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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 Beggar

And 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.