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A few weeks back, when Covid first struck, we ran a lockdown-friendly 14-day free membership offer. You could sign up for free and, if you liked it (and were wise and decisive), you could convert to a full membership. As an extra little sprinkle of stardust, we offered the converters a quick review of their opening pages.

That’s always an interesting exercise, reminding one of the astonishing breadth of fiction. And one of the opening pages that floated my way - this one from a writer called Karen - opened with this brilliant opening phrase (referring, by the way, to a sack of tiny monkeys):

Won from a fellow tar on the turn of a knave …

You know instantly that you’re in the hands of an accomplished writer there, with poetry and vigour right there in the first dozen or so words. You also recognise that the voice is going to be distinctive, which it duly is. Here are some other lovely bits from Karen's first page:

Earl reminded him sharply with a blow from his fist. The old dog would reap a bright forget-me-not on his temple as a reprimand.

And what about this:

Experience had taught him that encouragement in the softest of tones invariably succeeded in calming a frightened creature. Horse, woman, whatever. 

Part of the joy of these openings is the delicious realisation that we are about to witness a voice, and a character, that lies several standard deviations away from normal. You might think of published books like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated:

My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. My mother dubs me Alex-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her.

That first sentence lulls you into a sense of security. Then my ‘friends dub me Alex’ catches you out and forces you to pay close attention to what’s coming. And then – bim-a-bam-bosh – you get your reward with the delightfully barmy phrase ‘a more flaccid-to-utter version…’.

We’re just two sentences into the book and, if you were browsing in a bookstore, you’ve already made up your mind to make the purchase.

Or how about this:

Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.

That’s the opening of Where the Crawdads Sing and it combines poetry with an immediately distinctive presence.

In all these cases, the book announces itself with something distinctive, something that rejoices in language, something that doesn’t sound anything like the book next to it in the shop or online.

And that sort of sounds like a recipe for success: invent something distinctive and glittery for the first page. Get the sale. Then tell the story.

Except that to succeed, to really succeed, the distinctive thing you offer has to be baked into the story at the very deepest level. The Crawdads opening makes a promise about place and mood that the entire book lives up to. The Safran Foer opening likewise makes a big, bold splashy promise that the book also amply lives up to. (That book is multi-voiced, so there are multiple promises, in fact.)

So maybe the right way to think about these distinctive voices is that they perfectly align everything about the book. Genre, mood, setting, character. Those things line up so that the reader ends up reading some perfectly presented whole. It feels impossible to detach any one part of the book, so completely is everything integrated.

And that in turn means: no cheating. No shortcuts.

A flashy opening sentence or vignette is fine, but if the flash dissolves into something without a coherent original vision, you haven’t necessarily gained yourself much.

That kind of originality is hard to do. It took me five novels and nine or more books before I’d really nailed it. And of course, you can be a highly competent writer writing highly competent books without the bolt of inspiration that elevates your work to a whole different level. You never quite know how an idea will turn out until you’ve written the damn book.

But this I think you can do: you can take what is original and distinctive in your voice or concept and lean into it. Encourage it. Invite it to display itself to the full. You need to stay disciplined, of course. (No sloppy phrases, no weak writing.) But even the act of inviting that voice to unfurl to its fullest extent is an act of bravery.

And your bravery will be rewarded. Always. If you keep the discipline, then always.

Find the heart of what you have, the most distinctive strand of your story-DNA and lean into that thing. Make the most of it. Put it at the very heart of what you do.

I’d love to see snippets of text from anyone who thinks they are writing with a distinctive voice or an unusual, strong-flavoured character. If you reckon your text qualifies, then let’s share.

Meanwhile – Stay safe and keep writing.

Oh yes. And I’m going to have something AMAZING to tell you about next week. Stay tuned for that.

Is your name flaccid-to-utter? Or are you just spleening me? If you've got something you want to share, then share it below. Nowhere like Townhouse for winning a monkey on the turn of a knave.

I had thoughts, I really did. A useful laundry list of wonderful tips for making your prose shine and your plots glitter.

But – maybe another time.

I can’t help noticing that it is not merely Good Friday, but Good Friday in the Age of Plague. A lot of people are feeling isolated or scared. The wheels of history are grinding and they don’t care too much who they overrun.

I’m not fearful for myself or my family. We’re comfortably isolated in the country. The weather is wonderful. We have a big garden and our village community is actually more active and friendly than it ever has been before. Likewise my brother and sister, my mother, their families, my in-laws – they’re all fine. They’re OK.

