Our Articles

I mentioned last week that I was reading Linwood Barclay’s Elevator Pitch, in preparation for talking to him as part of our upcoming Summer Festival.

And – it’s big.

It’s not super-long – I’m going to guess it runs to something like 150-160,000 words – but it has a scale that goes beyond mere length. It’s a thriller that encompasses the whole of Manhattan. The mayor. The son. The journalist. The daughter. The terrorist. The terrorist’s boss. The cop. The victims. The families. The ambassador. The FBI agent. And more.

I haven’t counted the number of points of view, but the total is probably two dozen or more. So disposable are the POVs, you get whole (entertaining) chapters written from the perspective of someone that the reader, not the character, realises is about to die.

The book is a big, fun, entertaining read. Though the thriller thrills as it should, it’s never nasty. There’s no gratuitous violence. No voyeurism of pain. A kind of compassionate humanity lives over the whole book.

But it’s the POVs I want to talk about.

Most of you will be working on a book with a single viewpoint, or maybe two or three carefully judged ones. You’ll agonise over whether one of your characters should be allowed her own POV, or whether she should have her little bit of fictional consciousness squeezed off the page altogether.

And then Linwood Barclay just manufactures points of view as though they didn’t matter. He’ll pop someone in a lift (= elevator, oh my American friends), give us three pages of insight into that character’s immortal soul, then splat that character from existence.

What’s going on? Why do you have to curate your characters with all this astonishing care, when Linwood Barclay can just manufacture and discard POVs with wild abandon?

Well.

Big question.

(And OK, I realise in my head I was doing that “well” in a Sven-Goran Eriksson voice. The guy used to be manager of the England football team, and he turned “well” into a two-syllable, very considered, Swedish-accented word, whose role was to live at the front of every sentence. If you were in a car with him as navigator, every time you asked for directions, he’d have said, “Well,” with such depth of thought that you’d have sped past the turning before he had time to give you an actual answer. So, now that you know that part sounds like in my head, we’re going to do it again.)

Well-ll.

Big question, but it resolves quite easily into three rough choices.

Utterly intimate

If you want to be utterly intimate with your main character and you want your reader to share that intimacy, you need a single viewpoint. It doesn’t matter too much whether that viewpoint is delivered first person or third, what matters is that the reader is living completely in that character’s shoes.

I do it myself. I’ve written about three quarters of a million words about my little Fiona Griffiths and every single one of those words is written from her point of view. Never once do the novels peep even for an italicised page or two into another mind.

The big win in this approach is depth and intimacy of characterisation. And it’s no coincidence that the element readers immediately foreground in my novels is the character. Yes, they’ll talk about the plots, but only after they’ve dealt with the character.

The big loss in that approach is that you risk a kind of claustrophobia. In my world of crime thrillers, for example, the strictly one-POV approach is relatively rare, because you have no access to dramatic action unless your character is there. That’s tough: it’s the most limiting, most difficult constraint that emerges from the way I’ve chosen to write.

My techniques for dealing with it are varied. They include: (a) locating my character at the point of drama more often than is actually credible, (b) making her a generator of drama in her own right, (c) giving her enough other points of interest – funny, crazy, romantic, interesting – that we don’t need non-stop drama, and (d) making those points of drama as long and intense as I can.

Epic, broad-sweep

The Linwood Barclay approach is the exact opposite. One of his point of view characters is the Mayor of New York, Richard Headley. The insight into RH’s inner world is so scant, it’s only just there at all. At times, it can be quite hard discerning whose point of view a chapter comes from.

That’s not bad writing. That’s careful, judicious writing.

Barclay knows that RH is not one of his primary characters, in the sense that readers aren’t hugely going to bond to him. So a dab of paint here and there is enough. He’s not an automaton. He’s in charge of this chapter. But you don’t really care about him, so I’m not going to go all-in with this character. With the characters Barclay does care about (and that readers care about), we have a much more detailed inner-life portrait.

The big wins of this approach are roughly twofold.

One, you generate a sense of scale. A Dickensian sense of an entire city, crawling beneath the novelist’s lens.

Two, you can jump to whichever piece of action is most dramatic, most involving. If you actually just traced the path of the book through one character’s journey alone, that character wouldn’t encounter nearly enough dramatic action to keep the reader involved.

And the loss?

Simply that none of Barclay’s characters register as intensely or in-depth as is possible with the one-POV only approach. They simply don’t get enough time on the page to generate that alchemy.

