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My wife doesn’t often recommend books to me, but she did recently. The book is I Capture The Castle, by Dodie Smith, written in America during the war, but not published until 1949, after some years of anxious revisions.

I’ve only read about a dozen pages of the book and already know I’m going to love it. That sense is, admittedly, helped along a bit by knowing that the book was an instant hit on publication and has remained a word-of-mouth treasure ever since. But it’s more than that.

Here’s the opening sentence:

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

The narrator continues:

That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left.

Since we’re in the quotation mood, here are a couple more bits from those first few pages:

[My sister Rose] is a pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her, I know she is a beauty … I am no beauty, but have a neatish face.

[My stepmother Topaz] paused on the top step and said: ‘Ah, girls …’ with three velvety inflections on each word.

Now she [the stepmother] is in bed and is playing her lute. I like the idea of a lute, but not the noise it makes.

Now, quoting snippets isn’t really the best way to present a novel. A novel is the best way to present a novel. But I hope you feel that, even chopped up into morsels, there is something instantly seductive here. Instantly moreish.

And the question I want to ask is: how come? What’s the secret? What do you have to do on the first few pages to write a novel that will still be read with warmth and affection, seventy-five years after its creation?

Simple good writing is a part of it, of course. I talked a month or two back about Elizabeth Gilbert’s use of an ordinary-but-wide vocabulary in her book, The Signature of All Things. Dodie Smith does the same here.

So anyone might talk of someone’s complexion being pink and gold, but it takes a little flash of genius to add the word feathery. That suggests downy and soft and touchable, but also perhaps the hint of a caress or an artist’s brush. And at the same time the word works because it’s odd enough – controversial enough – to spark consideration of why it deserves its place.

Those velvety inflections work in roughly the same way. Can you yourself find a way to say ‘Ah, girls’ with three velvety inflections on each word? I doubt it – and yet the slight provocation somehow deepens the effectiveness of the phrase.

As for the idea of the lute versus the noise it makes – that’s just plain funny.

So, OK, we have on our check-list so far:

1. Write well
2. Be funny

In Dodie Smith’s case, we might add also:

3. Be warm

Clearly, that advice won’t work for every book, but it’s notable that there is a kindness to these opening pages, which is simply pleasant to be around. So the sister is pinkish gold and feathery. The stepmother is very kind and the narrator is very fond of her. Even the dog ‘gazes at me with love, reproach, confidence and humour.’

Yes, we go to fiction for things other than kindness and warmth, but if we happen to pick up a book and find ourselves in a warm bath of laughter and affection and gentle teasing, it’s not all that likely we’ll want to put it down.

But I think we get nearer to the mark if we throw in this:

4. Get personal

I Capture The Castle is narrated by seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain. Her personality is alive in every sentence. You already have a sense of that personality from the bits I’ve quoted. If you’re writing third person, then you won’t be able to deploy your protagonist’s own voice in quite the same way, but you can still snuggle up as close as you can to that protagonist and get his or her personality blooming as soon and as vividly as you can.

There are, however, several further ingredients of the Smithian stew, I think.

One is certainly:

5. Be quotable

That first sentence about sitting in a sink is often seized on as a Famous First Sentence. And the thing about lutes & music is deliciously perfect too.

At the same time, and though quotability is a factor here, it’s not one I’d want to get too hung up on. A lot of newbie authors like to adorn their first pages with flashily quotable lines. Things like – oh, I don’t know – “Killing a man is easy. Keeping his blood off your shirt is hard.”

That has a strut, a look-at-me quality, that probably does do something to attract the reader’s interest. But if it doesn’t derive from real personality – if it’s written for that movie poster, and nothing else – it won’t have staying power. So, for me, the “get personal” message is always more powerful and more enduring than the “be quotable” one. It sticks longer in the memory.

One more of Smith’s ingredients is something like this:

6. Be curious

Cassandra Mortmain is live-writing a diary, reporting life very much as it happens. And she’s sweetly, naively excited to be writing at all. She looks forward to being able to talk about everything. She doesn’t attempt a full description of their crumbling castle home on page two, because ‘I won’t attempt to describe out peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now.’

