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Here’s how writing works:

You get an idea for a story (or, actually, a book of almost any kind.) You write it down.

In one way, what you have is a bit rubbish (because it is a bit rubbish.) And in another way what you have is perfect, because it exists. 

So then you start to edit and prune and change characters and reknot your plot points. As you do all that, you do have a general sense of craft. Economy with language is good. Plot needs to be in constant flux. Beware of creating too many viewpoint characters. And so on.

In the early stages of your writing career, that craft knowledge is really important. It’s a compass that prevents you skedaddling off on long journeys to the wrong place. As you get more experienced, the craft knowhow still matters; it’s just that it becomes more like second-nature. You don’t think about it as much.

But the thing that ultimately steers your editing isn’t some manual on How To Write, but it’s your own sense of what feels right on the page. Take this random paragraph from a work-in-progress:

The bears love any excuse to go shooting. They make long trips into the hinterland. The sound of their musketry echoes across these plains, echoing over the flat earth. This fire isn’t particularly accurate – most of the carcasses have been not shot, but clawed to death – but it’s an impressive haul. Four elk, three reindeer, any number of geese, some cormorants. salmon. A mangy wolf.

That feels interesting, doesn’t it? A book you might to read more of. But it’s also, to my mind, not quite right.

There are some obvious – technical-type – problems, such as the repetition of echoes / echoing. But there are also some things that bother me, that might not bother somebody else. Is hinterland quite right here, for example? It’s a geographer’s term that came into use at the end of the nineteenth century, and then mostly in the contexts of industrial planning or economic geographies. The setting of this little paragraph is mid-sixteenth century and very far removed from that kind of context. To me, the word just feels wrong. It might perfectly well sound fine to you.

And while I like the list of animals at the end of the paragraph, it feels underwhelming. I’d want to enrich it.

Also: “any excuse to go shooting” feels a bit pallid to me. These are actual bears with actual muskets and that sentence doesn’t quite seem rich enough to honour that set-up, so I’d want to find more interesting words there. Trips, likewise, seems a bit bland.

And the sort-of joke about the bears and the inaccuracy of their shooting seems a bit muffled, somehow. I’d want to make more of it.

Some of these feelings seem purely personal. Others seem like ones that most editors would agree with. But, either way, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the editorial judgement of you, the author. That’s it. That’s the whole deal.

So if I were scrabbling away at this paragraph, I’d end with something more like this

As for the bears, they love any excuse to get out their muskets. They make long forays into the back-country. The sound of their musketry echoes across these plains, whistling over the thin earth and flat rock, a pebble skimmed over water. It’s not clear how accurate this fire is – most of the carcasses that eventuate seem to have been clawed or bitten to death, not shot – but the heap of the dead is impressive nonetheless. Four handsome elk and a pair of skinny calves. Three reindeer, one of them pregnant and with two kids inside her. Any number of geese. Some cormorants. Salmon. One mangy wolf.

That definitely feels better – that is, more reflective of me. If you had your hand on the same paragraph, you might have had some similar concerns but ended in a different place. (And do notice that on this occasion my edits made the paragraph longer, not shorter. There’s no rule that says editing can’t add text as well as subtracting it.)

That’s an example of editing in microcosm, but not all editing happens in microcosm. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the editing process is the way you learn to understand your own book.

Yes, you might start a project with some broad idea of why your Big Idea has resonance. But as you edit your book into shape that broad idea will take on a ton of detail. You’ll find, almost certainly, that there are more depths to your book than you had ever realised.

Here’s how things have panned out with my current Fiona Griffiths novel, the one that’s been delayed about a million years.

That book is set in a secure psychiatric hospital. My character was, as a teenager, hospitalised with mental illness and she has an abiding fear of such places. OK. So far, so good. It’s pretty obvious that the setting and that character make for a nice complementarity.

But how exactly? I wasn’t sure how to bring those two things together. In particular, the end of the book caused me real problems. I knew I needed a big climax but nothing I quite put on the page seemed to deliver. Then – duh! – I realised that my character needed to experience drug treatment at the hands of a hostile doctor. She needed to be give psychotropic drugs being given for malign reasons – and her sense of self needed to fracture under the load.

That’s really different from most of my endings, which are a bit more pow-biff-bam than that, but it was obviously the right one for this book.

