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My last email was grumpy. Bah humbug. A silver cane waved menacingly at orphans.

This email is festive. A Merry Christmas to us all! A shower of sweets for street-children, a fat goose for chilly clerks.

Just two things to say:

One, aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we as writers lucky, to have this thing we love doing? Laying down sentences on an empty sheet. It’s free. It’s creative. It’s reliably joyful.

And yes: this whole game has its arduous aspects, of course. All good things do. Getting an agent? Hard. Getting sales? Hard. Writing well enough to deserve either of those things in the first place? Yes, also hard.

But that’s not the core of what we do or why we do it. It’s writing things like this:

I’m Homer, the blind brother. I didn’t lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out. When I was told what was happening I was interested to measure it, I was in my late teens then, keen on everything.

Or this:

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of her head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.

I didn’t write either of those paragraphs. (EL Doctorow did in Langley and Homer, and Gillian Flynn did in Gone Girl.) But imagine the joy of writing those things. Not all at once, of course, but getting there slowly, chipping away at a paragraph – chip, chip, chip – until the exact right pattern of words made itself felt.

We get that pleasure, you and I, and all we need is a laptop. Lucky us.

That was number one. My number two thing to say is, are you a member of our Townhouse community? If not, you ought to be. It’s free and it gives joy and companionship… and, as it happens, it’ll give you useful feedback, support and encouragement too.

Just go to the Join Us page on our website and select the FREE option.

If you aren’t yet a member of Townhouse, you are genuinely missing out. You have friends there; you just haven’t met them yet. Make that a little free gift to yourself this Christmas.

That’s all from me.

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY:

Your Feedback Friday exercise this week is simple: eat so much Christmas pudding that your EYES BULGE. In my view, it is perfectly acceptable if you get the same effect from eating mince pies. My wife likes Christmas pudding so much, she buys 12 of them at a time. They line a whole shelf and wink at me each time I open the cupboard, whispering softly of puddingy secrets.

When it snows, at any time of year, we get a pudding from that cupboard, walk up into a snowy field and eat it there, with squirty cream from a can.

And so, as Tiny Tim said: "A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!"

Til next year.

Harry

Friday email – Friday 13 December 

Subject: It’s not them. It’s you. 

Hmm. We’re getting close to Christmas and this email has a bit of a bah, humbug tone – but I’m also writing on Friday the 13^th, so I think I can get away with a little cheer-spoiling, so long as I don’t err again soon. 

And –  

I saw a blog post recently, from a guy in the fitness niche. He’d been asked about why someone wasn’t losing weight, even though they were controlling their diet and exercising properly and doing everything right. 

And he just said, BS. It’s not possible that you’re doing everything right – over a period of weeks and months – and not achieving the desired outcome. Like: you’d actually have to break laws of physics if you eat (say) 1800 calories a day and spend (say) 2200 calories a day, and then not (over time) notice weight loss. 

That’s not the way our blogosphere normally goes. On the whole, telling customers or readers or users that they’re completely wrong isn’t a brilliant way to attract customers / readers / users. 

But, OK, sometimes people are wrong and it helps to say so. 

In our niche, the myth I most often hear is some variant of: 

“I know my book is fine [because of Made-up Reason X], but agents don’t want it because they only give book deals to friends / they can’t handle conservative viewpoints / they only want books by pretty blonde thirty-somethings / they only want books with violence / or whatever else.” 

All assertions of that kind are basically false. 

Agents want books they can sell. They want books that they can plausibly sell to Big 5 publishers, or to the kind of independents that can compete financially with those guys. 

It IS true that agents will be dubious about taking on niche literary fiction. There are excellent, tiny imprints that do a great job with more demanding, niche, or experimental novels. But “great job” in this context does not mean “generating huge amounts of moolah”, and agents working with this kind of fiction are essentially doing it pro bono. 

It’s also true that agents may well be dubious about working with digital-first publishers. Those guys can create huge sales, but they don’t always, and advances are small. If an agent thinks that a digital-first imprint is your most likely destination, they may say yes anyway, but they will be thoughtful. 

And there are niches – certain sorts of fantasy or science fiction, for example – where self-pub is so dominant that Big 5 publishers don’t really compete. 

So yes, there are examples of good, saleable books being rejected by agents. But that doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. It just means you’re knocking on the wrong door: you’re a fisherman trying to sell your catch to a cheesemonger. If you want an agent, you have to make sure that agents basically want your type of thing in the first place. 

