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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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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 technique

One 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. Rewrite

You 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 model

The 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,

Harry

PPS: 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.