If I plot out how that understanding actually came to me, it’s roughly like this:

• Write 80% of the novel
• Feel dissatisfied
• Fiddle away at the part I’ve written, try different strategies, fix things that need fixing. All this was self-editing, albeit work done before I’d completed the novel.
• Feel dissatisfied
• Sketch out possible endings, most of them involving big all-action drama, along the lines of my previous work
• Feel dissatisfied
• Scratch away a bit more. Drive the plot forward. Edit old sections.
• Then realise that I’d never properly picked up or understood my own theme. I’d had Fiona reacting really badly when she first arrived at the hospital, but that story had no proper ending. My chief baddie in the book is a doctor; I had to get that baddie injuring Fiona in the way that Fiona most feared.
• Relief! Delight! A sense that I know what I’m doing
• Finish the book
• Feel pleased, because I now know this book has legs / Feel dissatisfied because there’s a lot of work still to do
• Go back and start the editing process yet again. (I’ve done lots already.)
• Come to bits that I had never quite liked in the past, but didn’t know what to do with. For example, my hospital had never quite felt isolated enough, or like its own little kingdom. But now I knew how Fiona would be ending up (as a patient in that selfsame hospital, with her life very much at risk), it felt much more obvious how I wanted to deal with the hospital’s isolation. Scenes that had baffled me before just fell into place.

There’s lots more still to do. Lots of plot smoothing, lots of simple writing edits. But now that I have my keystone in place – Fiona gets drugged; Fiona almost dies – I know that everything else is just a matter of time and work.

The lessons from these reflections? Well, a few actually, but including these:

1. Editing is big and small. It’s about changing individual words and it’s about getting massive ideas about how the end of the book needs to work, with consequential changes for absolutely everything else.
   
   
2. Your ability to be dissastisfied and remain dissatisfied with your text is key. It’s that “not yet right” feeling which guides you to a better book. It’s probably also why writing can be so arduous as well as so joyful. That relentless dissatisfaction with your work – that’s the very feeling that makes it better.
   
   
3. Bigger ideas often guide the smaller scale ones. So take that work involving bears and muskets. Food and cannibalism are themes in that book, so the the list of game – food, in this context – needed elaboration, and the pregnant reindeer with kids inside her was, in a way, a graphic, if ghoulish, representation of cannibalism. It’s not that readers will notice such things exactly, but the more you look to add those touches, the richer and more coherent the final manuscript becomes. A perfect manuscript has a kind of holographic quality to it: the whole embodied in the part, and vice versa.
   
   
4. But also: smaller scale ideas often guide the bigger ones. It was writing a scene between the doctor-baddie and Fiona that made me realise, she needs to be drugged. Specifically, I was fidding around with the scene, because I was dissatisfied with it. That dissatisfaction with how the scene was playing out sentence by sentence led me to the realisation that would end up solving The Big Problem with the book.
   
   
5. And: it’s work at the coal-face that fixes things. Yes, I believe in long, thoughtful dog walks as a way of solving plot conundrums. But most of the actual breakthroughs come when you are mucking about with text – actually writing it, or actually editing it.

This long and baggy email is, in a way, a big fat preamble to one final message:

I’m doing a self-editing webinar – for members only – on Tuesday 6 July. If you’d like me to rip your work apart, like a bear savaging a reindeer, then send me a chunk in advance of the session. Do that by adding a comment to the "self-editing webinar" blog post here. And remember the event is for members only. If you're a non-member, please don't submit work as we won't be able to use it.

Thankee!!

Hello folks

We've got another self-editing webinar coming up on 6 July at 19:00 (UK time.)

If you want to submit some work for me to RIP APART WITHOUT MERCY then:

a) Mwah-hah-hah. I look forward to feasting on your bones

b) Please give me a chunk - maximum 300 words - in the comments below. Please include your name (or I'll just use your Townhouse handle.) Also the title of the piece, and just one short sentence telling us what kind of book it is. (Plus something about the set up of the snippet, if we need to know.)

I won't be able to use everything. In the past, I've been able to get through 3-4 pieces in the hour.

Please don't submit your work below if you're not a JW member: we won't be able to use it.

Please also don't submit your work unless you are comfortable having it discussed publicly, cos public discussion is exactly what's gonna happen.

