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Over the past couple of months, we’ve released two books: GETTING PUBLISHED and 52 LETTERS. Reader response to those books has been lovelier than a basket of white roses brought to you by a unicorn.

This week, we’ve released the third book in that trilogy. It’s called HOW TO WRITE, and it’s about – duh! – how to conceive, plan, write and edit your novel.

It’s a massively practical book. With lots of “how to” and “how very damn not to” examples taken from a huge variety of actual bestselling books. If the book doesn’t help you write better, I promise to eat my own leg in penance.

Now, as a way to celebrate the completion of the trilogy, and as a way to wave goodbye to the Summer Festival, for just a few days only, we’re making all the books as cheap as we can:

HOW TO WRITE

Ebook $0.99 / Print $10.99 / Kindle Unlimited $0.00

My best attempt to set down everything I know about conceiving, planning, writing and editing a novel. 

“I must have read 50 books on writing, style, editing etc, but I found Bingham's book in a way the most useful of all.”—Reader Review

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GETTING PUBLISHED

Ebook $0.99 / Print $9.99 / Kindle Unlimited $0.00

Your one-stop bible for everything to do with getting an agent, getting a book deal – and getting published well.

“Truly, the best book I've read on publishing. The truth and nothing but the truth no matter how hard hitting. It will save you much heartbreak.”—Reader Review

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52 LETTERS

Ebook $0.99 / Print $8.99 / Kindle Unlimited $0.00

A compilation of my Friday emails – mad, discursive, practical, and enthused.

“Not since Stephen King’s On Writing have I so valued a writer’s writing on writing! These aren’t just 52 Letters—they’re 52 love letters.”—John David Mann

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All prices ping back to full price on Sunday, so grab your bargains while you can. And just think. For just three crinkly little dollars you could give your writing library a fancy new lease of life. Be crazy not to, huh?

Next week, I’ll have some data on this promo. What worked and what didn’t. It’s the first time we’ll have used Facebook ads at scale for a book promotion, so we’ll let you know how those went. As ever, we’ll be ruthlessly honest about our experience, so you can start to get a feel for exactly how online publishing works.

As you know, I’m an author first and a Jericho Writers person second – and author-me would really love it if you went out and bought one or more of those books. I raise my hat to you, and will name my next child after you to boot.

For some reason – probably that we all love words – last week’s email generated the biggest response I’ve had for a while. A lot of you have a quite prodigious vocabulary and I raise my hat to you all. Or rather: I raise my hat, my cap, my boater, my beret, my trilby, my cloche, my helmet, my tricorn, my deerstalker, my pillbox and my elegantly laced yet somehow menacing fascinator.

All your responses were interesting – they always are – but one really hit home. Someone tipped me off about a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert. (The link’s in the PSes, if you’re interested.)

The gist of her talk was this:

Writers get frightened of being writers.

We’ll get too much success! The success will eat us. We’ll never be able to perform under commercial pressure. I couldn’t work with an agent, an editor, a publicist, a host of foreign publishers.

We’ll get too much failure! We can’t do our best work thinking about those rejection letters, thinking about those bozo Amazon one-star reviews. We can’t create with joy and spontaneity when we have to tangle with the complicated limbs of the publishing industry.

Or some other reasons. Or some set of mutually contradictory reasons.

It doesn’t matter what, really. The point is: writers get frightened of being writers.

This is, as Gilbert points out, a panic largely confined to the creative arts. Her dad was a chemical engineer, who never got frightened of chemical engineering. My father was a lawyer and a judge, who never got frightened of being a lawyer and a judge. I seriously if most plumbers doubt they can do their best bathroom-installation work under the pressure of a client wanting a new bathroom.

So what’s going on? And how to combat the panic?

Her take is interesting and, I think, has real merit.

Back before the Enlightenment and, especially, before the Romantics, we didn’t think of people being geniuses, but having geniuses. Creativity and inspiration dwelled somewhere outside – as a Muse, perhaps, an actual spirit. In Latin, genius loci, the spirit of a place, was something that dwelled at a given site, the divine spirit given specific form and nature.

The human’s work was therefore not to be the genius, but to listen to the genius. To catch the music and set it down.

That sounds a little spacey if you put it as bluntly as that. And yet – you will all know what it feels like to be in true creative flow. The words just come. The vision. The characters. The dialogue. To be sure, it doesn’t come down perfectly: you still need to edit the damn thing. You still need to use your brain and craft to shape the material. But it feels like the origin of all that good stuff lies outside you – or, at the very least, way outside your conscious ownership or control.

