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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 Impatient

With 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 Accurate

Some 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 Simple

And 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:

1. There is, immediately, some sense of the physical world. A road. Traffic. A weak sun. A low-rent garage. Railings.
2. 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.
3. 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:

1. A physical setting
2. A credible character
3. Some 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:

Passion

If 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 cojones

So 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 idea

A 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 soon

How 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 ...