But one of the things that fiction achieves is to take us to the edge of strange inversions and new recognitions. Fiction takes you to a place where you realise something unexpected – or actively impossible – is also true. In Pride and Prejudice, we know for sure that Lizzie doesn’t love Darcy. She makes it clear. She turns down his proposal with force and asperity.

Lizzie does not love Darcy. FACT.

But – boom – fiction does its thing, it turns its wheels, and we realise she loves him with all her heart, and all her soul, and all her mind. The Lizzie/Darcy love is as complete and perfect as any we could imagine. FACT.

Fiction isn’t as crass as to say the first view of things was false. More like, it was incomplete. The old binary view of truth buckles a bit at the hands of good writing. Those inversions and completions are an essential part of fiction.

But reality is pulling the same trick right now. We’re a celebrity obsessed culture, right? Any teenage YouTube vlogger can sell some weirdly huge mountain of books just because they know about (I don’t know) eyebrow threading or vegan yogurt.

FACT.

But cometh the plague, cometh the inversion. It turns out we have no interest in these posing celebrities. (Billionaire David Geffen putting pics of his yacht on Instagram as he outlines his isolation strategy. The moron.)

We have an interest and respect for the people who work in healthcare, without acclaim and often enough without much cash either. We turn out in our city streets to clap and cheer and bang saucepans and say, these are our heroes. Not just today, but forever. We have loved you always and have only known to say it now.

FACT.

And we here at Jericho Writers are the same. We’ve had some emails from healthcare workers who have told us that they’d love to become JW members but can’t afford the fee.

In more normal times, we’d act like commercially responsible businesspeople. Ones with budgets and targets and marketing plans.

But you know what? Stuff that. Our budgets are have been completely shredded and our marketing plans are in the bin.

So here goes:

If you are a healthcare worker,
then tell us – and we’ll give you 75% off your JW membership.

We don’t care if you’re a trainee nurse, a top consultant, or a citizen volunteer. If you’re supporting the health service at this time of crisis, just tell us. All we need is a picture of some form of ID that shows you are what you say you are, and we’ll tell you how to get your 75% discount.

This isn’t a clever marketing strategy, so there are no strings attached. No ulterior purpose. Just – the world doesn’t really need more writing mentors at the moment, but it sure as hell needs more nurses. This is our version of standing outside our homes and clapping.

(I should probably also say that we won’t see your email before Tuesday at the earliest and we’ll have a huge backlog of emails to get through at that point. So if you do want to take us up on this offer, please bear with us. We’ll be with you as fast as we can.)

That’s it from me – or almost.

When I write these emails, I often discover something I hadn’t realised at the start. And that thing about fiction inverting an apparent reality to reveal a true one underneath – the Lizzie/Darcy love story, for example – I wonder if that is true of all great fiction? Or all fiction? I wonder if it’s true of mine.

Just now, I don’t know, but it’s a damn interesting thought.

Stay safe. Keep writing. Keep clapping.

And tell me about your fiction. Does it achieve that inversion? I think mine probably does - or aims for it anyway. But I want to hear from you. Tell me about how your fiction upends expectations and makes the impossible true. Or do you disagree completely ? Either way, let's all have a Heated Debate.

Someone receiving this letter has (I bet) written a book about canning tomatoes and preserving lemons. If so, that book is currently dancing its way up the Amazon’s bestseller charts right now.

If you happen to be a publisher that’s big on children’s study aids, you’ll already have sold out and be reprinting pretty much every text you have. Some of those reprint orders (in the US) are for a million-plus number of copies.

Fiction is having a surge as well. Why not catch up on your TBR pile now? Seems like a good time to get stuck in.

The book category that has most taken a ding is adult non-fiction, in categories unrelated to the current crisis. (Which you need to interpret broadly. Books on creating and tending a garden in a limited space have sold out. My children and I always plant potatoes and various other vegetables at this time of year. When we came to order seeds and seedlings, we found that our normal suppliers were completely out of stock. Dammit.)

But all this leaves plenty of questions.

If you have a manuscript that’s ready to go, is now a brilliant time to query agents? Or a really terrible one?

Well, committed as we are to delivering the very best and very latest in news and information from Planet Author, we are happy to tell you that the answer is …

Nobody knows.

