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The things writers do, right?

A couple of days ago, a bunch of Jericho members and I got together to co-edit some text. The text came from the members themselves. We had dozens of submissions, but we had time for just five or six chunks of text, each of about 250 words.

And then – we edited. Live online. I shared my screen, so people could see me editing the text and hear my thoughts as I did so. Meantime, everyone commented on what I was doing – or what they thought I should be doing – via the live chat.

The webinar was a proper experiment, one that could easily have gone either way. After all, live editing a Word document for an hour and a bit wouldn’t strike most people as a brilliant way to spend an evening. But writers aren’t most people. And (in my view at least) the thing was a real success.

The best part? It felt utterly authentic. I deliberately hadn’t prepared my edits or my comments in advance, so I came to the text very much as I would do with my own work:

Hmm. What do we have here? What’s working? Yes, that bit’s OK, but this strikes me as wrong. How can I fix that? Well, let me see. Here’s an easy, obvious edit. But something extra needs to go here. Don’t know what yet. I’ll put something in square brackets and move on …

If nothing else, I hope it shows that what looks like a fairly slipshod, make-it-up-as-you-go-along process can end up delivering polished, professional text. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, it can even deliver a little bit of magic too.

Now there’s probably a lot else to talk about (and I’d love feedback from anyone who attended), but I did want to pick up one point, because it’s one I often come across in manuscripts by newer writers.

The point is this. Short, sweet and simple.

When you’re starting a book, your very first task is to get readers to board the damn train.

Getting them onto your train is the single hardest thing you do as a writer. When the reader has even a scrap of investment in your character, even a morsel of interest in your story, their default inclination is to read on. You actually need to do something horrible to stop them. (Like being boring. Or writing terrible prose.)

But when the reader is on chapter one, page one, paragraph one, they have no specific impulse prompting them to read on. At this stage, they liked your cover, they maybe heard something from a friend or a blogger, but nothing else. No attachment to character, no germ of story.

And in fact, the situation is worse than I’ve just made it sound.

To make any progress with your story, your reader has to do some serious work.

They have to understand who your character is. What her world is. What her relationships are. What her situation is. They have to start piecing together a huge amount of information from the fragmentary information that you offer.

For sure, that chore never entirely goes away. New characters arrive, new emotions swirl, there’s always new information to digest. But that labour starts from a much different base. Sure, we may not know everything about the Luke Skywalker / Darth Vader relationship, but we know plenty about the basic world they inhabit. We can add new information to a generous existing stock.

Not so at the start. The start of your book is the most perilous moment. The read-on incentives are at their scantiest. The work you are demanding is at its peak.

So: you have to get the reader on board your story-train. That’s the first thing. The first and most important.

So don’t overload them. Don’t:

• Start one paragraph in 2020 then leap back ten years in paragraph 2
• Start one paragraph with Character A, then immediately start telling us about character B
• Have a quick sequence of short chapters with each one starting with a new character and a new place. (There might be some counter-examples here, but be careful.)
• Introduce too many characters too fast
• Tell us about place A in one section and, almost immediately, tell us about place B
• Throw too much new-world information at a reader too quickly. So if you are writing a book set on a different world, then use one settled not-too-weird situation to start out in. Same thing applies if you are writing about our world, but an unfamiliar corner of it (say, 1890s Manhattan). You need to start with some simple vignette that gives place and time and situation, then start expanding from there.
• Introduce more than one big mystery. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, the opening scene is atmospheric all right, but not too weird … or at least, not until you get to the line ‘The king was pregnant.’ And boom! Le Guin has unwrapped her Great Big Mystery. Most of the rest of her world-building could simply wait.

And really, all these exhortations amount to just one:

Be gentle with the reader. Don’t encumber them with too much baggage while they are still boarding your train. One light satchel and a sandwich containing some sustainably caught fish. That’s plenty for the start of the journey.

Once the reader is on the train and rattling comfortably towards their story-destination, you can get as baroque and as over-the-top as you like. Throw that sustainably caught fish and serve them a banquet featuring smoked oysters in aspic. Tip that satchel out of the window and bring in a set of matching leather valises along with a couple of smartly dressed footpeople.

But not yet. Not while your reader is still boarding the train.