All clear? Yes? No?

Yes! Tremendous. Look forward to seeing you there.

We’re thrilled to be launching another year of our Ultimate Novel Writing Course. It’s the most practical, hands-on course we offer, helping you go from first draft to full publishable manuscript with expert tuition and ongoing support. We chatted to Sharon Dunne, a student on the 2020-2021 course, about how the UNWC has impacted her writing journey.  

JW: Hi Sharon! What stage were you at with your writing before the UNWC?  

SD: I had very little experience before the course. I'd always loved writing but it just wasn’t feasible as something to do as a career, at least not in my circle. I started writing properly about a year beforehand and, after eleven or twelve months, I realised that I needed help. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I was just going with it - but if I wanted to make it a serious career, I really needed some help.  

JW: What was your favourite part of the course?  

SD: It’s hard to choose! Meeting my group was absolutely amazing because they were such great support. You end up building a friendship - a supportive circle where you can help each other when someone is struggling. That was one of my favourite things. I think the weekly exercises, the feedback, and the tutoring have been excellent as well. I had started with a book, but I ended up deleting a whole 96,000 words and starting again. I’d thought I needed a little bit of help, but I realised quite quickly that it just wasn’t good enough.

The first tutor feedback I had was from Wes (Brown, UNWC tutor) and it was really good. He gave feedback in such a supportive way that it encouraged me to start again. Now I’ve just finished my manuscript. It’s just been sent off to Lindsey (Alexander, UNWC tutor) and it’s so much better. I basically learned from the ground up and I worked really hard at it – the whole experience was great.  

JW: Amazing! Do you think starting from scratch on your MS was made a little easier because of that support? 

SD: Yes, definitely! I had started writing without knowing I needed the basics, but once I’d started learning them I realised that [my original manuscript] wasn’t good enough and there was no point in trying to make a load of changes. In the end I just wanted to start again. Actually, I think I was more excited than anything. Whatever chapter I was writing, I would use that for whatever was the focus of the course each week – so I was kind of tweaking as I went, as well. The weekly tasks were really good because I performed them on my work-in-progress as I wrote.   

I had started with a book, but I ended up deleting a whole 96,000 words and starting again...

JW: It sounds like that corresponded really well then! Which aspect of the course did you find the most challenging? 

SD: I have four small children and I work, so I suppose for me the most challenging thing really was just finding the time. But I was, and still am, very creative and I was learning very fast throughout the course. It was during that time I realised I just loved it – I really loved it. So I made sure I made the time, whether it was 9pm at night or getting up at 6am and doing a couple of hours in the morning. That was probably the most challenging aspect, but it was good to fully commit.  

JW: How have you found fitting the course round your schedule? 

SD: The course is great; it’s so flexible, especially for someone like me whose time is very limited. The amount of time and effort you give it is up to you and I think the more you put in, the more you’re going to get out of it. So I just decided that I was going to do the task every week no matter what, whether that was late night or early morning. I think that helped with building relationships with everyone in my group, as well. We also set up some monthly zoom calls where we could talk things through and see if anyone needed any help.  

JW: It must be lovely to have that nice, supportive environment, because sometimes writing can be quite isolating. How would you rate your confidence with writing after the UNWC? 

SD: I’m way more confident now! I believe that it’s possible now, and I’ve just committed to keep going.   

JW: That’s brilliant! Do you feel that you have something close to being ready to submit? 

SD: I’ve just submitted my work-in-progress to Lindsey (Alexander, UNWC tutor). I’m waiting for the response and then I’ll have feedback to do the next draft. I have a few drafts done – the second draft is the one that’s just gone over for critique. I would hope that I could then do another draft with Lindsey’s feedback – she’s been great as well – and hopefully then be ready to submit. Actually, last year I booked the Jericho Writers Self-Edit Your Novel Course for this September, so I’ll do that with my new draft, and I’m hoping that after that I’ll be ready to submit.  

I'm way more confident now! I believe that it’s possible now, and I’ve just committed to keep going.

JW: Amazing – I look forward to hearing about how you find the Self-Edit course as well. Lots of people have said great things about Debi [Alper] and Emma [Darwin].  