But that’s not mostly what I hear. Mostly, I hear authors who have written, let’s say, a standard issue crime novel complaining about being rejected by agents. 

And if you’ve written a crime novel, and you can’t place it with agents, then EITHER: 

You haven’t yet tried enough literary agents (10-15, let’s say) 

OR 

Your book isn’t good enough. 

Assuming an even basic level of professionalism in your approach to agents, then one of those two answers WILL apply to you. 

And the commonest, commonest, commonest reason for being rejected by agents? 

Your book isn’t good enough. 

It’s not them, it’s you. 

We’re not really supposed to say that in the blogosphere. It’s not the most supportive, friendly thing to say. But it’s true. And, actually, it IS the most supportive thing – because it’s the only message that will really alleviate your issue. 

At Jericho Writers, we do of course have a ton of services aimed at helping you make your book better. (The gold-standard service? It’s manuscript assessment, of course – or the Ultimate Novel Writing Course if your book is still a work-in-progress. Call or email us if you want honest advice, tailored to you and your exact needs.) 

However, the paid-for service part of things comes second. 

The first part lies with you. You need to recognise that your book may not yet be strong enough to sell, and that fixing this issue lies in your hands. 

Honestly? If I could choose between working with a gifted but feedback-resistant writer and a less gifted, but feedback-responsive one, I’d choose the latter every time. 

Write a book. Write it better. Edit it harder. Market it professionally. And don’t complain about agents! 

Good luck, and I promise I’ll be less mood-spoily next week. 

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY:   

Let’s use FF this week to just consider all any questions you have about literary agents. If you have experience of submitting, then share it, even if you don’t especially have questions arising from that. Let’s just share experience, unearth your questions, and see if we can help each other. Log in to Townhouse, then post your thoughts here whenever you’re ready. 

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The missus is reading the kids a (somewhat edited) version of The Sons of Adam, my third novel from way back. It’s a historical romp, set mostly in the oil industry of the 1920s and 30s, but flanked by world wars at either end of the book. The kids are loving it, especially the war stuff. Tucking the kids in one night, I literally couldn’t find two of them, and was blundering around in the dark trying to find them. 

Then two blond heads poked up from a little crawl space in between the end of one bed and the wall. ‘We’ve built a dug-out, and we’re going to sleep here.’ Honestly, the kids are small but the space they’d made for themselves was tiny. 

They spent the whole night there and refortified their den in the morning. But – the power of fiction, eh? The loveliness of imaginative play. 

I was thrilled. 

Til soon 

Harry 

PS: If you’d like 1-2-1 feedback from a literary agent on your submission package, we can help with that, too! We’ve just released a batch of sessions spanning January to April 2025. Find out more about what’s on offer and how to book here. 

PPS: On a similar note – if the word of traditional publishing bewitches but also baffles you, why not consider our Path To Publication course? In eight weeks, our expert tutor Kate Harrison will teach you everything you need to know about the inner workings of the publishing industry 

Lots of things in writing are hard. One thing in particular is very, very easy… but it’s astonishingly neglected by a lot of writers.

Here’s an example of getting something wrong, using an extract I’ve invented for the purpose. In my mind, this extract might stand at the start of a novel, but it could be anywhere really. 

So:

Dawn woke her – dawn, and the rattle of trade that started to swell with it. Barrels being rolled over cobbles, a cart arriving from the victuallers’ yard, men starting to bray.

It had been a cold night and promised to be a cold morning, too. Her feet found the rag mat next to the bed. She washed hands and face briefly, and without emotion, then lifted her nightgown and began to bind her breasts, with the white winding strip she always used. Round and round, flattening her form.

She continued to get dressed. Blue slops. Bell-bottomed trousers, a shirt, a waistcoat, a blue jacket, loose enough for her shoulders to work. Just for a moment, she looked at her hands. They’d been soft once, and were coarse now, hardened off by the scrambles up rigging, the hard toil on ropes.

Caroline – Charles as she was known to her fellow ratings – had been forced to take work as a man when her father died two years ago, right at the start of this new war against Napoleon. She had tried taking work as a seamstress, but the pay had been poor, and she had a younger sister always sickly to look after. In the end, she had found herself forced to dress as a man and work as a man, here at the great bustling port of Portsmouth…

I hope you can see that this passage is kinda fine… and kinda fine… and then disastrous.

The first paragraph here is fine: it starts to establish the scene.

The second paragraph is intriguing: why the flipping heck is this woman (clearly not a modern one) so keen to flatten her chest?

