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This email is something of a follow-up to last week, so if you didn’t like last week’s missive, I strongly suggest you ditch this one IMMEDIATELY before you LOSE ANY MORE OF YOUR LIFE to what I can only honestly describe as PURPOSELESS NONSENSE. If that means you aren’t sure how to spend the next four minutes, let me offer you:

• My daughters’ favourite guide to different horse breeds
• Sudoku for idiots, and I do mean idiots
• A collection of botanical reliefs by the mighty Rachel Dein
• A discussion of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida.
• An excellent video that gives you a step-by-step guide on how to set fire to your hand, or indeed any other part of your anatomy. [My 7-year-old safety adviser says: “No, not your head.” She’s right.]

Right, then.

Knowledge and ignorance.

We all know that it’s important to give your characters character. So, we think about:

• Physical appearance
• The way the person dresses
• Their close relationships
• Their job
• Their childhood and family background
• Their special skills (riding? Martial arts? North Siberian dialects?)
• Their memories
• Their objectives
• Their values
• Their personality

And so on.

And good. All this is good. It’s necessary. If you haven’t done this good, patient, multi-dimensional work, you need to do it. The more you know the character, the more that knowledge will flood your writing.

Some of the things you know about your character will almost certainly enter your writing directly. (Your protagonist had a hideous car accident on a level crossing when a teenager? An accident where he was at fault? Where others were seriously injured? You’ll almost certainly want to let that life-defining incident seep into your story somewhere.)

Other things may not directly enter your writing. Your character grew up in a Wiltshire village? He can still remember the blue curtains with yellow flowers? The lumpy bed? The low cottagey ceilings? The hens from next door who used to invade their summer games of cricket? Well, some of that might get into your book, but a lot of that knowledge is simply there if you need it. It’s on hand, accessible.

The simple guideline is: Your knowledge of a character is sufficient, when anything you care to reach for is immediately present.

To be sure, there’s a sleight of hand involved here. It’s not that you create a stock of knowledge before you start to write and are limited to that stock as you proceed. On the contrary, it works more like this: you develop your imaginative knowledge of your character to the point at which the thing you need (the memory, sensation, response, clothing choice, observation) leaps to mind the moment you need it. It’s as though you reach up to get a cup from a shelf and the act of reaching creates the cup.

The thing that’s key here is simply: is the option supplied by your imagination right for the character? For the story? Has a specificity that seems personal rather than general? So there are plenty of people, for example, who grow up in English villages, but there’s something unique feeling about the exact blue-and-yellow curtains / lumpy beds / cricket ‘n’ hens combo.

OK. All this is good, wholesome stuff. But what I really want to talk about is ignorance and uselessness.

When I made a list of character traits above, you won’t have balked at my inclusion of ‘special skills’ on that list. If you made some kind of character inventory before starting to write, you almost certainly ticked that box.

But what about ignorance and incompetence? No one is a genius at everything. No one is even ordinarily competent at everything. The great philosopher may be a dullard in the kitchen. The martial arts ninja may have terrible taste in clothes. Or (to think of a character close to my heart) a genius detective may well also be:

• A terrible cook
• An underwhelming girlfriend
• Forgetful of extremely basic facts about her own life
• A very undependable cleaner
• Unnervingly unpredictable in conversation
• As infuriating as she is brilliant
• And so on

The gaps are at least as interesting as the superpowers, and perhaps more so. If you create a character with one or two superpowers (a martial arts ninja who is also an acclaimed sushi chef) that character will inevitably seem a little flat if there are no deficiencies to offset the accomplishments. Your character will always have an air of fantasy about him or her, and that air of fantasy prevents proper connection with the reader.

Another issue is the loss of the opportunities for humour that idiocy offers. There’s a particular joy in relishing a character’s idiocy just a page or two after you’ve relished their brilliance.

And –

Really, the secret of good writing is to force a reader to engage deeply. The deeper that engagement, the more attentive the reading, the more fully that book will satisfy its audience. And if a story keeps tacking between “Wow, how did they accomplish this?” and “What kind of an idiot would do that?”, the engagement is more or less guaranteed.

Now, to be sure, I work with a highly coloured character and these things are more visible with such characters. But still – an illustration may help make the point, even for people who run with more everyday characters. So, I once wrote a fight scene that had Fiona in ninja mode: breaking a bad guy’s jaw with astonishing speed (and after astonishingly little provocation.)

Those kind of fight scenes are standard thriller-fare. But then Fiona gets incredibly shaky. Walks to a bus shelter. Has an inane conversation with the only other person there. (Him to her: ‘Are you all right?”. She to him: “I don’t know.”) Then she walks smack-dab into the Plexiglass wall of the shelter and bruises her forehead. Goes home, has a bath. Smokes a joint. Does some real detectiving (phoning round hospitals to see if she can find the man with the smashed jaw.) Keeps pressing the bruise on her forehead because it reminds her that she’s real. Then calls her boyfriend and has a flirty conversation with him, which she knows is somewhat fraudulent (she’s only high because of the fight and the shock afterwards.)

It's just not possible to steer an orderly path through this lot. You can’t just go, “Oh, Fiona’s great at everything” or “Fiona will certainly behave like X”, because the truth is that she’s just not predictable that way. The deficiencies in Fiona’s character keep setting potholes in the way of a more orderly progression.

It’s the same with knowledge. Fiona’s knowledge of the law and police procedure is exemplary. Her knowhow around certain sorts of law-breaking is alarmingly high. She knows plenty about cannabis cultivation. She has pockets of surprising knowledge – history, geography, books – but there are huge gaps too. She knows not the first thing about cooking. She’s ignorant of anything mechanical. She has no dress sense and no interior design sense. She doesn’t know anything about popular culture. (In a very early tale, she had to puzzle out, slowly, that Clint Eastwood was a movie star.) Her grip on office politics and gossip is erratic at best.