SD: Yes I’ve definitely enjoyed them in webinars! I’ve also found the webinars really good – on the Jericho Website I found the ‘How to Write’ video course that Harry did, and I found that super-useful. I watched the whole thing when I first started writing. 

JW: To what extent do you feel being an UNWC student has helped you find new opportunities? 

SD: I think I’ve been opened up to an awful lot of opportunities because now I understand so much more about the fundamentals of writing. I have a lot more knowledge of how agents and publishers work, the different ways to get published, how difficult it is to get published and the standard your work needs to be at before you submit. Also, the importance of having a supportive team – I got to know all the other writers, knew where I could go for help, the different types of assessments and reviews you could get on your manuscript, and the whole writing world in general. I suppose that was especially good for me because I was very new to it – before I started this course, I didn’t know any other people who wrote in their spare time.  

JW: I’m so glad you had that for support; having like-minded people around you is so important to keep going. In what ways do you think taking a writing course is helpful (compared to learning independently)? 

SD: I think mainly it helps because of all the support. I know some people don’t like critique, but I loved it because it told me where I was going wrong. It made me want to change it - otherwise I would have never known! Obviously so much was wrong – nearly everything was wrong – and it was all revealed in the critique so maybe even from the first week it set me on the right track. Lindsey talked me through and I realised, okay, this is just not good enough. I know if I’d kept writing independently, I wouldn’t have improved. Some people perhaps are born being able to write well, but I needed to learn.  

JW: You definitely do need that constructive criticism sometimes, especially in the early stages. Is there anything else you’d like to add?  

SD: Generally, the tutors were all fantastic, and the group as well. I’ve found that the whole thing has been a really enjoyable experience and it’s taught me so much.  

Sharon Dunne is an Irish mother of four young boys. She is a primary school teacher (who previously worked in advertising) and lives in the sunny South East, although she often questions the 'sunny' part!

Sharon is writing a novel called Phoenix Park, which follows the lives of three Irish women, two of whom are running for President. The third is a relentless reporter with the Viral Touch, who's covering the election. One of them is hiding a secret and when it's uncovered, the trajectory of all three women's lives are changed forever

The Ultimate Novel Writing Course is now open for applications for the October '22 - September '23 course.

With online tutorials and mentoring sessions led by leading authors in their fields alongside in-person events, editorial assessments, literary agent inductions, and more - no other course offers this level of support as you work towards publication.

Find out more:

Happy Wednesday, all!

Today I am excited to share with you a little bit about a new and upcoming agency that is really opening doors for Northern writers.

Clare set up The Liverpool Literary Agency—the city's first—in 2020, to help other writers break into publishing. The impetus behind the decision came from observing the many barriers which befall local and talented, yet underrepresented, writers from all backgrounds.

Clare is a new agent, but with her wide array of experience, gained from working in PR and marketing, undertaking an MA in Writing, and publishing her own books (both with an indie press and her own imprint), she is more than qualified to take the lead on such a promising project. In fact, in just a year, the Liverpool Literary Agency has already expanded and is now excited to welcome Anna Gamble to their lovely and growing team.

Clare is one of our many agents offering 121s this summer. This is our bespoke service offering both valuable and personal feedback on your work from leading literary agencies across the country. Clare and her team have already signed an author through this service, and she has very kindly taken some time away from her busy schedule to offer us a short yet exciting interview.

Without further ado, below are some highlights from the interview, where Clare tells us a bit about what she's seeking as an agent, and the future of Liverpool Literary Agency.

Don't hesitate to check out the interview in full, on Clare's AgentMatch profile.

"It's amazing seeing the creativity come out of the region and the amazing stories people tell, and the ethos, the moral compass and messages within the books. Even a crime book can have a message about social inequality but keep the plot exciting and the reader hooked."

Hey Clare, thanks for joining us today! We'd love to get to hear more about what you're looking for in your submissions this year, your advice for authors, and not to mention the exciting plans you've got for Liverpool Literary Agency!

Q. What's at the top of your fiction wish-list?

I love historical settings, women's fiction, psychological thrillers, unreliable narrators, dual narratives, and stories about identity and our place in the world. I love historical fiction, especially World War Two resistance stories... it's where I found my voice as a writer. I think it's because that period in history shows the life and death decisions people had to make, and raises that question of—what would you do? There are too many parallels of war, refugees and prejudice, between then and now, and I think writing in this genre can help to open people's eyes.

