February 2024 – Jericho Writers
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Walking the Talk – part three in a series

An odd topic this time: the author’s note. I’m currently writing a note for The House at the End of the World and realised that it’s a topic almost no one ever addresses.

That note is not something that anyone ever seems to care about. It seems less consequential than a synopsis or query letter – and, in any event, much easier to write.

But you have to think about what you want from writing and how you expect to achieve it.

Maybe, you’d love to get one book accepted by one publisher and that’s it. Perhaps you don’t want or expect to make a living from writing. You may not want or expect to be writing a book a year. Perhaps the idea of marketing your own work fills you with horror.

And that’s truly fine with me. Those aims are perfectly honourable and your life is your life. If you’re one of those people, then this email is not especially aimed at you.

For everyone else – everyone, that is, who wants something like a career from writing – then the author’s note matters.

It matters for two reasons.

First, because it gives you a chance to make a personal connection with the reader. Your text itself is your product. People want (let’s say) a crime novel. So they go to Amazon or a physical bookstore and buy a crime novel. A huge proportion of novels are never finished by their readers (especially literary fiction, ahem.) But that means, if someone gets all the way to the end of your novel, then chooses to engage with your author’s note, they’re well on the way to being fans.

What do you want to do at that point?

If you were at a physical book signing, and someone asked you to sign a book, telling you that they were a fan, what would you do? Would you scribble your name on the inside cover, tersely hand the book over, and yell ‘Next’? Or would you engage in a couple of minutes’ conversation? Would you seek to cement the relationship which the book itself has started?

Of course, you choose the latter option. I mean, if you have the sentience of an amoeba, then of course you do.

You do that because you are a naturally nice person, of course. But you also do it, because you are more likely to get a repeat purchase from someone who has bonded with you, no matter how glancingly.

The author’s note is a place to create that bond.

It’s not as good as face to face, of course, but one note can reach tens of thousands of readers. It’s a place to be personal, revelatory, funny, honest. It’s a place which can show your personality, shorn of the constraints placed on you by fiction.

If you do it right, people don’t just think, ‘Oh, today I finished a great crime novel.’ They think, ‘Oh, today I finished a great crime novel and I feel that I made some little personal connection with the person who wrote it.’ That’s the start of a relationship which leads to multiple purchases over multiple years.

That’s the first reason.

The second reason is that you can parlay that moment of connection into an actual marketing tool.

Every serious author today ought to run their own email list. It can be very cheap and easy to set up. (Use MailerLite if you’re starting out, Convertkit if you’re more ambitious and more techie.)

And your author’s note can say, “Hey, folks, if you liked this novel, then join my Readers’ Club.” Best practice is to offer a little gift in exchange for any sign ups. Roughly speaking: if you give me your email address, I give you a story that’s free and exclusive to club members.

Remember that in ebooks, that invitation – join my Readers’ Club – can use a clickable link to take readers straight through to your sign-up page.

And once you have readers on your mailing list, you can stay in touch. You can tell them jokes, share news and enthusiasms … and, of course, announce book launches.

I won’t get into the details here, but suffice to say a small but well-run email list can generate sales well above the size of the list itself.

There are multiple ways to seed your email list with names, but no question at all, the very best technique comes from harvesting enthusiastic readers who have just finished and loved your book. Those are, pretty much by definition, the very best emails to have.

So use that note.

Don’t be crass. Be seductive, not pushy. Be authentic … but maybe, be your best-authentic self, not your woke-up-on-a-rainy-Friday-with-a-headache authentic self. And ask for readers’ email addresses.

They’ll be happy to give them to you.

Feedback Friday

Write with Jericho Week #7 / Point of View

If you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.

If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.

If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.

Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.

This week, the task is important … but optional. It’s really focused on anyone who’s not sure about their POV choice. If you’re happily first, or third, person, then just go with that. There’s no especial reason to rethink it. I’ve never once thought about writing my Fiona novels in anything other than first person, and the result is about 800,000 words all written, first person and present tense, from the inside of Fiona’s head.

