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Last week, I said:

“As you write, and as you edit, you are faced with 1,000,000 choices: again and again and again. Are you happy with this sentence? What about this one? Does the attacker strike your heroine? Strike her with what? Does he hurt her? Does she hurt him back? Does she escape? How does she escape?”

And –

Well, just casually, almost by way of an aside, I’ve assumed it’s just fine to write about violence against women. But is it? Pretty obviously, violence is bad, and male violence against women is especially unlovely … and making an entertainment out of all this? Isn’t that a bit Ugh?

One approach is to say that violence of this sort should never be used for entertainment.

A British screenwriter, Bridget Lawless, in fact set up a prize – the Staunch Book Prize – which rewarded novels that did not feature violence against women. The prize sputtered on for a few years before closing.

The prize was never without controversy, though. Women thriller writers, Sarah Hilary and Julia Crouch, both noted that women do in fact suffer violence by men. Crouch said, what the “prize immediately knocks out is the lived experience of millions of women in this country.”

That’s true of course … women do suffer violence, so we should talk about that rather than conceal it. And that feels like it might be a let-out, except if I’m being super-duper honest, my last book involved a contemporary detective running around searching for artefacts linked to King Arthur. The one before that involved an extended caving scene and some (literally) mediaeval monastic practices. My books aren’t really attempting to take the ‘lived experience of millions of women’ and make art out of them. They’re attempts to provide bloody good entertainment using stories which aren’t, quite frankly, all that plausible in the real world.

I don’t think that I’m especially keen on having dead women, rather than men – I think I’m an equal-opportunities killer. But, yes, my books do involve violence against women. Fiona suffers ill-treatment in every single book and in many cases, other women are also victims, often dead ones.

So do I use murder for entertainment? Yes.

Does that include murder of women by men? Yes.

Are my books intended to represent a carefully considered view of the actual ‘lived experience’ of women? No, definitely not.

So, bluntly put, am I exploiting stories involving violence against women for pure entertainment purposes? Yes, I am.

But do my readers, including my female readers, mind about any of this? No, they don’t. Or at least if they do, they care in such small numbers that the issue would seem not to matter all that much. And, I should say, I’d guess that at least 60-70% of my readers are women, maybe even more.

Now, assuming that you (A) like writing books and (B) think that men whacking women is generally a Bad Thing, we need to figure out what’s going on here.

The first thing to say is that books do generally need a splash of darkness. They don’t absolutely have to have an episode of violence at their heart, but an awful lot of books do. And it’s not surprising. We don’t want to read books about the everyday. We want our books to operate like really high-class gossip: “Gosh, no! Really …?” That reaction almost always derives from transgression of some kind and the blackest sort of transgression (especially in a sexually permissive age) is violence.

The second thing to say is that there are ways of writing violence that are just … ick.

Any time where the camera lens is pressed up against violence with a kind of glee is, for me, unreadable. (Indeed, I won’t even read on; I know I’m not going to like that book or that author.) Where the violence involves sadism or anything with a sexual edge, then any hint of glee or pleasure in the moment is, for me and, I think for a lot of readers, just a hard no.

And for me, that’s what is always comes down to in the end.

Does the way you write end up commoditising violence – making a kind of porno reel out of it?

Or does your writing try to deepen our humanity? Does it try to enter those dark moments and speak truthfully of the fear, the grief, the compassion?

I think if you do that, you’re OK – no matter what your genre, or story, or purpose in writing. There’s a moment in my upcoming book where Fiona comes across a corpse. The man has been hit hard with a frying pan, then shoved into a freezer, where he froze to death. That’s an ugly (albeit off-screen) dying, but it wasn’t played for laughs. It wasn’t played for sadistic thrills. The murder delivered a moment of quietness – reflection. And Fiona then went to see the dead man’s father and brother. And felt their shock and grief.

None of this is filtered through some ‘holier than thou’ lens. The difference between my books and a sermon in church? Quite detectable, I’d say.

So, for my money at least, entertainment is fine. Violence as part of that entertainment is fine. But – stay human, not icky.

A good life rule, that.

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Be Bloody, Bold and Resolute

Last week, I asked for 250 words of happiness. Today – violence.

The crack of a silver candlestick – Colonel Mustard falling – blood on the library floor. A country house aghast.

Take any episode of darkness from your manuscript and let’s have a peep at it. Remember: we don’t mind a bit of blood and gore. But stay human, not creepy, please.

Post yours here.