The result of this is that the reader can’t predict my character’s journey. Not from the start to the end of the book, but not even from the start of the page to the end. That means the reader has to pay close attention, or they’ll miss something. The more predictable your character is, the easier it is for the reader to start skimming.

And skimming is death.

That’s more or less it from me, except that – while we’re on the subject of death – please do read the PSes below before you start setting any part of yourself on fire.

Oh yes, and it’s Good Friday next week, which is an actual holiday, so I’m going to take an actual holiday. That means no email from me next week. Normal service resumes the week after.

Til soon.

Harry

PS: That setting yourself on fire thing? It’s real. I have set my arm on fire and it’s fun. I can’t advise you to have a go – in fact, please don’t do it, because it’s obviously unsafe. But if you are fool enough to do it, then do it outside. Make sure your arm is thoroughly wet (with ordinary water, not butane-spiked water) before you start. And have a plunge bucket (again, ordinary wet water) ready for emergencies.

But, yeah, better not to do it at all.

Right. So:

In one of the Bond movies, Bond and The Girl (in this case, Madeleine Swann, played by Lea Seydoux) are standing at a rail-stop in the desert when a car approaches, shimmering out of the dust. Swann says, ‘What’s that?’, which is not a dumb question, because the vehicle is barely visible. Bond lets the car get a little closer, then says, with a kind of satisfaction, ‘That is a 1948 Rolls Royce Silver Wraith.’

And look: this is a movie, not a book.

And look: a Bond movie is more of a fantasy movie, than it is a realist one.

And look Bond is Bond. We appraise Bond movies according to a general scale of Bondishness. Ordinary critical tools are not strictly relevant here.

Nevertheless, Bond is a useful way to explain the temptation. Bond’s comment there tells the reader that he loves vintage cars and is at least somewhat expert in them. In other movies, Bond shows a similar expertise in wines, in Russian military secrets, and much else.

The movie makers (and Ian Fleming, the author) are at pains to characterise via expertise. Bond knows about the good things in life (wines, cars, watches). He knows about the violent things in life (guns, weapons, and the rest.) The viewer or reader understands something of Bond’s character from the knowledge he chooses to display.

But – Bond is a fantasy, given licence by its fame. Your novel does not have that licence. Let’s say an author creates a character who is (why not?) a professional escort with ambitions to become a spy. She’s with a client and comments ‘He wears an Alexander McQueen double-cuffed shirt, with custom-made silver links. A Patek Philippe Nautilus gleams from beneath the cuff …’

What are your thoughts as a reader?

The author, I think, wants you to have two things in mind. First, this character lives in a world of exciting luxury and, second, that she has a kind of enviable expertise to share. The knowledge she has lends her a kind of class.

I’m not sure that either of these things is achieved. As a writer, you want to get the reader feeling present in this world of luxury. For me, and for most readers, that will not be achieved by a list of brand-names. I can’t picture a Patek Philippe Nautilus. I’ve no idea how an Alexander McQueen shirt looks different from any other kind of shirt. As a reader, we don’t think, ‘Yes, I feel present here …’. We think, ‘Oh, the author wants me to know that this is all very luxurious.’ That second thought is a hopelessly poor substitute for the first.

Once upon a time – when Ian Fleming was writing, for example – technical knowledge did, I suppose, bring some cachet. “Oh, Ian Fleming must know plenty about wines if he says that the Petrus ’54 was markedly better than the ’57.” But today? Phooey. We all have Wikipedia at our fingertips. We can all know as much of anything as we want. (Even my nine-year-old has achieved a strange degree of expertise in her chosen discipline: “Which horse has more stamina, a Morgan or a Connemara …?” “How many hands is a Welsh cob?” “Is a Friesian horse good for beginners …?” My wife and I have promised to buy her a horse, once she has saved up enough to buy a field to put it in.)

The really severe problem, however, is that in most cases the rush to brand-namery ends up emptying the character. So, honestly, how many people can tell from a brief glance at a watch peeping from beneath a cuff, what make and model it is? I’d say almost none. Even the Patek Philippe-wearing crowd wouldn’t be able to do that. Presumably a seller of posh watches could tell one from another. Ditto anyone deeply involved in the industry itself. But who else? Virtually no one. So either our escort has a side-hustle as a saleswoman. Or she’s just peculiarly interested in watches. Or (in practice) the author is simply steam-rolling the character in order to get a brand-name in.

You can’t do that. Your character is the most important element of your whole book. The most delicate. If you crush her – however temporarily – for the sake of a brand reference, you have diminished your reader’s attachment to the person whose job is to get the reader through the book. That’s never a choice worth making.

If you want to show that your escort character is comfortable with this kind of environments, you need to do so in a way that reflects who she is. This kind of thing, for example:

“He spends a lot of time adjusting his jacket, his shirt cuffs, the gleam of his watch. Before the end of the evening, he’ll have to mention what kind of watch it is. The less classy types – that is, most of them – tell me how much it cost. The lowest figure I’ve been given is eight thousand pounds. The highest is nearly hundred grand. To begin with, I assume they were bullshitting me, that these numbers were all part of the brag. Now, I think the numbers are pinpoint accurate. Money is the only metric for these people, the one thing they never lie about.”