Publishing is one of those industries that can move easily to remote working, in theory – but there’s a lot of difference between theory and adjusting to the actual practice of it. An acquisition committee might be able to meet perfectly well on Zoom, for example, but they’re not used to it. It’s not how things have generally been done.

That’s one thing, which suggests the industry will be more cautious. But there’s another which says it has to act as usual. Acquisition committees will be buying books now for publication in 12-18 months and for mass market release perhaps nine months after that. So the market these books will be launching into will be (presumably) a post-covid one. If publishers denude their pipelines now, they’ll be looking naked in 2021/22.

So that says that publishers will, for the most part, be looking to acquire and process as normal.

My own guess, in fact, is that publishers will struggle to release a full catalogue of books over the next six months, so some titles will get kicked down the road. That will mean that acquisitions now can be squeezed a little without discomfort.

And agents?

Well, agents will presumably be working from home, but that’s where plenty of agents work from already. Bigger agencies can easily work remotely. Not much change there.

Except – kids.

I’ve got four children at home when I expected them to be at school. Not just that, but the school, in the nicest possible way, is constantly bombarding us with home learning material. (Which of these 3-D shapes roll? Let’s take a look at this list of Tricky Words. Can you make a box with six oranges in it? You can have two oranges in that half and four in that half. Or … And don’t get me started on the Biff & Chip books for early readers. ’What is that?’ says Biff. ‘It’s a giant axe,’ says Dad. ‘But why do you have that terrifying glint in your eye?’ says Biff. ‘And why are you all spattered in red? And where is Chip?’ …)

In short, agents may have more time than usual, but they most likely have less. And they still have to manage the affairs of their existing clients, which are probably more than normally turbulent.

So I’m going to guess that somewhat fewer queries are going to be read and processed than normal. I’m also going to guess that new acquisitions by publishers are going to thin out a bit. Not much, but a bit.

And yes, you do see some publishers on Twitter defiantly hanging out their “We’re open” messages. But I’m sceptical, as are others. In the words of Liz McKean, a US agent, “I know editors, on Twitter at least, are all like We’re reading! We’re buying! Agents, send us books! And that’s great! I love it. There are some editors, possibly those without kids at home, who may have more time to read. I love that, too! But while they might be enthusiastic and excited to read, they don’t have room on their lists to buy 10 more books than usual. Each imprint’s list is not going to expand. It might not necessarily contract, but it’s not like an editor is going to be able to buy six more books a year just because we don’t have to ride the subway to work right now.“

As for what kinds of books agents and editors are acquiring – well, those acquisitions will largely ignore the current pandemic.

Yes, if you are a public health expert and have something urgent to say, and if you can bash out a book in four weeks, people are going to be jumping on that text immediately. But the market post-covid? No one knows. Will people want lots of pandemic books? Or upbeat books, that mix tears, laughter and an uplifting message? Or will people just settle back into murder stories and psych thrillers and gentle romances, just like always?

Because no one knows, there will be a spread of answers and you’ll see authors / agents / publishers placing their bets all around the great Roulette Table of Fiction.

And, unless you are a very output and business-focused indie author, you don’t care anyway. You write from passion, and a deep understanding of your genre, and the market is what the market will be. That’s the bit you can’t predict or control anyway, so there’s not too much point in trying. You write from your heart.

One other prognostication before we leave.

Crises don’t reshape an industry. They accelerate trends that were happening anyway. Since you can’t now walk into a bookstore to buy books, you have to buy them online. Many of those online shoppers will return to bookshops when they can. Some won’t.

Publishers will use the excuse of pandemic to trim their lists and lose some staff, but they won’t fatten their lists and rehire all those staff afterwards.

Author advances will be put under pressure owing to ‘exceptional circumstances’, but you won’t see a rebound once things return to normal.

In all those ways, the crisis of 2020 reflects the banking crisis of 2008. Things that were done in response to emergency just settled into place, the new normal.

That’s not meant to be downbeat, especially. Readers will go on reading. Writers will go on writing. As long as those two things hold true, we writers don’t have to care too much about all the shenanigans in between. We’ll be OK.

The best advice for people on the verge of submitting to agents now? The same as it’s always been. Write a damn good book. Make it as good as you can. Then get it out there.

Good luck. Stay safe. Have fun. Keep writing.

What has been your experience? What are your thoughts? Did you try preserving lemons too? And did you make them too salty like me? Give your views below and let's all have a Heated Debate.