Contrast that experience with the post-Romantic concept of genius: It’s us! We’re special! We’re brilliant! We wear floppy clothes and drink laudanum!

There’s a me-me-me quality here, which gets all the benefits of genius (aren’t I wonderful, darling?) but all of the costs as well (what if the damn work doesn’t come? What if it’s no bloody good?)

Now I don’t really want to argue about the ontology here. (Ontology = the study of what exists.) So is there really an external genius? Or a part of our subconscious? Or just a free-flowing form of imagination we can access in the right mental state only? I don’t really care.

What Elizabeth Gilbert suggests we do is just separate the things. You showing up for work: that’s the part you’re in charge of. The creative genius may choose to turn up that day, or may not. You know damn well that if you don’t come, the creative genius can’t.

But you can’t control that part. You never could, never did. Your job is to show up for work and apply yourself.

Just make sure to leave the window open a little, and maybe have a little dish of rose petals somewhere on the desk beside you. Geniuses love hard-workers – and who doesn’t love a rose petal? If you want to say a prayer - and that Liz Gilbert, she loves a prayer - then say a prayer. Invite the genius. Or swear at it. Or just communicate. You might just get blessed, once again, by that golden hand, that silver tongue.

Go well my friends. Bite into those PSes. They’re chewy this week, but with a soft caramel centre.

One of the simplest insights in writing is that words matter.

That sounds so perilously obvious that I ought to scurry away from it and come up with something a little more rewarding. Maybe a list of 100 Fancy Words that everyone ought to use more.

Inimical
Crepuscular
Ullulate
Chiasmus
Arboreal
Sussuration
Ductile
Canticle
Colostomy

But – y’know – that kind of approach to writing mostly leads to unreadable rubbish. I’ve published over two million words in my career. I’ve probably used the word inimical from that list. Maybe ductile. Certainly canticle. I seriously doubt if I’ve used the others without a kind of ‘Oooh, look at me’ glitter in my eye when I did.

The fact is that the vocabulary that you have – that you are genuinely master of – is almost certainly sufficient. You just have to use the right damn word.

What’s more, the vocabulary you already have is a place of treasure. It is richer and brighter and with more movement and dazzle than you realise. But you probably aren’t using it. You are, quite likely, drawing from the easy first five thousand words, the ones you use all the time, every day, week in, week out. But native English-speakers typically have a comfortable range of 20-35,000 words. Those aren’t words you use all the time, yet they’re words that you can deploy perfectly easily when the need arises. (See the PSes for a brilliant website where you can test your vocab.)

Here’s what I mean:

How often in a year do I use the word cockle? Answer, very seldom. But when my older girl came home with a cockle shell she’d found somewhere, I knew what to call it. When my older boy was recently diagnosed with possible appendicitis, I knew perfectly well what the doctor meant, even though I might not have used the word once in the five years beforehand.

So you have a broad vocabulary of words you understand perfectly well. But do you use them, my friend? That’s the whole soul and purpose of this email. Do you use the words you have?

Right now, you can do this for me. And I mean RIGHT NOW THIS MINUTE, YOU LAZY DONKEY.

Open up your current manuscript and bring up a random page. Not one with too much dialogue, but apart from that, any page you like.

And ask yourself: are the words you use interesting or boring?

Specifically, do your words feel like they’re all drawn from the Dull Five Thousand? Or the glittering parades that beyond those plodding, quotidian footsoldiers?

So here’s a sentence made up of the Dull Five Thousand:

A bird had somehow got into the room and, unable to find a way out, flapped feebly at the windows.

Here’s a sentence that draws richly from the glittering parades:

There was the ballroom, gleaming and empty, where once – in the chill of late autumn – Alma had encountered a trapped hummingbird, which had shot past her ear in the most remarkable trajectory (a jewelled missile, it seemed, fired from a tiny cannon.)

This second sentence (from Elizabeth Gilbert’s brilliant The Signature of All Things) doesn’t use any fancy vocab in the sussuration sense of fancy. But – ballroom, encountered, hummingbird, trajectory, jewelled, missile, cannon – it draws happily and broadly and precisely from our thirty-thousand word storeroom and creates treasure on the page.

