfection.We continue in silence as the day brightens and golden rays gleam on the dewy rice stalks. I look at the age spots on the back of the monk’s head, waiting for him to ask a question.It does not come.“Venerable Father, I am sick,” I say.“Indeed? You look hale as a tiger. How are you sick?”“I…my body is sick. My hand shakes.”“So does mine.” The monk laughs gently. “I don’t see anything wrong with that.”“I cannot train. I am in pursuit of the Perfect Cut. I have attained it once, by accident, and I am unable to find it again. And now I am afraid I never will.”“Perhaps you are never meant to.”I pause. “Why?”“What is the Perfect Cut to you?”“The cut where the target is severed with such perfection that everything rings in harmony.”“Why do you seek it?”“Why train, if not to reach the epitome of skill?”My commentsI just like this! It has the feel of poetry. Very spare. Lots of clarity. The dialogue has just enough twistiness in it – an obliqueness to the turns of thought – to keep us interested, but never confused. If I was editing this, I’d just do one thing: I’d kill one of the adjectives in that first sentence. I’d probably take out ‘golden’ – my Perfect Cut.Untitled, by LizThis is the beginning of my ghost story set in the late 1950s on the border of England and Wales. The story starts 1st December 1956.And here I was, after a day of travelling and too many sleepless nights, back at the house where I had arrived as a newborn twenty-six years before. There was a neat symmetry to it, given the circumstances. Even in my exhaustion and misery I could appreciate the irony of a writer straying from her intended path in such a perfectly plotted, circular way. The thought was a useful distraction, if nothing else, as I climbed the last few yards towards the house, half-blinded by the stinging wind. The Black Hill was not a kind place on a December afternoon at the best of times, but winter had arrived early and resolute this year, storming down like an invasion from the north and blasting all traces of autumn away overnight. In London, fog had blunted the outlines of buildings and blurred the faces of passers-by, and I had moved from our rooms to the warmth of the library, on the tube, on buses, cushioned from the worst of the weather. Here, everything was sharp and cold. Gorse spiked above the rusty bracken. Hawthorns twisted spare, hoary branches towards the east. The bare mud of the track was frozen into jags. It was hard ground, even in the summer, with a meagre skin of soil over the old sandstone rock. My commentsThis feels like it wants a quick edit, but I know this part of the world well, and its physical details are beautifully nailed – right down to the hawthorns that have twisted, east-pointing branches. (The prevailing wind is from the west, and the mountain trees are all lop-sided.) Rather than make specific comments, though, I thought I’d just show you how I’d edit this piece, if it were mine. It’s already good though. What follows is just a wash-and-brush-up.:And here I was, after a day of travelling and too many sleepless nights, back at the house where I had arrived as a newborn twenty-six years before. There was a neat symmetry to it, given the circumstances. Even in my exhaustion, I could appreciate the irony of a writer straying from her intended path in such a perfectly plotted, circular way. The thought was a useful distraction, if nothing else.I climbed the last few yards towards the house. The Black Hill was not a kind place on a December afternoon at the best of times, but winter had arrived early and resolute this year, with a wind to tear away the last traces of autumn. My eyes streamed in the blast. In London, fog had blunted the outlines of buildings and blurred the faces of passers-by, and I had moved from our rooms to the warmth of the library, on the tube, on buses, cushioned from the worst of the weather. Here, everything was sharp and cold. Gorse spiked above the rusty bracken. Hawthorns twisted spare, hoary branches towards the east. The bare mud of the track was frozen into jags. It was hard ground, even in the summer, a meagre skin of soil over sandstone. Wishing on a Dream, by Patricia ThomsonNo intro – just “something I’ve been messing with for a while”.But we’re here in the States, playing some dates to make up for ones we had to cancel when visas got screwed up.  Tonight was our first show in Hartford, Connecticut, and now we’re on our way to Sayreville, New Jersey.  My hometown is about forty minutes south of there. We’ve played around New Jersey but never in it so this is being looked at as a homecoming show for me.  I look out the bus window into the streetlight-lit darkness, knowing familiar sights are out there and wanting to see them, to be in territory I know for a change.Then I see it, and just like when I was a kid I perk up.The red and white and gold revolving neon sign above the Anheuser Busch bottling plant in Newark glows against the orange-tinged night sky.  Seeing the stylized A with a bald eagle in flight behind it meant that we were exactly halfway between our house in Oceanville and Aunt Marie’s house in North Arlington.  Not that there’s no reason to go to either anymore.  Aunt Marie retired to Florida two years ago and I have better things to do than listen to my father go on about September eleventh being fake and why I’m running around Europe with a bunch of hippies.  “Where I’m from, not where I live,” I say into the night.And no matter where I go, I never feel welcome.My commentsReally easy, simple, terrific writing. The scatter of placenames already anchor the narrative in place. The Anheuser Busch bottling plant seems like a brilliant marker of location too.  That fine sense of place is matched by a nice sense of something like nostalgia – but more complex, because of the protagonist’s cautious self-distancing.That complex relationship to the past is threaded all the way through this snippet. (hometown … homecoming show … familiar sights … wanting to see them … no reason to go to either … better things to do than listen to my father.) That collection of thoughts and feelings prepares the ground for the character’s own two-sentence, two-para summary at the end. And even the summary feels unsettled: she’s not settled in the past, she’s got no new place to settle now.This is really strong stuff. My one real niggle? I think that compound word “streetlight-lit” should be run over by a steamroller and then pounded into dust. And then put on a rocket and fired at the sun.But this book has class written all over it. If I were an agent, I’d be salivating.That’s it from me. I’ll go back to these themes again next week. There’s a lot of meat here. I’ll also do my best to make these comment-athons a bit more regular. They’re clearly really working.I’ll shut up now. I am going to build a rocket, destination Sun. If you want to read more of these pieces, or to upload your own, then the Monster Upload thread is right here: https://community.jerichowriters.com/page/view-post?id=73 Till soonHarryPS: Oh heck. You don’t want a monster massive set of PSes. So I’m going to recycle this one from last week:1.    Come to The Getting Published Day. Don’t fail to get published because you’re doing the basics wrong. We’ll tell you what to do and how to do it. Learn more.2.    Come to our Self-Publishing Day. I love self-publishing. I think the modern Amazon- and ebook-led self-pub model has done more for authors than anything at all since the rise of literary agents. But if you self-publish, you have to do it right. We’ll tell you how.

OK. Next week, we’re going to change the subject completely. In fact, next week, it’s once again time to inspect your finest jewels. So, please, if you have a chunk of work – max 250 words – that you’d like me and the assembled company to look at and admire, please present it. We’ll do that via Townhouse, so everyone can see your chunk:Upload your work this Townhouse post just add a comment at the bottom.You won’t be able to upload your work if you’re not signed up, but sign up is free and easy, so don’t let that stop you. If you’re not yet on Townhouse, you can just sign up here.Right.That’s next week taken care of. First, though, a think I need to draw this little triumvirate of short and grumpy posts to an end.On the one hand, it’s been really good to share some annoyance with the crapper end of agenting and publishing. I know from your responses that those annoyances are more frequent than they ought to be. More persistent.But at the same time, I can’t help feeling that it would be wrong to leave it there. Publishing is an industry driven by passion above all, so it’s extremely common to find agents and publishers go above and beyond to bring work to market.I’ll give just two examples, but I could give a hundred.The first one is personal. I have a pretty fancy agent. He heads up London’s oldest independent literary agency. He has some pretty fancy clients, notably Hilary Mantel and George Orwell (or what’s left of him.) And I once came to him with a book project.I wanted to sell a “how to write” book to Bloomsbury, because I thought it would help get the word out about the Writers’ Workshop (the forerunner to Jericho Writers.) The project was never going to be especially commercial from my agent’s point of view. It was, in fact, going to be largely unrewarded.But Bill, my agent, didn’t so much as blink. His job is to sell books for his clients. He wasn’t about to push me to pursue something more lucrative. So I wrote the book. He sold it. His cut of that advance: £400. Once you make allowance for his support staff and his Central London offices, I would guess that Bill saw 25% of that, or maybe less.And the contract that this particular bit of Bloomsbury came back with was – shocking. It was just a bit of Bloomsbury that had never really encountered Planet Agent and still used the kind of contracts that Dickens would have recognised. The balance of risks and rewards was grossly biased in favour of the publisher.And Bill said no.Just no. He wouldn’t have one of his clients sign the contract. So he renegotiated it, line by line, for weeks. When it was ready, he told me I could sign it. I did so, and he got his (tiny) share of the (very small) advance.Now, over time, both Bill and I made more money via royalties, but still not vast amounts. And I grumbled to Bill that Bloomsbury weren’t supporting the book in the way that I’d expected. Bill looked into my grumbles and agreed that they were valid.So he took my mini-battle – over a small book and a tiny advance – all the way to board level at Bloomsbury. He was willing to put some of his key relationships on the line because one of his clients wasn’t happy. It didn’t matter that the book was a small one. It mattered that the publisher wasn’t properly keeping its end of the bargain.We didn’t, in fact, end up resolving the situation completely to our satisfaction. But by heaven, Bill tried.For an advance that would have bought a fancy lunch and nothing else.He didn’t do any of what he did for the money. He did it because I was a client and he had a duty towards me.He, like many many agents, acts out of a belief in the book (and the author) and a sense of honour.That sense of honour is still very frequent across publishing. (More on how to get an agent here. Oh yes, and our header image this week is designed to evoke a sense of honour and pride. That\'s my excuse for a totally random image, at any rate.)One more little story.Last year, at our Festival of Writing, we welcomed Anne Meadows, the Editorial Director at Granta Books.Granta is a very fancy literary publisher. It’s the kind of outfit you’d be proud to be published by, stuffed full of prize winners and other esteemed authors.But prizes and esteem doesn’t necessarily translate into book sales. And Granta still has to be commercially sensible. So it doesn’t often offer huge advances. Which means that literary agents are unlikely to keep themselves in Marc Jacobs and Laboutins by bringing their authors to Granta’s doors.But agents don’t care.They come anyway, bringing their authors. And Granta and agents and authors all work hard to achieve the best results they can, even though (in most cases, not all) financial reward will not be the thing that drives them.And what does?Well, simply bringing wonderful stories, wonderfully told, to the kind of readers that appreciate those things. That’s it. That’s the reason.Take away that sense of passion and the authors wouldn’t write, the agents wouldn’t agent, and Granta wouldn’t exist.In short, yes, there’s plenty to be grumpy at in the world of publishing. And because we at Jericho are, always, on the side of authors, we will go on venting our grumps rather frequently.But at the same time, we’re not idiots. This industry loves writers. And you’re writers. So it loves you too. Really truly. Big love and squashy kisses.That’s it from me on all matters short and grumpy.Don’t forget to upload a sample of your favourite work here.We’ll tuck into that lot next week.If you want to talk about short-and-grumpy things, then just pile into the comments below.

Folks, next week - on 14 Feb - I want to take a look at some of YOUR work. I\'ll pick out my tipple-top favourites for praise and commentary, but I\'ll get to as much as I can in the comments as well.To participate, please:FInd a chunk of work that especially pleases youUpload a maximum of 250 words via the comments below this postGive us a book title and a sentence or so to understand the characters / scene you\'re writing about.And also, please, feel free to comment (truthfully but constructively) on any work uploaded by others.You\'ve got all week to do this.On 14 Feb, I\'ll fish through the work you\'ve uploaded and pick out a few bits for my email that afternoon. I\'ll also add comments, where I can, to the thread below.That\'s it from me. Any questions? No. So hop to it. Your finest work please. I look forward to seeing it.

If ever I feel alone or friendless, or fear that these emails are falling into the Great Void of Unknowing, all I have to do is to write a grumpy email about agents and/or publishers. The torrent – the surge, the tsunami, the deluge – of responses tells me that you are out there, and listening, and care as much as I do.That surge of responses deserves a direct reply.Before I get to that, though, I do need to ask for your help, please. We’re trying to figure out what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and what you’d like from us. We ask you about courses, membership, events and more. The survey runs to just ten questions. Your responses will shape what we do next.Please take the survey here.Thank you. And now for some short-and-grumpy thoughts about all things Agent and Publisher.First:-A lot of you – and I mean a lot – wrote to me with stories broadly similar to those I mentioned last week. Probably the commonest tale was the one which, simplified, runs: “A literary agent took on my manuscript with a lot of gushing excitement, but then, as time passed, stopped communicating with me at all.”And I repeat: that’s not OK. Yes, they’re busy. Yes, until you have formally signed with an agent, you aren’t technically their client. You don’t have an actual contractual claim on their time.But –I don’t accept that as an excuse. I once had a shouting row with an official of the Association of Authors Agents. He claimed that agents owed nothing to non-clients, because they weren’t clients. I argued – and still do – that no honourable agent can treat the community of writers with disdain.I still think that’s obviously true.And don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with agents rejecting work. I don’t have a problem with them doing so with the blandest and least helpful of form-emails. But if an agent engages in a personal way with your work – perhaps they ask for a full manuscript, or they meet you at a Festival and tell you how great they think your work is, or they ask for editorial changes, or anything of that sort – then they owe you a timely, personal and considered response.If that response is a “no, sorry, changed my mind” – well, OK. That’s not what you want, but if it’s honest, clear and timely, you can’t really complain. Just seize your manuscript and make it better.Too many agents, too often, fail to give that personal, timely response, and it’s not OK. (Our advice on getting agents here.)Second:-One or two people who have had bad experiences wrote to tell me that they have basically given up. They’ll write for themselves, but will no longer seek publication.People need to make their own decisions, of course, but I do think that’s a pity.The fact is, that for all its problems, Planet Agent is genuinely open to new and unknown writers. If the story you write is blisteringly attractive, it will be picked up. It will secure an agent. It will secure a book deal. From the perspective of the individual writer, these things may feel like a matter of black chance and blind luck, but they’re really not.At Jericho Writers, we see a lot of manuscripts and a lot of authors. When we see something that really dazzles, we basically know it will find an agent and a deal. Equally, some of the manuscripts we come across aren’t yet publication-ready. That doesn’t mean the author is an idiot. It just means they have more work to do. Those manuscripts, we know, are not yet ready to sell.And then, yes, there is an intermediate category of good-but-not-yet-dazzling. Those books are sometimes picked up. Sometimes not. In those cases, it is more of a dice roll.But the smart advice remains the same as it always has. Find a genius concept. Develop your craft. Tell your story well. Write better.Most of what we do at Jericho Writers is to help you do those things. Do them well enough and the whole getting published bit is reasonably easy.Third:-Avoid, avoid, avoid the vanity presses.Because it’s hard getting a literary agent, people are tempted into the vanity snake pit. As it happens, I think there’s a whole email’s worth of comments to make about those snakes, so I won’t say much now.Simply this: if a publisher asks you for money – via ‘partnership contract’, ‘hybrid publishing’, or whatever other term they prefer – they aren’t a publisher at all.Publishers make their money from selling books to readers.Vanity publishers make their money from selling dreams to writers.Please keep your money in your wallet and say no to the snakes. Vanity publishing, I do not love thee.Fourth:-Self-publishing is an utterly viable route to publication and readers. It’s not second best. It’s just different.The only real caution here is that you have to commit. You can’t just toss a book out onto Amazon and hope that it flies. It won’t. You must view your writing as a business and your publishing as a career. Your first book won’t make money so don’t expect it to. If you do well, though, then by the time of your third or fourth book, you’ll be seeing results that make you think, Yes, this writing lark might actually pay me. I am finding readers. I have a community of fans. I’m an author, and proud of it.Fifth:-Protect yourself.Even if you go trad, even if you have a wonderful agent, even if you have a terrific publisher, protect yourself.The single best way you can do that is to write steadily and build a mailing list. That list will, if properly managed, guarantee your access to readers and income for years and years to come. Don’t neglect it, just because your publisher looks shiny and the excitement is palpable. That mailing list is your rock. You may one day need it.Sixth – and last:-Don’t forget why you write.You never came into this game because you wanted this agent or that book deal. You came into this game because a story forced its way into your head and wouldn’t let you goi.The joys and challenges of that story are real no matter what. So are the rewards. We writers are lucky. We carry joy in our heads. That’s it from me. I promised you I’d be Mr Sunshine this week and – in a slightly undependable, British January way – I’ve delivered on that, at least approximately.(Oh yes, and the granular, golden header image to this post is a photograph of the surface of the sun. Each one of those little granules is about the size of France. My six-year-old sun is currently planning to walk on the solar surface. I said, \"Don\'t you think you might get too hot?\" He looked at me with the joy of a six-year-old outsmarting his father and said, \"Nooo. I\'m going to wear a special suit.\" One-nil to him, I reckon.)And again: over to you. What are your experiences? Your worries? Your hopes? Your beliefs? Are you bitter, hopeful, cautious, or just happily nuts? Tell me what you think below and let\'s have a Solar Heated Debate.

A short and irritable email this week, inspired by a trio of author-interactions I’ve had in the weeks since Christmas.Three authors. Three stories. Here they are.Author #1Sells her debut book to a Big 5 publisher for a reasonably good advance. Lots of excitement, lots of mwahs, lots of happiness.The excitement and happiness lasts for a while, but in the weeks before publication something in the atmosphere starts to fade. A cover reveal is mishandled on Twitter. A publicist is changed, a bit abruptly. Actual, tangible marketing activity seems hard to locate.The author happens to grumble – a bit – to me about it. I ask the author what the level of supermarket orders is. She asks her editor (with whom she still has a decent relationship.) Editor says, roughly, “No, a bit disappointing unfortunately but, yay!, orders from Waterstones are yadda yadda, blah blah, change the subject.”The marketing never materialised.That’s author #1.(Info on how to get published can be found here.)Author #2Has a reasonable track record over several books. Sales in one (smallish territory) have been good. Sales in the bigger, more influential markets have been weak, probably due to inattentive publishing. Reader reviews and critical reception has always been strong.Anyway, after a hiatus, Author #2 writes another book and gets a (perfectly fine) offer direct from a publisher.She goes to her agent with the offer. It is now that agent’s job to turn that offer into a contract, and to knit together a set of deals across the various English language territories, so that the author has a proper sales platform to work with.But – after weeks of delay – the agent dumps the author. Nothing to do with the author; more a change of direction for the agent.Now, it’s perfectly OK for agents to alter direction, of course, but that doesn’t, to my mind, mean that you can desert your existing clients at their moment of greatest need. On the contrary, you need to get the deal done, then move on. You take on those obligations when you take on clients. Like it or lump it.That’s one thing, but there’s another. In this case, the agent was and is part of a large and well-resourced agency with plenty of other agents. So if Agent X wants to change direction, she should damn well speak to her colleagues and say, “We can’t, as an agency, let our client down, so please can someone step in here for me.”That didn’t happen.The author – the admirable Author #2 – has a publishing offer that urgently needs attention and she’s been abandoned by both her agency and her agent. Great.(Info on how to get an agent in the first place can be found here.)Author #3This author email wasn’t even especially grumbly. It was just a “hi, how are you” from someone I last talked to years ago.But one snippet from that conversation struck me. Author #3 got an agent. Agent launches the manuscript at the Big 5 publishers and their immediate competitors. Some nice words came back, but no offers.The author then thought, “Well, that’s disappointing, but there’s a slew of smaller publishers who might be interested,” … only to discover that her agent had no intention of approaching them. Their relationship ended right there, over the corpse of an unsold book. And I don’t like any of this. Not one bit of it.Here’s what I think:Author #1: What happened here was that a big publisher killed its marketing efforts when it didn’t get sales from supermarkets. What should have happened was that the marketing effort pivoted to be Amazon-led, not supermarket led. But no such pivot happened. The publisher hasn’t yet come clean with the author, and likely never will, but when the supermarket orders failed, that author’s career was dead – even before the first book of a two-book deal was even published.Author #2. Agents can’t abandon authors when authors most need their help. It’s fine to part company, but you have to take the author’s needs in mind when it comes to timing. And big agencies should act like big agencies. If one agent is forced to step out, another should gladly step in. That shouldn’t be forced on the agency by a plaintive author. It should – obviously – be the way the agency wants to approach its business.Author #3. If an agent takes on an author, they should take that author on. Yes, a small publishing deal will earn peanuts for the agent, but it’ll quite likely be one of the most important things ever to happen to the author in question. An honourable agent should let the big deals pay for all the deals that never quite happened.And many agents, agencies and publishers are deeply honourable about these things. I don’t want to suggest that malpractice is rife across the industry. But it is too common.And I don’t like it.These things are almost never the author’s fault. It’s just crappy behaviour by people who should know better. But because authors are (weirdly) relatively powerless in their own industry, there are no effective sanctions against bad behaviour. These things come down to a question of honour. Of honouring the broader contract between author and agent, or between author and publisher.What can we do about it? Not a lot, except call it out when we see it.What can you do about it? Not a lot, except know that you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not you, it’s them. Oh yes, and if you start to feel like you are being badly treated by your agent or publisher, then you are quite likely right to think so. It’s time to start making plans to move on.There.Rant over.As promised: it was grumpy.Alas, however: it was not also short. My bad. I can’t really do short. Sorry.I shall be sunnier next week. I shall be Mr Sunshine, with my tapshoes on. I have given you a sunny header image to brighten your soul.And what about you? I think this week we should scrap the Heated Debate and go straight into your experience of Planet Agent and the World of Publishing. What\'s been good? What\'s been bad? Let\'s eat an ice cream and talk about it.