What you win in terms of scale and flexibility, you lose in terms of intimacy. In both cases, good writing allows you to claw back some of your losses, but the losses are real, no matter what.

Two or three

And then there’s an intermediate group of novels where there are multiple characters, but not in Linwood Barclays’s all-you-can-eat buffet kind of way.

There are romantic novels where he and she each have a hand.

Or historical novels where, the duke and the factory girl and (oh I dunno) the ship’s captain all have a role.

These are the novels that, from experience, generate the largest number of anguished emails. Roughly: “Hi Harry, I’ve just organised all my chapters into a spreadsheet and the ship’s captain has only 20% of the total page space, maybe less if you exclude the flashback where he worked in the ship’s chandlery, and I worry if maybe I should scrap the captain and given the girl the scene on the ship where the storm arrives, only then …”

And – I don’t know.

I mean: I haven’t read your books, so I don’t know. But you have basically two lamps to guide you. (And these are Lamps of Truth, so they’re good ‘uns when it comes to the whole guidance thing.)

Lamp the first: Don’t give your character a POV unless they have an actual story. That means a challenge, a crisis, a resolution. It means jeopardy. It means internal and external obstacles to victory. It means that all the plot ingredients needed for an entire novel are present, in miniature, for your point of view character too.

Lamp the second: Don’t give your character a POV unless you actually care about them. If you don’t, the reader won’t.

*** 

This whole business of POVs causes more anguish than almost any other, I reckon. And in the end, these general rules, while helpful, are only guidelines. Before you email me with one of your duke / factory girl / captain emails, just remember that I DON’T KNOW. The guidelines are helpful in terms of clarifying your thoughts, but the final decisions and judgements can only be made with a specific manuscript to consider.

That is all from me.

I will e-see loads of you at the Summer Festival next week and over the next few months. The rest of you will just have to sob bitter tears of remorse that you didn’t get your tickets in time. (Or – alternative thought – you could just go and get one. Details below.)

That's it from me. And I don't think that my trio of duke / factory girl / ship's captain is a very good one. What trio of characters do you have? And which one do you worry should be for the chop ...? Chime in below and let's all have a Heated Debate.

Oh blinking blimey. I’ve got lots of things to tell you and I’m not quite sure what order to do it in.

It’s like I’ve come home from a trip to Hyderabad by way of Phuket, Osaka and the Kingdom of Gog. I have eleventy-one interesting items in eleventy-one boxes (one of which roars and one of which sighs) and I can’t start to arrange my items until I’ve unboxed them all and stared at them a bit.

There’s going to be a mountain of packaging that I’ll have to cope with somehow.

Hey ho, and here we go.

Box 1

I did a webinar for Jericho members on Wednesday and there were almost 200 people there and it ran half the night. It was very interesting and I’m going to tell you more about this in a moment.

Box 2

Virtually all of our Summer Festival sessions are going out live and interactive, except that I did one with Adam Croft as a pre-record.

He’s an indie author and, if you don’t read psych thrillers and you’re not in touch with Planet Indie, then you don’t know who he is.

But when he brought out Her Last Tomorrow, that book sold so well he had paid off his mortgage in a matter of weeks.

His previous books had each earned maybe a few thousand dollars in total.

The shoutline for Adam’s breakout title was “Would you murder your wife to save your daughter?”

Box 3

I find nothing inside this box except a note from Sophie, our monarch of marketing, saying “Tell them about the 1-2-1s.”

I always obey Sophie, so I comply:

You lot gobbled up our first batch of 1-2-1 slots with literary agents so fast that we had to bake some more. You can find all the information right here:

https://jerichowriters.com/festival-of-writing/one-to-one-sessions/

Those cookies get eaten quickly though, so don’t wait too long.

Box 4

What is the elevator pitch for a book? I mean: what is it really?

It’s not the shoutline. It’s not the blurb. It’s not the synopsis. It’s not your query letter. It’s not even a sentence from your query letter. (I mean it might be, but certainly doesn’t have to be.)

So what is it really? And does it actually matter?

You are not, in fact, likely to find yourself in an elevator with a Top Literary Agent, so why stress about what you’d say if you were?

Box 5

By strange coincidence, I’m interviewing the #1 international bestseller Linwood Barclay as part of our Summer Festival. I’ll be talking (among much else) about his current thriller.

Whose title is Elevator Pitch.

The book opens with a guy trying to pitch his screenplay while in an elevator with a top entertainment exec. The elevator goes up to the fortieth floor then – geddit? – pitches downwards.