And you can do the same. You know the word cannon. And ballroom. And trajectory. And jewelled. Those words aren’t even hard or obscure. They don’t live at the outer reaches of your vocabulary. They are yours to use.

If you look at your manuscript and find your language feels a little dull, then pay close attention to the nouns especially. The dumb way to enrich your work is to take a boring sentence and shove it full of la-di-da adjectives, with one or two ridiculous verbs thrown in for good measure:

A pulchritudinous bird had somehow inveigled its way into the grandiloquent room and, unable to find a manner of egress, flapped disconsolately at the unfortunately glazed windows.

If you anchor your sentence with some excellent nouns (ballroom, autumn, hummingbird, trajectory, missile, cannon), the rest of the sentence kind of falls into place. You can use adjectives from the Solid Five Thousand (empty, late, tiny) and the sentence does fine. You can throw in some slightly more splendiferous items too (gleaming, trapped, jewelled) and the sentence remains beautifully balanced.

Pay attention to the nouns first. The rest is easy.

That’s it from me. Go and burrow in the PSes, though. There lie riches

OK. More dialogue today.

Three little bits of housekeeping first.

Number One. The Summer Festival was such a massive hit, we’ve decided to bring that vibe into our JW membership package – lots of regular, live material, from a whole range of different, brilliant speakers. You can see our autumn line-up here. We’ll be making big plans for next year as well. There’s no extra cost for any of this – it’s all free within your membership. Hooray.

Number Two. We’ve always been keen to help people where we can and, to celebrate the end of the Summer Festival, we’re going to give 10 under-represented writers free memberships for a year. More about how to enter at the end.

Number Three. We got into a fight with Jeff Bezos last week – and lost. Your email this week comes on a Friday. Next week, it might be either Thursday or Friday, and it will sizzle with good things.

Right. Nuff of that.

Dialogue.

I was going to offer up a couple more snippets with comments this week, but I picked one to start with, and that one ran away with me.

So just one snippet this week. Take a look at how contrary, how twisty this one three-hundred word chunk is. Look at how silence can operate in the same was as actual dialogue. How silence can push back at the reader, at the listener. And how the real thing being revealed by dialogue isn’t so much the content of what’s being talked about as the emotional reactions of the speakers to that content.

Here goes:

REBECCA / NO TITLE

Ida has recently lost her hand and had a vicious go at her best friend as a result of which she has locked herself away in her room. She set her maid outside her door to stop people from entering but her lover, who is also a military General, has come to see her.

The door clicked shut and a momentary silence fell over the room. Why was he here?

"If you've come to lecture me then you are too late," she said. "I've already had enough lectures for the day."

It wasn't true. She hadn't had any. Agatha had come yesterday and given her an earful. She had told her 'This is not how a young woman behaves…', and 'You should know better than to be so vulgar in public…', that she had '…been raised to be more tactful'. They were nothing new, but coming from the woman who was more of a surrogate grandmother made them sting just as much as if Agatha had taken Ida over her knee and smacked her.

"That is not the reason I came," he said. "Though all I will say on the matter is while Vastian was clearly not thinking when he opened his mouth, your outburst was inappropriate."

Her fingernails dug deeper into the wood of the chair.

"No, the reason I came is to tell you, in case you didn't know, he's gone."

There was a tightening in her chest. She did know. Aidric did not need to elaborate. She had woken early that morning and gone to her balcony for air. From there she saw Vass leave on his horse, its saddle bags heavily laden.

"I know," she said.

"He'll be back."

"I doubt it."

Vass had only done what any sensible person would do if their friend had treated them in such a way.

"Of course he'll come back. Friendships don't end because of one argument."

No, she guessed they didn't. Still this felt more final, worse than an argument.

My comments

The reason I picked this is because it’s a really nice example of how fluid and mobile and surprising even quite a short piece of dialogue-led text can be. It’s also a good example of how silences can register as effectively as sentences.

Take the silences first. 

When Aidric enters the room, he says nothing. The question looms, “Why was he here?”. That’s a question for the character, of course, but it becomes one for the reader too. The silence is a little marker of the question’s importance. It’s like there’s something too holy, too important, about the question for it simply to be asked out loud.

And, crucially, if you set up a question like that, you have to not answer it – or not answer it quickly.

So instead, the speaker turns her back on the question. Instead of saying, “Why are you here?”, she starts telling him about lectures.

Then, the passage that follows turns its back on the character’s own statements. (“It wasn’t true. She hadn’t had any.”) Then proceeds to give a true statement of events.