In my last email, I talked about scene building and I spoke a little as if the only two structural units in a story are the scene itself and the plot itself.But that’s not really right. In the film industry, which gets a bit more technical about these things, they distinguish between the scene and the sequence. The scene could be very short indeed:Actor gets out of car at lawn. Walks across a dark front lawn. Knocks at a door.Something like that could easily come in at under ten seconds of screen time. But then you have the sequence, which is a chain of scenes that form a logical, coherent group of their own. So Jason Bourne style car chase in Paris is likely to have multiple, multiple short scenes. Something like this:Jason Bourne jumps in car. Drives nervously away. Police sirens start to wail. He stamps on the gas. Car chase stuff. Bumping down a flight of steps in a Mini. People shooting. Cars crashing. Then, tra la, somehow Jason Bourne gets away. He ends up, safe but shocked, in an underground car park.You can see that from a movie-maker’s point of view, there are a ton of scenes to deal with and film, but from the movie-goer’s perspective, the whole thing feels like one coherent unit – ‘the Paris car chase’.Now, last week, we spoke about how the scene itself has a kind of rhythm of its own. A question gets launched. The tension around that question increases. The stakes and sense of pressure rises. Then the question is resolved or transformed one way or another. That scene ends and a new one begins.All good stuff, right?Well, it can be useful to apply the same kind of thinking to the sequence too. And here, the inner unity of the sequence often comes down to this: are the story-questions launched in each scene intimately linked or not?So last week, we looked at a very short scene of 450 words. Fiona had just escaped from some baddies. She was looking for sanctuary. She came to her mysterious Russian friend, Lev, for help. He took her to his clean, but extremely basic, squat. She effectively rejected that as a place to stay. He agreed to take her somewhere else.That was the gist of the scene. But the unity of the whole sequence flowed something like this:1.    Fiona is just driving peacefully along a Welsh road, when – boom! – she gets abducted. That out-of-nowhere quality often signals the start of a major new sequence, a major new turn in the plot. The story question is now: why has she been abducted? What is going to happen?2.    She’s taken to a barn and interrogated with violence. She believes that, even if she tells everything she knows, she will be killed at the end of the interrogation. The story question is now: will she spill the beans? Will she escape?3.    She escapes, injuring one of the bad guys in the process. The story question is now something like: Will she make her getaway properly? Or will she be recaptured?4.    It becomes clear that she’s avoided recapture, but she is very worried about whether her ever-fragile mental state will cope with what’s just happened. The story question is now: will she cope?And so on.The sequence doesn’t come to an end properly until she is back at work having, roughly speaking, survived not just the violence, but the mental consequence of it. If you look at your own work, you’ll find other similar sequences naturally jumping out at you.And –And what? What are the actual practical consequences of these thoughts?Well, there might be a few, actually. For example, it’s very common to have a lovely time writing a sequence of scenes, such as I’ve just described. The story flows. The action moves. The whole thing is as fun and easy as writing ever gets. And then – you hit the end of the sequence. You have to find your footings again in the context of the wider story. And for a week or two, you thrash around, wondering why the work has suddenly become harder.And the short answer there is: worry you not. That’s just part of storytelling. Give it time.But also, it can be really worth thinking about your sequences in isolation. Are their highs or lows sufficiently high or low? Does there feel like a real structure there? (So think of the difference between a Jason Bourne car chase and a complex story-sequence like the Fiona abduction / escape one. The movie car chase is just plain fun and it doesn’t need much structure. Your work doesn’t have special effects and it doesn’t have Matt Damon, so you need the structure.)If the sequence as a whole feels flat or lacking in intensity, it’s most likely because you haven’t quite evolved an internal sequence-structure that fits. If that’s the case, then the very simplest bit of analysis is just to take what you’ve written, scene by scene, and see how your story questions evolve. If there’s a natural, powerful movement from one scene to the next, you’re doing good. If the movement seems abrupt or too slow, you need to alter your pacing accordingly (which might mean adding or subtracting entire scenes, of course.)But really, this email is a win if it makes you think about sequences as a story-unit in their own right. The problems and solutions in writing are often really, really obvious as long as you ask the right question. And sometimes those questions need to be asked about sequences.That is all from me. I am neither ill. Nor locked in a vault.That’s a win, right?How about you? What sequences have you written that were most fun to write? Or most problematic. Tell me what you think, and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

Thanks all for your supportive comments last week, when – cough, cough – I was very poorly. I’m pretty much back in the saddle this week, and I thought I’d bring you something sweet, simple and very actionable – a practical start to the New Year, in effect.So: stories are made of scenes strung together in a plot. Let’s just assume for now that your plot is OK. In which case, the quality of your book is going to hang, to a very large extent, on the quality of your scenes. What makes a scene work? What are the tricks of the trade? What are the things you need to look out for?Well, the curious little secret is that these things are (mostly) obvious and simple. They’re just hard to do. So here are some rules:Jump to the action as fast as you canIf you want, you can jump right into the action, even at the cost of not quite making sense initially. You can then, 2-3 paragraphs in, go and back-fill the information the reader needs to make sense of things. So for example, you might start with dialogue, without the reader knowing where the characters are situated. Once you’ve got things going via dialogue, you can add the, “They were standing in the middle of a …, etc”. That often gives you a stronger more engaging start, than starting with a description could ever deliver.Leave the scene as fast as you can. You can always tie up any loose threads in the next scene … and you probably need to tie fewer things up than you might think.It’s often said that every scene needs to have a kind of conflict. I don’t think that’s quite right – or at least, it’s not the most helpful way of describing things. What IS true is that there needs to be something unsettled in the scene. Something mobile. A question that needs an answer.Your character’s emotions need to be engaged. If he/she doesn’t care, your reader won’t care.In general, but not always-always, you want a balance of scene description (so your scene is physically realised), dialogue (because that’s the most supple, alive element in any scene) and action (in the sense that we know what your characters are doing.)There should for preference be a useful reverberation between the action that’s taking place and the physical atmosphere in the scene. That can be obvious (a proposal in a rose garden) or contrasting (a proposal in a butcher’s shop), but you want some alive, interesting echo between action and place.And here’s a biggie: you structure your scenes much as you structure a story. You set up the question early on in the scene. You develop it. You reach a climax. You resolve quickly and move on.Now all that seems pretty wholesome. A good, wholegrain style menu for writing a scene. But because that kind of advice seems pretty damn bland taken on its own, here’s a mini-scene of my own, with comments in italics added.The situation here is that my character, Fiona, has just escaped from a damaging and traumatising situation. She has fled to a buddy of hers: a guy called Lev, who is ex-Russian Special Forces and not exactly a run-of-the-mill character. She trusts Lev to look after her, but Lev needs to find his range first. Here’s how things go: +++++++++I park where Lev tells me to, outside a cream-painted house, with a sheet of graffitied chipboard for a door.Very swift intro to the physical location. So brief, it hardly interrupts things‘Is here,’ says Lev.The door is held by a crude wooden catch. No lock.Fiona’s observation this. By noticing the crudity of the accommodation, she is letting you know, in effect, what she’s thinking. Lev opens the door for me – there are no hinges, so he has to lift it – and I step inside.I knew that Lev didn’t have a permanent home in Britain or, I think, anywhere. Mostly he sleeps in his car or on the floors of friends’ houses. But when he isn’t doing those things, and isn’t abroad, he uses squats.But knowing that and being here: two different things.Again: Fiona isn’t saying, “I feel X about this place.” But she’s letting us know all the same. Indirect access to character emotions is just fine.The downstairs room is lightless. The doors and windows have been boarded up front and rear. There’s a poor quality kitchen in place – white formica doors loose on their hinges, chipboard surfaces bubbling and splitting with damp – but I already know there’s no water in the tap, no power in the sockets.More physical description. But this isn’t done for its own sake. By now, it’s clear that the question raised by this scene is roughly: “Is this horrible squat going to satisfy Fiona’s needs for sanctuary? And how will her discomfort shift her relationship with Lev?” Those aren’t huge questions in the context of the story. But they don’t have to be. They just have to feel alive and important for the duration of a (shortish) scene.Lev says nothing. Just points me upstairs.Upstairs: two bedrooms, one bathroom, nothing else. Bare boards. No furniture. No heating. No bathroom fittings, even. Lev has taken over the larger of the two bedrooms. A military looking roll of bedding, neatly furled. A ten-litre jerry can of water. A wash bowl. A primus stove and basic cooking equipment, all clean, all tidy. A black bag, of clothes I presume. A small box of food. The front window was boarded, but Lev has removed the boards and they stand leaning against the wall.This is the first revelation of the accommodation proper. In that sense, what’s gone before has been just preamble. This is where the scene-question gets sharpened up further.Light enters the room in silence. Leaves again the same way.I don’t say anything.Don’t even step into the room, not really. Just stand there in the doorway.So everything’s hanging. At the moment, we’re reaching a moment of crisis in our mini-story. Will this squat work for Fiona? It’s not looking good. Her hanging back in the doorway (rather than stepping forward into the room) is as close as she gets to actual conflict with Lev. And that’s not much conflict. That’s why I don’t think focusing on conflict is especially helpful.I am not what you would call a girly girl. I don’t have a particular relationship with pink. Don’t revere handbags or hoard shoes. I don’t love to dress up, or bake, or follow faddy diets, or learn new ways to decorate my home. On the other hand, I have just spent the weekend being tortured in a barn near Rhayader and I was, I admit it, wanting something a bit homelier than this.Fiona humour! And for the first time really direct access to her thoughts / feelings. Again, this is pushing us closer to the point of crisis/decision/resolution.Lev stands behind me seeing the room through my eyes. Perhaps he was secretly expecting me to be thrilled. Perhaps he is thinking dark thoughts about decadent Western girls, our need for luxury.More humour. But here we have Lev’s position and Fiona’s. At the moment, these are two opposed, unresolved forces. We don’t yet know how this is going to resolve.He says nothing. Not straight away. We just stand there in the pale light. Even the tiniest sounds echo among these hard surfaces, so a single creak of a floorboard rolls around the room, like a pea in a shoebox.Tension ratchets up for a couple of lines. Then …Then Lev says, ‘Is not suitable.’That was halfway between a question and a statement, but I let it be a statement.Lev says, ‘We go somewhere else.’Boom! Done. We know that Fiona’s opposition has won the day. As far as we can tell at this stage, the Fiona / Lev relationship hasn’t been injured by that micro-conflict. And of course a new story question is immediately launched: Lev still seems willing to find sanctuary for Fiona, but what is he going to offer? Will Fiona find her sanctuary? And will that be enough to allow for her recovery? Those questions are immediately tackled by the scenes that follow. +++++++++++That’s it. As you can see, not a lot of heavy-duty story-freight hangs on that scene. In a way, you could cut it completely and the book would lose nothing much in terms of plot. But from the reader’s perspective, the scene is funny. It’s tense. And they learn something about Lev (the way he lives) that they may have been curious about for the space of about 400,000 words (ie: since the moment they first met him in book #1 of the series.)And one other thing: the scene is short. That whole thing notches up just 450 words, or about a page and a half of a paperback. But that’s still long enough to launch a question, develop it, build some tension round it, have plenty of personality / emotion / humour in the situation, then resolve it and move on. Do that enough times in the course of a properly plotted story, and you have a book, my friend.How about you? DO you have a way you like to write scenes? Recipes you follow? Rules you adopt? Let me know and we\'ll all have a Heated Debate.

Once upon a time, in a town far, far away, there lived two people, Sam and Elly. They were writers.Sam wrote fast-selling, humorous non-fiction, plus a dash of more serious journalism. Elly wrote lovingly crafted literary fiction.But the thing is, although they were writers, it turned out that, they had a flame that shone still more brightly again. They wanted to be publishers.But they didn’t want to be Sensible Publishers churning out me-too commercial fiction and hurling it at supermarkets. They wanted to be Real Publishers, finding books that they genuinely loved and bringing them to a small but appreciative audience.The books they loved were crotchety, contrary things. One of their authors Eimar McBride wrote sentences like this:For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.Any Sensible Publisher could tell at a glance that a book like that was totally unsaleable, so they didn’t pick it up. But Sam and Elly – trading under the name Galley Beggar Press – did.That wasn’t the only horrendous decision they made. They also published a book called Ducks, Newburyport, which was also obviously unsaleable, not least because it was over 1000 pages long and composed, almost entirely, of just eight monster sentences.The thing is, though, this story has a happy outcome. (And an unhappy one. And then a happy one again.)Because although those books and dozens like it were obviously unpublishable, people LOVED them. In fact, the books put out by this tiny little publisher have gone on to be longlisted, shortlisted, or winners of pretty much every major literary prize you can think of. Prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Wellcome Book Prize, The Goldsmiths Prize, The Desmond Elliott Prize, The Jan Michalski Prize, The Folio Prize, The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize. Some of the books have sold in very large numbers too.But this is publishing, so wherever you find a happy outcome, you can be pretty sure that a freight train with failed brakes is hurtling down some track towards you, gathering speed as it approaches.And so it turned out.If a book is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, part of the entry condition is that a certain number of books have to be made available to one of the prize’s retail partners, The Book People. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing. Because The Book People were going to pay £40,000 (around $55,000) for the books.So, that’s good, right?Well, yes.  Except that The Book People took the books and promptly went bankrupt. “Hey, you know that £40K we owe you? Yeah, well. In your dreams. Sorry ’bout that. Merry Christmas.”I happen to know Sam and Elly reasonably well. They have both done a fair bit of editorial work for Jericho Writers (under our previous moniker, mostly.) And I remember, not long after they moved to Norwich, that their plumbing collapsed. It was winter. They had a tiny baby. And no heating. Not good, right?So we told them to fix the heating and we’d pay what it took. They could pay us back in manuscript assessments. So they fixed their heating. We sent them manuscripts. And everyone, including our clients and including one tiny shivery baby, was happy again.Anyway, the point of that story was to indicate that Sam and Elly aren’t plutocrats who wear Laboutin shoes, drive Aston Martins, live in castles and dine off roasted swan. They’re the sort of people to whom £40,000 is rather a lot of money.It felt like, via The Book People, their entire world had collapsed.But this is Christmas. And this email tells a Christmas story.Because Sam and Elly asked the world for help. They didn’t just wander out into the Norfolk marshes and shout at clouds (though, you never know, that might have worked too.) They put an appeal out on the Internet. Here in fact:Help Fund Galley BeggarAnd the world responded. We at Jericho flung some shiny gold coins into their cyber-hat, but so did hundreds and hundreds of other people too.And a couple of days back, I had imagined that the gist of this email was going to be “Could you please help this gallant pair reach their very demanding £40,000 funding target.” But I’ve just been to the funding page now and they’ve already blown their way through that target and money is still coming in.But wouldn’t it be the greatest of all possible Christmas gifts if Sam and Elly actually got enough funding that their publisher could live on a slightly less precarious footing? What if they didn’t have to live, hand-to-mouth, knowing that a couple of failures could drag the bulwarks of their little ship down close to the waterline again?So, if you have a few pounds, dollars, roubles or rupees jingling in your pocket, how about you toss it into Galley’s outstretched hat. You aren’t simply funding Galley Beggar. You are funding literature.And literature needs you.Donations don’t have to be big. The small ones all add up. And everything makes a difference.Wishing you all a very merry Christmas. I’ll be back in the New Year.Go steal an Aston Martin and don’t overcook that swan. Chat about anything you like down below. If you have a wonderful recipe for Christmas food, I\'d love to hear it.

Alert readers will have noticed that there was an election in Britain yesterday, one that produced an emphatic result. Boris Johnson – love him or loathe him – was the frontman of that campaign and that success. And the funny thing is – I know him. Only a teeny-tiny bit, admittedly, but we were at college together, a year or two apart, but still close enough to know each other by sight.That’s the intro, but this isn’t an email on politics. It’s one about writing. And it struck me that almost the only memorable moment of the whole election campaign was a curiously personal one.Boris Johnson was touring a hospital, with a swarm of cameras following him. A local journalist, from the Yorkshire Post, asked him to look at a photo. The photo was of a boy, with suspected pneumonia, lying on a hospital floor, because there was no bed for him.That doesn’t strike me as a particularly tough situation for a politician. You look at the photo. You manage a frown of concern and sympathy. You say that’s terrible. Then you say (if you’re one of the rogues who have been in power), “We have to look into that. Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention.” Or you say (if you’re one of the rogues in search of power), “That just shows why the whole system needs reform.”Johnson took neither of these well-trodden routes.He refused to look at the photo. He kept trying to fire off his “Get Brexit done” lines. He looked uncomfortable at the prospect of the emotional encounter expected of him (concern, human sympathy, frustration at a system that didn’t deliver.)The journalist pressed the point: here’s a photo, look at it.Johnson tried a little more to evade, then actually took the photo from the journalist’s hand and pocketed it. “Now, finally, we can talk about Brexit again,” he said, in effect.Taking someone else’s phone is hardly an assault, but it is a bit odd. It smacks of the alpha male, the bully … except the eight-year-old version of that. A kind of playground dominance.Why did that little scene make a noticeable ding on a busily argumentative election? Or, transfer that little vignette to the pages of a manuscript, why would it work so well there? Why would a scene like that, properly written, seem to rich and shimmering with life?While you ponder, here’s another Johnson-anecdote.My father was a judge at the very top of his profession. (Here’s his Wikipedia entry, if you’re curious.) Because people at the top of public life tend to bump into each other, my father knew Boris Johnson too. Not well, but a bit.And at one point they were both up in Scotland, in some rattly castle, at a conference on – I don’t know, the sort of conference people like that go to. My mother was also there. The castle was close to the sea. Johnson had a car with him and my parents didn’t. A trip to the sea was planned. Boris Johnson offered to collect them and take them down there.And –He didn’t show up.He did go to the sea, yes, but he didn’t drive the one minute necessary to collect my parents. My father then must have been seventy. My mother not much younger. And back then, Boris was just a jobbing MP with a large public profile. My father was the most senior judge in the country.The injury done was hardly very extensive. My parents waited for their ride for about twenty minutes, then decided Johnson wasn’t coming and called a taxi instead. When they were next in Johnson’s company, he didn’t apologise. Didn’t refer to the broken promise – which my father says was very clear and explicit – in any way.Two tiny anecdotes, about a man who is now emphatically in charge of the British government.What do we make of these things? Not as students of politics, but as writers of stories. What do we make of these things?Well, look, the obvious way to parse these episodes is:Episode 1: Johnson has a touch of the sociopath. He can do fake bonhomie, but he can’t do actual human sympathy. By pushing the point, the Yorkshire journalist found a way to unpeel Johnson’s mask, to show us the real, frightening human.Episode 2: Johnson is a selfish idiot who left a pair of distinguished and somewhat elderly people waiting for a lift to the sea.But life is more complex than that, isn’t it? Perhaps a better reading of these episodes is:Episode 1: Johnson was in the last stages of a tremendously long and exhausting election campaign. His minders were telling him to get on camera and talk about Brexit. So yes, he messed up, not very severely. Had he seen an actual little boy on a hospital floor, maybe he’d have been as caring and empathic as some Princess Diana / Nelson Mandela mashup.Episode 2: Johnson is famously not a details man. He’s disorganised, chaotic – and he just forgot. Whoops. No big deal.And that ambiguity has a lot to do with why those episodes grip us. Because there’s no one way to read them, indeed because both readings have a kind of validity, we have to study them. We have to consider them. We feel (A) that something personal and significant has been revealed, but also (B) it’s not quite clear what has been revealed. The quest to understand pushes the reader to turn the pages, but that quest also pushes the reader further into each page. You can’t risk skimming the text, because to skim might cause you to miss a detail that switches or adapts your view.The very best novels often have a flickery quality, which isn’t properly resolved until the end.So, in Pride and Prejudice, the reader is constantly trying to understand Darcy. Is he a brute? Or just clumsy? Sincere or arrogant? If you look back at some of the greatest scenes in the book – the fabulous scene where Darcy proposes for the first time and Elizabeth forcefully refuses him – you see the constant flicker. Yes, he seems arrogant. But yes, you can see his point of view too. As soon as you think have a stable view of the human, the picture shifts. You end the scene with more data on Darcy, and perhaps an opinion, but you’re still not sure. You have to read on.And naturally, in a great book, that ambiguity only finally resolves at the end. Elizabeth’s life and family are in crisis! Darcy rides to the rescue! He is vastly generous! He has been the soul of honour throughout! Love and happiness beckon!And that’s why, I think, that a lot of “show don’t tell” advice is just wrong. The advice normally says things like, “Don’t say that your character is angry. Show them being angry.\" They advocate writing like this: \"Lydia’s face turned pale and her voice quivered with rage as she struck the table and …\"Yeugh.It’s all too direct. Devoid of multiple interpretations. (Our show don\'t tell advice is here.)The best details, the best micro-scenes, aren’t ones that emphatically reinforce a given point. They’re ones that can be read in two ways, or ten. That force the reader’s attention, the way life so often does.For what it’s worth (and, remember, I kinda knew Johnson at college, years before all of this), I think all of our explanations of Johnson’s behaviour are correct. All of them.Lack of human empathy? Yes. Selfish? Yes. Pressure of a massive election campaign? Yes. A minor forgetting by someone known for it? Yes. All those things and more.As for how you mix those things up, how they fall out in practice – I don’t know. And if a political leader is a bit light on the personal empathy stuff, how much really does that matter? Churchill was a drunk. Kennedy was a philanderer. Those things didn’t make them terrible leaders.That’s it from me. I have just invented a new foot bath involving a small bathtub full of warm porridge (See picture in the header photo). I can’t wait to try it out – and I shan’t think about politics once.But what do you think? I don\'t mean about politics, though you can loose off on that if you really want. What little details or scenes really work for you? Which have that rich flicker of ambiguity? What have you written that you feel proud of in this respect? Let\'s dive into my porridge bath and have a Heated and Porridgy Debate ...