Til soon.

Harry

Who do you write for?

I mean, readers, yes, obviously. But who? Your mum? That old English teacher you loved? Crime fans in general? People who love Patricia Cornwell in particular?

There are two reasons to ask these questions. The first is marketing. If you’re writing people who want a fresh take on the Patricia Cornwell vibe, that would suggest a certain approach to book covers, titles, marketing slogans and so on. You might even refer directly to Cornwell, or her most famous character, Kay Scarpetta, in your marketing yadda.

The second reason has to do with the choices you make as you write the book itself.

As you write, and as you edit, you are faced with 1,000,000 choices: again and again and again. Are you happy with this sentence? What about this one? Does the attacker strike your heroine? Strike her with what? Does he hurt her? Does she hurt him back? Does she escape? How does she escape? Is her breath ‘hoarse and rasping’ afterwards? Or does it come in ‘juddering heaves of relief’? What phrase do you prefer? And what does she do next?

Now, obviously, you’re going to make all those choices on the basis of what seems right to you – you have no other option. But at the back of your mind, there’s always a sense that you’re writing for one set of readers rather than another.

For example, if I were writing forensically-led crime fiction, I’d have to assume that my readers knew Patricia’s Cornwell work and would be wanting me to break new ground. I couldn’t just reprise Cornwell’s tropes and expect success myself.

Indie authors – intelligently analytical as they are – often take this further, and try to conceive of an ‘Ideal Reader’ – a dog-loving, mother-of-two Kansas 40 y.o. housewife, with plenty of friends, love of hiking, watches true crime shows on Netflix, reads mostly crime, but will cry at soppy love stories too.

The idea is that if you know your ‘Ideal’ reader, you can craft your book and your marketing material to appeal perfectly to that one person.     

And? OK. Very smart writers I know do just that and they say it works for them. In part, it works because book marketing works best when it’s micro-targeted. A good campaign is one that gets excellent conversions happening amongst a very tightly defined group of readers. A bad campaign is one that starts so-so conversions from a much broader group. So: a hyper-detailed picture of your Ideal Reader keeps your marketing focused.

But I have a somewhat different take.

I think you have to turn yourself into your own Ideal Reader.

Partly, that means bringing your own tastes to bear. As I say, when it comes to editing, you don’t really have a choice.

But you also have to ensure that you become your own readership. What books do you expect your readers to have read? What authors do they love?

You need to have read that book and know those authors. If you’ve read Patricia Cornwell as keenly as your readers have, you won’t just repeat that stuff. In the end, your desire for novelty will be the same as theirs.

These things go deep.

I know, for example, that more of my readers are American than British. So I have a particular love of giving my American readers a taste of Wales that’s very Welsh. So, for example, a few miles from where my Mum lives, there’s a village called Newchurch. Easy to say, easy to spell, right? But I’d pretty much never use that placename in one of my Fiona books. Near Newchurch, lie the settlements of Rhosgoch, Glascwm, Llanbadarn-y-garreg, and (where my kids go riding) Bryngwyn. I’d use any of those placenames instead, joyous in the knowledge that Kate from Kansas and Ali from Arkansas will struggle to pronounce any of them.

Or again: I wrote a book that had to do with the archaeology of the British Dark Ages. I know my readers to be literate and intelligent. Plenty of writers might have avoided a ton of ancient history detail, but I knew my guys would like it. (I know I like it. I’ve become them.) So the book is spattered with chunks of Latin, and late Celtic poems, and mournful Romano-British monks, and factoids about Anglo-Saxon vs British burials. (The main difference being that the Anglo-Saxon invaders were pagan, the ancient Britons were Christian, so their burial rites looked different. I am English, but I’m still on the side of the ancient Britons. Twll dîn pob Sais.)

One last example:

How fast or slow do you take a scene? Do you hurtle through? Offer a reaction shot or two, but still move at pace? Or do you allow yourself a paragraph or two of considered reflection?

My writing creates my readers, but my readers also create my writing. I know that my readers relish the Fiona character – they want more of her, not less. So, while I’m hyper-sensitive to anything that feels boring or self-indulgent, I’m happy to allow proper space for reflection. On the whole, my scenes go slow but deep, not fast and shallow. That’s respecting my readers, not ignoring them.

Over time, any difference between you and your readership gets snuffed out. You learn from them what they do and don’t respond to. You learn what books and authors they like. You follow down those trails.