She writes her book in a kitchen sink, then on the stairs, then in her bed (the remains of her only dressing gown wrapped around a hot brick.)

Because Cassandra is zestful about the act of writing and reporting, we become zestful about the act of reading. It’s as with my murder stories: my detective loves murder. All corpses please her, but good corpses delight her.

Delight is contagious. Infect your main character and you will infect your reader too.

So far, we seem to have collated a reasonably doable list of action points. That doesn’t make it simple, mind you. ‘Write well, be funny’: it’s not like those things are easily done. But still. They are, in principle, things you can work at.

But, being truthful, I think we have to throw one extra ingredient into the mix:

7. Be magical

Dodie Smith wrote other books, other plays. Apart from I Capture The Castle, only one of those works had enduring success … and you’re much less likely to have read Dodie Smith’s book than to have seen Walt Disney’s adaptation of it: One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

Presumably, Smith didn’t suddenly get extra helpings of genius for her Capture The Castle book and lose them all for everything else. Equally, John Le Carre became a better novelist in the years after he wrote The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, but if you could only save one JLC novel from the inferno, then that would probably be the one.

The fact is that, as authors, we arrange our ideas on a table as we are deciding what to write next. When we find a configuration that feels right, we let rip. We spend a year or however long writing that damn novel. Then we edit it hard. Then we have what we have.

Sometimes that novel is a perfectly workmanlike, entertaining, decent read. And good. We’ve done our job; we’ve earned our crust. And other times, the same set of skills applied to other ingredients just product something of magic. A matter of chemistry, really.

And quite why does I Capture The Castle have that chemistry so abundantly when Smith’s other adult novels didn’t? Well, we don’t know. You can’t know until you’ve written the thing.

So write your book. See if it’s magical. If it’s not, write another.

That’s all from me. We have a skip in the garden and the children are currently inside it, having a picnic.

Plenty of writers stress over genres:

What genre is my book? Yes, there’s a death, but it’s not really a crime story. And there’s a romance, but it’s not really a love story. And it’s set in the 1980s, which makes it historical, but nobody wears a corset or says methinks, so it’s not really hist fic either. Help!

The answer, really, is simple. Genres don’t matter, but readers do.

To understand what I mean, just walk into any large bookstore. The nearest big store to me – Waterstones in Oxford – has fiction dominating the ground floor. There’s a niche set aside for crime fiction and one or two other specific genres.

Mostly, though, the label above the shelves is simply “Fiction”. You’ll see Jane Austen snuggling up with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delia Owens making nice with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jojo Moyes deep in conversation with Saul Bellow.

Most novels just aren't sold under a particular category label. Readers are smart enough to know that Saul Bellow will offer a very different sort of read to the one provided by Jojo Moyes.

That seems clear enough and yet agents – curse them – always want to know how to bracket your book. The result is that we quite often see query letters say things like, “my novel is a Coming of Age Novel / Romance with a fashion industry setting”, with capital letters strewn around as though trying to manufacture a genre where no genre actually exists.

And no: there isn’t a genre like that. There isn’t a category on Amazon which matches that. There most certainly isn’t a set of shelves in any physical bookshop with that as its sign.

And yet – there are books like that, The Devil Wears Prada for one.

And look, agents want to know something about your book before they start to read it, in much the same way as you want to know something about a film on Netflix before you start watching. Is it a thriller? Or a rom-com? You might be happy with either, but you just want to set your expectations before you start.

It’s the same with agents. If you tell them that a book is a thriller, they will read with their thriller head on. They’ll be thinking, Does this feel like the start of a thriller that publishers could sell successfully to a large audience? If you tell them your book is a rom-com, they’ll think about that market instead.

And if your book has a nice clean genre, then tell them. My books (now) do. They are in increasing order of specificity: crime fiction, detective fiction and police procedurals.

But most books don’t have those nice clear categories. So just describe the book in a sentence or two, much as you would if you were describing it to any reader.

“The novel tells the story of Andrea Sachs, who becomes junior assistant to Miranda Priestly, the fashion world’s most powerful – and feared – editor. Andrea struggles to accommodate the demands of her boss, the fashion world, her love life and her own desire for a meaningful purpose.”