Closing lines of chapter 1:

“The elevator was in freefall.

Until it hit bottom.”

The story is about a chain of induced elevator crashes in New York and the effort to find the person responsible.

The screenwriter pitching his screenplay got as far as telling the movie exec his Big Idea before they were both splatted from existence. In his story, a character discovers a time machine, but the time machine can only move you five minutes forward into the future or five minutes back in the past.

What would you do with that tiny superpower?

Box 6

This is the box that was sighing and is now making a small mewing sound.

I poke some lettuce through the airholes and the mewing stops.

The box has leaked very slightly and smells of wee.

Box 7

OK, so the elevator pitch for my first Fiona Griffiths novel would be something like this:

Fiona Griffiths is a homicide detective in recovery from Cotards Syndrome. Cotards is a genuine psychiatric condition in which the sufferer believes themselves to be dead.

You notice (because you are alert to these things) that this formulation isn’t at all slogan-y – you couldn’t put it on the front of the book.

It tells you nothing at all about the plot. It doesn’t even say “this is a detective novel with murder at its heart” although you probably guess (correctly) that it is.

And it’s not vague. It doesn’t wave its hands in a mysterious way. It gives you two facts. Fiona is a murder detective. And she used to think she was dead.

I suppose it actually gives you one more fact – that her condition is a real thing from which real people suffer – but that’s really only to make it clear that this is at least a somewhat realist novel. It’s not fantasy. It’s not speculative.

Box 8

This box is very small and inlaid with a wondrous array of minutely carved woods.

It contains nothing except this observation:

“Harry’s elevator pitch doesn’t look like a marketing thing at all. It doesn’t have that gaudy, aspartamine-flavoured brightness. Maybe Harry is completely crap at marketing.”

I do as it happens agree with the first two parts of that observation and maybe even the third – except I wish to dispute the word “completely”.

Box 9

This box is rather large and lists slightly. We need a stepladder to open it up properly, but there is nothing inside but a waft of scent.

While breathing and enjoying that scent, we find ourselves thinking:

“What would it like to think you were dead? How can an alive person possibly think they are dead? And wouldn’t it be strange to be caught between life and death like that – and be a murder detective. I’d like to know more about that book.”

And aha!

And snap!

And all that Harry-is-rubbish-at-marketing tosh!

My elevator pitch has snapped itself shut over your leg and now you can’t get yourself free.

Box 10

In the webinar, I said that the elevator pitch was two things, two vital things:

1. It was a very short way to get someone to say, “Ooh, that sounds interesting, tell me more.”
2. It was the soul of your book and every page of your book had to vibrate with that inner soul.

Which were clearly interesting and powerful things to say, but no one actually knew what the second one meant.

Including possibly me.

Box 11

Inside this box is a tall and elegantly dressed woman. 

She fixes me with a glittering eye and stalks away, out of the room and out of my life.

When I look at the box more closely, I discover that the name and address on the packing label are not my own. I feel somewhat embarrassed. On a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is “very embarrassed indeed”, I’d be about a 6.

In the bottom of the box, discarded or forgotten, is a veil. It is very soft and has the pale grey of a pigeon’s underbelly.

Box 12

Twice, oh reader, have I been in an elevator TRAPPED right next to the Chief Executive of a really big publishing company.

I didn’t pitch my book.

I talked about the weather, or something dreary.

Maybe I really am crap at marketing.

Oh God. I mean: maybe I actually am.

Box 13

This is the one that roars.

I have telephoned London Zoo. I hope they will come and take it away.

There is a terrible scratching sound from within and the box does not look the strongest.

I regret everything about this box. I should not have brought it home.

Box 14

OK, so one of the people on the webinar – a wise and noble human named Jon – said this in a subsequent comment on Townhouse:

I’ve been thinking a lot about your description of the elevator pitch as encapsulating the ‘soul’ of the story.

The ‘soul’ of my book, I think, is Membra’s growing understanding that what she sees as her flaws and imperfections, and her adaptations to them, have contributed to the strong, resilient and ‘worthy’ person that she is and always has been, and that removing them - i.e. achieving ‘perfection’ - risks her becoming a different, and perhaps less self-actualised person. She understands that imperfection has value and that perfection is a chimera. It is this that enables her to make the final decision she makes at the climax of the book NOT to use the Perfection Engine to revert the universe to its perfect state - both from a selfish perspective (she doesn’t want to lose the person she is) and from a wider moral perspective. So she (to use my ‘slogan’) ‘saves the world from paradise’.