But, OK, plenty of people are worried about the decisions they’ve made, and this exercise is for them. Here’s what I’m after:

Title

Genre

A line or two of explanation, if needed

A passage of 300 words or so. Choose a passage where you’re not too certain what Point of View feels right. Pop that passage (max 300 words) on Townhouse and say what your issues are. Let’s see what others think. And if you want to offer the same passage with two different POVs, then please do. Just make it clear what you think your preferred version is!

That’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘POV task, Option X, [Title of your WIP]’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.

Til soon.

Harry

Walking the Talk – part two in a series

For Feedback Friday last week, we wanted to look at whether your characters are multi-dimensional.

We asked: does your character have physical sensations? Memories? Characteristic patterns of behaviour / speech / thought? Do they have real-seeming interactions with other characters, where those interactions honour the individuality of each person? Does the character have a sense of humour? And so on.

It’s a hard task, actually, because it would never make sense to cram every character dimension into a single 300-word passage. Quite the opposite. Those multiple dimensions are there to be called on as and when the story demands. If the story doesn’t demand (say) the character remembering stuff from their childhood, it would make no sense to try and insert some Interesting Recollection, just for the sake of it. My forthcoming novel might have, I don’t know, perhaps a dozen significant memories in the space of 10,000 words, and that feels plenty.

Also: although we tend to separate things like Character and Settings for the purposes of teaching people how to write, those things should always bleed into each other.

If you’re seeing an autumn wood through the eyes of your character, the reader should experience both wood and character. It’s always X’s experience of Y that the reader wants to encounter.

So – and again as part of my ‘walking the talk’ series of emails, I thought I’d take an extended chunk of my forthcoming book and talk through how I personally handle these challenges.

The point here isn’t so much “I’m a really great writer so you should do these things exactly like me.” It’s more that I feel queasy about lecturing about things if I don’t show some ability to exhibit those things in my own work – and, at the very least, I ought to try to do those things.

So here we go. Here’s a chunk from towards the end of The House at The End of the World. Fiona, a detective and my lead character, is walking in the grounds of a secure psychiatric hospital with one of its patients – Jared Coad, a former Special Forces soldier with severe mental health challenges. The situation she’s in should be acutely dangerous, but she doesn’t quite feel it that way. The passage follows, in italics. My comments are in square brackets and bold.

You might want to read the italicised passage first, before coming back to the comments.

There’s an outcrop of limestone at the tip of the headland. Glittering and pink. Orange lichen. Moss. A hardy little mat of stonecrop, a few whitish flowers still holding on.

[It looks like this paragraph is pure description, albeit voiced in Fiona’s characteristically terse manner. And, OK, it mostly is pure description. But when you really look at it, the description echoes the title and the elevator pitch. The “tip of the headland” – that is, the very outermost point of this strip of land, which itself lies ‘at the end of the world’. And that thing about the hardy mat of stonecrop and its flowers is an observation about survival – about life and death. That is the deepest theme of the entire series.]

We scramble up the rock. I hardly need assistance, but Coad offers a hand and I take it. He lifts me with that startling physical ease. A power that finds it hard to calibrate itself against my sub-fifty kilo weight.

[Coad is a very strong, fit man, so this passage characterises him a bit, but it also brings Fiona’s own physical being into play. She’s a small woman. He’s a strong man. This tiny bit of action observes those physical facts – and does so in a way that’s totally consistent with the moment.]

‘I served with a girl once,’ Coad tells me. ‘Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Part of the set-up in Hereford. She was good. Very fit. Didn’t take any shit.’

I wait for anything further, but nothing more comes. But perhaps that’s all Coad needs by way of summary. Good. Fit. Takes no shit.

I score two out of three, then.

[This is Coad’s way of talking – and Fiona’s way of not talking. It also gives voice to Fiona’s interior observation – and the reader will know Fiona well enough to know that she is good, doesn’t take any shit, but isn’t especially fit.]