Q. What do you look for in a query letter?

I like it when writers create their own logline/elevator pitch, even if we later tweak it. We had a great pitch with a 'Sophie Kinsella meets Schitt's Creek' for a women's fiction book, and I want writers to know that they should feel confident enough to align their work with well-known examples. Don't say your book is 'unlike anything else out there'—it's an instant red flag because we agents need to know how to pitch it to the commissioning editors at publishing houses. If you, as the author, don't know where it sits in the market, then neither will they.

A key thing for me is also seeing, is the passion there? Why does the writer want to tell this story? What's their story? You can be narrating any gender or background, telling any story—it doesn't have to be based on personal experience, but what is it about that particular story for you?

Q. Any advice on writing a good synopsis?

A good rule of thumb for determining what stays and what goes: If the ending wouldn't make sense without the character or plot point being mentioned, then it belongs in the synopsis. If the character or plot point comes up repeatedly throughout the story, and increases the tension or complication each time, then it definitely belongs.

Q. It's so exciting to see the Liverpool Literary Agency grow, what shall we expect from you and your team next?

We're launching a new website soon, listing all our authors, and we'll be excited to announce the recent deals on there too. We're excited to keep growing, helping more writers from underrepresented backgrounds get into publishing, and hopefully expanding our team.

If you are interested in booking a one-to-one session with Clare, please visit here.

If you're in need of some support and advice in regards to your query letter and synopsis, please do check out our resources on our website; we have lots of information to help guide you on your way. Or, if you're a member with us, our lovely Writers Support team will be happy to offer you a free query letter review! Login to access the service here.

It’s easy to think that because life permits something, then story must too. After all, stories are allowed things like starships, unicorns and Dr Evil, so it would seem that stories are more capacious than life, holding everything life offers, and then some.

Well, yes and no.

Yes: stories get to have starships and unicorns, while life does not. But then again, life is permitted randomness, which stories basically may not have.

So let’s say you were writing a Manhattan-set rom-com. You’re getting to the denouement. Mr Lovely is racing through Central Park to greet his girlfriend, Fraulein Gorgeous, and ask her to marry him. We all anticipate that Fraulein G is going to say one ditzy thing, do one charming thing, and then say yes. We’ll laugh a little, shed a tear, then move on, happy.

But Life might have other thoughts. So, let’s say, in reality, Mr Lovely was racing through the park, when – oh, I don’t know – a subway tunnel collapses, or an ice cream truck hits him, or (why not?) an overflying airplane accidentally releases some blue ice, which falls 20,000 feet and splatters his romantically-inclined skull.

(Blue ice? Um. It comes from aircraft toilets and it shouldn’t leak, but sometimes does. In the 1970s, some blue ice struck a chapel in London and caused so much damage, the building had to be demolished.)

Now, because Life can and does release blue ice over major cities, there’s no reason in fact why the Lovely / Gorgeous romance might not be ended by a lump of falling waste. But a story can’t handle that.

Story demands a unity of logic and (ideally) a unity of theme too.

Take the logic part first. Although things can and do happen for essentially no reason, stories are our way of putting the meaning back in. That reason can operate within the boundaries of strict logic. (The detective got DNA results back from the lab, which led her to Bad Guy’s house, which allowed her to …) But it can equally well operate within almost purely metaphorical ones – ones that deliver thematic coherence to your story.

Take, for example, the war film, Bridge over the River Kwai.

In that film, Colonel Nicholson (the Alec Guinness character) is a British officer who has become a prisoner of war, held by the Japanese. The POWs are ordered to build a railway bridge to help the Japanese war effort. Nicholson – as a way to maintain his self-respect? as a way to show off the skills and resourcefulness of the British army? – becomes obsessed with building the perfect bridge. When Anglo-American commandos then prepare to sabotage the bridge, Nicholson becomes conflicted, seeking to protect ‘his’ bridge. In the concluding firefight, he is wounded and falls onto the detonator’s plunger, thereby destroying the bridge.