You don’t have to like everything that every one of your readers like. I’ll get book recommendations from readers (either via email, for example, or from names cited in an Amazon review) where I read the book and don’t like it. But that’s fine too. What matters is knowing (roughly) the universe that your readers inhabit, and using that knowledge to shape your tastes and your choices. The process becomes a rolling, laughing, respectful conversation with a multitude.

And if you follow that path, things become easy.

Your Ideal Reader? It’s you.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: HAPPINESS

Modern Fiction often feels like it honours the dark over the light, the grave over the upbeat.

And, OK, I don’t have a fight with Modern Fiction. But, just for this week, let’s lighten up. Give me a passage of 250 words that shows happiness. Anything upbeat. A moment of relief or laughter or gladness.

Let’s share those excerpts and give feedback one to another, till evening falls.

When you're ready, post yours here.

Til soon.

Harry

When I started work on my first novel, I didn’t set out to write something funny. My priority was to craft something relatable: a story that would resonate with readers, as well as entertain them.

In pursuit of realism, I hit upon an important truth: real life – mine, anyway – involves endless mishaps, missteps and mistakes that can either be laughed at or cried over. Like most of us, I typically choose to chuckle – and pretty quickly, I found myself squeezing something sweet from the proverbial lemons my protagonists’ lives served up, too.

Three (almost four!) books in, I feel like I’ve found my comedy groove. Here are five things I’ve learned about writing to raise a smile – or, if you’re lucky, a belly laugh – from your reader.

1. Characters drive comedy (and plot)

In almost every funny book, film or play there’ll be at least one character who’s inherently amusing. Sometimes this will be because they subvert a cliché: think Sister Michael, the hilariously misanthropic nun from Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls.

Elsewhere, a character might have comedy chops because they embody a cliché. Jane Austen’s Mr Collins epitomises the kind of pompous, hectoring clergyman that nobody wants to sit next to in the drawing room.

If you’re creating a purely comedic character, bear in mind that they can’t exist only for the lols. They must serve a purpose or advance your plot. Sister Michael is the Derry Girls’ main antagonist, frequently an obstacle to their scheming. Meanwhile, when Lizzy, the plucky heroine of Pride and Prejudice, rejects Mr Collins’ proposal, he marries her friend instead. This throws Lizzy more squarely into the path of Mr Darcy, who (spoiler alert!) is her perfect match.

2. Don’t pull your punches – but throw them carefully

An important note on ‘laugh at’ characters: always punch up, not down. If you’re inviting your readers to find someone ridiculous, make sure they deserve it – and that they’re risible by choice.

Self-importance, snobbery and wilful ignorance are awful qualities in a dinner party guest, but brilliant foibles for a character you want readers to find funny.

My advice for writing such a person? Imagine someone you’d actively avoid in the workplace, would hide from at a family wedding or might refuse to get in a lift with, just in case it got stuck. Then, make them ten times worse.

3. Be specific

Close attention to detail can really help you nail a comedy character. Do they have a ridiculously elaborate hairstyle, or waft around in a cloud of too-strong perfume? Have they adopted a super posh, royal family-style accent, despite being from a small town in the middle of nowhere?

Think about little things that will help you to show, not tell, why this person is begging to be laughed at.

4. Comedy and empathy are cousins

Your next step is to force your poor, unsuspecting main character to interact with whoever you’ve just made up. If you’re as mean as I am, you might make the supercilious dullard their boss, or the interfering, hysterical fusspot their mother.

Putting someone your readers care about in a toe-curlingly awkward situation is not only a quick way to garner laughs – it’s a powerful way to stoke empathy, too. Who among us hasn’t experienced crushing embarrassment, or the intense frustration of having to be polite to someone they’d prefer to give a piece of their mind?

Comedy is a brilliant way to undercut a problem or circumstance that might otherwise feel bleak and depressing. In David Nicholls’ The Understudy, the protagonist is a failing actor. His hopelessness is underlined by the non-verbal role he’s playing as the novel opens: that of a dead body in a crime drama.

Far from sugarcoating the situation, the humour invites readers in – laughter somehow makes us participants in the story, rather than passive observers. From page one, the reader is invested in seeing this protagonist’s life get better. After all, it’s difficult not to root for someone who’s making a living by pretending to be dead. 

5. Layer your lols

Some books – The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, for instance – have humour hardwired into their basic premise. However, even giving your book a funny foundation doesn’t guarantee you’ll keep readers amused over several hundred pages.