‘Have you thought what you’ll do?’ I ask.

‘What? After you fuck off to whatever you fuck off to next?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. As in: yes, I’ve thought about it.’

‘And?’

‘Fuck knows. Staying here was never in the plan.’

‘No.’

[In fact, what happens is that Jared Coad decides to swim out to sea and drown himself. This bit of dialogue is setting up that future. But again, I hope the dialogue feels realistic, or realistic enough, and has the personality of the two participants in it: Coad’s sweary military directness, Fiona’s intelligent but economical language.]

We look at the sea for a while. There are rolls of wire out here too, but we’re on the highest point of the headland here and the wire lies below us, not out of sight exactly, but almost. Enough that it doesn’t have to bother us.

We watch for a while. The gulls. The waves. The rolling print of the wind on the water. Stippling squalls that turn the sea’s smooth watercolour into something jumpy and agitated, like the surface has been rubbed with gorse.

[Jumpy and agitated? We are approaching the climax of the book, so the sea here is providing a visual image for the mood of the story itself. And there’s something else here too. This bit of land is beautiful – a lovely part of coastal Wales – but is also, effectively, a prison with more-than-Supermax levels of security. Is it hell or heaven? It hovers between the two, but here, the wire is out of sight which means that the heaven version tends to dominate. Again, there are shades of the ‘house of the end of the world’ theme here, and the ambiguity in what the end of the world might signify.]

Coad: ‘You know, you think, if you could get out, you could just stay away from trouble. You know, like you live on some remote Scottish island or something like that. You’d be OK.’

I nod. ‘Yes. I can see why you’d think that.’

‘But then, you know, you’d meet other people. Someone would do something to piss you off. Not even a big thing. Just, you know, something.’

I think of Rashford and Edwards. Or the two builders he assaulted. The guy with his head in a cement mixer. The other tossed into a roll of razor wire.

I say, ‘Yes. Something would come along.’

‘So …’

He says nothing further, and I nudge him.

[More dialogue. Coad is worried that he wouldn’t be safe out in the world, so, for him, leaving this hospital is probably not an option. Fiona agrees with that opinion, but here a little fragment of memory comes into play – remembering the violent incidents that brought him here as patient – and her here as detective.]

‘I should get going. It’s almost twenty to seven.’

‘OK. Yeah. OK.’

We walk back to the hospital, taking a looping route to stay clear of the admin wing, the view from their windows. Coad says that before seven o’clock, there won’t be any staff activity on A-Wing itself. That we’ll be in the clear.

That’s all very well, but as we arrive back, the patients are still at their windows. There’s more clapping. Also, a few mimed suggestions as to what we might have been doing out on the headland.

[The other patients – also psychiatric inpatients with a history of violence – can observe Fiona and Coad on their walk. The ‘mimed suggestions’ are obviously crude and, given the men involved, probably very crude. Fiona is conscious of the sexual chemistry between her and Coad but she’s also a woman with an appropriate sense of her personal boundaries. That phrase picks through those issues as well as she can – but in doing so acknowledges herself as a sexual being – yet another dimension of character.]

Coad says, ‘Don’t worry about those arseholes. I’ll deal with them.’

‘Does “deal with them” mean “beat them senseless”? If so, maybe you could just leave it.’

‘Sure?’ he asks, as though querying a takeaway order.

‘Yes, Jared. I’m sure.’

‘OK. That’s good. Swinford’s a big fucker.’

That makes me laugh. I’m not an unqualified admirer of all of Coad’s choices, but he has a basic integrity that I like.

I say, ‘Oh, I bet you could take him.’

[There’s some authority here from Fiona – authority and wisdom. She understands what ‘deal with them’ is likely to mean and steps in to avert some unnecessary acts of violence. Also: we see Fiona here (and Coad) as moral creatures: each operating according to their own code of integrity. The moral dimension is pretty much essential to any deeply considered character.]