In one way, this is just a causally coherent explanation for how the bridge came to be built, then destroyed. But no viewer simply experiences it like that. There’s something about Nicholson’s journey – the obsession, the perfectionism, the death, the explosion – that gives a kind of coherence to everything that’s happened before. If you took out the two minutes of film around that final firefight and the destruction of the bridge, you’d have essentially nothing. Lots of prettily filmed events, but no story.

So the Lovely / Gorgeous romance + blue ice killing just doesn’t work as story. Yes, you could make that an opening scene. (The rest of the novel then becomes about Fraulein Gorgeous coming to terms with the random death of her beloved.) And indeed, life-changing random events provide the kick-off for plenty of stories.

Generally though, you are always – via strict causal logic, or metaphor – seeking to pull events into an orderly shape. In the end, you’re about creating emotional journeys and a sense of derived meaning.

Life just doesn’t offer that neatness.

Journeys don’t end until you die. And meanings come from us, and our story-making desire, more than from life itself.

The more dense you can make your storytelling – neat causal logic plus an overlay of metaphor and character journey – the stronger and richer your final story will be. 

In short, life is great, but it’s baggy. If you want your story to look right, I recommend the corset. Breathe out, lace up tight – and don’t eat.

Back in the day, a top author – such as Henry Fielding, who died in 1754 – would enjoy giving some of his characters names like Mr Thwackum (a savage clergyman and schoolmaster) and Squire Allworthy (a man as virtuous as his name suggests.)

Charles Dickens, a century or more later, wasn’t quite as direct, but you can still hear the character suggestion come through pretty clearly in names like Ebenezer Scrooge (a miser), Uriah Heep (an unctuous sycophant), Tiny Tim (the one to generate the tears), Thomas Gradgrind (a fact-obsessed school superintendent), Wackford Squeers (a cruel headmaster), Estella (beautiful, but distant – like a star), and so on.

These days, we generally don’t do that. The problem with those names is that they hang a huge placard round the neck of the character. “Hey, I’m Allworthy. You don’t even have to think about who I am – you don’t have to scrutinise the way I talk and act and make choices – because look at this great big placard. I’m ALL-WORTHY, right? Look how great I am.”

In effect, the name compresses the space in which the character can operate – and a book without characters isn’t going to be worth all that much.

Dickens’s names aren’t quite as blatant as Henry Fielding, but the sheer improbability of a ‘Wackford Squeers’ announce the author’s intention almost as directly. The placard is smaller, but it’s still there.

The modern approach therefore tends to be sadly dull, You might have a Gradgrind-y type character, let’s say, but you’d call him or her something like Mark Pettigrew or Samantha Anderson. Your ideal name is just interesting enough to remember, but just boring enough that it’s not calling attention to itself (Jabberwocky Jones or Bianca Blanco.)

Likewise, you’ll think not just of your star players, but your team sheet as a whole. You might love the name Rhodri for a friend of your protagonist, but if you already have a Rhys, a Rob, a Rhian and a Rhydian, your reader is going to get seriously confused. 

This advice so far has all been very sensible, but, but, but …

Isn’t there a halfway house, perhaps? Something that could add flavour without simply depriving the character of space in which to operate?

And the answer, surely, is yes. The trick is to add a bayleaf or two, not the whole damn kitchen cupboard. (I learned this trick from my colleague, Sarah Juckes, by the way, then realised I’d already been doing something similar, but unconsciously.)

The idea is that you choose a character’s name that refers, even in the most oblique way, to some deep-lying essence of the person. So, in Sarah’s Outside, her characters are trapped in a single, horrible room. The name Willow suggested something of the outdoors – the yearning for it, as well perhaps as the slender-but-tough whippiness of a willow stick. It’s a lovely way to encapsulate a feeling – but at the same time, the name is common enough that it doesn’t break the basic Mark Pettigrew / Samantha Anderson naming convention.

What’s more the name does make a difference. You can almost feel the energy the book gets as a result. If you doubt me, just try giving Willow the name Samantha Anderson. You’d never choose to make that switch, would you?

I used to think I don't play a lot of those games in my Welsh fiction, or at least that I did so only very sparingly. In the first book, I allowed my main character, Fiona “Fi” Griffiths, to meditate on her name:

Fi. That’s ‘if’ backwards.