That passage still shows expertise of a sort: an expertise in sleazy rich guys. It also displays a useful sliver of ignorance. She doesn’t really know about the prices of these things. Her judgements are to do with people, not watches. The result is that the passage enhances her credibility as a character. We’re further into a fictional world, not pushed out of it. We feel the world that the author wants us to see, but we encounter it in a way that places character first. That’s the way to do it, always.

I don’t write about high-luxury environments myself, but I have included in the PSes a chunk of one of my Fiona Griffiths books, in which my character (operating undercover as a low-paid, semi-homeless cleaner) enters an upmarket winebar. The bar is not remotely at the Patek Philippe level of luxury, but the step from Fiona’s current life-level to the bar is a big one. I don’t mention a single brandname in the chunk below, and don’t need to.

You’ll need to read the passage to see if it works, but if it does, it achieves its effect by:

• Using simple, telling detail – a hole in a boot, a sodden foot.
• Using descriptive language that explicitly avoids excessive knowledge
• Imagery that emphasises distance, not belonging
• Getting the character to behave in a way that’s wrong for the place she’s in.

Simple to say and, phew, simple enough to do.

I once bought a knock-off Rolex in New York’s Chinatown for $10. It looked really nice until all the gold rubbed off, but even then it had a kind of charm. If I had $100 million, I still wouldn’t buy a fancy watch. My little Tabby might get a pony though …

Til soon.

Harry

PS: Here’s the chunk. My comments in square brackets.

I was here early. Six twenty. Have been walking up and down since then looking in at the warmly lit windows and feeling out of place. One of my boots has a hole in the sole and my foot is sodden. [Simple indicator of poverty]

But in the end, I go in.

It’s a smart bar, nicely done. Dark wooden floor. Scrubbed wooden bar. Lots of heavy fittings: oak casks, brass nautical lamps, a huge glass bowl filled with wine corks and dried hops. [Nothing resembling a brandname, let alone expert knowledge. The opposite, in fact. These are observations that anyone at all is capable of making.]

I stand, dripping, in the entrance area as men in suits and women in tailored outfits talk, laugh, fiddle with their phones. [Again: the opposite of brandnames. The emptiness of that phrase, tailored outfits, almost says, ‘Look, I expect other people would know how to describe those clothes better, but I don’t, because I’m not of that world.]

A waiter with a stubbly beard and a blue neckerchief approaches. He’s wearing a smile but I have this vision of him simply clearing me away, the way you might if you came into your kitchen and found a dead pigeon or a stray drowned mouse making a mess of your scrubbed limestone floors. [A characteristic Fiona-ish image, but again one that emphasises the huge gulf between her and this place.]

I stand there, dripping, waiting to be tidied. Wet cotton mops and metal buckets.

But I’m not tidied. Vic [the person she’s here to meet] emerges from behind a raw oak pillar. My face must change somehow, because the waiter swings round, sees Vic. Some look is exchanged, and the waiter waves me over to where Vic has a table waiting.

‘You made it,’ he says.

He clucks around me, a fussy uncle. He wants me to remove my coat, but I keep it on. Take off my hat, but keep it close. [She does the wrong thing, socially, in this environment. It’s not just the badness of her clothes. She doesn’t know the right way to behave.]

He wants me to choose a drink. Pushes a long wine list at me, tells me to order anything. I ask for water. He tells me again to order anything, meaning that water doesn’t count, so I say orange juice, a small one. [Ditto!]He orders another glass of red wine for him, a bowl of olives, toasted ciabatta slices and olive oil, a selection of antipasti, and my orange juice. [Vic does know the right way to behave and his unfussed accuracy of behaviour is a better clue to his social milieu than the kind of watch he chooses to wear.]

Good morning, everyone!

Today we are excited to share with you a Spotlight On interview featuring Paige Wheeler from Creative Media Agency.

CMA was founded by Paige in 1997. As an agent, she represents a range of genres in fiction and non-fiction, including women's, book club, romance (contemporary and historical), mystery, thriller, memoir, business, self-help and popular science. She also represents some young adult and middle grade fiction. She is not the best fit for picture books, short stories, sci-fi or academic non-fiction. Authors represented by Paige include A. J. Banner (In Another Light, published October 2021), Roberta Isleib/Lucy Burdette (A Dish to Die For, published August 2022) and Sheila Roberts (The Road to Christmas, published September 2022).

Paige is also active on Twitter at @pwheeler_agent where you can stay up to date on her projects.

"Whenever people ask me what a literary agent does, the first word that comes to mind is advocacy."

Hi Paige, thanks for speaking with us today!

What brought you to agenting?

I’ve been in publishing for over 30 years. I originally started on the editorial side of publishing before moving over to agenting. My first agenting position involved working in television and books – representing television writers, producers, and on camera celebrities. I also represented book authors, which was incredibly rewarding. I loved working with authors and advocating for their work, so I transitioned into literary agenting and formed Creative Media Agency in 1997. The agency grew quite quickly, so I formed Folio with two business partners. After eight years, I realized I missed the boutique experience, so I relaunched CMA.

What’s your favourite thing about being an agent?

Whenever people ask me what a literary agent does, the first word that comes to mind is advocacy. I absolutely love working with authors to shape their work and advocating for the best deal possible. I also work hard with my clients to plan out their career, looking down the road to future goals. There’s nothing more rewarding than helping a writer achieve their dreams of becoming a career author.

What makes for a successful author-agent relationship? How can both parties get the most out of the relationship?

I believe that communication is one of the most crucial aspects of building a successful author-agent relationship. My job is to figure out what the author wants and to chase after that, so we need to be able to talk openly and honestly. This starts at the beginning of the relationship when we discuss goals and preferred communication style.