Bingo. That’s the book. You haven’t described a genre, exactly, but you have successfully described what kind of read you are offering.

That’s all agents need. They’ll adjust their expectations accordingly and read with interest.

Same with editors. When they read a manuscript, they’ll be thinking, “How can I package this book to achieve a strong level of sales?” They’ll be thinking about covers and comparable authors and recent hits and possible marketing approaches.

In order to get a good set of answers to those questions, editors do need a good two-line summary of the book – the sort that we’ve just given – but they don’t especially need any genre categorisation at all.

As a matter of fact, I’d go further than that. Genre descriptions can be so restricting that I’d want to throw them off, at least partly. So yes, my novels are contemporary police procedurals with murder stories at their heart.

But they’re also not some of the things you might expect them to be. So although my novels are technically procedural, they show an almost total disregard for actual police procedure. There’s not a lot of shooty-bang-bang stuff. The action is slow, not fast. And the crimes being investigated are, in many cases, so extravagantly unlikely that nothing like them has ever actually happened.

So if I were writing a query letter – or an Amazon book blurb – I’d want to hint at the ways in which my books run contrary to genre, not with it.

Because, in the end, it’s not genres that matter. It’s readers. You do, I think, need to have a really clear idea of what kind of book yours is. What’s the heart of its appeal? What’s that appeal expressed in a sentence? What kind of cover sings about that appeal? Where on Amazon will your very best readers most likely gather? What other authors do those readers love?

These questions matter. Genres don’t. You will, I hope, find liberation in that thought. I know I do.

Today’s email landed in two quite distinct set of inboxes.

One group of inboxes belongs to a group of (friendly, relaxed, good-spirited) people who thought, “Oh, look, here’s another email from Harry.”

The second group of inboxes belongs to a ferocious tribe who noticed, and were instantly enraged by, the grammatical mistake contained in the phrase Between you and I.

What is the mistake? Ah well, though English doesn’t have a host of grammatical cases – unlike German with 4, Russian with 6, and a surely unnecessary 7 in Polish – there is still a difference between the nominative case (“he” or “I”) and the accusative case (“him” or “me”.) And prepositions like their complement to be in the accusative. So I shouldn’t have written between you and I. I should have written between you and me.

Although plenty of English-speakers don’t bristle at errors like that, you lot are different. You’re a bunch of writers. You’re attuned to these issues and mostly don’t make them in your own writing. I’m not sure I get enraged by such errors any more, but I do certainly notice them. Every time.

And, look, I think it’s still safe to say that using a nominative pronoun after a preposition is an error. But let’s just remember what that means. All we’re really saying is that most language users still use the preposition + accusative structure. Not to do so, places us – somewhat – as a non-standard user.

But for how much longer? The who / whom distinction (another nominative / accusative issue) has largely vanished from our language. Or, to be more accurate, it’s just started to get awkward. Take a look at these examples:

               The agent, to whom the manuscript was sent …

               The agent, to who the manuscript was sent …

               The agent who the manuscript was sent to

Do you like any of them? The first is technically correct, if we’re being old-school about it, but it does have a somewhat fussy flavour today. The second option just sounds wrong. The third just sounds clumsy. So mostly, today, we’d rewrite any of those options as The agent who received the manuscript. By making the agent the subject again, we can get rid of that correct-but-fusty to whom construction.

Another example of a grammar which still exists, but patchily, is the which / that distinction. Technically, the word that introduces a clause which defines the noun being described. Like this:

Manuscripts which contain murders are always excellent.

That sentence wouldn’t be right if you took out the “which contain murders” bit. Clearly, that sentence is saying that the presence of murders in a manuscript is what guarantees their excellence. In these, definitional-type clauses, you always need a which.

Other times, it’s clear that a clause is just adding information which could, in principle, be dropped entirely:

Manuscripts, which authors have slaved over, are wasted on agents.

That sentence is essentially saying “manuscripts are wasted on agents”. You could drop the clause about authors’ hard work and the essential meaning remains unchanged.

So OK, we know the difference between which and that. Whether or not you knew the rule, you probably don’t mess up in a really obvious way.