That internal journey is what I think the soul of the story is, and the primary candidate for the single focus of the pitch. It’s the ‘real’ story.

Now if you are actually still reading this email, you should sit bolt upright and mark the moment somehow – perhaps you want to bark or hurl a teacup.

Jon, mate, you are saying something important.

I think you are saying something true.

Box 15

Contains nothing but a forlorn tune.

There are no words to the tune, but the following words fit the melody in a hand-meet-handmade-kidskin-glove sort of way:

Maybe the soul of the book (in my Box 10 / Ooh-tell-me-more sense) is intimately connected with Jon’s more profound take on the subject.

Like maybe they’re the same thing, only in one case you’re just looking at the trunk and leaves and in the other case you get to see the roots as well.

Aha!

The tune lingers and is strangely pleasing.

Box 16

When you think about it, Adam Croft’s million-dollar shoutline (“Would you murder your wife to save your daughter?”) is everything in one:

• It is perfect copy for a Facebook ad. Like perfect copy. It was Facebook ads that propelled that book, and its author, to superstardom.
• It has the quality of intriguing specificity. You instantly want to know more about the story. It rings that Ooh-tell-me-more bell, ring a ding ding.
• It completely honours the book and vice versa. That shoutline echoes in every single page of the text.
• The shoutline itself is all wood and leaves, but you already have a sense of the roots. What happens when family ties are strained like that? What happens when that terrible moral choice is forced on what is already an uneasy marriage?

Boom! Maybe the marketing soul of your book is just the soul-soul of your book wearing gaudy clothing. Maybe the “Ooh tell me more” bit is just a pathway (for you and the reader) to the deeper stuff.

Box 17

Contains a skitter of anticipation.

I really want to know whether Linwood Barclay’s latest bestseller takes that 5 minute time travel superpower idea beyond the first chapter.

I need to finish the book. I’m going to have a lot to ask him.

Box 18

Contains the soul-soul of my detective book, the one with roots as well as leaves:

Fiona struggles to assemble her complicated and unwieldy parts into a functional human being. Because that process often fails for her, and because she has to work hard at it, we notice how much effort she has to make. And then we realise: we all face the same challenge and we face it every day. Fiona is us.

Somewhere outside in the garden, a silver bell rings.

That is the end of my boxes.

I am still worried about Box 13.

How about you? And what did you bring home of Phuket?

Are any of you missing a tall and elegantly dressed woman?

Hi folks, If you're a JW member and were on the elevator pitch webinar tonight, then feel free to ask any questions here. Or just chat. What was your favourite pitch? There were some good uns!

I'll dip in and out of this chat over the next day or two so keep an eye on it. NB - I'll post the replay link as soon as I have it

Hello JW members

As per my email - can I have your elevator pitches please for the webinar next week. Webinar info here:

https://members.jerichowriters.com/content/perfecting-your-elevator-pitch-with-harry-bingham/

(That link does work - I've just checked it - but you do need to be logged in to the JW site to see it.)

Rules for the elevator pitch:

• One submission per person please
• JW members only (sorry everyone else - but this is a members only event)
• Max 50 words per pitch
• But aim for less. Most pitches can be done in <20 words, and often <10

Hope to see loads of you at the webinar. I'm looking forward to it myself ...

Some writers, or so I’ve heard, do not love social media. They do not love and adore creating websites. They would rather boil their feet than spend hours on Twitter.

If you have ever checked out my Twitter account or Facebook author page, you will notice that I am like a Trappist monk when it comes to my use of those platforms. And – I survive: an Authorsaurus.

The fact is, there are a million different routes to building an author platform and they’re all kind of fine. Here are some of your options.

Do nothing – you’re still writing your book

If you are still at the stage of writing and editing your manuscript, then quite honestly you are doing the most important thing in the world for you right now. I mean, you should probably check that you are still married and that your children haven’t gone feral, but aside from those things, you should just let the manuscript swallow your thought and your energy. You don’t need to do anything else.

Do nothing – you just hate Twitter

OK. Let’s say you’ve got to the stage of getting an agent or even a book deal. But you just don’t like social media. You aren’t good at it. You don’t want to do it.

So fine. Don’t. If a traditional publisher loves your book, they’ll still buy it. They’ll structure their marketing campaign in a way that takes into account your preferences.