Be gentle. Get them on board. Then gather speed.

So. My original plan was a logical one. Next week, I’m going to be doing a live webinar with JW members, in which I’m going to edit members’ work live on screen, talking about my thought process as I do so. The hope is that we all learn something about the working process, and the thinking process, behind that self-editing task.

OK. That seems like a nice sensible idea for a webinar. And my equally sensible idea for this email was that I’d talk about about that self-editing task (one I love) as a way of geeing you up for the webinar.

And –

Well, we’ve got to Friday, and I don’t feel like talking about self-editing. I want to talk about goats. So goats it is.

(And, by the way, before you commit any more of your ONE AND ONLY LIFE ON EARTH to reading this stuff, I should tell you, hand on heart, that you will learn absolutely nothing of practical value here. Despite the subject line of this post, I am not even going to tell you how to fold a goat.)

Right-ho.

Now, for a long time, up to the birth of Christ and for the next century or so afterwards, the ancient world had plenty of written texts, but the longer, more complex ones were all written on scrolls. The scrolls were mostly papyrus, a paper-like sheet made from the pith of the eponymous plant.

Scrolls were great. Writing was easy. Reading was fine. The things were easily stored and transported. You didn’t have to carve stone or store wax tablets.

But, they were also a pain. The damn things didn’t lie flat. There was no easy way to navigate within the text. Storage was wasteful, because of all that empty space in the middle.

By about the first century AD, a new technology arrived: the codex, where the written sheets were laid flat, one on top of the other, and sewn along one side. Every page lay flat. Navigation was easy. Storage was a doddle. (Except, oddly to us, the spine of the codex was generally stored in, facing the wall, a fact that presumably enraged all professional authors of the age.)

The codex was such an improvement that, in the Western world at least, the scroll was pretty much dead within a mere four centuries – a pace of adoption which counts as shockingly fast by ancient-tech standards.

At the same time, papyrus too went out of fashion. It didn’t fold well and cracked easily. So, over the first few centuries of the Christian era, the papyrus scroll was replaced by the parchment codex.

And ‘parchment’ might sound like a term that denotes any kind of old manuscript, but it doesn’t. A parchment is made from a sheepskin, stretched out, scraped down, cleaned and dried. It was then rubbed down with pumice stone for a perfectly smooth finish. Then given a light dusting of powdered chalk.

The very first parchments were as clumsy and thick as you might imagine them to be. By the later middle ages, parchment achieved a kind of tissue-like thinness. And if you didn’t have a sheep, then you could use a goat, or a calf, or a lamb, or a kid. If you split the skin into two layers (as you did with sheep), you called the resultant product a parchment. If you didn’t split the skin into layers (as often with goats), the result was a vellum. 

But what next?

Let’s say you have a pile of goatskin vellum and you want to assemble it into your witty chick lit masterpiece, you have a range of choices.

You could simply take cut the largest rectangles you can out of your goatskin, pile em up, sew one edge, and bingo – you would have an extremely giant and goaty book.

But all the convenience of the codex would be largely lost. How would you manouevre such a thing? Except for impressing people, or display purposes, you wouldn’t really want something of such bulk.

So the goatskins were folded and sewn, and any remaining folded edges cut, so you could read them.

An once-folded goat made a giant book – a folio.

A twice-folded goat made a handsome, but smaller book – a quarto.

A thrice-folded goat made an octavo.

You could go on folding your goat, if you were patient enough, to form a duodecimo or a sextodecimo.

Because goats varied in size (and ditto sheep, kids, lambs and calves), these terms didn’t really denote a specific size. A goat-kid quarto might not look so different from a calf-skin octavo.

But still. As paper came to push aside parchments, printers still used the same terminology to describe their products, which were still made by the same process of folding, sewing and cutting.

The standard US definition of a medium octavo book gives you a book of six-and-a-half by nine-and-a-quarter inches, or about 17 cm by 23 cm. The most common format, the mass market paperback, is the duodecimo, or about 13 cm by 19 cm. The standard “B-format” paperback in the UK is roughly the same size.

And, one day in California, a man named Jobs decided it would be fun to make an electronic device that could store and display writing and images. But what size to make it? There was no particular boundary on what could have been made. A square screen? A very long one? A very giant one? Or what?