Griffiths. Nice ordinary name, but two more ‘if’s lurking at the heart of it. My name, literally, is as iffy as you can get. The only solid sound, the only one you can actually hang on to, is that opening G, and it’s not to be trusted.

Elsewhere, I don’t muck around much. My other series characters are really named just to be plausibly Welsh (in most cases) and of the right approximate generation.

But when I explore more closely, I do often end up with names that carry a scent.

In my current (much-delayed) WIP, the doctor in charge of a secure psychiatric hospital is called Etta Gulleford. That is a striking name, of course. It commands attention, just as the woman in question is also striking and commanding. Is the name a bit disconcerting, perhaps? Hard to place? Probably, and if so, that fits with her character too.

The inmate in that hospital that Fiona is most interested in also has a non-standard name, Jared Coad. Again, that’s not quite so unusual it challenges the boundaries of realism. And I mostly chose it because it was plausible and yet memorable. A two-syllable name to remember.

But, thinking more about it, I think there’s more going on there too. Jared is an Old Testament biblical name. The character is a damaged warrior, but with depths of virtue. A dangerous prophet? An ancient Judaic king? Those echoes do work for the character on the page – magnificent, avenging, doomed. The splash of antiquity somehow adds a useful dimension to an otherwise very twenty-first century character.

I'll quite often change characters names as I write a draft, twisting this way and that way until I have something that feels right. That feeling comes by touch and feel: I'm not at all programmatic about it. And sometimes, to be honest, the names never quite feel right. They nag at me long after publication.

(Which brings me to a further tip, actually. Unless you are really sure of your choice of name, only use names where you can use the Find and Replace tool easily. That means avoiding a name like Jo, because it forms a part of too many ordinary words (jogging, banjo, and the like. If you use a name like Joely, you get the same kind of flavour but the Find and Replace tool will still work for you.)

I’d really love to know how you name your characters and, in particular, how you manage to add a hint of character or depth into a name that still seems like a plausible choice for the character concerned. And no, fantasy authors, you don’t get the day off. I want to know how you pick names too. Voldemort isn’t a name you’d give to a good guy, is it? I guess the “mort” part of that name is bringing hints of death, but I probably wouldn’t lend my wallet to someone whose name began “Volde” either. So, yep, SF and fantasy authors too: I want to know how you come up with names.

Don’t email to tell me. Share your thoughts in the comments below. Let's have a heated debate ...

Last week, I totally forgot about my Friday email until the deadline was starting to loom in a scarily loomy way. (Overhanging by 5 or 10 degrees, and offering thin holds on sketchy protection – that kind of loomy.)

So I dashed out an email that had a single thought at the heart of it. This one:

Creative writers and, really, creators of almost any sort,
are often asked to perform their best work
without any kind of support.

That email then turned into a kind of mission statement. Very roughly: “we can’t alter the basic difficulty of your situation, but we can and will be as supportive as we can.” There wasn’t really any practical, actionable advice in the email. When we sent it out, it felt like some underweight homework rushed out to meet a deadline.

But you lot told me otherwise.

I always get plenty of responses to these emails, but last week I got double the normal volume. The general gist of those answers was summed up in one email that said my message felt like a hug, necessary and comforting. And, good: consider yourself e-hugged (in a way that respects your personal boundaries and all covid-regulation protocols in your country of residence.)

But it struck me, as I read your replies, that there are two phases to our acts of creation and each phase makes a different demand.

First, there’s a purely creative phase, one that’s all about production.

This is where we dream up the idea of the story. It’s where we nudge and tweak that (still theoretical) story into shape. It’s where we write our openings chapters (in a rush), our middle chapters (slowly and in pain), our ending chapters (with relief.) The end of this creative phase is marked by delivery of a complete manuscript, starting on page 1 and running all the way through to the beautiful words, “THE END”.

For that birthing process, I strongly recommend an attitude of slightly crazed positivity. And I do mean crazed. It’s not enough to think, “Oh, sure, I think this novel will probably be good enough to be looked at with some interest by a literary agent.” In my experience, you need to be ludicrously positive. You need to be dreaming of that multi-publisher auction, your book piled high in supermarkets, your name on bestseller lists, foreign rights deals flooding in. Whatever works for you.

You don’t have to be reasonable. Just give yourself whatever drug gets you through. You’ve got a daydream about being invited onto Oprah? Or getting a call from a certain Stockholm-based prize committee? Then good. Dream away.