But, but, but …

A lot of rules look clear on the pages of a grammar book but dissolve on contact with reality. Take a look at these actual examples from my current work in progress:

Peter looks at me with that soft-eyed affection which is the special preserve of older uniformed officers contemplating their younger, bossier detective colleagues.

I spark up. Inhale. Open the window enough that I can blow smoke through the dark slot which leads outside.

I park down by the beach which, out of season, has an abandoned quality. Windswept and forlorn. 

The first of those examples is clearly correct in terms of the grammar. The police sergeant’s affectionate look is defined by the (sarcastic) clause that follows, so I got that right.

The next one? Well, I don’t really know. You could argue that the “which leads outside” is definitional, but you could argue it the other way too. And I know for a fact I wasn’t guided by grammar in making the choice there, but sound. The sentence had just had a double th-sound (“through the“) and it probably didn’t need another. So I went with which.

And the last example – the beach one – is just wrong. There’s only one beach, so the clause which talks about its abandoned quality can’t be defining it.

I’d be very surprised indeed if a British copy-editor were to correct that mistake, however. We Brits are just more relaxed issues like that. A good American copy-editor probably would correct it, however. US copy-editing standards are more demanding and more precise. (Another example? Brits will often use a plural pronoun, they, to refer to a singular noun, like the government. It's not that Americans never do that, but they do it so little, it still strikes plenty of American ears as simply wrong.)

But you know what? I still like the way I wrote that sentence about the beach, even with that “erroneous” which. It just sounds better to me.

The fact is, I trash conventional grammar all the time:

I use a lot of sentence fragments.

I start sentences with conjunctions.

I drop the subject from verbs.

I use words that don’t exist.

I often do all that, back to back, in one sweet jam of Offences Against Grammar. Here’s one twenty-four-word excerpt that merrily commits enough crimes to send the Grammar Police into a spin:

Clean shirt. Early start.

I make tea. Fire up my computer. Kick my shoes off, because my feet aren’t in a shoey mood.

And in the end? Well, I suppose I still adhere to the kind of grammar rules which remain largely unbroken, by most people, even in informal contexts. So I wouldn’t say “between you and I” because that strikes my ear as wrong. But I’m more than happy to shatter other rules (the sentence fragment one, say) and bend others (the which/that distinction, for example.)

You, of course, don’t have to do as I do. Your job is to find your own writing voice and tune that in a way that suits you best. If that involves technically excellent grammar, then great. If it doesn't, that's really fine too.

About once a month I get an email from someone who frets that they don’t know enough formal grammar to be a writer. And to hell with that. If it sounds right, it is right. That’s all you really need to know.

Last week, oh ye hungry seekers of knowledge, we talked about publishing contracts and the snares that lie therein. If you missed that email, you can catch up with it here. But I left the biggest problem aside so we could get properly stuck into it this week.

The issue is simple: rights reversion.

Let’s say you sign up with Megacorp Publishing Inc. All parties sign in good faith. Megacorp believes in your book. It has every intention of marketing it hard. All good.

But – life happens. Maybe the book cover was poor, or your timing unfortunate, or supermarkets just weren’t buying your book for some other reason. Any case, the book didn’t sell. Megacorp lost money. Your contract isn’t renewed.

And just to be clear: that’s not a one in a hundred outcome. That’s what happens in maybe 6 or 7 cases out of 10. Most works of fiction lose money. Two or three breakeven (but those contracts will be negotiated down or not renewed.) One or two successful books make enough money that the whole merry-go-round continues to spin.

So, OK, your work is one of the unfortunate ones. You spun the wheel and lost. What now?

Well, in the olden, olden days, when books were made out of paper, reversion was standard and easy. A publisher had to keep the book in print. If they didn’t, the author could say, “republish the book or give me the rights.” Publishers generally just reverted the rights, and life went on.

But of course, these days, e-books never die. And print-on-demand means that even paper books never have to die. So the old reversion clauses dropped away and were replaced by ---- nothing. Or if they were replaced, their replacements were so weak as to be meaningless. I’ve seen contracts where publishers insisted on retaining rights to a book so long as annual sales were in excess of 20 units. A book can be essentially dead and still beyond reach of that author.

Why does that matter? Well, you might not care about reversion now, but that doesn’t mean you won’t at some point in the future.