Lots of novelists think hard about the total impact of their story, their characters-in-plot. That’s right, obviously. Is this ending impactful enough? Does my middle section hold the attention? Do my characters engage the reader? All good stuff. And of course, impact can be measured in a lot of ways. Yes, car chases and shootings have a very clear kind of impact. But humour makes an impact. A really strong emotional drama does. An astonishing revelation. A creeping sense of dread. And so on. That’s impact. You want to maximise it. Good. But personally, my obsession comes to its peak with a slightly different metric. Not total impact, but impact per page. I want a book where each page feels thick with some kind of adhesive force (excitement, humour, romance, revelation, whatever.) That obsession of mine – with density not just impact – gives rise to a few different sub-obsessions. So I’m Mr Stingy when it comes to words. If I reckon I can clip two words out of a sentence, I’ll do that every time. If I can remove one word, I’ll do that. Because my first-person character also tends to the extremely laconic, I find myself dropping main verbs often. Any tiny bagginess in the prose feels like a mainsail flapping loose. That’s the first, easiest, most obvious way to increase density, but there are plenty of side-tricks too. So I’m very interested in a rich sense of place, because a rich sense of physical being just makes any scene feel more vibrantly present. I’m interested in humour, because it’s a brilliant cheaty way to hop your way through relatively dull passages and scenes. Any interesting and engaging character also gives you a get out. You just wind them up, let them do what they do, and let the reader peep horrified/delighted/thrilled at the results. But I want to talk in this email about one specific side-trick that just always works. It may or may not suit the story you’re writing at the moment, but, you know what?, it probably does. And it’s this: Family. Harry’s Law on Family is this: Take any set of interactions around any set of characters and  that set of interactions will feel more profound, dramatic and consequential if some portion of that inner group of characters are family. Oh yes, and it’s fine if some of the family are dead/missing. The easiest way to understand this is to observe just how often family signifiies. To pick a few bestsellers: Harry Potter: Harry’s orphanhood and the role of his real vs fake parents is absolutely crucial to the whole architecture. Yes, JK Rowling’s use of family is interesting in that HP’s parents are dead … but as we’ll see that trick isn’t so uncommon. Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Same thing. Lisbeth is (effectively) an orphan. That’s absolutely central to her depiction in the stories. Da Vinci Code: OK, in this rather silly story, Robert Langton’s family is of no consequence. But the goal at the end of the rather silly enterprise is understanding something astonishing about a rather famous family story. Gone Girl. Amy’s relationship with her parents (and their creation of Amazing Amy, a sort of surrogate daughter) is also central. Wolf Hall. Family, admittedly the family of a court, lies at the heart of the whole enterprise. And so on. It’s absolutely true of my Fiona books too, where Fiona’s series-length quest is to find out who her biological father is (and why she landed up with the adoptive one she loves.) Strip the whole family story out of any of these things and they feel thinner poorer things. Still don’t believe me? Then ask yourself which of these lines packs more power: Luke, I am your father. Luke, I’m a roofing guy who did a bit of work for your cousin Mark a little whiles back now. (And yes: I know that even the first line there is a misquotation.)The moral of these thoughts? Well, it’s mostly to keep your story architecture compact and to pull things back to family where you can. I’d say that birth family has most force. Then the protagonist’s own children carry next most force. Actual marriage relationships are weaker, but still important. After that, nothing else really signifies in our tiny little reptilian brains. (With one big exception: I have a theory that books aimed at teenagers don’t really care about birth family. Because teens are so impelled to look outwards from their family, you often don’t get a lot of power from bringing family into YA books. It’s all about the love interest.) You can think about these things from early on. So let’s say that you are writing a standard police procedural. Your character is a cop. The structure of the book is going to be: murder, investigation, solution. But you can still bring family in. Is the criminal somehow involved with a parent? Or is the parent? Or a parent is actually the Chief of Police? Or a famous prosecutor? You only have to toss out those questions to see how instant the sense of enrichment can be. And how multiple the sense of potential new storylines.Best of all: enrichment = increased density of impact.And I love density. Thanks all for your reaction to our promotional stuff last weekend. The response pretty much blew our socks off and we’ve been walking barefoot through the cold, cold frosts ever since. But happily of course. Who needs socks?So, tell me, does your story have family at its heart? And if it doesn\'t, could it? What\'s your set up? Do you think Harry\'s Law is right or wrong? Let\'s take our socks off and all have a Heated Debate.

OK, so my new favourite thing for today? It’s when you’ve been writing professionally for 20 years and still get really excited when a writer shows you some techniques that look sexy, fun, creative – and productive.More of that in one short second, but first, if you missed my webinar on self-publishing (or, really, on author-led marketing), then you can catch the replay here:https://jerichowriters.com/bf-self-pub-webinar-replay/We’ve had massively positive feedback on that webinar. People said things like:I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed watching your self-publishing webinar the other day … I was genuinely inspired.This is hands down the best live webinar I\'ve been on. Pure value and an inoffensive pitch ;-) Thank you so much Harry.I watched the replay last night and it was packed with really great information. You guys are definitely the best and most motivating writing resource I have found on my journey so farLoved your webinar and your follow-up below really helped me buck up … One personal question: Did you ever figure out why your kids were wearing helmets in your kitchen? No, I never did figure out why my kids were wearing helmets in the kitchen, but then again they found a fake fur pompom in the garden yesterday and built a hedgehog house for it, complete with bed of leaves and dish of milk. So helmets in the kitchen? That passes for normal, I’m afraid.As for the webinars, a lot of people avoid them because they assume the content is going to be all tease and no value. We don’t do that. We just cram as much serious value into the hour as we can. We do mention a product at the very end of the webinar, but we also tell you not to buy it, so that seems fair. Oh yes, and remember that you can get all the slides from the webinar from a download link here, so no need to take notes.Right. Bish, bosh. Next thing.So last night, the Mighty James Law delivered a webinar yesterday on Ideas, Plotting and Planning – that whole process of coaxing a novel into shape. Some of the material was familiar to me, but much of it wasn’t and was genuinely inspirational.In particular, I loved-loved-loved James’s willingness to state something that isn’t often enough said.Lots of published novels are bad. They annoy the reader. In James’s candid summary:Things that annoy me about novelsWhen I just don’t give a &%$£When I have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doingWhen they do something completely unexpected(usually to bail the author out of a plot hole)And we all know the feeling, right? You’re 100 pages into a perfectly competent novel, written by a pro author and published by some big, fancy publishing house. And you just don’t care. Or the action taken by the main character seems desperately contrived or stupid. (“No. Don’t enter the dark house where an armed gunman might be lurking. That sounds idiotic. How about you call your colleagues in the POLICE and call for ARMED BACKUP. That’s the whole point of being in the police, isn’t it?”)Issues like that kill a novel. I don’t finish those books. I don’t buy another one by the same author. I don’t think they should have been published, or not with that much laziness in storytelling and editing.So I am (I hope) as alert as James is to the risks. And of course if you write in a genre like ours, you are always bumping up against what the story wants (character enters dark house alone) and what reality demands (phone for backup.) So realistically, you will always be bicycling close to the edge of that precipice. You just want to avoid spilling over the edge.My solution is rudimentary. It involves lots of writing, even more rewriting, gallons of tea, and a trust that my own editorial smarts will end up washing any plot stupidities out of the fabric. That probably works well enough in the end, but I have always worried that my process isn’t especially efficient.James’s solution to these issues is the Why Diagram.It’s a kind of structured attempt to drive out plot-stupidity from your novel before you write it. Why is the reader going to care about your Initiating Incident? Why should they care about your main character? Boom, boom, boom. James’s technique forces you to look at and answer the big questions before you put pen to paper. It’s basically a tool for de-stupidising your story before you even start writing. There’s lots else in his presentation too, but that’s the part that made me sit up and bark.Plus … James has got three beautifully published books out, more on the way, and a TV deal in the oven. So you know what, I think he’s onto something. I’ll hand over to James himself for the detail.View James’s webinar replay hereUnless you are wiser than Methusalah or as sour as a dish of crab-apples, I think you’ll learn something and I think you’ll chuckle. I’m a grizzled old SOB, and I did both.One more webinar to go this season. It’s the Thrice-Blessed Sarah Juckes talking about How To Get Published. If you want to sign up for that (for free, of course), the sign up page is right here. Do note that the webinar is on a Wednesday; the others have been on a Thursday, so don’t get tripped up.That’s it from me. Go and spin some sunbeams into a wreath of happiness. I’m off to find some tea in the Townhouse - like our guest in the header image.But what about you? Do you find a lot of commercially published novels a bit disappointing? And what are your planning / idea generation techniques. Pull up an ebony chair or a duck-feather chaise longue and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

So, yesterday was the first of our super-brilliant autumn webinars. Last night’s discussion was about how to self-publish your work: the mindset, the basic model, and some extra tips for adding thrust to those efforts.One thought I had afterwards is one I often have:It’s a kind of regret that these conversations are restricted to writers-interested-in-self-pub. Because actually, the heart of what I spoke about yesterday is Author-Led Marketing – the kind of marketing that you can do very effectively, for very low cost, and totally irrespective of who your publisher is.In other words, let’s say you are dead-set on trad publishing. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe you even have an agent or are progressing nicely down that happy road. Very good.Let’s say you get your book deal. (Yay!) Your book starts heading for market. (Double yay!) And then it occurs to you that the fate of your book is wholly in someone else’s hands. Those other hands will be trying very hard to get your book bought by all the major supermarkets and other physical retailers, but what if they don’t succeed? And, given that all big publishers are hurling a lot of titles at a limited number of retail slots, they are quite likely not to succeed. So what then? What happens to your book then?The scary truth is that the marketing budget for your book will rapidly shrink down to a little bit of nonsense on Twitter and the like, and the chances of your book selling well start shrinking down to a small, round zero. Those odds aren’t much affected by how good your book is. If your book doesn’t have a substantial retail platform, its chances of rescue by word of mouth are basically nil.That’s where author-led marketing comes in – and it’s my personal view that every serious author these days needs to invest in their own marketing system. (Invest time, I mean. The actual costs are pretty small.)That marketing system will elevate your sales no matter what your outcomes in the world of bricks-and-mortar print.  That marketing system will guard and protect you. It will insure your career. It will increase your income and give you more flexibility over what you can profitably write.It’s a modern author-essential.These discussions tend to be wrapped up in a self-publishing wrapper, simply because every single author-led marketing technique of the last decade has emerged from the world of indie authors. Some of those techniques work well only for self-publishers, but the big red engine at the heart of all indie success works for everyone. Trad, indie, hybrid, anyone. It can work for you.In other words, if you have never thought about how to market your books, it’s high time you started. You can spend an hour learning the ropes on our Webinar Replay page right here:https://jerichowriters.com/bf-self-publishing-webinar-replay/ [The formatting on that page is a bit weird at the moment, but the video plays normally if you click it, and we\'ll sort out the formatting as soon as we can.]Right. Bish, bosh. That’s done.There was something else I wanted to pick up from yesterday, and it was sparked by questions like these:BENEDICT: Is it possible to make money publishing Middle grade e-books, if you\'re not already a popular writer?CAROLINE: Hi Harry, one thing that concerns me is that it sounds like to make it work, you have to be churning out books very quickly! I am not a fast writer... Is self-publishing still going to work for me?SARAH: Hi Harry, my series is planned out at 27 books (not all written yet!), but is also planned to be split into three sets of nine books with past, present and future time periods… Do you have any tips for setting out with something this ambitious?DIANA: I have written my first novel. Edited and rewritten after Jericho editor report. It\'s literary fiction. My next novels will be significantly different. Your model seems to suggest that a series is the most important aspect of self-publishing … Lit fiction is probably not the most lucrative market?GAIL: I\'ve written a memoir - a WW2 pilot. No series. How do I build an email list?And, look, there are specific answers to all these questions. (Roughly: yes, middle grade can work. Yes, less prolific authors can succeed with self-pub. Yes, there is probably a good way to sequence some massive 27-book endeavour. Yes, lit fic is a hard sell in self-pub terms, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work at all. And yes: marketing a one-off memoir is hard, but there may be ways to cheat the system a little.)But the big answer is broader and bigger. So is the underlying question. Because the underlying question is often something like this:What does success look like? What would it be to be a successful author?There’s just no one single right answer to that question. Or rather: the single right answer depends on you and no one else.Yet I think there’s often a tendency to think that there’s only one model of successful author. Or maybe two: Lee Child (if you’re thinking of commercial fiction) and, I don’t know, Jonathan Franzen if you’re thinking of literary fiction.Millions of copies sold. Or prizes won. Or both.And if you don’t check one of those boxes, you haven’t succeeded, or not really.But that’s horse dung, my friend. Fresh, bright, and steaming.Here are some other ways to succeed:You write a memoir that people cherished by you read and love.You write a memoir that is read and valued by those in your professional community (Air Force pilots, for example.)You get published by a small publisher. You have a book on your shelves. It never sells very much, but you never wrote it for huge sales in the first place. That was never the expectation or the purpose.You write a literary novel that perfectly satisfies you, artistically.You write a commercial novel that satisfies you artistically and gathers a core of passionate, supportive readersYou earn enough money from your writing that you can chip into the family coffers and allows you to describe yourself, truthfully, as a professional authorYou don’t ever get published, not the way you once wanted at any rate, but you have a skill and a passion and a community of friends who share your passionYou read your draft manuscript and feel real, unfolding pleasure at the story you are telling.These things are all successes. Every one. Especially the last, because it was to generate that sense of pleasure that we all came into this ridiculous game.Of all the Jericho Writers clients who have gone on to commercial success (and several have hit a million copies in sales and counting), the two I take most pleasure in came from a couple of writers, both well into their retirement, who wrote memoirs. Their work sold well, as it happened, but their pleasure and pride came long before their work had even hit the shelves. It wasn’t the sales that mattered: it was the accomplishment. The perfectly told story.And, full disclosure, my own authorial career flies on the same winds, swims on the same tides, walks the same well-grassed paths.I could, I know, make more money from my writing. I could market harder, write more, push those boundaries.But I don’t. And won’t. I like the books I write. I enjoy the act of writing and editing. I enjoy marketing up to a certain point, but when that marketing stops being fun, I stop doing it.There’s a model of self-pub author which doesn’t look anything like me. It’s the four-books-a-year author, who still has time to run five email lists, and dozens (hundreds?) of ads on Facebook, Bookbub, and Amazon.Those guys definitely make more money. Some of them also write good books. But they’re not me. I admire them, but I don’t want to be them. I’ve been approached – headhunted – by publishers wanting me to enter a partnership model that would turn me into something like those authors, and I’ve said no. Definitely, definitely not. It’s just not what I want.So define your own success. Don’t be pushed around by the success of others. Choose what constitute success for you and know that that’s the only true success there is.Go watch that webinar replay here. We’ll make slides available as well.Next week: James Law on plotting, and everyone loves James Law.Please walk in an autumn wood, while there are leaves still on the tree. Take a hat, though, because the winds are chill.But what about you? What defines your success as a writer? Tell me what matters to you and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

My favourite thing?Well, I have a lot of favourite things, but my favourite for today is when you guys ask super-brilliant questions that make me think … and generate the meat for a cracking email.And this week, honours are taken by Nigel S, who wrote to say:Hello Harry,Can I ask you about warmth in writing?I have probably read on average two books per week for the last sixty years. (That probably tells you everything you need to know about me.)Warmth in a story has always fascinated me, and I strive for it in all my jottings. For instance, Stuart MacBride and Harry Bingham have it in spades (Lord, I hate a smoke-blower, don’t you?) while M______ and L______ don’t.Anyway, try as I might to apply my mighty intellect to it, I can’t identify what it is that does the trick.So I’d be very grateful if you could give me and the writing world in general your take on why I can read a book about Laz and Roberta in a day, whereas it might take a week’s stay in Three Pines to get the juice.And that’s an interesting question, right? I’m certain, for example, that JK Rowling’s massive success relies in very large part on her wit and warmth. So yes, you come to her books for the boy wizard and Voldemort and all that. But you stay because of that sense of human generosity at the heart. The warm blanket and the just-right mug of cocoa.Same thing with Stieg Larsson in a way. If you describe the Lisbeth Salander character – Aspergers, violent, spiky, tattoos, motorbike, abuse survivor, computer geek – you expect someone who is impressive, maybe, but not someone you want to spend a ton of time with. Yet the books themselves do have a sense of warmth at their heart – warmth, not bleakness – and the result is that readers committed to a series, despite its multiple flaws.So, if warmth is a Good Thing, how do you build it? How do you make it happen on the page?The honest answer would be: I’m not sure. This email doesn’t offer a properly developed explanation. It offers some first thoughts in response to an interesting question.But I’ll start by saying that this question particularly chimes with me, because a few years back I was developing my Fiona Griffiths crime series. On the drawing board I had a character and book who seemed deeply unlikable, with a theme that seemed dark to the point of a cemetery midnight:Fiona used to think she was deadShe deals in homicideThe crime at the heart of book #1 was ugly (human/sex trafficking)Fiona’s dad is a crookShe has no romantic attachments and no historically successful relationshipAt one point in the book, Fiona sleeps in a mortuary. She’s not accidentally locked in. She’s not looking for clues. She just wants to sleep next to dead people.A book like that might or might not be impressive. But is it something you’d want to read? Is that a character you’d want to return to? Based on that chilly outline, I’d have to say no. (And some publishers did say no, by the way, for that exact reason. The tone of the rejections was roughly: \"Wow! We love what you\'ve done, but we don\'t think readers could resonate with this theme.\" In other words: we\'re clever, insightful readers and we love your book, but we think that the unwashed rabble out there wouldn\'t have our excellent good sense. I don\'t need to tell you what I think of that attitude.)But for the future of my career, the answer absolutely had to be yes. Yes, readers had to love the book and bond to the character. Everything depended on that.I didn’t want to change my basic outline, but I will say that the aspect of that first FG novel I thought about hardest as I was writing it had to do with the basic question: “How can I make this book feel warm?”One answer was humour (a tool that JK Rowling used a lot, and Stieg Larsson not at all.) But it’s an easy win. If a book makes the reader laugh, that little splash of sunshine will do a lot.Another answer, and a really important one for me, is close family relationships. For all Fiona’s mental chaos, and for all the darkness in her head, she loves her family. And they love her. Not in some American, happy-clappy, Thanksgiving TV kind of way. Just in an ordinary family way. Ordinary like this, for example:We [ie: Fiona, her mother and sister] eat ham, carrots and boiled potatoes, and watch a TV chef telling us how to bake sea bream in the Spanish fashion.Ant has homework that she wants help with, so I go upstairs with her. The homework in question takes about fifteen minutes. Ant waits for me to give her the answers, then writes what I tell her to.That snippet shows functional, happy, ordinary relationships. And when Fiona’s life is placed under stress by the events of the story, she ends up calling on her family for emotional and practical help, and the family gives it, generously, without fuss.That fictional act – placing someone at the heart of a web of loving relationships – somehow snakes outwards from the book and envelops the reader too. The family route works mostly strongly and easily, but your story may not accommodate it. (Harry Potter and Lisbeth Salander, are both in effect orphans, after all.) In such cases, you can build a kind of surrogate family. Ron and Hermione in one instance. Mikael Blomkvist and the Millennium team in the other. It’s the loving warmth thrown out by those relationships that steps in where a family would most naturally be.But I think my third answer probably runs deepest. It’s this:Chilliness in a book starts in the heart of your main character.And what matters here isn’t your character’s situation, or her achievement of love, or the existence of close ties. It’s what she wants. It’s what she strives to attain.So, yes, my Fiona had difficulty recognising her own emotions. She had never had a proper boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. She kept on making a mess of the relationship that is burgeoning under her nose. Here’s an example:The restaurant he’s [David Brydon, the prospective boyfriend] chosen is only a few minutes away … but he walks half a step ahead of me, moving a bit faster than I can manage, and he has his chest thrown out and his shoulders pulled back as though he’s a soldier bracing himself for combat. I realise that this is his way of preparing for an all-out assault on Fortress Fi, and I’m touched, though I would slightly prefer it if potential suitors didn’t regard a date with me as akin to entering combat.It’s possible that I was prickly with him in the wine bar. I sometimes am without knowing it, my habitual default position. Not good when it comes to flaunting those feminine charms.I determine to do better.And she does indeed try her very hardest to do better. It’s a clunky, awkward attempt to do better, but it’s genuine. Not just genuine, in fact. It’s heartfelt. This is someone urgently wanting human connection. Here’s an example:I smile at him when we’re sitting and tell him again that this is lovely. I even go as far as being coaxed into ordering a glass of white wine. I realise that I’m operating as though following instructions from some kind of dating manual, but I’ve found out that that’s usually OK with people. It’s only me who feels weird.From that point on, things go much better.And, as it happens, it works. She gets her man. She creates and sustains her first proper romantic relationship.But it didn’t have to. What mattered wasn’t the achievement of romantic completion, but the desire to find it. And indeed, as the series progresses, readers discovered that the path of true love never did run smooth (and certainly not when you have a series to write and an authorial income to generate.)And there it is. Great question from Nigel. Three answers: humour, family, and the desire for human connection. Because, as I say, these are opening thoughts, I’ll be interested in your reflections.So what do you think? What works for you, either as reader or writer? Let\'s all cuddle close, and have a Heated But Amicable Debate.

