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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 first

Deploy 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 second

I 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 third

This 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 soon

Harry

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 WRITTEN
I'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 STAR
Didn’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 QUEASY
Sorry, 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