What’s at the top of your fiction wish-list?

For adult fiction, I’m currently interested in Women’s Fiction (similar to Big Little Lies or What Happens in Paradise), Book Club Fiction (I absolutely loved Eleanor Oliphant is Fine), mysteries and thrillers (Behind Closed Doors was awesome), and romance, including contemporary romance, historical romance, and inspirational romance.

For YA and MG, I would love to find contemporary fiction (think Jenny Han or Sarah Dessen), Mystery (I adored One of Us is Lying), and Dystopian. For Middle Grade, I am also open to Fantasy.

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

For nonfiction, I’m looking for Memoirs similar to The Blueberry Years or Under the Tuscan Sun, Narrative Nonfiction (think Into Thin Air or Maybe You Should Talk to Someone), nonfiction that tackles women’s issues (such as Survival Mom or Girl Wash Your Face), Business/Entrepreneurship (Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office) and Practical Nonfiction (Home, Science, Self Help, Parenting, and Pop Reference).

Q. Is there any genre you’d rather not receive?

I’m not looking for picture books, short story collections, science fiction, poetry, screenplays, and academic nonfiction.

Q. What do you want to see in a query letter? And what do you hate?

For a fictional query, I love to see a strong, attention-grabbing synopsis as well as the first five pages of the manuscript. In your synopsis, I always appreciate when an author can clearly and concisely explain the heart of the story and what makes it unique. A good query letter will leave me excited to dive into the pages. If the author has previously published, they should include that in the query letter as well. Please also include “Query” in the subject of the email.

For a nonfiction query, I love when an author submits a concise nonfiction proposal packed with detail and information. Make sure you include recent comp titles and have a marketing and promotion section as well as solid steps for promoting your book. We ask that each author submits an extended author bio along with the query.

I always appreciate it when the author has done a bit of research on the agent/agency. So, it’s nice to include a personalized greeting. Please do not send out a mass email to 20 different agents. Also, it looks great if an author followed our query guidelines posted on our website, https://cmalit.com. If an author sends in 20 pages with no query letter, it always gives me a moment of pause.

Q. Same question when it comes to the synopsis. What should writers do? What should they avoid?

For the synopsis, I would recommend creating a strong summary. Try to open it with an attention-grabbing line and include helpful details that sets your story apart. Please try to avoid any major plot holes. When reading a synopsis, I want to know what makes these characters interesting, the hook of the plot, and any interesting world building.

Q. What are you looking for in the opening pages of a novel? What really excites you?

I love a fresh, unique voice that immediately jumps off the page or a unique take on an old trope. Within the first few pages, I’m looking for complex, interesting characters, immersive writing, and an engaging hook. I want to be quickly pulled into a project without a massive interjection of backstory in the first chapter.

Q. What are some of your favourite authors and books?

Some of my favourite (non-client) authors include BA Paris, Peter Mayle, Kristin Hannah, Daniel Pink, Helen Hoang, and Kristan Higgins. As for books, there are two books I’ve read recently that I thoroughly enjoyed. The first was One of Us is Lying by Karen McManus. I loved the premise of the story. I’m a big fan of any story that has an innovative twist on a classic book or film. The plot was intriguing and kept me guessing until the end. The other book I loved was The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni. Not only was the story engaging and well-told, but the nonlinear timeline kept me on my toes.

Q. What interests or passions do you have beyond the world of books? What do you love?

I’ve always been into home design—I have a slew of shelter magazine strew about the house and I’m a recovery HGTV addict for the past 15 years. I enjoy reading about sustainable lifestyles but I sadly can’t live that way. Right now my biggest passion seems to be an addiction to K-dramas. I’m totally hooked and I can’t get enough. I watch them in Korean with the subtitles on. Subsequently, I’ve found I’m frequently craving Korean food.

Q. Any final words of advice for authors in the writing or querying process?

Don’t get too discouraged by a rejection. Reading preferences are highly subjective and I need to feel passionate about a project to take it on. Keep working on your craft and querying agents. It may take some time to find an agent that’s the right fit or to realize that you need to strengthen your writing. I don’t reject writers, I reject projects, so I generally offer authors the opportunity to resubmit with a different project.

The full interview can be found on Paige's AgentMatch profile.

In the meantime, if you’re struggling with your query letter and synopsis, do check out our free resources on our website. We have lots of info to help you on your way. Or, better still, if you’re a member with us, our lovely Writers Support team will be happy to offer you a free query letter review!

Benjamin Jowett was a Victorian professor of Greek, a theologian and a college reformer. Photos of him have a somewhat stern and whiskery air, but he is responsible for one of my favourite quotes ever:

We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps have found it. But have we had any fun?

I love that. As writers, we’re not all that interested in truth, so perhaps we can rephrase: We have sought a decent story, and sometimes perhaps have told one. But have we had any fun?

That quote is in my head because it occurred to me this week that perhaps my best books are also the ones I most enjoyed writing. It’s certainly true that the ones I most laboured over ended up proficient enough, but less joyous in the reading.

For example:

• My first ever book, The Money Makers, had less craft in it, less knowledge of writing technique, than anything else I’ve done. But it was powered by a great concept and burned with a kind of pleasure. That pleasure does, I swear, transmit itself in the reading. You end up just plain liking the book and, as a result, you’re inclined to forgive its lack of sophistication.
• My non-fiction history book, This Little Britain, was a passion project for me. I had to write it at extreme pace (big advance, short deadline) and the book somehow benefitted from the resultant lack of reflection. I had to dig in, write fast and enjoy the ride. A longer writing time would have delivered a smoother read, but a more engaging one? Maybe not.
• Of the Fiona Griffiths novels, the one I probably enjoyed the most was The Deepest Grave. That book is plain bananas: it’s a police procedural about a hunt for relics of King Arthur. The novel ends up with a swordfight in a cave. There’s no writing manual on earth which says you can write a realistic modern-set police procedural about such things, but I did, and I loved it, and my delight in the subject matter echoes through the book. Of all my FG novels, that’s probably the one that has most resonated with readers.