A couple of weeks back, I talked about how important it was to gear your book for the market. I don’t mean – and never mean – that you shouldn’t write from a place of passion and love. You should! You should! But you need to write from a place of passion, love … and market wisdom.Now, a few of you wrote back to say, essentially, “Hey great, Harry. In that little story of yours, you told me how you sat with your agent and drank tea and ate ginger biscuits and had the market explained to you by a pro agent with thirty years’ experience of selling. What about those of us who don’t have an agent, YOU DIAMOND-ENCRUSTED NINCOMPOOP?”And, OK, that’s a fair question. I was going to answer it last week, in fact, except that I suddenly decided I needed to tell you all about the oldest texts in existence. (My reasoning for that change of tack? Absolutely none. Sorry.)Anyway, here goes:How to understand the market for your book if you don’t have an agentIf you don’t have an agent, you are mostly cut off from the chatter that accompanies the sale of manuscripts to editors. Not entirely, of course, you can pick up snippets from Twitter, or from Publishers Weekly or the Bookseller. But the fact is that even publishing editors understand the market less well than agents, simply because they understand the appetites of their own firm, but don’t know what other firms are buying. Agents have those ‘What’s hot, and what’s not?’ conversations every week, with every firm, so their feel is second to none.And when I say you need to write from love and passion, I do mean it. So let’s say you have quite a dark comedy about (I dunno) a blind woman looking for love. Then you read that the big new thing in publisher land is Up Lit, and everyone wants books that are sunny, not dark.What do you do? Simply turn your book on its head and write something wholly different from what you first intended? No.Similarly, indie authors have a lot of data-tools available to them, that purport to guide them on what books they should write. Those tools say things like, Regency Romance is saturated, but YA dystopia looks hot. And the data is probably right. But again: if writing regency romance is what you want to do, why would you jump into YA dystopia just because a stupid data tool tells you to do it?So you go with your passion, but intelligently.That means, with your blind-woman / dark comedy novel, you’re going to search out similar books. You’d think about things like:Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. (Yes: woman is in search for love. No: she’s not blind. Yes: she has some significant emotional challenges. Yes: the comedy engages with some quite dark subjects.) Nathan Filer / Shock of the Fall. (Central character is a guy not a woman. But yes, plenty of comic moments. Yes, examines life from inside a disability.)Anthony Doerr / All the Light We Cannot See. (No, not a comedy. Yes, directly about blindness.)And so on.As you can see from my comments, none of those novels perfectly reflect the one you want to write – which is good, not bad – but you can also see that your novel lives inside that company. You can feel the family relationships.And then?Nothing. You don’t copy. You don’t draw stupid conclusions. (‘Hmm. Anthony Doerr’s novel brought Nazis into the story about blindness, and we all know that Nazis are storytelling gold, so maybe I need to reset my story from contemporary London to, um, 1942 Munich.’)Rather, you just read the novels that are in your zone.Yes, you read some classics. You read some non-fiction. (So, for example, if your book deals with blindness, you read autobiographical work by Borges, and Lusseyran, and others.) But mostly, and most importantly, you read novels that:1.    Have come out in the last 3-5 years2.    Are, broadly speaking, in your zone3.    Have done well commercially and (ideally) also critically.That’s it. Then you write the book you want to write, but you do so with your mind and imagination formed by the current state of literature.So, for example, Anthony Doerr’s heroine trains her senses by mastering complex puzzles, built for her by her locksmith father. If you used that trope, or something similar, it would feel a little flat. Over familiar. Stale. If on the other hand, you’ve imbibed that book, and loved it, your mind will likely spring to some other way of tackling that same issue. Some natural progression from Doerr’s own approach.That’s all you need. Simply supplying your mind with the right feedstock will work.So yes: a couple of weeks back, I told you how I got one of my books market-ready through a conversation with my agent. But I didn’t tell you how the Fiona Griffiths series came to be born. Then, I decided I wanted to turn to crime, but had lost touch with the modern crime market. So I went out and bought – everything. Two dozen novels, two dozen authors. All contemporary writers. Most of them big-selling. British, Irish Scandinavian, American. A wild medley of approaches. Literary and commercial. Series and one-off. First person and third person. Dark and gentle. Funny and grim. Police procedurals and everything else. And so on.Then, I didn’t use that knowledge in any mechanical way. I just absorbed it and wrote what I wanted to write. But the knowledge changed what I wanted to write.And lo and behold, I wrote the most timely book I’ve probably ever written. So I was putting the finishing touches to my first Fiona novel, when Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became huge. It was when Claire Danes (as Carrie) was storming a small screen near you with Homeland. And so on. My book wasn’t a copy of any of those things. Indeed, it had been written before I had any knowledge of them. But I was pushed by the exact same zeitgeist and ended up in (my version of) the exact same place.Result: a novel that hit the spot with readers and was sold, quickly and easily, to publishers all over the world and which was also adapted, fast and easily, for TV too.You can do the same. And quite likely, if you look at your bookshelves, you’ll find you’ve already done it.That’s all from me. I am off to remove a pumpkin from my son’s head.But what about you? Have you tried the approach I\'ve recommended here? Did it work? Do you have other suggestions? Let\'s all have a Heated Debate ...

This week: a jump into the past that returns us to an eerily modern place. You’ll see what I mean a little later.But first, let’s play, ‘Who’s the oldest?’The oldest surviving book in the world is, probably, the Codex Sinaiticus. The word codex just means book: that is, it calls attention to the specific physical structure, involving binding on one side only of a set of loose leaves. The ‘Sinaiticus’ bit just refers to the book’s location, in the Sinai Peninsula.This codex is approximately square. The text is hand-written. And it’s huge. The whole thing has about four million letters. It took the hides of about 360 animals, mostly calves, to make it. The book, unsurprisingly given its age and location, is a bible. The surviving text contains an entire New Testament, and most of the Old Testament as well.But in our quest for anciency, I think we need to drop our concern with the physical structure of the document. We’re looking for ancient texts, and don’t really mind if that comes in the form of animal skins sewn together, or gold sheets bound together (like the 2500-year-old Pyrgi gold tablets), or marks on stone, or impressions in clay.PtahhotepThus liberated, we can leap back further. The oldest complete text written by a named individual is the Instructions of Ptahhotep, first found near Karnak in Egypt. The text itself is “only” about 36-40 centuries old, but Ptahhotep himself lived in about 2400 BC, or 44 centuries back. If you hopped onto a time machine and set it for that era, you’d know you’d be almost halfway once you hit the birth of Jesus.The text begins thus:The Governor of his City, the Vizier, Ptahhotep, said: \'O Prince, my Lord, the end of life is at hand; old age descends; feebleness comes and childishness is renewed. The old lie down in misery every day. The eyes are small; the ears are deaf. Energy is diminished, the heart has no rest … The bones are painful; good turns into evil. All taste departs.That’s quite an intro, though the text itself is disappointingly bland. (‘Quarrelling in place of friendship is a foolish thing,’ is a fair sample of the content.)But we’re not done. We said we didn’t want to get stuck on the codex as a physical structure, but nor should we get too hung up on the completeness of the text in question.The oldest text in the worldWhat we’re after, really, is the oldest surviving text of any sort and it’s another set of ancient Egyptian advice which claims the prize: the Instructions of Shuruppak.This text is about 4600 years old, and if you thought that Ptahhotep’s words of wisdom were a bit dull, you’ll nevertheless find them a whole class above these zingers from Shurruppak:You should not locate your field in a road.You should not buy a donkey that brays.Or my favourite:You should not abuse a ewe; otherwise you will give birth to a daughter.That’s pretty much as ancient as we can get in terms of hard physical text, but I haven’t yet told you how that ancient clay tablet actually begins its list of inanities. It opens like this:In those days, in those far remote days, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years, at that time the wise one who knew how to speak in elaborate words lived in the Land.How to open a bookI promised you something eerily modern, right, and there it is. What does Shurruppak\'s opening remind you of? Maybe something like this:Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen … (Grimm Brothers / Sleeping Beauty)A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away … (Star Wars, opening crawl)Listen! We of the Spear-Danes in the days of old …(Beowulf)In other words, the opening text of the world’s oldest text starts the exact same way as a modern sci-fi blockbuster, or a poem composed by a bunch of Anglo-Saxons. That sense of a time beyond our knowledge, a land where rules could be a little different. It’s like our portal into fiction.And, given that the author of, say, Beowulf certainly didn’t know about the way Shurruppak handled his intro, or the way the Grimm Brothers would handle theirs, you have to say that this isn’t about copying. It’s not a meme that went viral. What we’re looking at here is something deeply embedded in the way we tell stories. Something hardwired.I like that as a thought. Like it enough that I’d be happy to dedicate this email to that and nothing else.Desperate attempt to make this whole post relevant to youAnd in a way, that kind of opening to a story is useless to you. Novels don’t start that way. They search for the specific – something wholly exact in terms of character, time, place, situation. The deliberate murk of the ‘in those far remote days’ formula is pretty much anti-novel in style.But, but, but …I think novels do still use that sense of a story-telling portal. It’s not quite as formlised, as ritualised, but we still want to take the reader by the hand and help them to cross that threshold. We do it differently today, but that moment of transition is still jewelled, still magical. And that’s a first page, or first chapter essential right? A little tingle of magic. You want all your reader-Dorothys to say or think, ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’Succeed in that, and you’re halfway to succeeding, period. You and Shuruppak, both.Over to you. What do you think? How does your book start? Why do you think that \'long, long ago\' type opening works so well? Why don\'t we use it today? Or have we cunningly adopted those tricks in disguise. Tell me what you think and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

I got an email yesterday from a writer with a conundrum. Roughly: “I wrote the book my heart wanted me to write and now an agent says that there isn’t a market for it.”And truthfully, I’ve seen variants of that basic email hundreds of times over the years. It’s a desperately common predicament.What’s more, I know the feeling. When I first set out to write non-fiction, I had a great idea for a book. I’d take a look at British history through the prism of exceptionalism. All European countries have encountered plenty of plot and plague, regicide and warfare, invasion and insurrection. But in what ways was Britain’s story genuinely distinctive? What really stood out as exceptional?The answer turned out to be quite a lot. There was plenty of substance there for a book.I started to write my non-fiction book proposal. It was obvious, for example, that I needed a chapter on the British navy. (Did you know that Britain once had more warships than the entire rest of the world combined?) So I wrote a long, interesting chapter on all things naval.I made it funny. If you write these things as an amateur, you have to offer the reader something in place of years of authority. So yes, people want to learn, but they want to learn in a non-scary way and if, every page or two, they get a laugh, then so much the better.I wrote a couple of chapters of the book and sent them out to the guy who would go on to become my agent.He liked my idea, but rejected the proposal.The material I’d drafted – a passion project – simply didn’t sit with the market. Yes: the market was happy with a funny book about British history. Yes: my British exceptionalism theme could work well. But the way I’d approached things was still just too serious.In short, he said no.Over a ginger biscuit and a nice cup of tea, he explained to me why I was wrong. What I needed to do instead. What the market was after.Now, if I’d persisted with my original plan, I’m pretty sure I’d have found some other agent to take me on. I’d probably have found a publisher, of some sort, at some price.But –In competitions between your heart and the market, you have to let the market win. Every time. I had the wisdom, back then, to listen to the guy-who-is-now-my-agent, and I went on revising that proposal until he was happy.Instead of a 100,000+ word book with chapters of 10,000 words, I ended up with a 70,000 word book with chapters of 2-3,000 words.The advance I received, as part of a two-book deal, was £175,000, or about $230,000. I’d guess that advance was well over ten times what I’d have got if I stuck to my original plan.And that sounds like a sell-out, a lucrative sell-out.But here’s the thing.The book got better.The book that went on to be published was better than the book I’d started writing. It was funnier. More engaging. More persuasive. Covered more material. Was more memorable.By engaging seriously with feedback about the market, that book got better – and put a lot more money in my pocket.Of the novels I’ve written, I can think of three that went through some serious editing between the first draft-for-a-publisher and the book that went to print.The first of those turned from a pile of steaming garden-fertiliser to an adequately good book.The second one turned from a baggy story to a taut one.The third one dropped its bonkers-but-entertaining ending in favour of one that precisely married up with the story that had gone before.Every time Mr Market won. Every time, the book got better.That sounds like it shouldn’t be the case: surely your artistic soul trumps grubby materialism. Except that the market is, in effect, the body that figures out what most pleases readers. It does that in a way that’s deeply sensitive to genre (so, literary authors needs to bow to a different god than crime writers, for example.) And the market also knows everything about every book that has been published. It churns through all that data and pops out its answers.If the market tells you, loud and clear, that your book isn’t yet working, that is almost certainly an indicator that your book needs tweaking. Or major surgery. Or, just possibly, lethal injection.I don’t say that the market is going to be right about every book ever written. The market will never quite know what to make of books that really burst boundaries. And there’s always an exemption for genius. Those guys get to set their own rules.But mostly? Books get better under the discipline of the market. It’s happened for me, every single time. Chances are, it’ll happen for you too.Now over to you. Have you reworked books to suit the market? Or did you plan them with a view to sales? And have agents been mean and horrible about your work? And were they mostly right, mostly wrong, or mostly something else. Tell me your thoughts and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

WH Davies was the kind of writer you don’t get so much now. No writers’ groups for him.  No self-promotion on Twitter.Born to a poor Welsh family in the late nineteenth century, he became apprenticed to a maker of picture frames. Bored and wanting adventure, he started to take casual work and travel, sailing to America in 1893.There, he spent six years as a tramp – a hobo. He stole free rides from freight trains, took bits and bobs of casual work, begged door to door. He worked on cattle ships across the Atlantic. Occasionally he passed his winters in a series of Michigan jails (by agreement with those jailing him; they profited from the arrangement.)In 1908, in London, he heard about the Klondike gold rush and sailed to Canada. He jumped on board a freight train, hoping to cross the continent on it, but slipped and was caught under the wheels. He lost his foot immediately, then his leg below the knee.He never made his fortune in a gold mine. He left his life of tramping behind him.He returned to Europe, to London, and started to write poetry. He still had no money, and lived in hostels for the homeless, and in those places writing poetry was something to be done strictly in private. To raise the funds for his first self-published book of verse, he had to save some cash. That meant leaving the hostel to spend six months tramping the countryside, living in barns.In 1905, he published his work, and sold it by pushing his 200 copies through the letterboxes of wealthy literati, asking for payment if they liked it.And –Enough of them did.Some high-minded journalists and other opinion-formers gradually got behind his work, and Davies gradually became a bestseller and a fixture (albeit an odd one) on the London literary scene.He’s best known now for his memoir of those years a hobo – Autobiography of a Supertramp, a book I strongly recommend. And also for this:What is this life if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows.No time to see, when woods we pass,Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.And so on.He’s right, isn’t he?I’m signed up to some self-pub-oriented newsletters, and one of the things that I find permanently daunting about those things is the sheer damn productivity of some writers. Books, four or five of them a year. Ads on three platforms, expertly created, tested and monitored. And newsletters. And conferences. And podcasts. And – blimey.Those guys probably work out four times weekly, arrange amazing date nights, and have everyone’s Christmas presents already bought and wrapped.I’m not like that. Nor, most likely are you. Nor do you actually have to be like that to succeed.And yes. I’m a big believer that the activity of “writing a book” needs to involve time spent at a laptop, hitting keys. If you don’t do that, you’re not a writer.But the best ideas don’t always come from screentime. Sometimes you need to take the dogs for a walk. Or go for a swim. Or walk under green trees and watch where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.I’d say most of my biggest ideas have come that way. Never in isolation, of course. You also have to read your research. To start mapping your ideas on paper (or screen, or post-it notes, or an assembly of well-trained labradoodles.)But still. That melting place in your brain where you are considering a problem without quite knowing that you’re considering it. That place where the light comes in sideways and finds new things to illuminate?That place is precious, and we writers should treasure it.Davies’ poem ends:A poor life this if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare.So that’s the message for this week. Take your phone or laptop and hurl it, right now, into the nearest duckpond. Walk until you see some wild clematis or a squirrel on manoeuvres.Think of your characters, then forget them.Let the magic happen.And how about you? Is the nearest duckpond full of your expensively acquired electrical gadgets? Do you have to walk a very long way to find wild clematis? And where do you get your ideas? What do you do to encourage sweet inspiration to bless your endeavours? Let me know below and we\'ll all have a Heated Debate.

My last post was about –Well, I can’t remember, because the thing that dominated your reactions afterwards was my use of y’all. In particular, I had people writing to me from Scotland, Northern Ireland & Australia telling me that I didn’t have to raid the American South to come with a perfectly good you-plural, when I could use a perfectly good Scottish/Irish/Aussie youse.And youse feels just right. I’m going to use it more often from now on.But that brings us on to the matter of which version of English we should respect as authoritative.Standard British English (SBE), because the Queen speaks it? Standard American English (SAE), because Donald Trump speaks it (kinda)? Or maybe some other kind of English, because both those Englishes have had their turn in the sun?The answer, of course, is that it’s a stupid question. No particular English is more authoritative or appropriate than another. You speak with (and write with) whatever’s right for the job at hand.Now most of you, I expect, write in SBE or SAE, and I’m sure you do that proficiently enough. But what when you have a character who doesn’t speak one of those Englishes? Perhaps that character speaks (for example) African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)? Or perhaps they’re someone who speaks English, imperfectly, as a second language?So how do you represent their dialogue on the page? How do you, in printed form, capture the way they speak?Either way, you don’t necessarily want to stuff your SAE / SBE into the mouth of that character. That might show a kind of disrespect to the character and the language they speak. (Which would be stupid, not least because those other Englishes are quite often more expressive. Did you know, for example, that AAVE has a full four versions of the past tense: I been bought it, I done buy it, I did buy it, I do buy it? Sweet, huh? AAVE has three versions of the future too.)So you’re determined to honour the status and expressive power of those other Englishes. But how?Let’s say, for example, that you have a Yorkshireman as a character in your MS. (Yorkshire is a large and self-confident county in the North of England.) Let’s say your novel is set in the London advertising world. Most of your characters don’t talk Yorkshire. This particular one – we’ll call him Geoffrey – does. You want to mark the way he speaks as being different; that’s part of what makes him who he is. It’s part of the richness of your characters and the dialogues they get into.Well, we could have our Geoffrey speak like this:Ear all, see all, say nowt;Eat all, sup all, pay nowt;And if ivver tha does owt fer nowt – Allus do it fer thissen.(That’s the ‘Yorkshire motto’ and translates as: Hear all, see all, say nothing. Eat all, drink all, pay nothing.  And if ever you do something for nothing – always do it for yourself.)But doesn’t that look unbelievably patronising? We have our book full of London ad-world types, then in walks Geoffrey sounding like something dragged from the rougher end of one of the Bronte novels. It would be hard to have Geoffrey speak like that on the page and not somehow create the idea that he was comical, or stupid, or boorish, or ignorant.The solution, of course, is precision. (Most things in writing are.)Take a look at that motto again. Some of the words are exactly the same as Standard British English, but just rendered phonetically – ear for hear, ivver for ever. But why do that? We don’t generally write phonetically. When I talk, I’ll seldom pronounce the last g in going, though some English speakers would. So if you were writing a character like me in a novel, would you write goin’ for going? Surely not.So rule 1 is: You don’t describe accents phonetically. Doing so just looks patronising and clumsy.But that rams you straight into the second issue, which is: what do you do when you encounter a word (like the Yorkshire nowt) that just doesn’t exist in SAE or SBE?And the answer there is equally obvious: nowt is a perfectly legitimate word. It just happens to be a Yorkshire one, not an SAE / SBE one.So rule 2 is: You include non-standard words / phrases / grammar in exactly the way that your character would use them.So we’d rewrite our Yorkshire motto as follows:Hear all, see all, say nowt;Eat all, sup all, pay nowt;And if ever tha does owt for nowt Allus do it for thissen.That removes the patronising phonetics, but honours the separateness of Yorkshire-ese by including its words and phrases in full. You haven’t lost a jot of local character. All you’ve lost is a metropolitan sneer towards non-SAE/SBE speakers.If you wanted to tone this down a bit (and I would), I’d use always for allus, and maybe yourself for thissen. I’d probably also swap in you for tha, just because you want to nudge the reader about a character’s voice and accent. You don’t need to bellow.And –You can have fun. I once created a character who stemmed from the Orkney Islands, off the north Coast of Scotland. Even by Scottish standards, Orkney is remote – so much so that it spoke Norn (a version of Norse, the language of the Vikings) until a couple of hundred years ago. Since then, that Norn has softened out into Orcadian, which is a sister language to Scots, which is a sister language to English.But –It’s a strange and beautiful thing. The language is sort of comprehensible to a regular English speaker, but only just.So on the one hand, my Orcadian character (Caff) says things like this:‘Ye’r a guid peedie lassie. Th’ wurst damn cook a’m ever seen, but a guid lassie fur a’ that.’You might not know what peedie means (small), but the rest of it is straightforward.On the other hand, Caff also says things like this:‘Thoo dohnt wahnt tae be skelp while turning,’ he says, as his hands show a big wave hitting the ship side-on as it turns. ‘If tha’ happens, we’ll hae oor bahookie in th’ sky in twa shakes o’ a hoor’s fud.’And this:‘Whitna raffle wur geen and gottin wursels intae noo, eh? A right roo o’ shite.’I wouldn’t say that those are totally incomprehensible – roo of shite means roughly what you think it might – but you wouldn’t especially want to be tested on the detail.When writing that kind of thing, you want to dance your reader along a line of comprehension / bafflement. I reckoned that readers wouldn’t know what skelp meant, so I added half a line of explanatory text about waves hitting ships to make it clear. But whitna raffle, roo of shite, bahookie in th’ sky and the rest of it – well, I just wanted to dangle those lovely, strange phrases in front of my readers’ noses, so we could enjoy their Nordic, sea-green beauty without comment.My character’s reactions to this dialogue were much as yours or mine would be. She understood some of what she was being told, but not all of it. Her own ripples of confusion added a layer of enjoyment to the interactions.Oh, and if you’re sitting there quietly impressed by my mastery of Orcadian … well, I did what I could using a dictionary that I bought online. Then I sent the relevant chunks of my draft to the editor of The Orcadian newspaper, and he was kind enough to correct my text where it needed it.That’s all from me. Youse have a good weekend.But tell me what strange and beautiful accents do you incorporate in your work? And how do you represent them on the page? Do you have especial bugbears? Or things you love. Or bits of dialogue that you use as a model. Drop in a comment below and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