So we start with a legitimate question about her lover’s presence. Then the character bats that question away with what she says. Then the text bats what the character says away, and takes us off into a little surrogate grandmother moment. (That grandmother moment has one bad sentence, by the way. The sentence starting ‘They were nothing new …’ is a bit of a mess grammatically. That happens weirdly often when a sentence gets over a certain length – this one is 34 words. The trick, of course, is editing with care and paying extra attention when a sentence starts to feel unwieldy.)

But, OK, we’re now one hundred words into the snippet. The original question is still hanging, of course, but it’s got more urgency and interest than if we hadn’t – twice – turned away from it. Its charge has been increased, not reduced, by the delay.

That’s nice.

But then the military man drags the question back into the room – but still backwards. (“That’s not the reason I came. Though all I will say on the matter…”)

So now we – the character and the reader together – know the real reason is about to emerge.

Time for another silence. You need to approach these big moments slowly.

As it happens, I don’t like the “fingernails dug deeper” bit. To me, those sentences feel like authorial shorthand, a type of cliché. (“Oh, shucks. I’ve got a moment of unbearable tension coming up. How do I signify that quickly? Oh yes. Fingernails digging into something. That’ll do. Bish bosh, OK, what next?”)

All the same, I like the silence. We just need any little trench between Aidric’s first comment (“That’s not the reason I came”) and the comment that follows. We just need a way to extend the reader’s suffering.

Lovely. And even better – that comment, “She did know.” This whole passage has played a kind of double game with us. The passage presents as though something of great significance is about to be revealed. Only – ta-daa! – it turns out that the protagonist is already well aware of it. And presumably was well able to guess what Aidric was about to tell her.

Now all this might seem like a damn stupid way to convey information, except that the passage isn’t really there to convey information about the departed Vass at all.

I mean, yes, the reader needs to know that Vass has left. And it does the job, right at the end, by saying, “she saw Vass leave on his horse”, nice and clear and simple.

But really, that piece of information is secondary to the question of how does Ida feel about it? And that question doesn’t have a nice, simple, tidy answer. Ida is in a muddle and so is the text. She evades the question, she lies, she goes silent, she delivers information well after it was logically time to release it. And that’s how Ida feels.

And that’s what dialogue does. It doesn’t just tell readers how Ida feels, it shows them. And the twisty, resistant, contradictory untruthfulness of the dialogue is reflective of a complicated mess of feelings in Ida. There’s no way you could tease those feelings out any other way.

Dialogue? I love it. It’s probably my favourite-favourite thing to write and I have a lot of favourites. That’s all from me.

I’m going to saddle up my horse and ride away from this castle. I’m pretty sure there’s a ghost in the Great Hall and its battlements smell of raven poo. Giddy-up.

Let me know what you think about all this, folks. And again, if you're a JW member, do remember our fab, free line up of autumn events here. It includes me juggling eels live online, so - what can I say? - it's gonna be good. And if you are keen to grab one of our bursaries, then:

• To enter, simply email us at info@jerichowriters.com
• Use the subject line ‘MEMBERSHIP BURSARY ENTRY’
• Do this by 24 September
• Tell us, in fifty words, why you want to join Jericho Writers as an under-represented writer. 

That's it. Toodle-pip!

OK, youse.

It’s Dialogue Day – based on your submissions to Townhouse. I realise, already, that I’m going to have to write a little dialogue mini-series based on the submissions I’ve received, so we’ll be on dialogue next week for sure, and quite likely the week after too. So if your submission isn’t picked this week, I may be able to pick it up later.

Oh yes, and no housekeeping to announce this week except that some of you will get next week’s Friday email on a Thursday. Which will be like opening your Christmas presents in November, but there it is. It’s a strange world.

Right. Dialogue. Here goes …

JJ Barrett / Triangle of Time
Stefan is reliving the same life over and over again and must convince PJ of that fact…

A quizzical expression appeared on his face as he refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. ‘That was quite accurate, up to half-way.’

‘We’ll discuss that shortly. You know the game Paper, Scissors, Rock?’ 

PJ nodded. ‘An open hand is paper, two extended fingers are scissors, a fist is a rock. Scissors cuts paper and wins, paper wraps rock and wins, rock smashes scissors and wins. Why?’

Stefan held out his right hand. PJ mirrored his action. 

‘On the count of three,’ Stefan said.