Overall, I think it is true that a joyous writing experience leads to a better reading experience.

That’s nice to know in one way. Most writers could make more money in other jobs – or indeed, use those other jobs to fund their writing time – so it definitely matters that writing is fun.

But …

Life ain’t always easy and writing isn’t always pleasurable. What happens if you are finding the writing a slog? The joyous writing = good writing rule is a comfort if you’re having fun. But doesn’t that also mean that painful writing = bad writing? In which case, the rule seems to double your troubles.

I think maybe it does.

I do strongly believe that you should write mostly for the fun of it. If you’re not actually under contract to a publisher, then why write if you hate it? Of course, in any book, there’ll be tough patches that you just have to push through, but that’s the same as any challenging hobby. Overcoming those challenges is part of the joy.

But some books have the joy/challenge balance wrong. The joy’s never quite enough, the challenges rather too constant.

So what to do? As usual, I don’t really know the answer, but my personal cocktail of solutions includes the following:

• KBO. This was a core part of Winston Churchill’s philosophy on life. If women were around, he expressed it as “KBO”. If they weren’t, he said it plainly: Keep Bu**ering On. (I’m only putting in some coy little asterisks there, by the way, because I reckon this email will end up in your spam folder if I don’t. I’m sure you could handle a pair of missing Gs.) In the end, an ability just to push through the tough patches is the single most important quality of any writer.
• If possible, take a break. And the breakier the break, the better. A sharp change of routine – a holiday, a love affair – is going to work better than “everything the same, but no writing”.
• Related to the above: if you have a life problem to deal with, then deal with it. I know that’s easier said than done, but it is often the shortest and best way.
• Figure out if there’s a technical flaw somewhere. A big one this, especially for less experienced writers. So often enough, you start a project with enthusiasm. At about the 30,000 word mark, that enthusiasm starts to dissipate. Then you write more text, but it just seems pointless. You don’t like what you’ve written. You give up. And often, often, often it’s because of an identifiable and fixable technical fault. So it could be something you’re doing wrong in terms of points of view. Or your sense of place. Or your plotting. Or almost anything. Those things will make your writing seem bad (because in this one specific way, it is bad). Then, since you don’t know what the issue is or how to fix it, you just give up. That’s where better skills help massively – and a JW manuscript assessment or a writing course will most likely sort you out.
• Cut. Oh my goodness, this is so simple and so powerful. If you are telling a good story in 120,000 words that you could express equally well in 90,000 words – and it’s very, very common to see such things – then you have attached a huge drag anchor to your narrative. It can never leap free because you are burdening the reader with 30,000 purposeless words. Cut, my friend. Cut more than you think you can cut. Take joy in cutting. You will feel your manuscript lift and surge forward in the water. It’ll love you for the surgery. Be ambitious.
• The dagger in the table. And sometimes, simply enough, a narrative starts to drag because it’s a bit draggy. The set-up is great. The ending you have in mind is fantastic. But the bit in-between? It’s all a bit ho-hum. So kill someone. Or have a bank robbery. Or have someone get abducted or buried underground. Offer a mid-story incident that shatters the shape of the story that the reader was expecting. Write a novel with two climaxes. Plunge the dagger into the table and watch it quiver.
• Ask yourself: have a nailed the basic concept for this novel? If you don’t have a stellar concept, your novel will never be stellar. If your concept – your elevator pitch – just isn’t all that strong, the novel will essentially be unsaleable no matter how many nice little plot turns you have in chapter 22, and no matter how quirky you make Aunt Maisie. And if you have embarked on a novel with too little zizz, then add it. You don’t have to scrap what you’ve written and start again. You just have to find the ingredient – a ghost, a murder, a secret letter, a splash of magic, a something – that gives life to all the rest.

That’s it from me. This is now the second day of a school strike. We had seven kids in the house yesterday – my four plus three others – and five today. School returns tomorrow. School and quietness …

Til soon.

Harry

I’m reading a book at the moment that came recommended, a psychological thriller about a small, close group of friends.

I’ve started the book. I’m seventy pages in. I already know I won’t finish it.

The problem, a terribly common one, is that I haven’t bonded with the characters. They don’t feel like real people. If I’m honest, I can’t tell one from another, or not really.

Now, quite likely, part of the problem is me. I’m TERRIBLE with names and faces. Always have been, always will be. I forget character names in my own books. I fail to recognise people I know and have chatted with extensively. My uselessness in real life probably carries over into books too.

But good characterisation should still overcome reader idiocy. Perhaps I might be slow to assemble the characters in my head, but I should still get there in the end, no? I shouldn’t be fifty pages in and still have no meaningful idea of who these people are.

Also – alarmingly – this book has avoided all the common pitfalls. So, the author has:

• Been sure to give the characters distinctive names. They’re not all Amy, Anna, Alice and Andy.
• Given them distinct physical characteristics. We have (inevitably) the pretty sexy one, the hunk, the dark scowling one, and so on.
• Put a bit of zing in their dialogue
• Endowed them with plenty of interpersonal history, likes and dislikes, divergent backgrounds and so on.