I butt his upper arm with my head and reach for his hand. We walk hand in hand to the hospital. I can’t quite look directly, but I have this sense that Coad is going red. But he clearly likes it. He holds my hand in a grip that’s too firm, but also gentle. We feel like a boy and a girl on their first date. Not a modern one, even. Like some pair from the fifties, where he’s come round to fetch me from my parents, calling my father sir, and bringing a little gift for my mother. I’m the same. I’m in my flared skirt with a short-sleeved blouse and bobby socks and hairband. I am a thing of pastel prettiness and line-dried cotton, and Coad is a young man of seventeen, with short hair, meticulously gelled, and a smart jacket, and an ironed shirt, and no injuries, no damage, no war, no history.

[This is pure fantasy, of course. Coad is about to die and Fiona’s life too is about to be in serious danger. Also, Fiona is about as far from a thing of ‘pastel prettiness and line-dried cotton’ as you can get. She knows that perfectly well too. So what is this passage about? I think it has to do with a yearning for a simplicity greater than either of these two can manage. And yes, there’s some sexual desire going on here, but the desire for a world without violent complication is even more prominent than that. It’s like the whole ‘house at the end of the world’ idea has been scrubbed away and replaced by this lovely – and utterly impossible – fantasy.]

I’m acutely self-conscious, saved only by the belief that he’s the same. He squeezes my hand in an on-off-on rhythm that’s meant for my reassurance, I think, but is also for his.

We march stiffly to the door at the base of A-Wing. He opens the door – with his keycard, of course. Except for my presence here, this is all within normal hospital limits. He holds it open for me, a good boy, attentive and courteous.

I go through. My card, the regular one, permits me to exit any red-zoned area. It gives me access to my staircase and my tower and my room and my safety.

I am on the threshold of my parents’ house again. There are moths fluttering in the porchlight. My hair-gelled beau has delivered me safely home and I have a decision to make.

I stand on tip-toe and kiss Coad on the mouth, again. Privately, just for him, no one watching, no public display.

More than a sister. Less than a lover.

As I pull away, I give him real eye contact too. His grey-blue eyes fix on mine. The intensity is there. The troubled quality. But something else too. A softness. Gratitude maybe, although I have as many reasons to be grateful to him.

[And we’ve returned to the world of the hospital with its keycards and red-zones and all of that. The kiss seals some kind of deal that they have. Some kind of sexual/romantic agreement, but also an agreement that has to do with the remaining action in the story. The gratitude they feel to each other is another character dimension in operation.]

Doing this exercise surprised me, in fact. I was startled to see how deeply and repetitively the themes of the novel emerge in the text: that hardy stonecrop and its flowers that just about manage to survive. I didn’t put that in because I was thinking about my elevator pitch. But I’ve so deeply absorbed and understood that pitch, it just pops up whether I’m thinking about it or not. That’s nice to see.

And when I started this, I thought, “Oh gosh, I’m not going to find that many character dimensions in any one bit of text.” But this chunk (about 900 words in total) has physical observation of the landscape, thinks of Fiona as a physical being, as a sexual one, as one with memories and gratitude and humour and authority and morality and desire. Now, OK, this is an important passage between the book’s two most important characters. It needed to be fairly rich. Other passages of equal length might be significantly less rich in dimensionality.

But that, roughly, is what character multi-dimensionality should look like. Not something to be forced into the text, but something that arises naturally when you write well and know your character intimately.

Feedback Friday

Write with Jericho Week #6 / Dialogue

If you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.

If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.

If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.

Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.

Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.

A really brilliant task this week.

I want you to choose a scene (max 300 words) between two different characters in which each wants something from the other and are trying to get what they want (eg: money, information, intimacy, etc).

The key here will be not just the conflict, but some sense of subtext heaving under the surface. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

I want:

Title

Genre

A line or two of context for the scene & characters

The scene itself, max 300 words

That’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Voice Task, Option X, [Title of your WIP]’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.