We’re going to talk about narrative distance. (Or psychic distance. Or, sometimes, emotional distance.)It’s one of the most important tools in the writer’s armoury and the fluid use of it adds depth and motion to your text. You may very well be using the technique perfectly without being aware of it. Or you may have an aha moment in this email that illuminates something and unlocks a whole new level of your writing.We start with a simple definition and some examples.Narrative distance has to do with how far your narration is from your character’s innermost heart and thoughts. So:“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”That’s Dickens commenting on eighteenth-century London, and he’s swooping, god-like, over an entire city, or an entire country. He’s so not-close to a character that no characters have yet appeared in the book.But you can swoop in further:“It was the Dover Road … on a Friday night late in November.”We’re getting more specific about time and place now. We haven’t yet hit character, but we’re getting closer. We move in again:“The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.”Things are now completely external (still no character to focus on), but time and place has become completely precise. It’s not that Dickens has given us precise co-ordinates of place and time, but whereas “Friday night” refers to a whole reach of time, the sound of this galloping horse must be heard within one specific half-minute of that night.We swoop in again.A coach – the Dover mailcoach – stops. The horseman asks for a Mr Jarvis Lorry. And:“[The] passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard, the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.”We’re now, as it were, face to face, with our character. If that “best of times” quotation had Dickens flying over London, we’re now in a coach right next to a person. We’re close enough that we see him physically acknowledging his name.That said, our view of this character is still external. We’re not in his head at all.As it happens, this scene from Dickens is just an appetiser. He doesn’t plunge all the way into the man’s head. But he could have done:“Jarvis Lorry reached thoughtfully for the note.”That word “thoughtfully” is somewhere between a purely external view and a genuinely internal one. Yes, we can sort of see from someone’s manner whether they’re thoughtful or not, but the word could equally well be used by the excellent Mr Lorry to describe himself.“He pondered a moment.” And now we’re definitely in his head. No one outside the admirable Lorry knows if he’s pondering or not.“As he read the missive, a slow fury crept over him.”From thought to emotion, and our sense of interiority grows greater.“The devils! Would they never leave him be?”And boom! The character has now taken over the actual narration. We’re in stream-of-consciousness mode. The character’s own thoughts are spilling, live and unedited, onto the page.And that’s narrative distance, the whole spectrum from hyper-remote to extremely intimate. From being actually removed from any characters at all to so up close and personal that the character themself barges the narrator off the page.Why this mattersI hope there’s something conceptually interesting about noticing this narrative spectrum. As I say, you quite likely deploy it fluidly and without noticing it. But to notice it fully can illuminate various elements of your text.For one thing, there’s rhythm. If you operate only at one level of psychic distance, your text will have a monotonous quality, much as if you had to watch a movie with no close-ups and no panoramas.For another, there’s movement. If you want to zoom right into a character’s innermost thoughts, you can. This is fiction. You can and should. But you can’t just crash into them without a graduated approach. You need to shift fluidly through the gears, getting closer in on the character, step by step by step. (Just think how crashingly awkward it would be to jump from “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” straight to “Jarvis Lorry reached thoughtfully for the note. The devils! Would they never leave him be.” Because the approach has been so rushed, the text is unengaging and hard to read.)And then there’s usage. When do we want to be right inside a character’s head? When that character is experiencing strong, significant emotion, of course.When do we want to be zoomed out and somewhat detached from character? Well, when we simply want to convey important external data about the scene, of course.When you think of it like that, it’s easy enough, but put all the pieces together and you have a powerful, powerful tool at your disposal.Because this post has run on long enough already, I’ll shut up now. But because these things make more sense in context, I’ve pasted a chunk of one of my scenes in the PSes below. That scene has a whole graduated movement from basically external to extremely internal. It’s delivered, what’s more, in first person narration, which just goes to show that these psychic distance issues are conceptually identical, whether or not you have an external narrator.That’s it from me. I’m about to saddle up and head for Dover. Giddy on up!Feel free to pile in with your own comments and observations in the comments thread below. Meantime here\'s a slice of my forthcoming Fiona novel, with plenty of comments - here\'s psychic distance happening in the flesh ...____So here’s a chunk from my forthcoming Fiona Griffiths novel. Bits in square brackets are my commentary on the whole psychic distance thing. The setting, by the way, is a secure psychiatric hospital, which is not a setting my Fiona is likely to enjoy …The transport whirrs up the little slope.Strange how a little knowledge alters the scene. Yesterday, with Rogers fulminating away about a rest-cure for psychos, all we saw was beauty. The sparkling sea, the scatter of buildings. [External. Loosely anchored in the past. Even the descriptions suggest something viewed from afar.]Now, all I can see is those yellow marker stones. The panic button and the taser. Those hummocks of stamped-down turf. [Descriptions now much more specific, local.]And suddenly – it feels real. [When you shift from far-out narrative distance to something closer in, you get that sense of enhanced reality, so Fiona is just voicing what the reader already half-feels.]This place. It’s not a rest cure. It’s a supermax prison for psychos. The pretty buildings are just window-dressing. A cloak tossed over darkness.The float whirrs up to reception and stops.I don’t get out.Say, ‘Sorry. Sorry, I just need . . .’I don’t say what I need, but my heart is racing. My face and neck are slippery with sweat. I have my head down between my knees and I think I want to vomit. [We’re getting even closer in now. We see the sweat on her face and neck. We feel her sickness.]A wash of fear.A constricting awfulness. [There’s something almost panicky in her language now. Very short paragraphs and main verbs have gone AWOL.]Mervyn Rogers thought I was the right person for this particular job. Oh, leave it to Griffiths. Sure, she’ll piss a few people off and make a cock of things, but it always comes right in the end. She’ll sort it out.And he couldn’t be more wrong. He’s the wrongest person on earth.The driver says, ‘You all right? We’ve got a doctor on site if you need.’I shake my head.Can’t talk. [Notice that she says, “Can’t talk” not, “I can’t talk” or “But I find myself unable to talk.” It’s like Fiona’s mounting panic is interrupting her ability even to narrate normally. Her gaspiness is making her narration gasp too.]Wipe sweat off my forehead, but it returns instantly.A prison for nutters. That’s where I am. That’s what this is. A prison for nutters with an unhealthy interest in violence.[Boom! And these are Fiona’s thoughts, quoted real time. The slightly formal, reader-aware narration with which we started has been replaced by this panicked and forceful stream of consciousness.]My heart is a long way distant from my chest.It is a bird taking refuge in a treetop. It is a rabbit watching its own skin fold down over its eyes.[And so on. Obviously, you can’t write like this for long without crowding the reader – being over-intense, over-intimate. So gradually the scene starts to pull back again. It ends where it started, with a nice formal narration of who does what, goes where, and says what. Narrative distance: I thank you for your services. I couldn’t write without you.] Now over to you. Thoughts, comments, questions below ...

So. Elevator pitches.That’s something we dealt with in one of my Festival workshops, and I wanted to pick it up again now. The issue is both finding the pitch that sparks interest in your book, then figuring out what to do once you have a pitch you love.But let’s start with a sample elevator pitch. This one for example:A) Boy with magical powers plays a key part in the battle of good against evil.What do you think? Do you like it? Do you want to read that book?And look: the pitch is sort of okaaaay, isn’t it? But OK in a way which means that the book is basically not saleable. It’s just too like every other kids fantasy book out there. There’s nothing to distinguish this book from everything else. If I were an agent, it’s not a book I’d much care to represent.So what about this?B) Orphan goes to a school for wizards.Or this:C) Orphan discovers he is the son of two very powerful wizards.  He goes to wizard school.Or this:D) Harry Potter is an orphan in the care of his uncle and aunt. Their care is very poor.Potter lives in an understairs cupboard, while his cousin is spectacularly spoiled.The non-magical (or ‘muggle’) uncle and aunt try to preventHarry learning about his parents – powerful wizards – but fail.He discovers he has magical powers and is invited (via owl) to attend wizard school.Pretty clearly, this is a series of books that could do rather well. Yet there’s a way in which elevator pitch A actually delivers the best description of the books. After all, the entire series arc is encapsulated in that description. The other three elevator pitches deal with nothing more than a few chapters of book 1. In effect, they deliver the inciting incident and the immediate consequences, but little or nothing of the actual substance of the book.So why is that first pitch so weak? And why are the other three strong?The simple answer is that elevator pitch B makes you want to know more. It has, instantly, that “Oooh, tell me more” quality which marks out any good elevator pitch.And indeed, when I do tell you more – when we jump from version B to version C – you still want to know more. Version C introduces Harry Potter’s parentage. That’s good, because it provides a connection between the orphan element and the wizarding one, but it introduces questions of its own. You still just want to know more.Version D might be a reasonable answer to that ‘tell me more’ question, except it isn’t really an elevator pitch any more. It’s too long. But you notice that even when you’re dealing with something as long and detailed as D, you still have an appetite for more. (How does an owl send an invitation? How does Harry discover his magical powers? Why are the uncle and aunt so mean? And so on.)These expanding descriptions of the book keep you locked into a permanent desire to know more … and if I handed you the first chunk of HP and the Philosopher’s Stone, you’d still be burning to know how the book and the series develops. That ‘tell me more’ impulse keeps pushing you to know more until you’ve read every damn book in the series.Which brings us back to why it’s so unbelievably helpful for writers to understand their own elevator pitches. Why you need to scrap pitches that feel as bland and generic as (A) and find ones that are as sharp and precise as (B) or (C).The thing is, you don’t ever have to use your elevator pitch with an agent, or an editor, or anyone else. There’s never going to be a ten-word box that you have to fill in about your book. But you do have to understand the bit that makes readers go, “tell me more”, and then place that bit at the emotional / structural centre of your work.So if JK Rowling had been working with (A) as her internal compass for the series, she might have minimised her hero’s orphanhood, she might not have found key roles for his vanished parents, and she might not have placed Hogwarts at the very heart of things. She might, in fact, have produced another bland, generic and unpublishable work of children’s fantasy.But because, at least in her head, she was working with something like (B) or (C) as an elevator pitch, she placed those elements – orphan, wizarding parents, wizard school – at the very heart of the books. So yes, the series tells a story about the battle of good vs evil, but that story emerges from one founded on the exact elements that piqued the reader’s interest in the first place.The same thing is true of absolutely any decent book and decent elevator pitch. So the pitch for my Fiona Griffiths series would probably be something like this:A crime series about a detective in recovery from Cotards Syndrome,a genuine psychiatric condition. With Cotards, a sufferer believes themselves to be dead.That doesn’t tell you anything about the plots of the individual books, or the series arc, or anything else. In that sense, it’s ‘local’ not universal. But that element of localism is essentially always true of good elevator pitches. Compare the universal-but-bland Harry Potter pitch A, against the local-and-interesting pitches B or C.And books are founded on the local. The universal can and should spring out of the local, but the local has to take precedence. So the whole architecture of Hogwarts / the Dursleys / muggle world vs wizarding world forms the foundations for the grand, universal story that lies on top. (And notice too, that whereas the Harry Potter pitch focused on the basic set up and the inciting incident, my own pitch ignores that completely and focuses only on character. The nugget at the heart of your pitch can come from anywhere.)The local vs universal thing is at work with the Fiona Griffiths stuff too.The whole complex series arc is built on Fiona herself. Her illness. Her recovery. Her strange sisterhood with the dead. My German publishers, in fact, have essentially the same cover for every book they’ve released. Each book has “FIONA” in huge text front and centre across the cover. The actual title looks secondary in comparison. That’s an almost literal picture of how the series is built. Hogwarts, and all that pertains to it, has a similar centrality in the Harry Potter books.So find your foundation. Find the thing that makes readers want to know more. Then place that thing, that vibration of interest, at the very heart of what follows. Make sure that as you start to expand the reader’s circle of knowledge, the new elements you introduce keep the reader’s interest.That, in a nutshell, is how you write and sell books.So now over to you. What\'s your elevator pitch. And does it feel bland and universal? Or is there a local, specific quality which prompts that \"tell me more?\" response. Leave a comment and let\'s all have a Heated Debate.

Twas the Festival of Writing last weekend, with a hey and ho and a hey nonny nonny.My highlights? Everything, really. It’s just like a great big bale of fun and passion and intensity squished down into a weekend-sized pellet and washed down with a bottle of wine. (Or two, if you write crime thrillers. Or three, if you’re an agent.)If you came, then it was lovely to see you. If you didn’t, pshaw! Come next year, and we can be friends anyway.I’ll probably have a few Festival-related missives to send, but I’ll start with the one about the head in the bag.So:I was giving a workshop on how to build a crime novel, using my own This Thing of Darkness as an exemplar. The basic thrust of the class was how to build your novel up, bone by bone, and how you don’t always begin that process from the most logical starting point. In my TToD, for example, I knew I wanted a denouement at sea – Fiona Griffiths on a fishing trawler in a storm – but that’s all I knew. I didn’t know the crime. I didn’t know anything about the solution. I didn’t have anything else really nailed down.And then: I built from there. I hauled my big structural milestones into place until I was confident I had a layout that could sustain a crime novel. (The twist in that little tale of triumph? Simply that at one point I had a 130,000 word novel that felt long and boring. Whoops. I talked a bit about how I solved that issue too.)But then I threw the crime-novel problem over to the class. I wanted us to build a novel then and there, to get some sense of what could and couldn’t work.To start with, I asked for an opening crime to launch our novel - the inciting incident, in effect. One person suggested a dead student. Apparent suicide. Whisky and pill bottle. Yadda, yadda.Now that’s a perfectly fine opening thought. And, to be clear, this was suggested ad lib, on the basis of precisely zero planning. The student setting was suggested by our own university surroundings. And, OK, we all know books that start much like that.But?There’s nothing there to suggest an angle. Nothing unique. Nothing pressing. Nothing to make an agent (or an editor or a supermarket book browser) say, “Oh wow. Want to know more.”Now that can be OK. My first Fiona Griffiths novel had a crime so boring I can hardly remember it myself. (People trafficking. A couple of people bumped off as possible informers. All very 1.01 in terms of crime premise.)But that first book of mine had something extravagantly memorable – it just wasn’t the crime. It had to do with Fiona herself; her past, her illness, her family background. And that’s fine. You need one golden line for an elevator pitch. That’s all. The element you care to emphasise can be anything at all.But still. Because we were building a crime novel in class, I drew attention to the basic dullness of that setup crime. A dead student? Looks like a suicide but we all know it wasn’t? I wanted to do better.And boom! I was running the class with an agent, Tom Witcomb at Blake Friedman, and he piped up with an alternative crime:Romantic dinner for two in Paris. Young Man proposes to His Beloved.His Beloved, tearfully, says no.Young Man, heart-broken, walks the streets of Paris, filling the Seine with his tears.He gathers his belongings, heads to the Gare Du Nord, and prepares for a life of loneliness and despairAt the station, he’s pulled aside by a guard. He’s asked to open his bag. And there, blankly staring and still softly dripping, is the head of His Beloved.I hope you can see the instant improvement here. That premise is basically all set up for a book that sells to an agent, a publisher and a supermarket buyer.Yes: a million questions remain unanswered, but the basic sell is instant, strong and memorable. You can pretty much imagine the cover already. (“He proposed. She refused. And someone killed her.” “The must-read thriller that everyone’s talking about.”)Of course, a good premise is thirty good pages, nothing more. There’s a lot more to be done to complete a plausible novel. Some thoughts:Who tells this novel? Tom W saw the Parisian detective as the central character. Personally, I think this is beautifully designed to be a proper psychological thriller with Young Man as the narrator. Done that way, the book would be a did-he or didn’t-he story the whole way through, with the reader changing their minds about five times through the book.Who did kill the Beloved? A criminal gang? Some shadow from her dark past? Probably. But the marriage proposal had to be causally linked to her death. So the Beloved would still be alive if Young Man hadn’t proposed. You can’t just have the death as a random accident.Climax and Denouement. For me, the Parisian setting is important, not just a throwaway starter. So the climax probably needs a Parisian, or at least a French, setting. One delegate suggested we have a battle on top of the Eiffel Tower with some bad guy being hurled to his death. That’s probably a bit comedic, in all honesty, but the basic thought process is spot on.The hard part of this book is going to be knitting together the Beloved’s dark past with the head in the bag. I mean, yes, you could imagine scenarios where bad guys want to kill the Beloved. But why don’t the bad guys just drop Beloved into the river? Why go to all the trouble of sticking a head into Young Man’s hand luggage?You will need to find an answer to that question that’s plausible enough to carry the book. Not real, true-to-life plausible, perhaps, but something that gets you over the line. (In my The Dead House, I had a basic plausibility issue with my crime. I don’t think the crime I dealt with has ever or would ever happen, but I probably did just enough to get away with it in fictional terms. That’s all you need.)I’ve talked about all this in the context of crime, but the same kind of thinking applies no matter what your genre. Some strong selling line. Some good unity of concept and tightness of execution. Lots of trial and error when it comes to developing a given starting point.That’s plotting. That’s writing. And it’s hard! But it’s fun.What about you? How do you construct a novel? Do you start with an inciting incident? WIth an elevator pitch? With something random? And what do you do from there? Tell all.Oh yes, and I\'m going to run a completely free webinar or two this autumn. Just tell me what you\'d like me to talk about and I\'ll put my thnking cap on. No subject excluded, except possibly Brexit.

An editorial colleague of mine here at Jericho Writers likes to tell writers that their first job as a novelist – literally the first thing their narrative needs to accomplish – is to get readers into the story. Before your story-train even starts to chuff out of the station, you need your readers on board, hats off, gloves folded, sandwiches at the ready.And that act of engagement by the reader requires one thing above all from you. It requires you to foster belief in your world and belief in your characters. Yes, if there’s a tickle of story-excitement too, that’s really great, but the tickle is the second thing, not the first.Your first job is to engender that belief: to create the shimmering surface of life.Knowing that, some writers make the wrong call. Here are three classic ways it can go wrong:The Error ImpatientWith this one, writers get worried that they need to reveal character emphatically and early. It’s as though they’re thinking, “I need to establish Character X briskly and decisively, so readers know who they’re dealing with.”The result: they bustle off to the Emporium of Cliché, credit card in hand. The salespeople there know their customers very well. “Suave super-spy, sir? Of course. Attractive to the women? A perfect shot? Excellent suits? Knows his wine? Of course, madam. May I also offer you a chiselled jaw? A piercing gaze? We’re giving away two free super-cars with every spy, sir, so this would be an excellent moment to make your purchase.”And the result of that ill-advised spending spree: readers aren’t engaged. Yes, they ‘get’ the character you have so swiftly constructed, but they’re not really interested. Their view is from a distance, all ready to walk away. (If you need help on developing character, then I recommend you go get our Amazing Character Development Tool.)The Error AccurateSome writers therefore choose to glue themselves close to a recognisable reality. A woman like you. A musical reference to some currently fashionable artist. Maybe a brand mention, but almost certainly something to do with clothing. A familiar setting (a bedroom usually, or a late-for-work thing, or a minor work problem.) And all this conveyed in language that’s not quite conversational, exactly, but diary-type language anyway: the way you might talk to yourself about all these ordinary things.And yes, OK, I’d probably prefer to encounter the Everyman/Everywoman character than the suave superspy one, but honestly? I don’t want to read about either. The Error Accurate ends up delivering someone perfectly believable, but just not intriguing. You want me to get on board your damn story train, but I think I might just linger here on the platform and see what else chuffs into view.Sorry.The Error of Baroque Emotion“Aha,” you say. “O-ho,” you mutter. “We know what readers want from their stories. They want to feel emotion. They want to be plunged into situations that shock, that stimulate, that shine brighter than the ordinary world outside.”And so we have gasps of agony right there on the first page. Or crashing sobs of grief. Or some improbable level of panic over some ordinary life accident (a missed train, a forgotten report.)It’s as though the writers is thinking, “Look, if I send my train into that station with a brass band on board – and a pair of performing monkeys – and a troop of dancers complete with a tiny acrobat from Java, people will just have to get on board. It’ll be the most amazing train in the station.”Well, kinda. And look: I love tiny Javanese acrobats as much as the next man. But this is all too much, too soon. The danger – the great and serious danger – is that your emotion seems unjustified. Premature. Deterring the very engagement you were seeking.The Approach SimpleAnd look, for some reason, I don’t know why, my books tend to open in a somewhat low key way. I don’t say that your book has to do the same. Plenty of terrific books do open with a splash of bright colour right there on page one. But they don’t have to.Here’s an example of one of my openings that almost boasts about its own drabness:Jane’s driving. Jane Alexander.The traffic is snarled because of some incident ahead. A weak sun moves in and out of cloud. On our left, a garage promises ‘Probably the Lowest Prices in the Vale’.The garage has thirty cars lined up behind metal railings. A man walking among them, talking into a phone. On our side of the railings, an elderly woman in a grey skirt and dark raincoat peers in at the cars, then over at the railway station. She checks her watch, pats her hair, walks forward, stops.I stare at her. Jane stares at the road.A nothing day.Nothing has happened. Nothing seems on the brink of happening. There’s no dramatic incident. No superspy, no gunshot. No burr of emotion. No desperate attempt to make the world of my story reflect the world of my reader. There’s just not a lot going on.But –Is that enough for you to read on? Do you feel ready to step forward into my story train? I think you do. And if so, here are the components that are keeping you engaged:There is, immediately, some sense of the physical world. A road. Traffic. A weak sun. A low-rent garage. Railings.There is immediately a recognisable human character – the elderly woman in a grey skirt. She’s clearly a little muddled, or a little something, but nothing extravagant. She’s not a superspy. She’s not someone-just-like-you. She’s not someone in the grip of wild emotion. She just seems – real. And that little hint of muddle or confusion in her behaviour lends a tiny dot of intrigue to the picture so far.The first person protagonist, Fiona, is in relationship with something: her driving buddy, Jane. There’s terribly little going on there – “I stare at her. Jane stares at the road. A nothing day.” – but even that tiny description opens up a question. Why is Jane not engaging with Fiona’s look? Is it just because she’s driving? Or is there an atmosphere inside the car? Why is Fiona actually staring at Jane? Those are, I agree, very little things, but we all know that stories can start out small.To form those three points into a bit of a checklist, we want:A physical settingA credible characterSome sense of the viewpoint character in relationship with someone (or something – the viewpoint character might be alone, but she still needs to be bouncing off something in her physical or mental space.)And those are small asks, please note. They demand the wriggle of life, and not much more. Remember that people have come into the station in order to board your train. To entice them to make that little further act of commitment, you just need to show that you are properly in charge of your materials: your world, your characters, the glimmer of story.And that’s enough. You can go bigger if you want to, but you really don’t have to.But tell me: what do you do to develop character - plausibly and enticingly - right there on page 1? What are your particular first page bugbears? Let\'s have a Heated But Polite Debate.