It looks like the author has done all the things she’s meant to have done – all the things that the writing books suggest. All the things that, erm, helpful weekly emails on writing advice are likely to suggest.

So what’s the problem? Why do some books never quite ground themselves? Why do some characters end the book still feeling two-dimensional and unreal?

The short answer – I’m not sure.

The longer answer is threefold.

First, I’m confident that you can’t just introduce your characters in a rush. When you’re at a party, that “Harry, meet Amy, Baz, Charlie, Dino and Esmerelda” thing doesn’t really give you a chance to remember who everyone is. But if you get five or ten minutes chatting with Amy before you get to meet Baz, and so on, you’re likely to win this game. Amy is no longer just a face and a name. She’s now someone who comes stored with her own little fact-file. When you meet Baz, you have enough data on Amy that she can safely be put into storage as you meet Baz.

I think the same rule applies in books. Slower introductions are better. And if, for example, your book just does have a group of characters turning up in a cluster – a group of friends meeting up for a long weekend – you can still split them apart. Amy and Baz can hike to the house from the rural train station. Dino and Charlie can score a cheeky snog in the kitchen. Esmerelda can just be late (she’s always late) and arrive in a flurry at the end of chapter two.

And then too, I think you need to look away from, not directly at, the issue.

What I mean here is that you don’t solve the problem of character identification by aiming to provide a torrent of quick data. “Hey, reader, you haven’t met Charlie before, so here’s a quick summary of what you need to know. She’s the tall, blonde, pretty one, OK? Gifted at university (studied English), but wasted in a sort of glam-but-dead-endy PR job. Blah blah blah.”

That kind of introduction, especially if it comes amongst a spatter of other such introductions, is likely to wash over and through the reader. I think they just don’t work.

Instead, just show your characters in action. Then it’s simple: just tell the reader what the reader needs to know to make sense of the action. So let’s say that two or three friends have gone out to dinner. Leaving the restaurant, Charlie breaks a heel. You now have a perfectly sensible opportunity to describe her clothes. You might well use the chance to describe her appearance more generally. (“I could see passers-by looking over at us. A woman, blonde and pretty, in a silver sequinned dress, lying on the pavement. You can tell they thought she was drunk, and perhaps she was a bit …”)

You’re still conveying data to the reader, but you’re not doing so by presenting an index-card of facts. You’re doing so by telling a story. The reader doesn’t feel engaged by the index-card approach (it feels like work), but they do feel engaged by story (it’s why they’re reading.)

The third trick, I think, is that you can do much less than you think. It’s easy to think that you need to do it all: How tall is our pretty Charlie? What’s her eye colour? What do her mum and dad do for a living? Can she ride? (I bet she can ride.) Was she academically strong? Is she lazy? Does she love kids?

The more facts you shove at the reader, the more the reader is likely to resist.

And – it doesn’t matter.

Your mantra can be simply this: tell the reader what’s necessary for the story. Not more, not less.

That way, you’re not asking the reader to keep track of data that they don’t need. You’re giving them only what they do need, when they need it, in a way that slots logically into your story. Right at the end of the PSes, I’ve put a chunk of text from early in a novel – a group of five people going out to dinner.

What’s interesting to me, reading that chunk back in the light of this email, is how brusque I am. Two of my five characters aren’t relevant longer term, so I essentially discard them. I tell the reader next to nothing about them.

The other three do have longer term relevance, but even here I present virtually no character-data unless and until it becomes relevant to the moment in question. So one of the characters – David ‘Buzz’ Brydon – is a fit, intelligent, capable, courageous police officer. He’s not introduced like that, until it becomes relevant. Then, when the story needs him to run, Fiona says simply, “Buzz, who’s superfit …” That data slots so naturally into the story, that the reader just absorbs it with the story. There’s no sense anywhere of an index-card being presented.

With Buzz’s colleague, Jon Breakell, it’s the same thing to start with: appearances don’t matter. Then Fiona asks him to stay with the two women and he “puffs out his not-very-mighty chest and indicates his willingness to protect the women from all perils and dangers of this night.” That’s still hardly a complete physical description, but you already have something about him that’s memorable and presented in a way wholly congruent with the story-task at hand.

Buzz and Jon Breakell start to take shape as the story takes shape. The reader’s expected knowledge of those two keeps exact pace with the story itself.

You can do the same. Go slow. Stick with story. Do less than you think you ought to.

That’s it from me. I’m off to buy a coffee and have a swim.

Til soon.

Harry

PS: Here’s a chunk from a (not yet published) Fiona Griffiths novel. The chunk presents exactly the conundrum we’ve been talking about: five characters to introduce early on. My comments below [In square brackets and italics] show how I’ve been thinking about things …

I know this that a crime has taken place because a group of us have been out to dinner.

Me.

Buzz – Sergeant David Brydon – my first proper-proper boyfriend and the man to whom I was once engaged. [Boom. One piece of data here and it’s a big one – hard to forget. But nothing about appearance or anything else. Just a single fact.]

Penny Haskett, the blushing damsel who will, next summer, step into the ivory satin shoes that I vacated and trip fetchingly up the aisle to become the first Mrs Buzz. [Penny Haskett doesn’t really feature in the novel, so I just offer the key bit of data – Buzz’s fiancée – and move on. I don’t care if the reader forgets her name. I haven’t bothered to do hair colour and all that, because it doesn’t matter.]

Also two fig-leaves: Jon Breakell, a colleague of mine in Major Crime, and Jade Harding, a friend of Penny’s whom Jon is courting. Jon and Jade will make a good couple, I think, but they’re here mostly because the whole me / Buzz / Penny triangle can still feel a bit weird at times, so we try to dilute the experience wherever possible. [Jade also has no longer-term story relevance, hence no real pretence at an introduction. Jon Breakell is a character who emerges again, but he isn’t relevant in the story NOW, so there’s no need to deliver data now.]