The third paragraph inks in a bit more of the mystery: OK, so this woman works on ships of some sort in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So why is she disguising herself as a man?

And then –

The disaster –

The writer makes the horrendous mistake of answering that question. The story was just beginning to make fine headway. We wanted to grip our reader and thrust them forwards into the story. Our first three paragraphs set up a fine story motor, which was already starting to chug away. Then by completely solving the mystery, we destroyed almost every shred of momentum we had.

By the end of that extract, we still have an interest in seeing what happens to this woman, but we don’t yet know her very well as a character. We can’t at this stage care very much about her. But we did care about that mystery. And the author just ruined it.

The lesson here – and the easiest technique in fiction is – take it slow. If the reader wants to know X, then don’t tell them X.

That’s it! That’s the whole technique.

A much better approach here would have been to simply follow Caroline/Charles’s morning. I’d probably have given her some kind of problem to solve. Perhaps, she owes an innkeeper money that she doesn’t have and needs to slip away unseen. Or she has to collect some belongings from one part of town but has to get back to her ship in order not to miss the tide.

That way, one part of the reader is asking, Will she get back to her ship in time? But that’s just a top layer to the more interesting underlying question of Why is she disguised as a man?

Indeed, we’ll study the whole rushing-about-town episode with extra interest, because while we’re not that fussed about whether she misses the tide or not, we are interested in that second question – and we read about these ordinary story incidents as a way to uncover clues about the bigger issue.

The key fact here is that readers love solving mysteries. They like reading a text to find clues and hints and suggestions that lead them to an answer. I think for most readers that process has an extra impetus if the mystery is embedded in something very personal to a key character.

So the technique you need to adopt is:

1. Create a mystery. Then,
2. Don't solve it. 

Whenever you find chunks of text – perhaps only a paragraph, perhaps only a line or two – that delivers mystery-busting information, ask yourself if you can withhold it. Does the information need to delivered now, or can this safely be left until later?

In my Fiona Griffiths books, I took the biggest mystery about her (Why is she so weird?) and didn’t answer it until the very end of book #1. I have some minor mysteries (What colour are her eyes?) that I’ve never answered.

In Caroline’s case, I don’t think you could plausibly avoid telling the reader about the need for male disguise for as long as that, but a good strategy would be:

1. Get readers intrigued by her need for disguise
2. Get readers involved in the other details of her life (which they'll love because of item 1)
3. As we start to involve readers in those other details, you can slowly reveal the money problems, the sickly sister and the rest
4. By this point, readers are now engaged in worrying about the money and the sister, and so you have another functioning story motor
5. That means you can slowly give up your first one and it's safe to start revealing the reasons for the male disguise. 

That’s one way to look at it – and a good one. But you should also ask: what does my character reflect on or think about right now?

In our sample chunk, Caroline did think about flattening her chest, because she was in the actual act of doing that. She had just washed her hands, which made her think about her hands. But she had no reason to start thinking about the whole reason she’d taken on male disguise. On the contrary: she was up at dawn, she had lots to do, she had problems to solve – those are the things that would have dominated her mental landscape.

So another way to put things is simply this: narrate what matters to your character in the moment that it matters.

Gosh, how easy that is.

And honestly, if you go to your manuscript with these thoughts, I’ll bet that 90% of you will find places where you give away information too early, or in a way that clashes with your character’s own focus of interest.

Create a mystery. Then don’t solve it. The easiest technique in fiction.

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Creating (but not solving!) a mystery

Today's challenge neatly follows on from what you've just read.

Find a passage - 250 words or so - in which you create but do not solve a mystery. Post yours here when it's ready. Give whatever context we need to make sense of that passage. And please also tell us how many words / pages / chapters it will be until the mystery is solved.

(By the way, I'm approaching a million words on Fiona and haven't yet given away her eye colour, so beat that. I'll send you a plateful of cherries if you do.) 

The challenge is open to anyone who wants to do it, but my feedback will be reserved for Premium Members. If you want to become one, I have good news! We've extended our 30% off November promotion into one last weekend, so now is the perfect time to join us. 

*** 

My Year 5/6 children performed in their school play this week - a version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. And golly gosh, what an old pro Dickens was. It's not just his literary gifts I admire, though I do. It's his joyously unembarrassed commercial instinct. "I want your florin, and by God I intend to get it." He'll use every tool he has to secure your attention. The idea that literary fiction has to be boring to be acceptable? Bah, humbug.

Till soon,

Harry