As you’re writing, keep an eye out for opportunities to include humorous moments that feel natural: witty asides, snappy dialogue, misunderstandings and embarrassments. These can be blended with ‘bigger ticket’ comedy incidents you’ve planned more deliberately. The main thing to remember is that the laughs you add to your story are like seasoning. Think of comedy like salt on a chip, or sauce on a steak. Too much could overpower your plot, but the right amount will sharpen, enhance and enrich other aspects of your writing.

Last week, I threw out a Feedback Friday challenge based off the first volume of our Good To Great course.

The essence of that task, and of the course material, was to consider your book’s elevator pitch not as a final thought – a sticker glued on to the book cover at the final minute – but as a blueprint for production. What’s the book’s DNA? What are its most essential ingredients, the elements that make it up? If your book is to succeed, that answer has to be compelling. Your book will stand, naked, on a bookstore table (or an Amazon page) that’s crowded with repeat bestsellers and authors much better known than you. There’s no way to win that contest except by having an idea that shines so bright and attractively that your book compels attention.

The course video (which I urge you to watch; it’s free) talks about how to start with an ultra-short pitch/blueprint – a list of ingredients even – and how to build out from there. To characters, to settings, to themes, and so on.

The aim here is that every aspect of your book should be firmly founded on your core idea – and that the idea itself should be so compelling that the book can’t not sell. The absolute key is to make sure that every part of your book lines up behind a single great idea.

Pitching backwards

Now, I hope it’s obvious that that’s a sound way to build a book… and yet – have I told you too late? Almost all of you reading this email have already written all or part of your manuscript. So me telling you now that you should have done something 60,000 words ago may not exactly strike you as terribly helpful. (One of you on Townhouse said that “pitching backwards feels like a feat of gymnastics” – which is a fair comment.)

And yet –

It is helpful. These things are helpful at any stage and every stage. If you know what you’re aiming at – a book where everything lines up perfectly behind one stellar idea –you can always navigate from where you are to where you need to be.

The trick is to navigate without cheating.

What you mustn’t ask is:

“How do I take the material I have already concocted and make it look as though it obeys these rules?”

What you must ask is:

“Honestly – does my material feel like it all lines up in this way? And is the idea strong enough? And, having thought these things through, are there adjustments I should make to the stuff I’ve already written, even though I know it will cost me weeks of work to make those adjustments?”

Anything else, you can bodge if you like. You can have a character who’s a bit limp, a scene that’s a bit weak, a plot turn that’s a bit contrived, a setting that’s a bit bland. All those things – and your book can still sell. None of my books has gone out into the world with no bodging anywhere.

But a weak idea? Or a book that doesn’t manifest the strong one that you started with? That book won’t sell. And it doesn’t deserve to.

So yes, pitching backwards is an arse-over-tip way to do things. (That lovely phrase comes courtesy of my sister’s long-ago riding instructor, a woman so sweary, she’d make Princess Anne look genteel.) But if you didn’t do the exercise properly when you started out, you need to do it properly now.

Is your idea strong enough?

Is there total unity between that idea and everything else in the book – characters, themes, settings, everything? Are those things so tightly glued together that your book feels somehow inevitable, necessary?

Those are the questions you must ask.

They matter.

And pitch backwards if you have to.

Standing stones and character Verdicts

When I set these Feedback Friday tasks, I’m often surprised at what comes back. Those surprises are always positive; I always learn something.

Last week, I realised that we build character up in layers. To we humans, the top layer is the one that matters most. To a pitch-concerned novelist, it’s the bottom layer.

Here’s what I mean:

Who is Fiona Griffiths? How do we describe her? Here’s how I think about forming an answer:

Standing Stones

I start with some key facts – rocks projecting unmissably from the landscape. They’re the things that any explanation of Fiona has to acknowledge. Any triangulation has to start from there. So:

• Fiona had Cotards Syndrome as a teenager (she used to think she was dead).
• Fiona doesn’t know her true birth mother or father. She was found in the back of her adoptive father’s car when she was about 2 years old. For a long time, she was mute.
• Her adoptive father was (is?) a criminal.
• Fiona can be violent. (A creepy witness once felt her bum. She broke his fingers and dislocated his knee. She was a police officer at the time.)
• Fiona has a double first in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge – and won a university philosophy prize to boot.
• At the start of the series, she’d never really had a proper boyfriend. When at university, she had a phase of thinking she was lesbian.
• Fiona is a detective.