Til soon.

Harry

Elevator Pitches: How to Hook an Agent

Writing an elevator pitch is a great way to get to the core of your book. Grabbing the attention of a literary agent can be a daunting task, but if you can express the new and exciting concept that your book has to offer in just one short sentence, you’ll be off to a flying start.

In the lead-up to our Meet Your Match event on 14 February 2024, we asked leading literary agents why elevator pitches are so important and how you can make yours as compelling as possible…


Why bother?

A good elevator pitch doesn’t just show the agent that you understand your book’s unique selling point (USP)it can also help you to think about your writing in a new way. Getting it right can take practice, but every time you put pen to paper, you’ll be narrowing down on what makes your book special just that little bit more.

“Elevator pitches are so important, primarily because they help YOU, the author, think about your book from a more salesy perspective—and throughout your book’s launch, you will need to be a constant salesperson for your story. Authors often have a hard time summing up their own book, but you’d be surprised by how much having a refined, concise elevator pitch will come in handy, and directly contribute to your book’s success!”

Rachel Beck, Liza Dawson Associates

View Rachel’s AgentMatch profile.

Standing out from the crowd

Think about the last time you picked up a book by a new author. What grabbed you about its premise? What made it feel fresh and interesting? An elevator pitch is a quick and easy way to get your agent, editor or reader hooked right from the beginning.

“A good elevator pitch bridges the gap between the familiar and the exciting. It tells me where your book sits on the market, and it tells me why your book isn’t like anything else on the market. So get that USP up front—tell me that you’re in a genre I love and tell me what you’re doing that nobody else in that genre has done before.”

Eli Keren, United Agents

View Eli’s AgentMatch profile.

Keeping it concise

One of the hardest parts of writing an elevator pitch is summarising your book in a single sentence. Practice makes perfectbut if you’re finding yourself unable to pick out that one crucial element at the core of your book, it could be a sign that something’s wrong.

“If you’re struggling with an elevator pitch because you have too much to say in just one line, it may be that your book is lacking a sharp hook—and that might be something worth revising.”

Elinor Davies, Madeleine Milburn

View Elinor’s AgentMatch profile.


Want an example of an elevator pitch?

Looking for an example? Here’s one from our very own Katie Day – who, before joining the Jericho Writers team, was our 2022 Meet Your Match winner:

When the neighbour she’s been spying on suddenly leaves, a lonely woman inserts herself into the life of the girlfriend he left behind. SORROW & BLISS meets YOU in a commercial women's fiction with a dash of domestic suspense.

Why did we love it? Because it showed a great awareness of genre, it gave us enough information to catch our attention while leaving us with plenty of questions we wanted to see answered, and it did all of that in under 40 words. In short, it hooked us!


If you’re ready to get started writing your own, take a look at Harry Bingham’s guide to elevator pitches here: How To Write An Elevator Pitch For Your Novel – Jericho Writers. And, once you’ve cracked it, why not share your pitch with us?

On 14 February 2024, we will be taking a look at your elevator pitches on Twitter/X with the return of our Meet Your Match event. Simply post your elevator pitch, details of your book’s genre and the hashtag #JWMeetYourMatch between 2pm and 4pm GMT, and we’ll match you with an agent we think would like to see your work. Plus, if we really love your pitch, you’ll also be in with a chance to win a free Agent One-to-One session!

Walking the Talk – the first in a series

As you know, I’m a writer – or I used to be.

But a little while back, I had the idea of making the Writers Workshop (as we once were) into a bigger, sleeker, better Jericho Writers. I wouldn’t say that the idea was a bad one exactly – I’m fantastically proud of the work we do – but it had more of an impact on my writing than I had expected.

Now, and thanks entirely to the incredible team we have at the top of JW, I’m in a position to step back and write some books.

And that means that …

Finally ….

I’m getting very close to …

The release of a new Fiona Griffiths book: THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD.