Their eyes were locked together. From afar it would have appeared as if the pair were about to fight, such was the intensity in their faces.

Stefan counted slowly, his half open hand rising and falling in time with the count. PJ followed like a shadow. ‘One… Two… Three.’

Stefan didn’t need to look. He knew they both selected scissors. 

‘Again,’ he said. ‘One… Two… Three.’ This time both Rock.

‘One… Two… Three.’ Scissors again.

‘One… Two… Three.’ Scissors for a third time.

Two more attempts and both times PJ and Stefan selected Scissors.

PJ was looking extremely uncomfortable by now.

‘Last one PJ. One… Two… Three.’ This time they both chose paper.

My comments:

This is slicker than it might first appear. The dialogue itself looks fairly ordinary – there are quite a lot of ‘one, two, three’s, for example – but dialogue is actually made up of multiple elements, not just the actual speech. That medley of ingredients includes:

• Speech itself
• Speech markers (he said, she answered, and so on.)
• Observations of emotional reaction
• Snippets of action
• Physical description

Here, the writer – JJB, I’ll call him or her – has thrown these things together with great deftness and terrific economy. Here’s the passage again, with my comments.

A quizzical expression appeared on his face [very succinct way to note a feeling. I don’t like “expression appeared on his face”, mind you, because I don’t know where else an expression could appear] as he refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. ‘That was quite accurate, up to half-way.’

[Little dab of intrigue. Why quite accurate? Why half-way? The reader’s interested.]

‘We’ll discuss that shortly. You know the game Paper, Scissors, Rock?’

[Brilliant refusal to engage. There’s an interesting question hanging – and the speaker immediately moves away from it. That hanging question therefore gives us a reason to read on. It also feels like a very peculiar subject to move on to – which is also intriguing.]

PJ nodded. ‘An open hand is paper, two extended fingers are scissors, a fist is a rock. Scissors cuts paper and wins, paper wraps rock and wins, rock smashes scissors and wins. Why?’

[Here, I think the writer is concerned that the reader doesn’t know what Paper/Scissors/Rock is, and gives a brilliantly compact explanation – try explaining the game in fewer words than that. It’s as though the reader knows the explanation is basically necessary-but-boring, so is trying to move on as quickly as possible. I’d have the same worry as JJB, but I’d probably reckon that enough readers knew the game that I didn’t have to worry. But this feels like a way to engage with the issue, no matter what.]

Stefan held out his right hand. PJ mirrored his action. 

‘On the count of three,’ Stefan said.

[Again, very compact. The author wants to move us into the action and the game as fast as possible …]

Their eyes were locked together. From afar it would have appeared as if the pair were about to fight, such was the intensity in their faces.

[And of course the emotion! I’ve written elsewhere about how one of the easiest tricks in fiction is just making your characters really care about whatever it is you want the reader to care about. In my case, that means getting my detective character to really, really love murder investigations. Here, we, the reader, are really going to care about what happens in the game, because the players obviously do – they look like they’re about to fight, for heaven’s sake! The fact that that emotion is suppressed and silent is actually more powerful. It makes the bland ‘one, two, three’s that follow all the more powerful. And the way the author (unshowily) moves in and out of dialogue, transitioning easily between dialogue / emotion / physical action, is all very deft.]

Stefan counted slowly, his half open hand rising and falling in time with the count. PJ followed like a shadow. ‘One… Two… Three.’

["Followed like a shadow" is good. It echoes the ‘eyes were locked together’ in the previous para. In some metaphorical way the two young men have been joined here – and the reader is joined in with them too. We’re bound in to whatever happens here.]

Stefan didn’t need to look. He knew they both selected scissors. 

[More good stuff – unshowy, but good. The obvious thing would be to have shown them both choosing scissors. But that’s not the interesting thing here. The interesting thing is that Stefan knew they would choose scissors, so that’s where the author focuses our attention.]

‘Again,’ he said. ‘One… Two… Three.’ This time both Rock.

[So simple. But so compact. The utter economy of description is impressive. I’m an economical author too, and I love this!]

‘One… Two… Three.’ Scissors again.

‘One… Two… Three.’ Scissors for a third time.

[Double ditto.]

Two more attempts and both times PJ and Stefan selected Scissors.

PJ was looking extremely uncomfortable by now.

[Marker of an emotional change that has happened through the course of this oddly static action. Nice.]