All these things are facts. They’re not things that are up for argument or discussion. They refer back to things that happened or are true in the present. They’re standing stones, your rocks, the first and most critical layer of character-formation.

(And in parenthesis: my character is quite big and highly coloured. If your character’s own standing stones are a little lower to the ground, that’s fine. You’re just writing a different kind of book.)

Dispositions

Now we get to the next level up – dispositions, ways of summarising your emerging character.

So, again for Fiona, we have something like this:

Fiona is electrically intelligent. She’s Sherlock Holmes level bright.

She adores murder investigation. It’s one of very few things that fully engages her.

She’s a dunce about many things-in-the-world. Her knowledge of pop culture is near-zero. She’s a hopeless cook. She has no dress sense. If there’s a glass wall in an office or a bus shelter, she’s quite likely to walk straight into it.

She’s funny. She’ll make you laugh.

Dead people calm her. She likes them. She feels them to be friends.

Yes, novel-detectives are always mavericks. But Fiona really is. Illegal handguns? Growing and smoking her own weed? Solo mission to shoot up some bad guys? Throwing Russian baddies off a cliff? Yep, that’s Fiona. (And that’s just book one.)

These things are facts, too. I mean, you couldn’t reasonably disagree about whether Fiona is intelligent or not. But this set of facts doesn’t have that standing stone like quality: single, obtrusive, unmistakable, un-ignorable – the marker-events of a person’s life.

This second list of ours – ‘dispositions’ – doesn’t comprise things as singular as our standing stones. You don’t really know whether Fiona is genuinely funny until you’ve heard her for a bit. If she makes you laugh once, that could be a one-off. But if she does it again and again, then you have to say, yes, she’s funny. Same thing with her intelligence. Same thing with her dunce-in-the-world-ness.

So, our second level of character analysis gets to things that are definite facts, but they’re not singular facts. They’re more like dispositions – repeated observations of a trait.

And then, we get to our third level –

Verdicts

Is our character conscientious?

Does she have a sense of right and wrong?

Is she loyal?

Is she open to new things, or does she prefer the tried-and-trusted?

Is she valiant – or, perhaps better, what is it that brings out her valour? When does she show her courage?

We as people like to discuss these things in relation to others, and as novelists we like to discuss them in relation to our characters. (And roughly: Fiona is not conscientious, she has a strong sense of right and wrong, she is loyal, she is open to the new, she is valiant in almost any context.)

But?

I don’t think these things should form part of your character analysis, or not really. I think something like the opposite is the truth. You build your character on the basis of your standing stones and your dispositions. Then you follow that character through the course of your story, writing her as carefully as you can. Then you can stand back and judge. Conscientious, yes or no? Valiant, yes or no?

As it happens, I think that in most cases, those questions won’t even have easy answers. I just gave a quick-fire set of responses in relation to Fiona, but they’re not very good.

Is Fiona conscientious? Yes: she goes way beyond expectations in anything murder-related. But in other spheres, she’s hopelessly unreliable. So: going through endless phone records because there’s just possibly a lead buried in there somewhere? Yes, she’ll do that, and without being asked. But: filling out a simple pension form, because someone in her office needs her to do it? Nope, she’ll avoid that until someone pretty much forces her.

Why I’m even talking about this

The reason why I’m plappering on about this (this word, courtesy of my elder daughter) is that when I asked you to give me your pitch / theme / character details, a lot of you shot straight through to the character verdict level. And I don’t want that. When you’re putting together the blueprint for your novel, the standing stones are way more important. The dispositions are next most important. The character verdicts don’t really matter at all – they’re something to argue about once the novel is finished.

I hope that makes sense. In any case, since this week’s Feedback Friday is going to hammer away at this topic, it’ll make sense before I have done with you, or I’ll want to know the raisin why.

This email is too long, so I will not tell you about the extraordinary encounter I had just yesterday with – but no. This email is too long.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: STANDING STONES

Right. Character. I want you to outline your character’s:

• Standing Stones. Big, singular, formative events or facts in your character’s life.
• Dispositions. Unmistakeable traits that run right through the book.
• Verdicts. What do you make of the character you’ve just created. (And, psst, I don’t really care about this bit of the answer. Nor should you.)

Do you want an extra bonus point? You do? Then also please tell me:

• Your ultra-short pitch or list of ingredients.

What we really, really want to see here is a lovely reverberation between the pitch and the standing stones. We want to think, ‘Oh yes, that character with that past in that story situation and that setting? Sounds glorious. Tell me more.’ If you do that, you’ve won. When you're ready, post yours here.