Given how long it’s been since the last Fiona book graced the shelves, that feels like a very big ta-daa. It will be the seventh book in the series – and the penultimate one. The next book will be the big, and series finale when all the storylines from the series will finally come together.

I’ve adored writing these books and, if it’s not nuts to say so, I’ve adored knowing Fiona. She and I have enjoyed our time together.

It’s great to be back in the saddle, but I’m also pleased because I’ve never much relished the sight of writing tutors who don’t write. If I offered to teach you carpentry, you’d rightly want to see a table I’d made. If my table was rubbish, you’d draw the obvious conclusion.

So, in the run-up to publication, I want to talk you through different aspects of how I conceived the writing and publishing of the book. The point here is simply to connect these (somewhat theoretical) Friday emails to the (intensely practical) topic of how I actually approach my writing.

We’ll start this week at the very beginning: with the book’s basic elevator pitch. (If you want to remind yourself about my thoughts on that topic, this email is probably the best place to start. It’s the one involving 11 boxes, 2 imps and an owl.)

OK, so what’s the pitch?

Because this is a series novel, it has two pitches: one for the book and one for the series as a whole.

As you know, the pitch for the series is something like:

  • A homicide detective is in recovery from Cotards Syndrome – a genuine condition, in which sufferers believe themselves to be dead.

If that feels too baggy, the pitch works fine like this:

  • A murder detective who used to think she was dead.

I probably prefer the longer version: it’s important that these are not fantasy novels and have no speculative elements. But hey ho, you can choose. I don’t care.

The past novels in this series have sold well and have an established fanbase, so a lot of those readers will buy this book just because they trust me to deliver. But each time I release a new title, completely new readers enter the series, decide they like the book they’ve just read, then start back at the beginning.

In other words: the pitch for the new book matters too. And that pitch goes something like this:

  • A Fiona Griffiths murder mystery set in a secure psychiatric hospital, populated by special forces veterans.

If you put the two pitches together, you get something like this:

  • Murder detective, who used to think she was dead, has to solve a crime originating in a secure psychiatric hospital, populated by special forces veterans.

That’s 25 words long, which is longer than I generally recommend for pitches, but seems acceptable, given that this pitch is explaining both the book and the series.

As you know, I also don’t mind pitches that just collapse into a list of ingredients. With this book, that list runs roughly like this:

  • Homicide detective
  • Used to think she was dead (Cotards)
  • Murder investigation
  • Secure psychiatric hospital
  • 50 special forces veterans as inmates

You only need to assemble that list to notice two things. (1) A secure psychiatric hospital is likely to pose specific and extreme challenges to someone with Fiona’s mental history. (2) The special forces guys are probably quite dangerous and probably don’t much want to be locked up for the rest of their lives.

I hope that you look at that setup and want to know more. And that’s the point of any pitch, right? To prompt further investigation. If you’re a fan of crime novels, I’d hope that this pitch piques your curiosity. If it has, it’s worked.

The Daughters of the Pitch

I’ve written before that the elevator pitch is for the author, and only the author. That’s why my own pitches are notably rough and ready. I don’t really come up with the same formulation any two times in a row. I don’t bother to come up with a line that could sit comfortably on a book cover or a movie poster.

But the pitch has many daughters, and those daughters all need to honour their parentage.

The daughters that any author needs to consider include:

  • Title
  • Book cover
  • Front cover quotes / shout lines
  • Back jacket blurb / Amazon book description
  • Back jacket quotes
  • Query letter [if you’re not agented and want to be]
  • Other marketing material: social media content, social media ads, email content, and so on

All those things need to line up behind the pitch. They can’t be inconsistent with it, and they should do what they can to broadcast it (while at the same time, performing their own specific role.)

If all this sounds a little vague – well, that vagueness is deliberate.

Take my title, THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD.