Well, the natural device to think about was the codex, a technology honed over two millennia and beautifully shaped for the human hand.

The 10.5” iPad has a screen size of about 13 cm by a handsome 23 cm – which is, near enough, the modern duodecimo format.

And that, my friends, is what I wanted to tell you today. Fold a goat – get an iPad.

I just thought you needed to know.

My missus is half-German and speaks to our kids mostly in German. Recently, she’s been reading to them from Cornelia Funke’s Hinter Verzauberten Fenstern – literally, Behind Enchanted Windows, a book about entering magical worlds through the windows of an Advent calendar.

The kids absolutely love the book. It’s probably beaten Roald Dahl in the race to favourite-ever story.

Part of what they love is precisely that portal fantasy element – entering a magical world from this one. That portal element is so central to kids’ enjoyment that you can think of a load of books which place that portal front and centre: Through the Looking Glass, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Tom’s Midnight Garden, for example. Even where the portal isn’t there in the title, it’s still often one of the central emblems in the book. Just think how important Platform 9 ½ is to the symbolism of Harry Potter: on one side of that platform is – just London. One the other side – everything magical and wonderful and dangerous and strange.

Those transitions are critical. You can’t mess them up. One of our editors, a much-published and acclaimed kids’ author, Brian Keaney, used to advise writers of portal fantasy that they write the first draft of that key transition scene in poetry, before remastering it in prose. His idea was to make sure that the magic of the moment was captured properly, before you started working on all the boring detail.

First poetry, then prose.

As a practical idea for me personally, that idea has never worked. I’d feel too self-conscious about the poetry to really let rip. And, contrariwise, my prose never worries too much about playing by standard prose rules, so I don’t feel especially constrained to avoid the strange or the magical.

Also, of course, I don’t write portal fantasy for kids and young adults, so the idea didn’t really relate to me.

Or so I first thought. But the advice stuck with me, because I came to realise that almost every book worth a damn has a portal scene of some sort in it. Books start with some kind of status quo. Then some inciting incident comes along and – another world beckons. Not a magical one, necessarily, but one whose rules and possibilities have that glitter of danger and possibility. If you don’t have that kind of moment, it’s questionable what in heck’s name you think you’re writing about. 

And the essential quality of the key portal scene is still the same, no matter what you’re writing. It’s to convey the transition from workaday (safe, known, stable) to magical (dangerous, unknown, unstable, replete with possibility.) That transition will have a specific quality to it, a quality that comes close to the essence of your story.

Here, for example, is a key moment from my The Deepest Grave. Fiona is at a murder scene. The woman, an archaeologist, has been decapitated and spears plunged into her chest. This is already no ordinary murder, but then we get the first flicker of portal:

Charteris’s empty eyes are turned towards the wall, where there hangs a piece of framed text, in that hard-to-read medieval script. I take a photo of the text for later reference, but try to read it anyway. It says, I think, something like this:

Agitio ter consuli, gemitus britannorum . . . Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur.

—Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae

I don’t understand Latin—though ‘Britannorum’ and ‘repellunt barbari’ presumably mean something like what you’d think they mean—but I feel the tug of that ancient world, its torments and darknesses. Perhaps there, in that tug, is an important part of Gaynor Charteris herself.

That’s not quite a wardrobe you can step through – but this isn’t a fantasy and it’s not written for kids – but it comes close. That phrasing ‘the tug of that ancient world’ is, clear as a day, an announcement of the magical world that will dominate the pages of this modern police procedural.

Over the next dozen or so pages, that first flicker firms up into something more definite, more certain. Fiona soon comes back to the murder scene, but this time in the company of an archaeologist (Katie) capable of reading the Latin. Here’s how the portal moment comes again, but more strongly this time:

I point her to the medieval fragment hanging on the wall. The one Charteris was looking at.

‘Oh, that? It’s Gildas. The groans of the Britons.’

I don’t say anything, but my face probably does a ‘Gildas who?’ kind of look.

Katie: ‘Gildas was a sixth century monk. A saint, in fact. His writing is one of our earliest sources for the period.’

And, reading the Latin, she translates:

‘To Agitius, thrice consul: the groans of the Britons . . . The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.—Gildas, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain.’