Anyway. That’s our fivesome. We’ve been to a bar, then on to a pizza place.

Pizza. Puddings. The works. A nice enough evening, except that it’s got to the point where everyone wants to go home.

So we troop up the Hayes, beneath a soft night sky and the first hints of oncoming rain. We’re talking of nothing much, when Buzz’s phone bleeps a text. He looks at the phone and says ‘Crime report. Up here.’

His finger points us up the Hayes, where it forks off into Victoria Place. He starts walking faster. I can see he wants to run, except he doesn’t want to abandon his Intended.

I say, ‘Jon, can you stay with Penny and Jade? We’ll meet you up by the castle.’

Jon nods. Puffs out his not-very-mighty chest and indicates his willingness to protect the women from all perils and dangers of this night. [As soon as Jon becomes relevant to the story, he starts to take shape. Fiona is characteristically colourful in the way she speaks about him, and we still don’t know hair colour or family background or that kind of thing, but we start to feel Jon because we see and feel him in the setting of a story.] Buzz and I jog, then outright run, up Victoria Place, then down Church Street.

Buzz, who’s superfit, says, ‘Double assault. Ambulance on the way. Uniforms present. Sounds nasty.’ [Now we start to get more data about Buzz – he’s fit, he’s efficient in a police-y sort of way – but again, we only get data relevant to the situation.]

I don’t comment, just run. The truth is, if the scene is already being attended by police and ambulance services, our services aren’t really required. Buzz isn’t even a detective these days. He now runs a Data Intelligence Team which helps the force direct its resources to where they’re most needed.

But still. Buzz is the kind of man whose boots run towards disasters, not away from them. My own, more elegant, boots share that same basic mentality. [More data in these two paras. Again, directly relevant to the matter at hand.]

Victoria Place.

Church Street.

The NCP car park on Quay Street looms into view.

Two ambulances there, lights lazily flashing. Patrol cars too. Uniforms taping off the street. [That’s it. Only a few hundred words, but we already have a loose sense of the emerging protagonists and – because the two spare women have already been discarded – we’ve also been effectively told who it’s safe to forget about. Very simple. And I bet you remember who’s who.]

Good morning, everyone!

Today we are excited to bring you another great Spotlight On feature, this time with Molly Ker Hawn from The Bent Agency.

Molly joined The Bent Agency in 2012 and leads their London office, where she works with authors from all over the world, selling directly to publishers in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. She represents middle-grade and young adult fiction, graphic novels (complete with illustration), and non-fiction for readers aged 8-18. She is looking for books that are inventive, well-crafted, rich with emotion, and the perfect blend of literary and commercial (leaning more toward the literary side). She's particularly interested in hearing from writers from historically excluded communities.

You can find Molly on Twitter at @mollykh, where you can learn more about her interests. 

"Show me something I haven’t already seen today: a surprising opening sequence, a fresh voice that plays with language in unexpected ways."

Hi Molly, thank you for chatting with us!

Q. What’s at the top of your fiction wish-list? What authors do you love? What kind of books?

I like gripping stories by writers with well-crafted voices. I want books that make me feel something: joy, fear, sadness, outrage, delight. I love writing that makes me suspect the author read every word aloud to make sure every sentence was the best it could be. I like stories about families, about war, about friendship, about love—anything that makes me want to keep turning the pages, and that will make young readers feel the same way.

Q. What do you love when it comes to non-fiction? What topics fire you up? Which genres leave you cold?

I’m interested in narrative non-fiction for young readers: social histories, biographies of little-known but historically important figures; anything with a feminist bent.

Q. Is there any genre you’d rather not receive?

I don’t really connect with books with animal protagonists.

Q. What do you want to see in a query letter? And what do you hate?

I know query letters are hard to write, and I’ve seen some authors overthink them. Tell me what your book’s about, in a way that’s intriguing and makes me impatient to skip down to the sample pages, and tell me just enough about yourself to show me why you’re the person to write this particular book.  That’s all you need to do.

Q. What are you looking for in the opening pages of a novel? What really excites you?

I read the opening pages of over a hundred manuscripts every week. Show me something I haven’t already seen today: a surprising opening sequence, a fresh voice that plays with language in unexpected ways.

Q. Tell us about a recent deal (or three) that really delighted you.

Selling Louie Stowell’s first books that she’s illustrated herself has been real thrill. Her Loki: A Bad God’s Guide Series has taken her career to a new level and I love seeing all her tireless work rewarded with success.

The full interview will be posted to Molly's AgentMatch profile.

In the meantime, if you’re struggling with your query letter and synopsis, do check out our free resources on our website. We have lots of info to help you on your way. Or, better still, if you’re a member with us, our lovely Writers Support team will be happy to offer you a free query letter review!

Some thoughts that have been skittering around my brain-pan like:

• Kittens on a polished floor.
• Dried chickpeas in a Bedouin caravan
• Corks on the eddy beneath a weir
• A flapper girl dancing at the Ritz with her caddish beau
• The final stages of the flea high-jump Olympics

Selection of simile is according to customer choice and on a first-come-first-served basis.

Before those thoughts, I will just say that a lot of you have been irritated by some slow and somewhat glitchy behaviour on our Townhouse community. It doesn’t affect everyone, and has been getting better, but it’s still annoying when it happens to you. We are aware of the issues and have got a team of boffins working on them. I hope there’ll be a major improvement by the end of this month. Here endeth the housekeeping.