It’s a big question, isn’t it?Are you just given a quotient of natural talent at birth or can you take whatever tools you have and just improve them by hard work, time and study? Are you born a Shakespeare or a dunce, without a chance to migrate from one to t’other? Or is it all about Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of study?These questions, obviously, matter a lot. If it’s just down to natural talent, then either you have it or you don’t, and that first agent rejection you received might just be code for:YOU ARE S**T. GIVE UP NOW.If you’re not yet published, I know for a fact that you have had that thought, or at least some close variant of it. And it’s a corrosive, life-sapping destroyer of creativity.Good creativity needs a kind of boldness. A willingness to find and release that handbrake. Not just release it, ideally, but unbolt it. You want to tear the damn thing out of the vehicle completely, so you can go freewheeling down the highways of your mind, in pursuit of the spark that got you driving in the first place.So here’s the answer.Yes, talent matters. Of course it does.You also, I think, need to be able to construct a simple English sentence without falling flat on your face. That sounds like a pretty simple hurdle to overcome, and it is, but there are nevertheless writers who struggle at that level, in which case (mostly, not always) publication is likely to elude them.So: yes, talent makes a difference. And yes, you have to be able to handle the tools of your trade without poking a chisel through your foot.But after that? Here’s what matters:PassionIf you don’t have that passion, you’ll never write a book. You probably won’t even complete your first manuscript, but if you do, you won’t have what it takes to do everything else. Re-work and re-edit it. Scrap some part of the original idea and replace it with something better. Get critical feedback and respond to it constructively. Get your first rejection letters and think, “Screw you” and “We go again.”Passion is essential. More important than talent. I’ve seen people succeed without the much innate talent, but I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever seen anyone succeed without passion.Self-editing cojonesSo yes, passion, but that passion needs to manifest in the right way. At Jericho Writers, we see a ton of manuscripts sent into us for editorial feedback. I don’t do that editorial work myself any more, but when I did, I can tell you that THE most frustrating manuscripts to receive were ones from capable but recalcitrant writers.So we might get a manuscript that was really quite good. I’d write a report that said, in effect, “Yes, this is really quite good. But there are the following general problems (A, B, C, D, …) and here are some examples of where those problems are impacting your work: blah-blah, yadda, yadda.”Then, the writer might send in the manuscript for a second read, and I’d get it, excited, thinking I might have something marketable in my hands. Only then, I’d read the damn thing, and I’d be genuinely puzzled. Was this the manuscript I’d already read? Had the writer, inadvertently, sent me the #1 version not the #2 one? I’d check in detail and would find that where I had explicitly mentioned an example of some manuscript problem, page number and all, there was in fact some amendment, normally positive, to that page. Everywhere else though, I’d find no changes at all, or nearly none. In effect, though the manuscript needed to travel just a few further yards to hit the finishing line, this whole editorial process had advanced it by a few quarter-inches.Those clients, as far as I can recall, have never ever gone on to get published. (They’re often the ones who get most angry with us too. “I thought you told me this was close to marketable!” Well, yes, buddy, but …)So editing matters. Being brutal with yourself and your text matters. An absolute desire for perfection, as near as you can get to it in this fallen world, that matters.Keeping-going-ish-ness(Yeah, OK, the English language probably has a word for that and I quite likely know what it is. But the hell with pedantry. My handbrake is lying somewhere in the dirt ten miles behind me and I have the winds of freedom in my hair. So ya-boo.)Closely related to the first two elements of success: sheer bloody-mindedness.I could give a zillion examples of this, but the two that stick are these:Antonia Hodgson, a senior editor at Little Brown, wrote a book. It was a 250,000 word book about vampires (long, long after the Stephanie Meyer wave had collapsed and died.) And it was lousy. It didn’t work. The superbly connected Antonia H was able to get an agent to look at it and that agent just told her, politely and emphatically, that the book was beyond rescue.So she ditched it.And wrote another.That one became a bestseller.Another example, and this is the one that really sticks with me:One of our editorial clients. I remember reading the first draft of his first book and I thought, nope, this guy doesn’t have what it takes. But that guy’s keeping-going-ish-ness was as strong as I’d ever seen. His first book, all three drafts of it, was a training exercise. He got serious with book #2. And blow me, two or three drafts into book #3, he absolutely nailed it. Got himself an agent. Got published.And he proved me wrong. His raw, intuitive talent just wasn’t that high on the scale, but his everything else was set to max.I was going to leave my list of things that matter to just three, except I realise I have to add one more:Your ideaA competently executed book with a mediocre idea will never sell. It won’t sell to a trad publisher. It won’t sell as a self-published book, or not really.You can amp that up a bit. If you write really quite well, but have a mediocre idea, it most likely won’t do anything.I was lucky with my first book. Yes, my writing back then had a certain bright competence, but I was still quite immature as a writer. That first idea, though? Was golden. That idea vaulted me straight through onto the high ground of commercial publishing.Dan Brown? Not a great writer, even by the not-too-taxing standards of commercial thriller writers. But his idea, the Da Vinci one, was a gloriously rich one for his target audience.Stieg Larsson? A competent enough writer, but one who needed to shrink his voluminous, baggy prose by 25%. A writer who wasn’t taken on by any of the big UK publishers because of that volume, that bagginess. But the brilliance of his idea, plus Quercus’s marketing cleverness, turned his work into the sales sensation of his era.And so on.Ideas matter. They matter profoundly. (And it is, by the way, very common for your first novel, the one you’re slaving over so hard right now, to be your learning novel. The one where you acquire the technique, learn the graft, complete your ink-spattered apprenticeship. Then when you figure out that book #1 isn’t going anywhere, you toss it aside and write the big one. The one with the big, ambitious idea, confidently and energetically executed. That’s the book that sells.)That’s it from me. I’m off to take the car into the garage. Apparently, it’s illegal to drive without a functioning handbrake. Oh well.Tell me about your experience. What do you think matters? What have I missed out? Or am I just plain wrong? Is it all about talent and nothing so much about anything else? I\'m all ears ...

The first time one of my Fiona Griffiths novels went to a copyeditor, no one had thought to check with me what I actually wanted from the process. (Which, ahem, is not absolutely unheard of in trad publishing.)My FG novels are voiced by my heroine herself. She sounds like this:We find signs to Porthgain, the village, but a small white sign points us further up the coast. ‘Porthgain Secure Hospital’.A one way track, unhedged.A pale sea rising on the horizon.We drive for a mile or two. Then, at a turn in the road, a gleam of white buildings occupying their own narrow headland. A jut of rock.Now, as you may notice, Fiona Griffiths doesn’t write the way you were taught to write at school. She uses sentence fragments, a lot. (A sentence fragment lacks a main verb, as for example, “A one way track, unhedged.”) She uses some extremely short paragraphs including plenty of one-worders. She never uses a semi-colon. She’ll often make a list where items are separated by full stops (= Brit-speak for period) instead of commas and so on.In short, she offends the instinct of every good copyeditor everywhere in the world.Now, it turned out that my friends at Orion had, in their goodness, decided to unfreeze a cryogenically preserved librarian from the 1950s. They’d thawed off the tweed, recurled the hair, and had her spectacles specially reframed to be extra scary. They then asked this fine lady to copy-edit the work of Detective Sergeant Fiona Griffiths.And –The result was not a happy one. Sentence fragments got resentenced. Those lists-with-full-stops got remade into regular comma-style lists. Semi-colons entered the manuscript in their swarms.My nice clean prose turned from stuff like this:A one way track, unhedged.A pale sea rising on the horizon.We drive for a mile or two. […]To stuff like this:The track is one way and unhedged. On the horizon, a pale sea rises up and we drive on for a mile or two. […]And, you know, that kind of writing is really fine. Most people write with plenty of main verbs. I use em myself. I’ve got nothing against them.But –That’s not how Fiona Griffiths writes or sounds or is. So when I got the completed revised manuscript back again, I just said no.No, that wasn’t how I wanted it. No, that wasn’t the voice of Fiona Griffiths that I’d so carefully contrived. And, in short, just no, no, no. (There was a swearier version too, but I kept that to myself.)So Orion, bless em, said, “You’re quite right. We were wrong. We’ll put it all back.” And they did, except that they cleaned up any actual typos and the rest.So good. That sounds like a win for common sense and late-blooming editorial tact.But what I want to say is this:There are no rules that matter except those of clarity and expressive force. If you are clear and expressive, your writing just is fine, and phooey to anyone who says different.It’s fine to repeat yourself. There’s TS Eliot’s much-quoted repetition about “Time past and time present are both perhaps present in time future” and yes, that’s repetitive, but it’s also poetry, so maybe doesn’t count.Except you don’t need to be one of the greatest poets of all time to get away with a spot of repetition. Here, in a rather humbler context, is Fiona Griffiths doing the exact same thing:Is Jared Coad the man we snapped in that kebab shop?I don’t know. Just going on the facial resemblance alone, I’d have to say definitely possible. Throw in Coad’s combat training and psychological profile, and you’d have to say definitely yes. But throw in the ‘oh, but he’s in a supermax secure psychiatric facility,’ and you’re left with – I don’t know. The definite yes and the definite no both seem emphatic.That’s four versions of ‘definite’ in one short paragraph. But is the repetition annoying? I don’t think so. To my ear, that paragraph sounds fine and I’d happily defend it from any tweedy librarian.You may note as well that that paragraph has plenty of contractions (“I’d” for “I would”, for example), which you’re not really meant to do. It also makes a noun of the entire phrase “oh, but he’s in a supermax secure psychiatric facility”, which is so wrong I don’t even know the name for what kind of wrong it is.But so what?Clarity, right? And expressive force. That paragraph has both.You can even (sometimes, not often) make good use of outright clumsiness. In one of the books, Fiona’s dad gives her mother a giant silver trophy for the “World’s Best Mam”. It’s awful and her mother hates it, but her father, undeterred, fixes it over the kitchen door. Fiona says, “On the way through into the kitchen, we had to stop to admire the trophy, which now looms over the kitchen door like something about to collapse.”And that last phrase “like something about to collapse” doesn’t offend against old-fashioned grammar exactly, but it does break good writing guidelines on specificity and elegance. “Like a tumbledown shed” is what you’re meant to say. Or “like a motorway carwreck.” Or something you can actually put a picture to.Except that – the phrase itself is clumsy and somehow jury-rigged. Like the shelf which holds the trophy, the actual description feels like a thing on the point of collapse. In other words, I doubt if I could find a better phrase, no matter how long I thought about it.So in short, in short, in short –Do what you want.Yes, you need to develop and good and sensitive ear and a keen sense of the kind of prose you want to hear yourself writing. But do all those good things, then write however the hell you want. Clarity and expressive force. Those two things, forever and always. You don’t need to worry about anything else.Till soonHow about you? What are your examples of rule-breaking prose that you don\'t intend to give up on? Or what things are you plain unsure about. Leave a comment below and speak to The Librarian.

I’m going to talk about marketing. That’s a conundrum for:Self-published authors, because if they don’t market their work, then no one else will.Traditionally published authors, because an increasing amount of the marketing load will fall on them, no matter what.Not yet published authors, because you guys still have to market yourself to agents or whoever else in due course.And although authors are a pretty diverse bunch, they’re generally united in really, really, really hating the whole business of self-promotion. The brash, self-loving types who make confident hucksters generally have a 0% overlap with the sort of people who scurry off to a quiet place to write down the pictures they have in their head.And good news:That brash hucksterism just doesn’t work in the world of books. You don’t have to do it. If you do, you’ll fail.And more good news:Doing marketing right is easy. I’ll tell you in just two words what it’s all about. (Though obviously this email will be the normal thousand word whopper, because I don’t do short.)But first, a cry for help:We’re taking a look at our editorial service at the moment. The actual quality of what we do is generally stunning and we work very hard to keep improving. We’ve got some ideas on how to to do that, but before we do anything at all, I’d like to hear from you:Have you personally purchased editorial services elsewhere?If you did, did you compare those services to ours first? Or were you not aware of ours? Or what? (You can remind yourself of what we offer right here.)And what swayed your decision to go with whoever you went with? Was it price? Was it word of mouth? Was it quality of follow up? Or what?And of course, if there’s anything you’d like from us that we’re not currently offering, then tell us about it.There’s no agenda behind these questions other than a genuine desire to improve a service that is already strong. And I’d love to hear from you. So just hit reply and let me know – I really appreciate your effort.OK. So, marketing.The first word that needs to discipline everything you ever do on the marketing front is simply: Authenticity.If you’re not authentic in your marketing, it’ll never succeed. So let’s say you’re coming to the Festival of Writing this September. (Tickets still available, by the way.) Obviously you’ll want to meet and talk to some agents.So be yourself.Nothing else will be remotely convincing to the agent. If you try to fake some hyper-extrovert brashness, you’ll come over as a clown or a fool. (Unless you are hyper-extrovert, in which case, fine. Be yourself.) Agents would far, far rather meet a writer who spoke with sincerity and truthfulness, then someone who was trying to sell in a pushy way.Same thing for trad-published authors. If you hate and loathe Twitter, for example, you’ll be crap at it. You can’t goad yourself into being something you’re not. So just tell your publishing team that you hate Twitter, and they’ll structure their marketing campaigns to take that into account.Same thing for self-published authors. Readers sign up to your mailing list because they want to hear from you, not some weird, constructed alter-ego. You may notice that these emails from me sound authentically me – because they are! I say what I think and I express myself the way I like expressing myself. The real me and the email me are one and the same. (Except that the real me is devilishly handsome, of course.)Which brings us to the second massive requirement on your marketing efforts: Strategy.You need to be authentic, but always strategic. Those two things together (plus time) is a lethally powerful combination.So again:If you’re coming to the Festival this September (and did I mention that the Festival always creates book deals and that tickets are still available?), then we said that you’d want to meet and talk to agents.So research them beforehand. Who’s coming? Who looks like a great fit for you? Make little cheat sheets for who you’d like to meet and including key data about why you like them. Include little printed photos, so you can be sure you recognise them when you see them across a dining hall. Remind yourself of what you want to ask, before getting into that conversation. And if you are in the midst of a long but inessential conversation with a fellow writer as Your Perfect Agent queues to get coffee, then break off that long but inessential conversation. (Politely, of course, because the authentic you is always polite.)Same thing with trad authors. If, for example, you’re invited to a meet-the-trade evening, figure out who’s going to be there. Figure out who you want to talk to. Make damn sure you spend as much time talking to the other person about what they do as you do in talking about yourself. And if you are on Twitter, then cultivate followers and influencers who are relevant to you. Be authentic and strategic.Self-pub: the same thing, but squared. There’s an inconceivably huge number of ways to market your work. You’re going to be authentic in everything you do. Your ads will truthfully reflect your work. Your emails will sound like you. Your Facebook content will vibrate with personality and genuineness.But you’ll prioritise. What sales channels work? What’s just fluff? When do you kill a series? How much time do you spend replying to reader comments and questions?I can’t in fact think of a single author/book marketing issue, broadly defined, where the Authentic + Strategic combination isn’t the right one to adopt. Make those two commandments central to everything you do and you’ll be fine.Don’t forget that I want to hear from you on the editorial side. If you have experience elsewhere, then tell me about it. Good, bad and just plain weird …And tell me about your marketing puzzles too. What\'s got you stumped? What bothers you in the small of night and assails you at the loom of dawn? Comment below, and we\'ll dig in ...

You all know about outer jeopardy and inner conflict, right? So if you have a protagonist with some great fear of spiders, you sort of know the climatic scenes are going to involve a spider farm, or a genetically modified giant spider, or something of that sort.To take a slightly more grownup example, the climax of Pride and Prejudice deals in the same themes that have seeded the entire book (love and marriage; maturity and immaturity; sober judgement and impulsive decisions.) The inner stuff and the outer stuff all run in parallel.And that’s all good. That’s all part of good writing.But there’s a more interesting way to join inner and outer. It won’t work for every book, or not in its more dramatic manifestations. But it’s still interesting enough that I want to put the thought in front of you, anyway. Oh yes, and this is the kind of thought that you can use at a really early stage in your plotting if you need to. If you use the snowflake method, for example, you can use what follows as one of the very first thoughts you commit to paper.Here’s how it works.You identify a deep conflict you want to explore.Ideally, that conflict should exist at a personal level, as well as a bigger, social, level. So you might think about power struggles between a man and a woman within a marriage, but you might also think about those things more broadly within society. We’re still talking about an essentially inner conflict, however.Then, you externalise that conflict, but on a massive scale. You don’t just write a portrait of a marriage, for example, you imagine a future where women are owned for their reproductive capacity. Boom: you’ve got Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.Or you imagine a world where humans are hermaphrodite and just have seasonal biological changes that flip them into (temporary) men or (temporary) women. And boom: you’ve got Ursula K Le Guin’s classic novel, The Left Hand of Darkness.Another example.You know that thing you get in a large city – London or New York, let’s say, where rich and poor inhabit the same physical city, yet live completely separate lives. Or you could think about a city like Belfast, where separation is effected via religion, not wealth or race.And, yes, you could write an interesting, carefully observed, realist novel about those things – or you could do what China Mieville did in The City, The City, and just create a world where almost literally the people of one world couldn’t ‘see’ the people of the other, and vice versa.In all these cases – Mieville, Le Guin, Atwood – the power of their stories came from the way they took an interesting personal / psychological / social issue and externalised it on a massive scale – citywide, countrywide, planetary.Now it’s not surprising that the examples I’ve drawn are from speculative fiction. This particular trick is quite close to defining what speculative fiction actually is. It’s the thing that lies right at the core of the art form.But … you don’t have to write speculative fiction to use the same basic ploy. This kind of structural plotting approach can be used much more widely (and subtly) than that.Take, for example, the Cold War novels of John Le Carre.Le Carre wanted to write about love and betrayal, and in particular the idea that all human loving relationships would end up in betrayal. (That’s a very bleak view and not actually true to life. But you can write great fiction while not being true to life.)Now, again, he could just have written a stony cold love story, in which everyone betrays everyone. But what would have been the resonance of that? Not a lot, one would guess.His flash of genius was to set that basic story in the world of Cold War espionage, where everyone really did betray everyone, and where nuclear weapons were pointing at major world capitals, and things (from a certain plausible perspective) really did seem unutterably bleak.And boom: that combination of inner and outer conflicts mirroring each other produced some of the greatest novels of post-war British fiction: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and the others in that sequence.To jump from some of the greatest ever works of literature to, ahem, my own work: I do the same thing. I don’t do it on the Atwood / Le Guin scale by any means, but:Internal conflict: My character is in recovery from Cotard’s Syndrome, a genuine condition in which sufferers believe themselves to be dead. My character is constantly grappling with what it is to be alive.External conflict: And my character’s job is that of … homicide detective. So her day job constantly brings her up against the same things that trouble her in her personal life.That unity of inner and outer just adds force to every element of the tale. The murder-stories have a bigger resonance. The personal-angst stuff feels integral not gratuitous. (And yes, when I was plotting this stuff out, snowflake-style, this was one of the big principles I used.)In other words, even if you don’t choose to go all out Atwood-Le Guin-Mieville, you can still borrow the same basic technique. It’s a brilliant tool, and I love it, and now you should go and play with it yourself.But what about you? Are you doing something similar in your work? Tell me about. Let\'s have a nice cup of tea and a chat ...

I watched a film on TV the other night. The film was Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, a thriller dealing with the drugs trade on both sides of the US-Mexican border. The film was released in 2015, but drew its inspiration from a period a few years earlier, when drugs-related violence was at its height.And –The film is essentially a lie. It treats the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez much as you might deal with Baghdad or Kabul: a territory where every street corner threatens to conceal a sniper or an IED.The film also implies that the American war on drugs has become almost entirely extra-legal. That there is no longer any meaningful attempt to arrest, prosecute and convict drug-barons. It implies also that the state-level US police in those border territories are so riven with corruption, you can’t safely trust any of them.None of this is really true. Yes, Mexico has had a serious problem with gang-violence. At the same time, Juarez is a major industrial city that does massive legitimate trade with the US. And Mexico, unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, is the kind of place that a reasonable person might choose to visit for vacation. And if I lost my wallet in Tucson, I’d hardly be worried about asking a police officer for help.In short, the film has its roots in facts, but it has its trunk, leaves and branches where they should be:On Planet Fiction. The world of make-believe.It’s a combination I know well myself. My last full-length book was a modern-day police procedural about the quest for Arthur. Arthur as in King Arthur, a man whose very existence is uncertain.Yes, I took care to make sure that my lower-level facts were all true. I took care with things like my description of hillforts, ancient manuscript references to Arthur, some science on the dating – and faking – of artefacts, and so on. But I only took care with these things, because I wanted to use them as a springboard into the delights of sheer invention.When I published that book, I was a little worried at the reaction of my audience. My readers are crime readers after all and that genre, above all, is a realistic one.But –They didn’t care. No one did. My reader reviews for that book averaged a full 5.0 on Amazon.com for a long time and have since dipped to 4.8. No book of mine has done better.The simple fact is that you do need to write fiction that feels plausible. You do not need to write fiction that feels remotely probable, or even possible.How do you achieve that plausibility? Well, the full answer would probably be a rather long one, so let me offer these three thoughts:Thought the firstDeploy those ‘lower level’ facts, as I’ve called them, as diligently as you can. Where your fiction touches ordinary life, make sure that you are as precise as you can be. In my case, I didn’t just invent a South Welsh hillfort. I searched around till I found one that fit the bill. Then I got in a car and visited it. The facts that I reported in the book – about evidence of jewellery making, a large number of animal bones, and so on – are all spot on.It’s not even that readers will know whether your facts are right or not. It’s that those facts will give your imagination enough security to leap without fear. The gap between truth and fiction will be invisible to the reader.Thought the secondI keep coming back to this and it surprises me. But honestly, I think great descriptive writing has a huge role to play here. A rootedness in place will gives everything else you write a kind of plausibility.In Sicario, there are quite long bits of film that are just shots of landscape. That sounds dull, in a way, but add some moody music and a tense story situation, and those shots just deepen your involvement in everything else. But also, they act as a kind of guarantor of reality. “Look, these are real places. There’s nothing tricksy or staged about this filming. The story must be real, because these places clearly are.”That’s nonsense logic, of course, but humans aren’t especially logical. And by the way, this approach works no matter what kind of book you’re writing.In my case (and that of Sicario), those places are real. They’re contemporary. You can go and visit them. But the same basic point applies to any book, whether you’re dealing with the court of Catherine the Great, or some planet in a far-flung galaxy. If you can get the reader, as it were, feeling the wind on their face and the sand between their toes, you are at least halfway to convincing them of everything else.Thought the thirdThis is the big one. The ultimate plausibility trick.In Sicario, the central character is Kate Macer, an FBI agent played by Emily Blunt. And she doesn’t really do anything. You could take her out of the film and the plot could (just about) unroll the same way. Her role is that of observer and interpreter. She witnesses the same things as we witness, but by interpreting those things through her own (pained, horrified) emotions, she explains to us what we should be feeling too.Now, I don’t really recommend turning your protagonist into an observer only. That’s not an impossible technique (the Sherlock Holmes stories are narrated by Dr Watson, after all), but it’s a tricky one. On the other hand, films are films and books are books, and that’s a bone we don’t need to worry at now.The point is simply this:In Sicario, we see and believe in Emily Blunt’s emotional journey. And she wouldn’t react that way if she wasn’t seeing real things. Ergo, the story she witnesses must be real. Boom! Case closed. Job done. Game, set and match.The way to get your stories feeling plausible, no matter how implausible they actually are, is to plant a real-feeling character in a real-feeling landscape, then watch like a hawk as his or her emotions unfold.That’s all from me for now. Now I\'m off to enjoy the beautiful English summer.Till soonHarry