I would say that you should still create a website and build a mailing list. You can just pay someone to perform the first of those tasks if you want. The mailing list itself just involves writing a reader magnet (a free download for your newsletter subscribers), then writing emails. And you’re a writer, so you’re not allowed to dislike tasks that involve only writing, right?

If you’re trad published, it’s not obligatory to operate a mailing list, but I see a ton of authors who, after two or three books, realise they need one and start to construct one. Well: better late than never, but it’s a grievous waste to have let three book launches go unharvested. Knowing your readers is the greatest security you can have. Well, apart from being a global #1 bestseller, anyway. That’s good too.

Use social media as a private networking tool

I do not love or trust Facebook. If you look at my author page, you’ll see it hasn’t been updated in literally years. I simply never go on there or think about. But …

There is one private group I use very often. It’s a private group for a bunch of crime authors, some very high profile. We share stories, ask advice, have a moan, shout hooray, and tell incredibly filthy jokes. It’s been one of the real joys of my authoring career and an endless source of easy networking.

There will be networks of that kind that are there to support you. Finding them isn’t always easy – often you meet someone at a live event, who then passes you the online invitation – but they can be a real joy and a source of professional support. Fun and useful; the best combination you can get.

Use social media as a public networking tool

Networking doesn’t have to be done in private though. In every ecosystem within publishing (crime, YA, women’s fiction, whatever else), there’s a constant chatter among publicists, agents, booksellers, bloggers and other industry types.

If you like being part of that conversation (and I mostly don’t), then participate. The key here is simply enthusiastic, positively-tinted engagement with everything that’s going on. If your community is all lit up with the quality of a new debut, then read the debut, add your comments, share a cover image, and so on. Most of this chat is probably on Twitter, but you’ll easily enough locate it. Just follow the chat.

You don’t have to be too strategic in any of this. Or rather: the strategy IS the participation, the fellow-feeling. If you have a track record of that engagement, it is vastly more likely that the community will support your debut when it comes out.

Notice that this strategy doesn’t involve much direct interaction with your audience, though. You’re interacting mostly with the industry group that interacts with that audience. Going the logical next step 

Use social media as an audience interaction tool

If you are serious about self-publishing, you will almost certainly want to grow your own Facebook following. If you’re publishing traditionally, then it’s by no means obligatory – but it will certainly be helpful.

Either way the principle is the same. You have to talk relentlessly and only to your core audience. If you write sweet historical romance, then the theme of your author page should be gentle historical romance. Snippets you found during your research. Images that move you. Books you love in the same genre. And so on.

It’s easy to think that someone else has more likes / retweets / followers than you, so you should do more. The result of that thinking is that you start giving away prizes in exchange for likes. (“Like my page and get the chance to win enough biscuits to fill a swimming pool.”) The real problem with those gimmicks is that they work. You get a ton of likes. You deliver a lot of biscuits.

The problem is that your likes are phoney. They have polluted your audience. Your organic reach will drop to nothing. You basically have to delete your page and start again.

So, sure, if you want, if you want to be the most golden and least prehistoric of authors, run an active author’s page on Facebook. But stay true to your audience with every post and every engagement.

What about you? What do you do? What do you avoid? And have you ever filled a swimming pool with biscuits (or, hell, cookies if you must - but I'm British, so I say BISCUITS.)

Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits. 

I live in rural Oxfordshire and, every Thursday, people assemble round our little village green to clap for the NHS (the national health system in the UK). Just recently, we've been rounding that off with a sing-song ... with words doctored by me for the purpose. This week we're going to sing this:

Mine eyes have seen the coming of the virus of Wuhan.
It’s jumped from bats to pangolins, from pangolins to man.
It’s infected every country from our shores to far Japan,
     Yet it still goes marching on.

Oh Corona, do not touch me! Oh Corona, do not touch me!
Oh Corona, do not touch me! But it still goes marching on.

They said that they would give us the protection of the herd
But as people started dying, the idea just seemed absurd.
So now we have to lock our doors, like prisoners interred –
     And it still goes marching on.

     Oh Corona, do not touch me! Oh Corona, do not touch me!
     Oh Corona, do not touch me! And it still goes marching on.

They say we need a vaccine and they say we need some tests,
But the vaccine isn’t working and the tests are not the best.
And meantime, we’re just stuck here under perma house arrest,
     While it still goes marching on.

 Oh Corona, do not touch me! Oh Corona, do not touch me!
     Oh Corona, do not touch me! And it still goes marching on.