Thought the first

A while back, I had a chat with my agent about an author who had just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I said that I’d read the book and just didn’t think it was much good. No particular prose excellence. A slightly silly story. The whole thing feeling more like a performance than a story you could invest in.

My agent agreed, but said that the author in question was very good at playing the literary game – essentially, she knew how to act the Grand Literary Author, so people had a tendency to believe her act.

Thought the second

A while back, I mentioned that I’d been reading Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a novella about the Magdalen laundries in Ireland. (The laundries were run by convents, mostly, and took in prostitutes or, indeed, simply unmarried girls who had become pregnant. In theory, these places offered rehabilitation, but in practice often kept their inmates for life, and in very restrictive conditions. The system collapsed in the 1990s and the Irish government formally apologised in 2013.)

There’s no question that Keegan is an excellent prose writer: understated, subtle, deft, confident. But at the same time, there’s something a little strange going on, isn’t there? The book was published in 2022 and told a story set in the Christmas of 1985. The book was nominated for, and won, the Orwell Prize for political fiction.

And, OK, I liked the book, though probably not enough to give it any kind of major award. But an award for political fiction. Huh?

Politics is, presumably, a system for allowing society to sort through its choices. Higher tax or less tax? More immigration or less immigration? More pay for teachers, less pay for teachers, or all teaching staff to be paid exclusively in biscuits?

In any interesting political conversation, there’s something to be said for both sides. Indeed, for any interesting political conversation to happen at all, there have to betwo sides – or more.

When it comes to the Magdalen Laundries, however, there aren’t two sides. There’s just the one. Absolutely everyone in the entire world, including the Irish Taoiseach and the Pope and Bono and probably every priest in Ireland, thinks that the Magdalen Laundries were a Bad Thing.

So a political prize has been awarded to a book that is arguing something even less controversial than “War Can Be Rather Nasty” or “Democracy is Quite Good Really”.

Why? Why bother? Why even call the book political, when it clearly is nothing of the sort?

Thought the third

One more thought – an alarming one.

What if you can’t escape your own branding? Or rather: what if you can’t escape the branding that you’re given by Publisher Island & Media Land?

Anyone looking at my own publication history will see some decently reviewed commercial fiction, some odds and ends of non-fiction (at the less hefty end of the scale), and that’s it. But what if – as I do – I have a highly literary project to sell?

Literary fiction needs reviews in a way that commercial fiction doesn’t, so the stuff needs to appeal to reviewers. If I had spent the last ten years traipsing around the literary salons of London and saying the right things about the right books, and mwah-ing plenty with the right editors and critics, and having minor spats with the sort of people that I was meant to have minor spats with, wouldn’t my profile be very different from what it actually is?

And sure: you can definitely go from Major Literary Figure to Writes Crime Novels for Fun and Money. But can you make the move the other way around? Won’t reviewers worry that if you’re a lightweight crime novelist at heart, any supposedly literary undertaking will have an emptiness at its centre, a fundamental unseriousness?

***

Well, I don’t know.

I do think that authors and books which carefully set out to please to the New York Times are (unsurprisingly) more likely to please the New York Times. And since the NYT is massively influential, you don’t just win that one newspaper, you have an excellent chance of establishing a particular opinion about you in Media Land generally.

That’s why, I think, books like Claire Keegan’s get so heavily praised. Being any kind of reviewer or critic involves exposure. “I’m tempted to think X, but what if everyone else thinks Y? I’ll be like the only child who dressed up as Tinkerbell for World Book Day, when everyone else was doing something from the Hunger Games.”

So if the opinion you’re being asked to hold is an utterly safe one (“Magdalen Laundries? Ooh, ooh, I know the answer! They were baaaaad …”), there’s a kind of relief. You won’t be the only Tinkerbell in the playground. You can safely rest assured that all the other kids will come as Tinkerbell too. The equation is roughly:

                Claire Keegan = Good Author

                Claire Keegan’s prose = definitely Good Prose

                Theme of the Book = Ooh, yes, we definitely agree with everything here

                Overall Judgement = Must be a good book, right? It must be safe to say so.

And that’s why someone (I don’t mean Claire K) who writes a rather moderate book but has spent ten years acting the Great Literary Author has a competitive advantage over someone who has spent a long time writing about corpses and shootouts and things that are, y’know, actually fun.

I’d like a world where what mattered was the quality of the book itself, with no distractions about who the author has or has not air-kissed, or even about who the author has or has not thrown off a (fictional) cliff or near-drowned on a (fictional) trawler. I bet you’d like that world too.

But that is not the world we have and that’s a shame. On the other hand, the problem I’m talking about here is one that doesn’t really afflict debut novelists. For most of y’all, youse and you plural, this snow lies virgin, unprinted by boot, hoof, claw or tippy-toe.

That said, if you want to make of yourself a young literary cub, then go for it. Write for an acclaimed (if largely unread) literary magazine, help run a literary festival, get into a Twitter spat with someone. Those things will help.

If you want to write YA fiction, then it does truly help to be in the conversation. That might mean going to the right festivals, or engaging with agents / editors / booksellers / bloggers etc on Twitter, or it might mean some other form of engagement too. Those things too will definitely help.

And yet …

Well, the main thing is still the quality of your writing. I’ve never yet failed to sell a book that I really wanted to sell. I’ve not always looked like the person who ought to be writing it, but your writing alone should be enough to dispel those thoughts.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to go and write a book about how Global Warming Could Be Quite Bad. I’m going to follow that up with my bestseller on Why Big Tobacco Might Be an Itsy Bit Dodgy.