As it happens, it’s the Festival that gives me my entry to today’s topic. A few year’s back, our keynote speaker was the brilliant Antonia Hodgson, author of the massively acclaimed, hugely bestselling debut, The Devil in the Marshalsea.Because Antonia was also editorial director at Little, Brown, it seemed a little bit like this was just how publishing happened for the in-crowd. You have all these amazing connections. You hone your self-editing skills by editing professionally for many years. You have a glorious outcome.That’s a nice story in a way, except it didn’t really feel like it was very relevant to an audience of aspiring writers not one of whom happened to be the editorial director of an internationally respected publisher.Only here’s the thing –The Devil in the Marshalsea wasn’t Antonia’s first book. It was her first published book.Her first actual manuscript was a 250,000 word vampire novel written long after the whole vampire wave had risen and crashed.It was, from the sound of it, a terrible book. And, for all her mighty editorial prowess, it took a literary agent to sit Antonia down and tell her the bad news.So what do we make of that? What do we learn?Well, we learn that Antonia Hodgson is like us after all. And that she had the guts to ditch one monster manuscript and start all over again.But also: writing a first novel is hard. It may not work. It may not work, even if you put your intelligent damnedest into fixing up that first draft.Indeed, we see this all the time with our editorial clients. Yes, some of them make a brilliant go of their first novel. But for others, the first novel is basically a learning experience. A sandbox where you can make every mistake in the book and then learn to fix it.But you can make 100 mistakes and fix everyone and sometimes what you’re left with is a good novel. A technically proficient, interesting, decently written, good novel.And (sorry!) that’s not enough in our game. The top few percent of every agent’s slushpile will consist of good, competent novels. No one ever woke up in the morning and thought, “Must head to Amazon and see if they have any good, competent novels in stock.”The fact is that we – readers, agents, editors – want to be dazzled and transported. We want to be blown away. And a novel that gets laboriously worked and re-worked just may not retain that dazzle.Indeed, it’s more than likely that the original concept was flawed. It’s quite likely that the writer didn’t really go for it when designing the basic story set-up. That they played safe rather than going all in. (Or, another error: they went all-in on a story that no audience actually wants.)And look: writing is hard.Nothing here is saying, “You’ve done this wrong. You’re a terrible human. Go and learn golf, because you don’t belong here on our planet.”Quite the opposite. I’m saying that for many writers – not all, but most – there’ll come a point where you think, “This story isn’t working and I can’t fix it.”And that’s OK. You’re learning. Sometimes a dodgy first novel is part of the learning. Fine. Don’t stress.I do think it’s a good idea to self-edit the thing hard. There are two reasons for that. First, you learn by editing. Second, most great novels look pretty dire in those early drafts. You don’t quite know what you’re dealing with until you’ve done some editing work.But let’s say you’ve self-edited hard. Perhaps you’ve worked with us editorially. Perhaps you’ve taken a course or come to the amazing Festival of Writing.You’ve done all that good stuff and … the book still isn’t working.Good.You’ve achieved your most important task which was to learn a hell of a lot about writing. The best way to write a good book is often enough to write a bad one first. That’s not failure. That’s apprenticeship.And you know what? Writing a first novel that goes on to become a bestseller isn’t necessarily the gift you might think it is.My first novel did get picked up by agents, did get fought over at auction and did become a bestseller. So I thought, ha! I know how to write books.But I didn’t, because I’d had a curtailed, weird apprenticeship. My second book was a total disaster. So bad, I deleted it and started again. That’s hard enough at any time, but I was mid-contract with HarperCollins and the whole episode felt seriously alarming. I rescued things, but the experience was no fun at all.One last thing.A lot of you will want to ask: how do I know? How can I tell when it’s time to move on?Well, I don’t know. Sorry.What I will say is that the experience of moving on can be both scary and liberating. Scary, because you have to release something you’ve been highly attached to. Liberating, because once you let go of that attachment, your imagination surges with all the other great things you could be writing about.Antonia Hodgson started with vampires. She made her name with historical crime fiction. Who knows what could lie in store for you?Tell me about your first novel dilemmas below ... consider it a Clinic for Worried Writers. The doors are open ...

August 4 2017, I got this terrific review from a reader named Anne Hill in the US.THE MOST BORING BOOK EVER WRITTENI\'m afraid this is the most boring book I have ever struggled through. Boring beyond belief. It really does not deserve any stars at all in my opinion. Although spelling and grammar were all they should be, the heroine is a most unbelievable and implausible individual ever created. What woman of 5ft 2 inches can be attacked simultaneously by four baddies and either kill or maim them without a scratch to herself. Through the book there were people mentioned without explanation as to who they were. So it did not feel as if one was reading the first book at all. Most confusing. The entire book did just not gel at all.That was savage for sure, but it wasn’t nearly as concise as this one from Mary Claude:ONE STARDidn’t read.What I really want to know about that review, Mary, was whether you read any of it at all? I mean, was the one star an expression of bitter regret that you’d spent $0.99 on an ebook that wasn’t really your thing? Or did you read the first page and then just think, Aargh, this is terrible? I don’t know, but I love your economy of expression.My absolute all-time favourite bad review, however, said this (thanks, Assegai):FIONA GRIFFITHS LEAVES ME QUEASYSorry, but when the heroine of the book starts feeling around inside the skull of an autopsied murder victem it really doesn\'t leave me feeling warm and fuzzy or wanting to read more or learn what makes her tick... I can deal with quirky, but Fiona Griffiths is FAR beyond quirky and well into mentally ill! I skimmed through the chapters after the the night in the morgue scene just to see how the author resolved things. The answer is not in a particularly believeable fashion. Glad I didn\'t take the word of the critics and buy more than one book in the series. I found Hanibal Lecter a more understandable and sympathetic character.And look, one of the reasons why I genuinely don’t care about these terrible reviews is that they’re in a tiny minority. My first Fiona Griffiths book has an average 4.4 rating on Amazon. The latest one hits 4.8 stars. Overall, I have hundreds, even thousands, of four and five star reviews. So I’m in the nice position of not really having to care about a few negative comments.But bad reviews do something else as well. They start to segregate your audience, and that’s great.Because here’s the thing. In the bad old days, nearly all marketing was quite untargeted. My first book came out in February 2000, and it got huge posters on the London Underground and mainline rail stations, probably a few airports too. They even – this is real – had women in blue sashes handing out little three-chapter samplers of the book to passing commuters.All this was thrilling to see for a newbie author ... but the targeting behind that campaign was crazily broad. Based on the reach of some of those posters, my publisher saw my audience as “All British commuters using mainline railway stations into London.” And sure, there was an overlap between people-who-use trains and people-who-like-my-books, but there’s no marketing magic there. It’s blunderbus, not sniper’s rifle. And that wasn’t surprising. Back then, there was no alternative.The internet has changed all that, of course. The trick of marketing anything online these days is to find your audience in the most granular way you possibly can.That’s how come advertising on Facebook works so well. You don’t have to market to people-who-use-trains. You can market to people-who-read-and-enjoy-books-like-mine.That’s why email marketing works so well, because you have a direct connection to people who have positively invited your efforts to keep in touch.That’s how come Amazon itself works so well. Go to Amazon’s home page and look at the “Recommended for you” bit at the top. Now look at your sister’s version of the same page. Or your dad’s. Or your childrens’. Or your friends. Assuming they’re logged into their Amazon account, those pages will always be personalised according to what Amazon knows about your buying habits.And that’s why negative reviews can actually be helpful.Anyone who’s squeamish about my main character, the crimes she solves, and the scenes she generates - well, they\'re never going to be a great reader of my books. Yes, they might buy one book on the off chance, but then never again. If that person leaves a review because they didn’t like X, then readers who are similar will move away and select a more appropriate title for them. That’s a win! Increasingly, Amazon won’t just know who might buy a single book by Harry Bingham. It’ll know who’s likely to invest in the whole series. And because selling a whole series is more profitable than just a single book, Amazon will have ever greater confidence in marketing hard to the exact right readership.It’s even the same thing with the reviewer who just said that my book was boring. That review stood alongside a zillion reviews that said it was great. So readers have to think, is this book boring or great? And, I think if you peruse the reviews in depth, an intelligent reader will figure out that my books don’t do a lot of gunfights and car chases, but do offer complex and absorbing plots led by a very complex and (I hope) absorbing character.So the gun-fight-‘n-car-chase readership will go elsewhere. My readership will flock to me.And again, that’s a win. I’d much, much rather a passionate following from a narrow segment of the reading population, than a “yeah, it’s OK” type reaction from a large segment.I’ll say more about this kind of thing in future emails: why granularity matters so much and how to exploit it for your benefit.For now though, just keep in mind the headline. Granularity matters. Passion matters. A passionate and narrow readership is worth ten times a ten times, unpassionate one.And that headline should guide everything you do, including how you write your books. So if you write a scene and think “My aunt Marge [See picture in header - that\'s Marge] likes crime fiction, but she wouldn’t like this scene, so I’d better tone it down, you are thinking the exact wrong thing. You should think, “My aunt Marge would hate this, but my ideal reader would love it. I wonder if I can find a way to ramp things up even further.”That strategy will work for you every single time. And it’s much, much more fun.Sorry, Marge.Harry

Of all the writing habits I have, one of the worst – the worst from good financial sense point of view – is that I like writing LONG books.My first novel was a spine-breaking 180,000 words. Not one of my novels has ever been less than 110,000 words. The first “short story” I wrote was 8,000 words, which is to say miles too long to be an actual short story. Heck, even this email is likely to be far longer than any other email you get in your inbox today.Ah well. There are some things you can’t fight, and my addiction to length is one of them.But that also means that when it comes to short-form copy, I’m at a loss.I’m not especially good at book blurbs, which want to be about 100-120 words (depending a bit on layouts and where you’re expecting them to appear.) Since titles need to be short and punchy, I’m not especially good at those either.In a word: I’m pretty damn rubbish when it comes to coming up with titles … and this email is going to tell you how to write them.Which means if you want to ignore the entire contents of what follows, on the basis that I obviously, obviously, obviously don’t know what I’m talking about, then I have to say that the evidence is very much in your favour.That said, I think it’s clear enough what a title needs to do. It wants to:Be highly consistent with your genreOffer some intrigue – for example, launch a question in the mind of the readerIdeally, it’ll encapsulate “the promise of the premise” in a few very short words, distilling the essence of your idea down to its very purest form.The genre-consistency is the most essential, and the easiest to achieve. It matters a lot now that so many books are being bought on Amazon, because book covers – at the title selection stage – are no more than thumbnails. A bit bigger than a phone icon, but really not much. So yes, the cover has to work hard and successfully in thumbnail form, but the title has more work to do now than it did before.Genre consistency is therefore key. Your title has to say to your target readers, “this is the sort of book that readers like you like”. It has to invite the click through to your book page itself. That’s its task.The intrigue is harder to do, but also kinda obvious. “Gone Girl” works because of the Go Girl / Gone Girl pun, and those double Gs, and the brevity. But it also works because it launches a question in the mind of the reader: Who is this girl and why has she gone? By contrast, “The Girl on the Train” feels a little flat to me. There are lots of women on lots of trains. There’s nothing particularly evocative or intriguing in the image. I don’t as it happens think that book was much good, but I don’t think the title stood out either. (I think the book sold well because of some pale resemblances between the excellent Gone Girl and its lacklustre sister. The trade, desperate for a follow-up hit to Gone Girl, pounced on whatever it had.)The third element in a successful title – the “promise of the premise” one – is really hard to do. I’ve not often managed it, and I’ve probably had a slightly less successful career as a result.So what works? Well, here are some examples of titles that do absolutely nail it:The Girl with the Dragon TattooBrilliant! That title didn’t translate the rather dour and serious Swedish original (Man Som Hatar Kvinnor / Men Who Hate Women). Rather it took the brilliance of the central character and captured her in six words. She was a girl (vulnerable), and she had a tattoo (tough and subversive), and the tattoo was of a dragon (exotic and dangerous). That mixture of terms put the promise of the book’s premise right onto the front cover and propelled the book’s explosive success.Incidentally, you’ll notice that the title also completely excludes mention of Mikael Blomkvist, who is as central to that first book as Salander is. But no one bought the book for Blomkvist and no one remembers the book for Blomkvist either. So the title cut him out, and did the right thing in doing so.The Da Vinci CodeBrilliant. Dan Brown is fairly limited as a writer, but it was a stroke of genius to glue together the idea of ancient cultural artefacts with some kind of secret code. Stir those two things up with a bit of Holy Grail myth-making and the result (for his audience) was commercial dynamite.And – boom! – that dynamite was right there in the title too. The Da Vinci part namechecks the world’s most famous artist. The Code part promises that there are secret codes to be unravelled.Four words delivering the promise of the premise in full.I let You GoThis was Clare Mackintosh’s breakout hit, about a mother whose young son was killed in a hit-and-run car accident. The promise of the premise is right there in four very short words … and given a first person twist, which just adds a extra bite to the hook in question. A brilliant bit of title-making.___So that’s what a title wants to do. A few last comments to finish off.One, I think it’s fair to say that it’s quite rare a title alone does much to propel sale success.Because there are a lot of books out there, and because everyone’s trying to do the same thing, there’s not much chance to be genuinely distinctive. My fifth Fiona Griffiths novel was called The Dead House, but there are at least three other books on Amazon with that title, or something very like it. That didn’t make my title bad, in fact – it did the promise of the premise thing just fine – but I certainly couldn’t say my title was so distinctive it did anything much for sales.Two, if you’re going for trad publishing, it’s worth remembering that absolutely any title you have in mind at the moment is effectively provisional. If your publishers don’t like it, they’ll ask you to change it. And if they don’t like your title #2, they’ll ask you to come up with some others. In short, if, like me, you’re bad at titles, you just don’t need to worry too much (if you’re going the trad publishing route, that is.) There’s be plenty of opportunity to hone your choice well prior to publication.Three, you don’t want to think about title in isolation. There should, ideally, be a kind of reverberation between your title and the cover. That reverberation should be oblique rather than direct. Clare Mackintosh’s I Let You Go had for its cover image a butterfly trapped against a window – a metaphorical reference to the anguish of the book’s premise. If instead it had shown a mother obviously distraught as a car struck her son, the cover – and title – would have seemed painfully clunky and ridiculous.If you get a great cover image that doesn’t work with your chosen title, then change the title. If you have a superb title and your cover designer’s image is too directly an illustration of it, then change the image. That title/cover pairing is crucial to your sales success, so you can afford no half-measures in getting it right.That’s all from me.My kids are making elderflower cordial and singing as they do so. They are also wearing helmets for no reason that I can possibly understand.Till soonHarryPS: Want to know what I think of your title? Then I’ll tell you. Just pop your title (plus short description of your book) in the comments below. I’ll tell you what I think.

Here are two facts about this ambition / profession of ours that can look daunting:It’s damn hard to write a good bookIt’s damn hard to sell it, once written.On point 1: well, who cares? If it weren’t hard, it wouldn’t be fun. You wouldn’t have the joy and satisfaction that comes from doing a difficult thing well.And on 2: well, yes. Good point. Gulp.It’s true that you can write a great book, get a great agent, sell to a great publisher, work hard with a great editor, and then, yes, you stand a chance of selling very well.It’s also possible that you complete those steps, but when the publisher’s sales team pitches to the supermarkets, the supermarkets just say no. And if they say no, that’s not because you’re a terrible author and you’ve written a terrible book. Those things might be true of course, but the supermarkets wouldn’t know. They haven’t read your book.To a huge and underappreciated extent, the race for supermarket sales (as far as debut or near-debut authors is concerned) is like twelve fat men running for the same door. Only one of the runners is going to make it and which one actually does is a matter of chance more than athleticism.In short, beyond a point, there’s not much you can do to influence sales through bricks and mortar retailers. You can go secure that great editor. You can work hard. You can smile sweetly at sales conferences (if you get asked) and all that stuff. But you just can’t influence those critical decisions. You aren’t even in the room, or anywhere near it.But all that doesn’t mean you can’t be highly pro-active as a modern author. Nor do you have to self-publish to reap the rewards.Here’s the thing:The most powerful way to sell on Amazon is via your own mailing list – your very own group of fans.The detail of building and using that list is relatively intricate. Not because it’s so inherently complicated, but because this is an area where detail matters. Exactly how do you solicit email addresses? What do you offer in exchange? What language should you use? How you solve those things can make a huge cumulative difference to how many emails you get (and what quality those emails are.)But that’s detail.The essence of selling via mailing list is really simple:You find people who like your booksYou offer them something that they want – probably a shortish story if you’re a novelist, something helpful if you’re writing subject-led non-fiction.People sign up to get the thing they’re after. They also (knowingly and happily) sign up to get regular emails from you.In those emails, you are charming, discursive, & helpful … and concentrate fiercely on the topic that brought these readers to you in the first placeWhen you have a new book to sell, you say “Hey guys, do you want my book?”They buy itBut that’s not the clever bit! That’s not the bit that explodes your sales and stuffs dollars into your bank account until you fall back laughing, “Enough! Enough! Enough!”The clever bit is this:Amazon notices the sales spike that your emails has generatedAmazon’s little marketing robots get so excited that binary starts spouting out of their socketsAmazon itself starts to pump news of your book out to all the readers it thinks are most likely to love it. That’ll be via emails, via “recommended for you” banners, via Hot New Release promos, and much else.A ton more people start to come across your work … and to buy it … and to discover the wonderful news that you are giving away a wonderful short story …And the whole process begins again.This is the critical motor that powers every really successful self-pub author’s career. It’s the trick that took me to six-figure sales in the US on the back of just 6 self-published books. It’s why even really advertising-competent authors (like Mark Dawson) say that the three most important things in digital bookselling are “mailing list, mailing list, mailing list.”And you can use that trick no matter whether you’re planning on a traditional publishing career, or on self-publishing, or on a hybrid of the two. I’d go so far as to say, there are almost no categories of author that shouldn’t be thinking of building and nurturing an email list. (More details here, if you need them.)Say, for example, you are traditionally published and your publisher just messes up. You have the advance, but your book sales are disappointing, and your career looks fatally wounded. If you emerge from the wreckage with the start of a decent mailing list, then you have built an asset that will support and protect you for years and years to come. My US trad publishing career did crash and burn (thanks, Random House!), but my US publishing career just went from strength to strength.Good books + mailing list = a strategy that never fails.And two other plus points: A mailing list prompts you to write a “reader magnet”. That magnet doesn’t have to be – and shouldn’t be – a full length book. I use two magnets for my fiction, one of 7,000 words, one of 13,000. Those things are too long for short stories. They’re way too short for any publisher to want to buy and print them.But they’re fun to write! And great for readers! They feel like a holiday from work, while being absolutely core to the work you want to do.And hey: once you have a mailing list, you can do almost anything. If you’re minded to write a 25,000 word story – for which, to repeat, no traditional publisher would pay – then you can write it and sell it via your mailing list, for $0.99 if you’re feeling generous, or $2.99 if you’re not. The basic mailing list strategy will still (once your list is somewhat mature) deliver real dividends.If I had to pick just one brilliant thing about publishing in the last decade or so, I’d have to pick the rise of Amazon and the e-book. If I got to pick two, I’d pick the list-driven sales strategy every time. Nothing, but nothing, but nothing, has empowered authors more.That’s true if you’re trad.It’s true if you’re indie.It’s true if you’re an exciting hybrid of the two, with the head of a goat on the body of donkey.That’s it from me. It’s sunny. And in the cricket, England are about to start batting …Till soonHarry