‘And the barbarians in question . . .?’

‘Northern tribes. Modern day Scots and Irish basically.’

She answers the question, but the words drop noiselessly, pebbles vanished in a well. We both share a sudden sense that it is almost disrespectful to be talking about these long ago conflicts when what we are dealing with is a very twenty-first century corpse. It’s strange how this investigation, young as it is, keeps getting tugged under by the past, and the deep past at that.

Stolen Dark Age finds. Iron Age spears. Gildas and his Latin lament.

That last paragraph gives you, in list form, the disconcerting elements of our portal-world. And notice that our extravagantly murdered corpse is not in herself disconcerting. To Fiona, homicide investigation is part of her day job. The corpse alone doesn’t create the portal. It’s the bits all around it. The parts that don’t belong. That parts that make up the music of this particular book.

When I think of it, probably all of my books have some kind of portal moment. I bet yours has one as as well.

And the advice that emerges from this set of thoughts? Simply this: notice the magic. Notice the music. Write in poetry first, if that idea appeals. But if it doesn’t, bring the poetry in anyway. This is the place where the music of your book sounds its first true notes. The rest is preamble. This bit matters. Make sure the music pushes through. Do that, and your book already has the glitter of something that the reader wants to read. 

Now, m’lords and ladies, I walk a tightrope this week.

On the one hand, I love good editorial services as much as I love apples fried in butter and cinnamon. Good editing is the rock on which all of Jericho Writers is built, and it matters hugely.

But, but, but.

Editing is advice. That’s all it is.

And yes, the advice is usually right. And if you take it books get better.

But you’re the writer. You’re the monarch of your text. In that little realm, your writ runs absolute. And in the end, the rule that matters is simply this: does a proposed change sound right to you? Or do you prefer it the way it is?

When Elizabeth Gilbert was told by an editor that she had to kill one of the female characters in her A Signature of All Things, she said no. That character stayed in.

In one of our Summer Festival webinars, Sophie Hannah was asked what to do if an agent told you that you couldn’t write the sort of book you wanted to write. She said (my paraphrase) to hell with that. Write the book anyway. It’s your life, not theirs.

When a copy-editor wanted to change the tone of my writing (meaning, specifically, Fiona Griffiths’ maddeningly quirky voice) I said no. And, because it was a copy-edit, I had to say no about a million times.

Insert a main verb into a sentence fragment, which I had deliberately wanted as a fragment? No. Stet.

(Stet is the Latin for “let it stand” and has long been the traditional way to undo a copy-editing change.)

Take a list of proper nouns and separate them with commas instead of, as I had done, with full stops? No. Stet.

Take a series of abruptly short sentences and link them into one longer and more elegantly flowing one? No. No way. Stet stet stettety stet.

And you. You’re the same.

Let’s say you are wise enough to come to Jericho Writers for a manuscript assessment. We’ll come back to you with a long report on where we see problems and possible solutions.

Your job is not to obey us.

On the contrary, if an editor says to you, “I think there’s a problem with X and you should probably consider doing Y,” ask yourself how that feels.

Mostly – I’d think about 60% of the time – you’ll think that the editor is right about both problem and solution. Great.

Then maybe 20% of the time, you’ll think, shucks, I can see the issue, but I’d really like to do Z not Y. Also great.

But in both these cases, you’re relying on your own gut. Your own sense of perfect. Your sense of this story and what it should be in that luminous land where all of your artistic goals are perfectly achieved.

You’re not obeying an editor. You’re simply using that editor to refine your own sense of what your manuscript wants and needs.

And that leaves the final 20% where you think, “You know what? I get why you think this denouement fails / this character is unnecessary / this twist is implausible, or whatever else. I get why you think that and I DON’T CARE.”

When I’ve had those situations with my editors in the past – often with minor issues, sometimes with big ones – I haven’t apologised and usually haven’t even explained.

I just return my manuscript with the changes made to my satisfaction. The 20% of issues where I’ve just ignored my editor – well, so what? If they want to cause a fuss, they can, but they never have. Their job is just to get me to deliver the best damn manuscript I can. It’s not to get me to check a series of boxes on some kind of Manuscript Approval Checklist.

You’re the same. You’re the boss. You’re the monarch of your text.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

All hail!