Those hopes may well be unrealistic. After all, the brutal statistics say, you aren’t likely to be published. If you are, the outcome – critical and commercial – may not be all that astonishing. But those true and reasonable facts are hardly likely to sustain you through months of creative endeavour, hard labour, and false paths.

So leave realism aside. For the creative phase, be as unreasonable as you want. Give yourself whatever dreams you need to inspire you. And remember this dictum of Jane Smiley’s: “Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.”

She’s right. Block out the negative. Dream your dreams. And write.

But then comes the second phase, the editorial one.

For most first-time novelists, I’d say completion of the first draft marks – very roughly – your halfway point in the whole creative process. The editorial process is likely to take as long, or maybe longer, as the writing phase. It’s equally critical. I’ve never once seen a first draft manuscript that was in good enough shape to find a publisher. My own first draft manuscripts (which I edit heavily as I go) would not be ones I’d be happy to send out.

And now you need to switch from the forgiving / dreamy / inspirational you to the pedantic / critical / perfectionist one. You need to transform from loon to prison officer.

Everything you have just written is up for review. Everything.

Your basic idea for the novel. Is that sharp enough? Attractive enough? Fresh enough? Does it infuse the entire book? Is it saleable?

Your basic plot arc. Is it clear? Does it compel the attention? Does the ending satisfy? Does the basic plot machinery work?

And does your main character engage the reader? And do your settings exist and have atmosphere? And what about your secondary characters? And was your first person / third person choice correct? And do you have the right number of viewpoints in play?

Oh yes, and does this sentence really need all ten words, or could you say the same thing just as well in eight?

For this phase, in my experience, you more or less have to drop the Oprah daydreams. Forgiving optimism isn’t the right spirit to bring to the task of constant fault-finding and error-correction.

Quite the contrary. In that first phase, you needed to praise yourself as the word counter ticked slowly up. Now you need to do the reverse. “Yay! I deleted 3,000 words today. Well done, me.”

In the first phase, you needed to think, “Yes! You know what? My Best Friend character really is funny, quirky and a delight on the page.” Now you need to ask, “Is that actually funny? Or is it just lame? Would the balance of this scene feel better if I just cut the banter?”

This process, always, is trial and error. You try one thing and see if it feels better. If not, you try another and another till you find something that pleases you.

A solid grounding in writing craft will unquestionably support this process – you’ll work more efficiently and produce a better outcome. But every editorial decision still comes down to a question of which sounds better to you, X or Y? Perhaps you settle on Y, and complete this new draft, then come back to the same place during a new round of editing, and you’ll find yourself asking “Y or Z? Or was I wrong to abandon X? Now what I’ve changed the Auntie Prue death scene, maybe I’d do better to stick with X here?” The process only ends when you read the manuscript and think that, yes, you like what’s written there. You can’t find a way to improve it.

Emotionally speaking (and in my experience, at least), the thing that sustains you through the editorial phase isn’t wild-eyed optimism, it’s a sense of relief.

You knew the first draft was problematic – of course you did. That’s why you had to keep telling yourself good-fortune fables to keep your spirits up. Now, with the editing, you can start addressing problems, and you feel the book starting to lift.

For me, that experience is of finding a faster, lighter, more purposeful book emerging from the manuscript I started with. It’s almost like you are pulling heavy, sea-going timbers from a boat, to find a sleek fibreglass hull underneath. That’s what allows you to be a brutal critic of your own work: you can see that the criticism leads to a better reading experience. You actually see it happening in front of you.

I don’t want to pretend that these observations are universal. They may not be. In the end, you need to arrange your emotional landscape in whatever way best suits you and your life and your project. If wild optimism is what keeps you going though that editorial phase, then please – be my wildly optimistic guest. If you like to edit your book as you write (and I do), then by all means bring something of the prison guard to your writing phase as well as your purely editorial one.

But forgive yourself. Find the process that works for you, and permit it. There isn’t a right or wrong as regards process. There’s only a good or bad in terms of the final manuscript. If you can navigate your little craft to the Harbour of Good Writing, then North Pole / South Pole / Panama Canal? Just take whatever route works for you.

Happy sailing, happy writing.