Clearly, no title can cram an entire ingredients list into a few words. If I had to try, it would be something like CRAZY COP IN PSYCHO HOSPITAL DRAMA. That ticks more boxes, but it’s a terrible title. Remember that a title needs to do several things:

  • Work well with the chosen cover design,
  • Be suitable for the genre – that is, appealing to the right group of readers,
  • Honour the elevator pitch.

None of those three things are optional. If you choose a genre-unsuitable title, for example, your book just won’t sell. That’s not a requirement where you can compromise, even a bit.

Likewise, the title really has to work with a cover design: two elements that work in tandem. It’s not uncommon for a cover designer to come up with a brilliant cover, which then prompts a change in the title. This has happened, in fact, with several of my books.

For all these reasons, a title need only hint at the elevator pitch. It’s part of a “first impressions” package, where cover design is the other absolutely key ingredient. (I’ll talk cover design for this book in a later email.)

With this book, I hesitated over the title and, ultimately, was torn between whether to use the word HOSPITAL or HOUSE. I went with the latter, largely because the word ‘hospital’ is arguably misleading. The word conjures up normal hospitals, not a place heaving with hyper-fit special forces soldiers. Also, the word ‘hospital’ somehow pulls the book away from the crime genre: they’re places of healing, not multiple murder, and I want a sense of murder to lie heavy over the book.

Obviously, though, it’s the final phrase which does the work. Those words – THE END OF THE WORLD – allude to a lot of things:

  • To the hospital’s remote location,
  • To murder: for a number of the characters in the book, this story really does bring about the end of the world
  • To Fiona: for her, this case does almost spell the end of the world, because of her mental vulnerability,
  • To the situation of the special forces veterans themselves: when they were sent to this place, and with no prospect of release, their lives were effectively ended.

Now obviously, the words in the title alone don’t convey all that. But there’s a limit to what any title can ever do. And a pitch, remember, is there to prompt further investigation. Nothing more. So if someone is intrigued by the book cover and title combo, all we want them to do next is explore the blurb. That’s where the pitch can start to expand from mere hints to a fuller presentation of what the book offers.

More of all that in another email.

Oh yes, and I did just want to say that the whole Write with Jericho / Feedback Friday thing is being intensely brilliant. We launched the current course as a bit of an experiment but the level of engagement has been just fabulous. We’re going to do more and go bigger. If you’re already a Premium Member, then do get stuck in. If not – well, do think about joining us for our next big course.

Feedback Friday

Write with Jericho Week #5 / Character

If you’ve registered for the course, you’ll already have received the course material.

If you’re a Premium Member and you haven’t registered, you can find the course material here. You can register yourself, for free, to get the same material by email.

If you’re not a Premium Member, and want to be, here’s what you need to do next.

Whether or not you are a Premium Member, I’d love you to participate.

A difficult one this, just because character is something that expands and finds its range over the course of 100,000 words. Trying to find a passage of c. 350 words that does everything in one place is definitely a bit artificial. I’m a decent character-writer myself but would struggle to find a single passage that displayed everything in one place.

That said, here’s the exercise.

Choose a passage of (absolutely max) 350 words, which shows off your character as being fully alive. Some of the questions we’re interested in is whether your character feels:

  • Distinctive (not clichéd)?
  • Lifelike?
  • Multidimensional?
  • In a nest of relationships?
  • In the physical world?
  • Has a full set of emotions?
  • Coherent?
  • Surprising?

Choose ONE passage, to a maximum of 350 words, and share it. Please also include:

Title

Genre

Brief context for your passage, including why you like it and what your doubts might be.

Remember always to give feedback on other people’s work while you are there. Can I ask that you offer at least 5 comments on other people’s work? That way, you put out good juju and good juju will surely seek you out.

That’s it from me. Share yours here as a ‘New Discussion’ and include a sensible title, eg: ‘Voice Task, Option X, [Title of your WIP]’. Also, if you’re looking for some top tips to help you search Townhouse better, take a look at this thread.

Til soon.

Harry

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