Oh, it’s shuttered every business and it’s closing every school.
And if you think it’s ending soon, then you’re a bloody fool.
But here on our old village green, we make this solemn rule:
      Oh, you may not march in here!

     Oh Corona, do not touch me! Oh Corona, do not touch me!
     Oh Corona, do not touch me! No you may not march in here.

That's us. But what about you? Your parodies and pastiches, please. With a word about the tune if it isn't bleeding obvious.  Over to y'all.

A day or two ago, I came across this quote from Virginia Woolf talking about Jane Austen: “of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.”

And that’s true, isn’t it?

Her plots were reasonably standard for her time. No innovations there. Her themes were comfortable and safe. There aren’t many quotable quotes. Her social situations are strictly limited. Her descriptive writing is almost completely absent.

She is, in many ways, one of the least adventurous writers you can find. Even her comedy is of the wry smile sort. No one has ever guffawed with laughter or found themselves snorting cornflakes out through their nose.

And yet –

She’s Jane Austen. She sits in the very top rank of British writers. Her reputation has just grown steadily since her death.

The heart of that invisible greatness?

Her precision.

Each character talks precisely like themselves, reacts precisely like themselves. Here’s a tiny moment from Mansfield Park. Fanny (the poor niece transplanted to the big house and prosperous family) has a ball thrown in her honour. Here is Fanny’s reflection:

She could hardly believe it. To be placed above so many elegant young women! The distinction was too great. It was treating her like her cousins! … The ball began. It was rather honour than happiness to Fanny, for the first dance at least: her partner was in excellent spirits, and tried to impart them to her; but she was a great deal too much frightened to have any enjoyment till she could suppose herself no longer looked at.

Here is her uncle’s attitude to the same moment:

Thomas himself was watching her progress down the dance with much complacency; he was proud of his niece; and without attributing all her personal beauty, as Mrs. Norris seemed to do, to her transplantation to Mansfield, he was pleased with himself for having supplied everything else: education and manners she owed to him.

And here is her aunt’s view:

“Yes, she does look very well,” was Lady Bertram's placid reply. “Chapman helped her to dress. I sent Chapman to her.” Not but that she was really pleased to have Fanny admired; but she was so much more struck with her own kindness in sending Chapman to her, that she could not get it out of her head.

There’s nothing so remarkable in the prose there. Yes, there’s a big of comedy in the last snippet, but nothing beyond what you could write yourself. And the characters aren’t so exotic either. You’ll find no huge act of the imagination at play here.

Yet there’s not a word awry. Jane Austen isn’t about huge. She’s all about tiny.

Take that last bit about Lady Bertram. Her reply is ‘placid’ – of course it is, because Lady Bertram has never been known to stir herself for anything. Her being ‘struck with her own kindness’ perfectly exposes the limits of her thoughts and imagination. And even that bit of dialogue is precisely right:

1. “She does look very well” – a positive comment about her niece.
2. “Chapman helped her to dress” – a thought about how come she looks so nice
3. “I sent Chapman to her.” – ah! In three short sentences, Lady Bertram has reverted to her own favourite subject: herself.

The childish simplicity of that 1-2-3 movement, and the sentences that carry the thoughts, give you an almost holographic insight into the good Lady B. It’s as though you could unfold that tiny bit of text to give you a complete insight into Lady Bertram’s every thought and feeling.

The moral for us, as workaday non-genius writers?

That genius doesn’t always look like genius. That paying careful, repetitive attention to the tiny details may not build some big fat obvious mountain of greatness – but it builds greatness all the same.

And of course, you don’t have to jump back to Georgian England to find writers like that. Anne Tyler has the same gift. So does Elizabeth Strout. So does Elena Ferrante.

And yes: I notice that I’ve just name-checked four writers in this email, all of them female. I do think, as it happens, that this virtue of precision is most often exhibited by women, but there are male writers (eg: Colm Toibin) who show you that the possession of a Y-chromosome doesn’t have to be crippling.

That’s it from me, so it’s back to that locked-down grindstone, folks. Test every sentence, every word, for its ring-true-ishness, because those tiny disciplines can unlock vast pools of emotional power. And once you get into the precision game, you’ll find it absorbing, compelling and deeply rewarding – just how writing ought to be.

Keep writing. Keep editing. Keep smiling. And stay safe.

Hate Jane Austen? Adore her? Writing galaxy-destroying military sci-fi in the spirit of Jane Austen? Let me know what you're thinking and let's all have a Heated Debate.