Usually, on Thursday afternoon or so, I start pondering what I’m going to write about on Friday.This week: no pondering. There’s only one thing I could possibly write about.The biggest book-related newsflash this week – or this year – is that Barnes and Noble is changing ownership. The ins and outs are a little complex (and everything is not quite settled), but if all goes according to plan:An investment firm, Elliott Advisers, is to buy Barnes and Noble, in a deal which values that business (including its debts) at about $700 million.That sounds like a lot of money, but given that B&N’s sales are $3.6 billion, the pricing actually feels pretty cheap – reflecting the dismal state of B&N.Elliott is also the 100% owner of Waterstones, the British equivalent of B&N. Both those chains are proper bookshops, appealing to proper book lovers. In that sense, the chains are distinct from the supermarkets, who just sell a lot of books but don’t care about them, or the British High Street & travel operator, WH Smith, which is as much a stationer and a newsagent as an actual book store.Waterstones was rescued from impending financial disaster by CEO James Daunt. It was Daunt who negotiated the sale of the firm to Elliott.Daunt will now act as CEO to both firms – B&N and Waterstones – and will divide his time between London and New York.As it happens, Daunt also owns and runs his own mini-chain of high-end London bookstores. It was his experience at those stores which won him the position at Waterstones.So, assuming that all goes according to plan, James Daunt will be the book world’s second most powerful human, after Jeff Bezos.So what does that mean – for readers? For writers? For publishers? For anyone?Well.It’s a big and important move. James Daunt has a huge reputation in the UK and it’s probably deserved. His secret sauce for success? Quite simply this:There is no secret sauce.In the UK, Daunt simply took everything back to basics.He turned bookselling into a proper career. (Albeit, inevitably, a badly paid one.) He retained staff who cared passionately about books and waved good-bye to the rest, perhaps a third of them. He cut costs. He made his stores prettier.And, in a move so radical that it shook British publishing to its core, he let each store manager select their own inventory. So, yes of course, every store was expected to stock major bestsellers of the moment. But beyond that, what stores sold was guided by local passion and local knowledge. From a reader’s point of view, stores got better. There was more energy, more passion, more commitment.But publishers, for a while, didn’t know what to do. In the past, publishing worked like this:Publishers paid Waterstones a big chunk of cash to get into a 3-for-2 front-of-store promotion. So Waterstones was actually retailing its shelf-space. It wasn’t really curating its own retail offering.Some of those 3-for-2s did really well, and became huge bestsellers.Others didn’t, and the volume of returns was enormous (often 20% of total stock.)Publishers pulped those returns, ditched those authors and just made money from their mega-successesThat was check-book publishing and check-book retail.Daunt killed that, and terrified publishers. How could they market books if the key step wasn’t just throwing bundles of money at retailers? [and if you want a reminder of the different publishing options, you can get that here.]Well, they solved that problem … kinda. But all they really did was turn their attentions (even more than before) to the supermarkets and other mass retailers. Waterstones’ local stores are great and feel like real bookshops … but they can’t build a bestseller as they did in the old days, because each store chooses its stock according to its own tastes.Daunt’s path in the US is likely to follow the exact same route.He’s commented that one of the issues he feels on entering a typical B&N store is quite simply “too many books.” Too much stock. Too little curation and guidance. Not enough knowledge from the booksellers. An atmosphere so flat, you could swap it for cigarette paper.He’ll cut stock. Reduce staff, but retain the best and most passionate members. Eliminate central promotions. Get better terms from publishers. Sharply reduce stock returns.Do the basics, but do them right.The impacts, positive and negative?The positive:Elliott’s cash plus Daunt’s knowhow should save specialist physical book retail in the US. That’s massive. It’s the difference between a US publishing industry that operates much as it does now and one that would be almost wholly slave to Amazon. That also means that trad publishing is likely to survive in roughly its current shape and size, rather than being sidelined by the growth of digital-first publishers (notably self-pubbers and Amazon itself.)The negative:US publishers will have to learn the lessons already absorbed by the Brits. If B&N no longer operates national promotion systems as in the past, publishers can’t make a bestseller just by buying space. Yes, they’ll go on seeing what they can do on social media and all that stuff. But, as in the UK, they’ll be even more dependent on supermarkets. The make-or-break of a book will be not “Is this wonderful writing?” but “did we get enough retail space in enough supermarkets at a sufficiently attractive price?”I know any number of authors where Book A did incredibly well, Book B did poorly … and Book B was better than Book A. The difference, in every case, was that the supermarkets backed A and not B, and there’s damn all a trad publisher can do once the supermarkets have said no.Oh yes, and supermarkets don’t really give a damn about the quality of writing. They don’t know about the quality of the writing. They just buy on the basis of past sales (if you’re John Grisham) or a pretty cover (if you’re a debut.)Of course, they’d say their selection is a damn sight more careful than that, and it probably is. But that’s still “careful by the standards of people who mostly sell tinned beans and dog food for a living.” That’s not the same thing as actually being careful.That sounds like a fairly downbeat conclusion, but the Elliott-saves-B&N news is still a real big plus for anyone who loves traditional stores, print books and traditional publishing. It’s the single biggest win I can remember over the past few years.What that win won’t do, however, is weaken the hold of supermarkets and Amazon over book retail. Those two forces are still huge. They’re still central.And of course, talking about print books has its slightly quaint side. Me, I prefer print. I hardly ever read ebooks. I just spend enough time on screens as it is.But print books constitute less than 30% of all adult fiction sales, and online print sales accounts for a big chunk of that 30%.In other words, all those B&N stores up and down the US are still only attacking 23% or so of the total adult fiction market. However well Daunt does, that 23% figure isn’t about to change radically. (Or not in the direction he wants, anyway.)But, just for now, to hell with realism. Let’s remember the magic of a beautiful bookstore.Daunt does. Here are some comments of his from 2017:“[there is a sense that] a book bought from a bookshop is a better book.... When a book comes through a letter box or when a book is bought in a supermarket, it\'s not vested with the authority and the excitement that comes from buying it in a bookshop. …Price is irrelevant if the customer likes the shop. The book is never an expensive item, [particularly for the many customers who] we know are quite happy to go into a café and spend dramatically more on a cup of coffee.\"Quite right, buddy. Now go sell some books. The readers need you.Till soonHarry

I’ve been reading a terrific guest post on our blog by our Craig Taylor. (And actually, “guest post” doesn’t feel like quite the right term, if I’m honest. Craig’s a buddy, not a guest.)The post is on how to write a scene and, in it, Craig asks:“If the theme of your work, say, is unrequited love, does your scene angle in to that theme? Does it demonstrate a circumstance or a feeling which is associated with unrequited love? Or does it demonstrate a circumstance or a feeling about requited love, so as to throw into relief the experience that one of your characters will have about unrequited love?”And those are interesting questions, aren’t they?I, for one, don’t write a book thinking that every scene I write has to “angle in” to my major theme. But what if that’s wrong? What if, in a well-constructed book, pretty much everything angles in to the one same issue? (Or, rather, cluster of issues, because a book that is rich thematically can never be too neatly categorised.)And here’s another thought:What if you don’t especially think about these things as you build your story? What if you do concentrate on good writing (nice prose, strong characters, a well-knitted plot), but don’t overthink the thematic stuff?What happens then? Is the result strong? Or will it never reach the kind of thematic depth and congruence that Craig is hinting at?Hey, ho. Interesting questions. So I thought I’d take a look at my own work and see what’s actually happened there.So my last book, The Deepest Grave, has a cluster of themes that include:Ancient history, specifically post-Roman Britain and the shade of ArthurTreasure and fakeryDeath (because this is a murder mystery, but it is also a book about Fiona Griffiths, whose attitudes to life and death are deep and complicated.)But then, I only have to write those themes down on the page here – something I’ve never done before; I don’t plan my thematic stuff – and I realise this: that those themes absolutely and necessarily contain their opposites. So a book that is about fakery and death is also, essentially, a book about:AuthenticityLife – or, more specifically in Fiona’s case, the whole knotty business of how to be a human; how to establish and maintain an identity in the face of her overawareness of death.OK. So those, broadly, are my themes. Let’s now look at whether my various scenes tend to hammer away at those things, or not. Are themes something that appear via a few strong, bold story strokes? Or are they there, fractal-like, in every detail too?And, just to repeat, those aren’t questions I consciously think about much as I write. Yes, a bit, sometimes, but I certainly don’t go through the disciplined thought process that Craig mentions in his post.And blow me down, but what I find is that, yes, those themes infest the book. The book never long pulls away from them at all.So, aside from a place and date stamp at the top of chapter 1, the first words in the book are these:“Jon Breakell has just completed his chef d’oeuvre, his masterpiece. The Mona Lisa of office art. The masterpiece in question is a dinosaur made of bulldog clips, twisted biro innards and a line of erasers that Jon has carved into spikes.”That’s a nod towards ancient history. It’s a nod towards authenticity (the Mona Lisa) and fakery (a dinosaur that is definitely not a real dinosaur.) It’s also, perhaps, a little nod towards death, because in a way the most famous thing about dinosaurs is that they’re extinct.It goes on. The mini-scene that opens the book concludes with Fiona demolishing her friend’s dinosaur and the two of them bending down to clear up the mess. Fiona says, “that’s how we are—me, Jon, the bones of the fallen—when Dennis Jackson comes in.”That phrase, the bones of the fallen, puts death explicitly on the page and in a way which alludes forward to the whole Arthurian battle theme that will emerge later.That’s one example and – I swear, vow & promise – I didn’t plan those links out in my head prior to writing. I just wrote what felt natural for the book that was to come.But the themes keep on coming. To use Craig’s word, all of the most glittering scenes and moments and images in the book keep on angling in to my little collection of themes.There’s a big mid-book art heist and hostage drama. Is there a whiff of something ancient there? Something faked and something real? Of course. The heist is fake and real, both at the same time.The crime that sits at the heart of the book has fakery at its core. But then Fiona start doubling up on the fakery – she’s faking a fake, in effect – but in the process, it turns out, she has created something authentic. And the authenticity of that thing plays a key role in the book’s final denouement.Another example. Fiona’s father plays an important role in this book. He’s not a complicated or introspective man. He doesn’t battle, the way his daughter does, for a sense of identity.But what happens in the book? This big, modern, uncomplicated man morphs, somehow, into something like a modern Arthur. That identity shift again plays a critical role in the final, decisive dramas. But it echoes around the book too. Here’s one example:“Dad drives a silver Range Rover, the car Arthur would have chosen.It hums as it drives, transfiguring the tarmac beneath its wheels into something finer, silvered, noble.A wash of rain. Sunlight on a hill. Our slow paced Welsh roads.”That’s playful, of course, and I had originally intended just to quote that first line, about the Range Rover. But when I opened up the text, I found the sentences that followed. That one about “transfiguring the tarmac” is about that process of transformation from something ordinary to something more like treasure, something noble.And then even the bits that follow that – the wash of rain, the sunlight on the hill – don’t those things somehow attach to the “finer, silvered, noble” phrase we’ve just left? It’s as though the authenticity of the man driving the Range Rover transforms these ordinary things into something treasured. Something with the whisper of anciency and value.I could go on, obviously, but this email would turn into a very, very long one if I did.And look:Yet again, I’ve got to the end of a long piece on writing without a real “how to” lesson to close it off.Craig’s blog post says, among many other good things, that you should ask whether or not your scene angles in to your themes. But I don’t do that. Not consciously, not consistently. And – damn my eyes and boil my boots – I discover that the themes get in there anyway. Yoo-hoo, here we are.Uninvited, but always welcome.So the moral of all this is - ?Well, I don’t know. I think that, yes, if you’re stuck with a scene, or if it’s just feeling a little awkward or wrong, then working through Craig’s list of scene-checks will sort you out 99% of the time. A conscious, almost mechanical, attention to those things will eliminate problems.But if you’re not the conscious mechanic sort, then having a floaty awareness of the issues touched on in this email will probably work as well. If you maintain that rather unfocused awareness of your themes, you’ll find yourself naturally gravitating towards phrases and scenes and metaphors and moments that reliably support the structure you’re building.And that works, I think. The final construction will have both coherence and a kind of unforced naturalness.And for me, it’s one of the biggest pleasures of being an author. That looking back at a text and finding stuff in it that you never consciously put there.Damn my eyes and boil my boots.Till soonHarry

I had plans for today, plans that involved some interesting and actually useful work.But –Our boiler sprang a leak. Even with the mains water turned off, it went on leaking through the night. Finding an engineer who could come out today (for a non-insane price) took the first half hour this morning. The engineer is coming at 3.30, and that’ll eat the last part of the day.And –I have a vast number of kids: four, in theory, but most days it seems like a lot more than that. And one of them, Lulu, spent most of the last couple of nights with, uh, a stomach upset. Of the intermittent but highly projectile variety.So –Not masses of sleep. And today’s interesting work plans have been kicked into next week.Which bring us to –You. Life. Books. Writing.The fact is that even if you’re a pro author, life gets in the way of writing all the time. Because writing isn’t an office-based job, almost no writer I know keeps completely clean boundaries between work stuff and life stuff. Life intrudes all the time. Indeed, I know one author – a multiple Sunday Times top ten bestseller – whose somewhat less successful but office-based partner always just assumes that she’ll be the one to fix boilers, attend to puking children, etc, etc, just because she’s at home and not under any immediate (today, next day) deadline pressure.And that’s a top ten bestseller we’re talking about. Most of you aren’t in that position. You’re still looking for that first book deal. The first cheque that says, “Hey, this is a job, not just a hobby.”So Life vs Work?Life is going to win, most of the time. And it’ll win hands down.The broken boiler / puking kid version of life intrusion is only one form of the syndrome though. There’s one more specific to writers.Here’s the not-yet-pro-author version of the syndrome, in one of its many variants: You have one book out on submission with agents. You keep picking at it editorially and checking your emails 100 times a day. But you also have 20,000 words of book #2 on your computer and though, in theory, you have time to write, you’re accomplishing nothing. You’re just stuck.That feels like only aspiring authors should suffer that kind of thing, right? But noooooooo! Pro authors get the same thing in a million different flavours, courtesy of their publishers. Your editor quits. Your new editor, “really wants to take a fresh look at your work, so as soon as she’s back from holiday and got a couple of big projects off her desk …”. Or your agent is just starting new contract negotiations with your editor, and you are hearing alarmingly little for some reason. Or you know that your rom-com career is on its last legs, so you’re looking to migrate to domestic noir, but you don’t know if your agent / editor / anyone is that keen on the stuff you now write. Or …Well, there are a million ors, and it feels like in my career I’ve experienced most of them. The simple fact is that creative work is done best with a lack of significant distractions and no emotional angst embedded in the work itself. Yet the publishing merry-go-round seems intent on jamming as much angst in there as it can manage, compounded, very often, by sloppy, slow or just plain untruthful communications.So the solution is …?Um.Uh.I don’t know. Sorry.The fact is, these things are just hard and unavoidable. Priorities do get shifted. You can’t avoid it. The emotional strains of being-a-writer – that is, having a competitive and insecure job in an industry which, weirdly, doesn’t value you very highly – are going to be present whether you like them or not.There have been entire months, sometimes, when I should have been writing, but accomplished nothing useful because of some publishing drama, which just needed resolution. No one else cared much about that drama, or at least nothing close to the amount I did, with the result that those things often don’t resolve fast.Your comfort and shelter against those storms? Well, like I say, I don’t have any magical answers but, here, for what it’s worth, are some things which may help:Gin. Or cheap wine. Or whatever works. I favour beers from this fine brewery or really cheap Australian plonk. The kind you can thin paints with.Changing your priorities for a bit. So if you really needed to clear out the garage or redecorate the nursery, then do those things in the time you had thought you’d be writing. You’re not losing time; you’re just switching things around.Addressing any emotional/practical issues as fast and practically as you can. So let’s say you have book #1 out on submission, you can help yourself by getting the best version of that book out (getting our excellent editorial advice upfront if you need to.) You can make sure you go to a minimum of 10 agents, and probably more like 12-15. You can make sure those agents are intelligently chosen, and that your query letter / synopsis are all in great shape. (see the PSes for a bit more on this.) You can write yourself a day planner, that gives some structure to the waiting process: “X agents queried on 1 May. Eight weeks later is 26 June. At that point, I (a) have an agent, (b) send more queries, (c) get an editor to look at my text, or (d) switch full-steam to the new manuscript.” If you plan things like that upfront, you don’t have to waste a bazillion hours crawling over the same questions in your head.Accepting the reality. It’s just nicer accepting when things are blocked or too busy or too fraught. The reality is the same, but the lived experience is nicer. So be kind to yourself.Find community. Yes, your partner is beautiful and adorable and the joy of your life. But he/she isn’t a writer. So he/she doesn’t understand you. Join a community (like ours). Make friends. Share a moan with people who know exactly what you mean. That matters. It makes a difference.Enjoy writing. This is the big one, in fact. The writers who most struggle with their vocation are the ones who like having written something, but don’t actually enjoy writing it. And I have to say, I’ve never understood that. My happiest work times have nearly always been when I’m throwing words down on a page, or editing words I’ve already put there. And that pleasure means you keep on coming back to your manuscript whenever you can. And that means it gets written. And edited. And out to agents or uploaded to KDP and sold.Of those six, then cultivating that happiness is the single biggest gift you can give yourselves.And the gin, obviously.Harry

Voice.It’s the secret sauce of writing. The magical herb that transforms your stew. It’s the leaf of gold in a martini. The lemony brightness.It’s also, no surprise, the single thing that agents most often look for in a debut work. A distinctive voice. The key to success.Although agents are most vocal in wanting this, I’d say that the same issue matters almost as much to self-published debuts. After all, if you’re writing just another romance, the reader can buy any old romance to meet their needs. They don’t have to buy your #2 in the series. But if you write something so distinctive that there’s just no adequate substitute out there, they have to buy your #2, and then your #3, and then … No prizes for guessing which kind of self-pub author makes more money.Right, so voice is good. But what is it? What actually are we talking about here?Well, the dictionary definition would be something like Voice = the author’s stylistic fingerprint. A distinctive way of writing, unique to that specific author.Voice is most obviously applicable to questions of prose style. So Raymond Chandler’s voice is immediately distinctive from the way he puts words on a page. This kind of thing:“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”Or this:“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands\' necks. Anything can happen.”But voice has to do with more than just prose.So if you think about (for example) I Am Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, there’s nothing so very remarkable about the way she puts words on a page. For example, this:“Then I understood I would never marry him. It\'s funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one\'s past, or one\'s clothes, but then--a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh.”That doesn’t have anything like the showiness of Raymond Chandler. Each sentence is perfectly simple. The finish is rather flat, as though the author is painting in acrylics, not oils.That sounds like a put-down. But the human / emotional insights are so precisely observed, so accurately and simply delivered, that their cumulative effect is overwhelming. The flatness of style is, in fact, closely married to the insight. The same kind of insight delivered in Chandler-ese would have deflected most of the attention to the writing, and removed the power of the actual observation.It’s not hard to find voice in any author of real quality. Take Lee Child. He hardly operates at the literary end of the spectrum. You could slap a chunk of his prose down on the page and not find anything so remarkable. For example:“Never forgive, never forget. Do it once and do it right. You reap what you sow. Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired. Protect and serve. Never off duty”That doesn’t look like authorial voice even a little bit. That looks like a chain of sentences lining up for the World Cliché Parade.But – Jack Reacher. That’s the secret of Lee Child’s voice right there. The way Reacher thinks, acts, remembers, operates is a brilliant construct. Reacher certainly doesn’t have any of Elizabeth’s Strunk’s quietly piercing observations, but Child gives us a complete, brilliant, detailed picture of the way a fighting machine like Reacher works. The (mostly) unremarkable prose is absolutely a part of that. Reacher doesn’t do fancy, so the prose follows suit.And, OK, all this is interesting. But we haven’t yet said anything useful.I mean, if voice is so important, then it would be kind of useful to know where to get it, how to build it. [Stuff I also discuss in this blog post, incidentally.]And – I don’t know.Not really.Or rather: I don’t think there’s a specific set of techniques you can use to go and get yourself a distinctive voice. In that sense, it’s not like problems with prose, or problems with plot, where you can simply run a fairly standard set of diagnostic tools to identify the specific issues and find solutions.On the other hand, I can tell you what kind of person you have to be to have voice. What kind of writer.Above all, you have to be a confident one. Confident in yourself. I love quoting Gore Vidal on this. He says:\"Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.”The hardest bit there is the not giving a damn. It’s finding the mode of expression that works best for you, then just going for it. Taking off that inner handbrake. Following the logic of your path to its end. Ensuring, relentlessly, that you are satisfied with every last word on the page. That those words, in that order, spoken by those characters are what you want to express.That means, in order to please an agent – you have to not give a damn about what an agent may think.In order to please your eventual reader – you have to not care, or not care directly, about their judgements.In effect, the finding-a-voice journey is an act of inner completion, that just happens to be executed via writing. Which is great. Which is uplifting. But which is also a real bummer, because what tools and techniques do you use to become a more complete human?I don’t really have a useful answer to that question. I’d say my voice was kinda present in my first ever novel – it didn’t read exactly like anybody else’s debut novel. But before I had anything like a completely confident voice, I’d written five (maybe six) novels and three or four works of non-fiction. And yes, I think there’s something replicable about that technique. Write five or six published novels, and you’ll find yourself writing in a Vidal-ish, not-giving-a-damn kind of way.But some of you might be a little more impatient than that. And yes, as a voice-acquisition technique, I’d say my own process was hardly speedy.So instead let me recommend these two approaches:1. Learn writing techniqueOne of the reasons why newbie writers end up sounding undistinctive is that they have so much else to grapple with. Is my plot working? Should I choose first person or third? Does this character feel vivid? Does this relationship have enough conflict? (etc, etc, etc).The result is that they never really get to grapple with those Gore Vidal-ish things at all. Their minds (my mind, during those first few books of mine) are too pre-occupied with issues of mere technique.So, lesson one, absorb writing technique until it’s second nature. The more you absorb and internalise those tools, the more your mind is freed for other things. For self-expression and self-finding.2. RewriteYou can’t be satisfied because something is OK. You can only afford to be satisfied when this is OK and expresses exactly what you wanted to say in the way that you wanted to say it.And because you don’t even know what you want to say until you start saying it, you’ll find, almost inevitably, that you build your way towards something good by writing and unpicking, and then re-writing and re-unpicking, all the way until you’re finally done.That’s lesson two.3. Ignore anyone else’s modelThe next thriller writer to be as successful as Lee Child will not write like Lee Child.The next crime writer to make as much of a mark as Raymond Chandler will definitely not write like Raymond Chandler (because zillions of people have written in a Chandler-lite kind of way and absolutely none of them made any kind of mark.)So forget about those models, great as they are.Forget also about the endless peer-to-peer workshopping, practised by a lot of university creative writing programmes. That workshopping has plenty to be said for it, no doubt, but too much of it will turn your work into something that sounds like all those other creative writing MFA type products. And you don’t want that. You want to sound like you.That’s lesson three, and here endeth all the lessons.That’s it from me.I am now going to take a hayfever pill and declare war on every blade of grass in Oxfordshire.Sneezily,HarryPPS: The best place to learn writing technique? Duh. That would be on Jericho Writers, of course. Among your options:The Ultimate Novel Writing Course. Does exactly what it says on the tin. I think this writing course might be the finest writing course in the whole world ever. That’s certainly the way we designed it. More here.Mentoring, with the mighty Daren King. We’re looking to add more mentors to this programme soon, but Daren has been doing this for ten years and he’s very, very good. More here.Jericho Writers Membership. Don’t forget that membership confers access to a really complete, detailed, joyous video course on writing. If you just watched all those videos over the course of a month, you would definitely be a better writer than you were at the start. If you have a manuscript on the go at the moment, that course will show you countless ways to improve it. More on the course here. More on membership here.

Here\'s the place to chat about my Friday May 17 email on the routes to publishing in 2019. The blog post I referenced can be found here:https://jerichowriters.com/how-to-get-published/ Have I missed anything out? Is there anything where you violently disagree? What has your experience been? Here\'s the place to tell me ...

Here\'s the place to talk about today\'s email - \"The days that say no\" - in which I talk about that feeling of reluctance to grapple with your current draft. We\'ve all been there. What\'s your solution? What\'s worked, what hasn\'t, what\'s your advice?And here\'s a picture of apple blossom to make us feel happy.

Want to ask questions? Got any follow-up? Don\'t agree with something I said? Then here\'s the place to do it. I\'ll follow the chat thread on this post for a few days following my email, and I\'m happy to talk about anything at all.Meantime, here\'s a picture of a scary-but-pretty bug.