Over to you.

Til soon.

Harry

There’s a sweet sadness about early September, isn’t there? The leaves aren’t quite turning, but they’re thinking about it. It isn’t quite cold enough for socks again, but my morning toes aren’t always so sure about that. The kids go off to school again, bravely, marking off their little transitions towards adulthood. And holiday mess is either put away, or lying around in piles, eyeing us balefully, awaiting disposal.

I mostly like the season – I just don’t want the kids to get a day older, really. I’d happily glue them into some groundhog present, where school always involves projects on the Vikings, and science classes revolve around magnets and things dangling on string.

And as for you? Ah me and oh my gosh – you’re to go back to school too, my hearties, and starting RIGHT NOW. Because, this week, we have a new course out, and it’s a goodie.

Specifically, we know that most readers of this email are reasonably seasoned writers. Few of you are hesitating over the very first pages of your very first manuscript. Far more of you are deep into your first novel, or working on your second or third. You’ve mostly wrestled not just with writing a book, but with editing it too. Plenty of you have made a serious assault on Planet Agent, and are planning further raids with some sober expectation of success.

This course is for you: the serious, competent, experienced writer. We call it Good To Great, because that’s the hurdle you now need to clear. You need to go from acceptable competence to writing something so compelling that an agent (or editor, or reader) can’t refuse the proposition you offer.

That’s a big ask. I’d say that plenty of people – if they’re serious, competent and committed – can end up putting together a decent novel. Something shipshape and watertight. A novel that feels tight and well-fashioned.

But none of that is enough. The competition writers face is heinous. If you’re a debut athlete, you work your way through multiple lower-level competitions until you’re expected to face an Olympic final. If you’re a debut writer? You get no kindness at all. No mercy. You are sent in to compete, immediately, against the most famous writers of the day. Your books are sold at the exact same price. And those other writers have a vast advantage in terms of sales footprint and brand recognition and marketing oomph. So, yeah, good luck.

This course is my best attempt to give you that luck.

Our aim is to help you, the competent writer, bring your book to the point at which an agent has to take it seriously. Yes, personal tastes and market movements will always play their part, but quality is still the most important factor in what gets bought and sold. Quality is the thing that kicks open doors, that arrests the flow of an acquisitions committee.

The first lesson in the course is free to all and I honestly think it’s one of the most useful teaching tools I’ve ever produced. The lesson is entitled ‘Pitch, Theme, Character’, but really it’s about how to lay out the foundations of your novel so that saleability is built in from the very start.

Most people (the merely competent authors) write the book that they want to write then consider their pitch as a kind of marketing sticker to be glued on top.

You, my fine furry friend, are not aiming at the merely competent. Your pitch is not going to be glued on; it’s going to be foundational. And it’s not just the story idea that matters here. We’re want to ensure that absolutely everything lines up behind a stellar pitch: plot, character, themes, settings – everything.

If you can do that – find a compelling pitch, and centre every aspect of your novel on fully delivering that basic promise – then the only remaining challenge is one of execution. And, OK, execution is a challenge, but it’s a doable one (and one which other lessons in the course will attack in plenty of detail.)

The first lesson is, as I say, free. You can find out about it here. The whole course is available to Premium Members and I’d just love it if you took the whole lot.

Feedback Friday this week is going to pick up on the task in that first video, so do please get stuck in. With any practical accomplishment, it’s never enough to read, or listen to, theory. You have to put it into practice. Actually shaping the words on a page or screen IS part of the learning activity. And when you team that up with Feedback Friday – where lots of intelligent and constructive writers in the same basic place as you offer a ton of thoughtful feedback – well, the learning impact is doubled, or trebled, I’m certain.

The leaves are on the turn. It’s back to school time. Your toes are cold. Let’s up and at em.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: PITCH, THEME, CHARACTER

You need to register for the course here to get your first lesson free.

Watch that video; the assignment won’t really make sense without it.

Then, I want:

A total of about 300 words that comprises your:

• Very short pitch for the novel. (Nothing fancy or clever or abstract please. A short list of key ingredients is fine.)
• Notes on theme, character, settings, and anything else that seems relevant to you.

I want to see a great pitch and a set of notes which tells me that your book will be firmly centred on those strong foundations.

This could, just possibly, be the most important and transformative writing exercise you ever do, so jump to it.

That's it from me. Post yours here.

Til soon.

Harry