You might want to self-publish commercially. (I reverted some rights from Penguin Random House and was making $100K from the series within a couple of years.) Or you might just care about the book and want to rejacket and relaunch it, without any great expectation of profit. Or you might just want to own the book, because it is yours, and you gave it birth, and you still love it.

For any of these reasons, only some of them commercial, you might want to revert the rights.

Well, lots of you will no doubt be thinking that there’s a fairly obvious and uncontentious solution:

Megacorp now has no meaningful financial interest in your book: if it didn’t sell during the launch window, it’ll never really sell, ever. (Not in the hands of Megacorp, that is: they’re not in the business of trying to revive failed books.) So in a rational world, you’d wait two or three years, then say, “Hey, Megacorp, things didn’t work out. No worries, but can I have the book back? I’m happy to pay something for the small amount of ongoing revenue you’re likely to lose.”

Megacorp would charge you something like 4-5x the income the book had brought in over the last 12 months. (That’s what units of the big publishers charge each other when books move around internally.) You get your book back. Megacorp gets some cash. Everyone’s happy.

But, oh ye hungry seekers of knowledge, we do not live in a rational world.

Actually getting your book back from Megacorp can be insanely hard. Or impossible. Or so expensive as to make no sense at all.

I once tried to revert some rights from HarperCollins. My editors had long since left the firm, so my only point of contact was a nice bloke in Contracts. But he had no authority to make a deal, so he had to talk to his colleagues in the two imprints that held my various books.

But the people in those imprints didn’t know anything about me or the books and they had no incentive to make a deal. If they earned a few grand from selling the rights, no one was going to congratulate them. If it turned out they sold the rights for a few grand, when I had some massive film deal about to be announced, they might even be yelled at.

So even to have the negotiation took months. And the proposed outcome was ludicrous: so expensive and hedged around with qualifications, that I simply gave up. They own some books that earn them no money. I don’t have books that I would love to have. A dumb outcome.

You need to sort these issues out upfront – in the contract ideally.

That’s harder than it sounds. Your agent won’t care, because they have no interest in self-pubbed or non-commercial books. Rights reversion is one of the few areas where your interests diverge sharply from those of your agent.

Megacorp will have some strategy decided at corporate level, that is desperately difficult for you to sway.

And, worst of all, YOU may not care – not in this first flush of excitement, with a publisher offering you actual real money to publish your work.

All I can say, my friends, is that you need to care. You need to surface the issue. You need to push for whatever you can get.

The ideal would be a clause that gave you a defined right to revert the rights after a specified period (probably 5 years) at a specified price (most likely a low multiple of recent sales.)

But publishers are brutal. They won’t give you that. So talk to your editor and your agent and raise the issue. Ask for a good-faith understanding of how reversion will be handled when and if the time comes. You’ll be fobbed off. People will try not to answer. But push. Do your best and get something. When you get that something, pop it into a simple email to your editor. “Hi Aquilegia, thanks for that chat about reversion this morning. As I understand it, we agreed …”

That email will give you a point of leverage if push comes to shove at some point in the future. If you can get something sensible in the contract itself, all the better.

And don’t be embarrassed. The Megacorps of this world have absolutely no rational commercial interest in depriving you of your work. You have every legitimate interest in recovering access to your book if and when Megacorp has no further use for it.

So fight for that access. You’re right, they’re wrong, and everyone knows it.

Oh yeah, and if you want to know what the Very Most Annoying Thing is in my Little Box of Annoyances, then it’s this:

It’s when publishers tell you, “Oh, we can’t negotiate this, because our policy is to have a completely standardised contract.”

They only ever say that when the contract is grossly biased in their favour. Publishers are, as humans, the friendliest, loveliest bunch you can imagine, but don’t be fooled. The contracts are put together by multibillion corporations, whose only interest is their own profit and glory. The resultant contracts stink. They’re not fair. They’re not meant to be fair.

Far too often, and with bigger authors as well as smaller ones, publishers take actions that – to my author-centric mind – represent abuse of power and nothing else. We can’t stop that abuse. We’re just little old us; they’re multibillion dollar corporations. But we can know what we want and what’s fair. Push hard to get it. 

Here endeth the lesson.