‘Last one PJ. One… Two… Three.’ This time they both chose paper.

Verdict:

The dialogue itself is almost painfully simple but the movement between the different elements of the scene gives that dialogue real weight and hypnotic force. That force is made greater by all those little touches – the two men as mirrors of each other, their intensity, the little dab of intrigue at the start, the way that intrigue is swiftly discarded. None of those things amounts to much on its own but, cumulatively, this reads to me like proper professional text. There are plenty of published novels that aren’t as well-handled as this.

Karen Hough / no title
Cate is 29 and deciding to be more responsible. Here she is with her financial advisor.

He pulled up the Canadian Tire website and pointed out two coffee makers. One brewed coffee, one had all the bells and whistles and ground the beans, made cappuccinos and americanos and other frothy things. It was $800.

[Minor points, but you’re contrasting two machines there and only giving the price for one. I think we need both. And an americano isn’t frothy. You need to use a different coffee-type there, or change ‘frothy’. But it’s basically a nice clean opening to the scene.]

“That’s crazy. I can’t afford that,” I said. 

He pulled up a calculator. “Your $3 latte—” his eyes flicked to mine. I made a “higher” motion with my thumb. I tend to get a large. “We’ll stick with a small for our purposes,” he continued. “Add in two new travel mugs, a bag of beans every month, and some fancy syrup—”

“And whipping cream,” I added helpfully. Another reason that I work out a lot.

“…and whipping cream, and a dusting of cinnamon and chocolate shavings.” He was obviously the sort of man that took his coffee black and looked down on the rest of us. “And you will still have paid the whole thing off in less than a year.”

“So you’re telling me to buy it?” I asked.

“I’m telling you that you are spending more than $1000 a year on coffee. If you’re getting a large—”

“Grande,” I corrected him.

He looked pained. “If you’re getting a large cappuccino every day, you are spending upwards of $1500.”

My comments:

Again, this is mostly neat and slick. I like the way the scene neatly avoids dialogue in places where that dialogue would just be dull. So, he “pointed out two coffee makers”. Presumably, he did that by saying something, but actually noting what he said would have been dull, so Karen just reports, compactly, that he pointed them out. That keeps focus on what the reader will be interested in, and avoids the dull stuff.

Nowhere does it say that if you write a page of dialogue, you have to report every word that’s said. Really smart authors often jump from direct speech (the stuff in inverted commas) to reported speech (eg, “he pointed out …”). That way you get the live, mobile feel of dialogue with all the boring bits trimmed.

On the same theme, I like the way the conversation flits from oral (“Your $3 latte”) – to eyes flicking – to a movement of the thumb – to an observation from the first-person narrator about herself – and back to speech again. That’s so swift – it’s just two lines – but it accomplishes so much. The bit of self-observation, in this context, isn’t quite a joke but it’s a flicker of self-awareness that feels close to humour. It’s definitely part of what gives this dialogue a mobile, unpredictable surface.

And then the conversation slides apparently sideways into a conversation about chocolate shavings and the narrator’s comment about working out … before ramming back to what appears to be a purely financial conversation … except then she corrects his ‘large’ to ‘grande’ and his eyes rebuke her for the pretension.

Yes, all this is a conversation about finance, but it’s also a conversation about personalities and values. It’s a conversation about her. The iron rod of “you spend too much on coffee” is just a line from which any number of other curlicues and detours can be drawn.

It’s a very good example of the mobility of good dialogue – the way you don’t quite know what’s going to happen next. And also the way it forces the reader to pay close attention. This is real show-don’t-tell stuff. You’re forcing the reader to pay close attention to the emotional movements of the  scene, because you’re not telling the reader what’s happening, you’re making them figure it out for themselves.

Another passage that feels very proficient, really confident. Again, this feels like publication standard material. Bravo.

***

That’s it from me. More on dialogue next week. Sorry I couldn’t fit in more passages this week, but in my defence this email is 2000 words long already.

Go well, my friends. I’m off to buy a $2,000 coffee machine. I shall pay for it with a selection of hand-curled commas and a few unneeded exclamation marks.

If you want to add your dialogue snippet for review, just add it to the original thread on Townhouse here. Do just remember that by uploading your snippet, you may get your work seen by tens of thousands of people and, ultimately, it might appear in a book-form collection of these emails. There'll probably be a TV show and a parade as well. So: don't put your head above the parapet, unless you want it there. More on all this next week.